Add these ingredients:

1 Matrox G450 dual-head video card, removed from one of the Enco studio computers months ago…
1 spare 19” monitor taking up a sizeable portion of my desk space…
1 slightly hosed Linux install, requiring a fresh reinstallation…
2 hours of over-the-wire Debian Sarge install time…
1 hour of Googling and configuration tweaking…

To get:

1 freshly rebuilt Linux box with a desktop display that spans two screens. Good for impressing co-workers, even if they don’t really understand what’s so cool about it other than being able to drag windows from one screen to the other…

Dear KDE,

I’ve been using you as my desktop environment on every one of my Linux machines for several years now, and generally speaking I’m quite pleased with the experience. This is, admittedly, largely due to the fact that I don’t push you very hard. I’m an easy guy to work for. All I ask is that you show me some icons, menus and give me easily workable window dressing with which to manipulate my software. Oh, and I’m quite fond of having a good, well-integrated terminal program. These are things you’ve all done quite well.

Sure, I haven’t always been a fan. I used to be all about the Enlightenment. Then that went kind of haywire, what with themes going crazy every few days and the whole death-of-EFM thing. I turned to the two big alternatives, then, not because I think the lightweight window managers aren’t up to the job, but because I’ve always been a big fan of the pretty. KDE 1.x was my salvation, for a while. Then came the 2.x series. What a mess that was, eh? I ended up in GNOME-land for a while, and was in fact quite vehemently against KDE, vowing never to touch it again. But of course the 3.x release came highly recommended from several people whose opinions I respect, including a couple who also had been burned. I gave it a try, and never looked back.

So I hope you don’t mind if I vent just a bit of frustration, here, because there are still a few things that desperately need fixing.

I understand that all software can be quirky, and highly-complex open-source software even more so. But is it too much to ask for you not to blow up in my face every time I make the mistake of actually wanting to tinker with the look and feel of my desktop? I’m not in there poking around at arcane configuration files, mind you. I’m just checking and unchecking options you freely provide me, right there in your own “Control Center.” Why should enabling a sound option mean that my desktop wallpaper and icons go away? Can you explain that one to me, please? And while I’m on the subject of sound, what’s up with that? Why is it that the only way I can reliably enjoy music on this computer is to disable the aRts sound system? That makes a whole lot of no sense, if you know what I mean. And here’s an idea. How about not breaking completely when I try to use the much-vaunted integrated network browsing features? I’d like to actually see that work “as advertised,” thank you very much.

All the cute bouncing-icon wait-cursor eyecandy in the world can’t hold me if the actual practical functionality doesn’t work. All I ask is that you please consider that in the future, and pretty please do something about making sure that changing an icon preference doesn’t mean having to restart my desktop environment. Not to make idle threats, but you do know that Enlightenment DR-17 is approaching a usable state, right?

Yours, etc,
Me.

I couldn’t resist not posting yesterday or most of today so I could enjoy the fact that the “posting frequency” indicator (down the left-side column a ways) read zeros for Week, Month and Year.

Yes, that’s the kind of geek I am. If I was the truly dedicated sort of geek, and by “dedicated” I mean “not lazy,” I’d have ensured that that the Month and Year indicators read 100%. But… I’m too lazy for that.

Hey, I couldn’t do this last year. The old version of the website code didn’t have the posting frequency indicator…

Did you know that the NCP utilities for Linux are capable of mounting Netware 5 server volumes via IP as well as IPX? Up until this morning, I didn’t. I’ve been jumping through hoops for years, setting things up so that my Linux machines can see the fileserver. As of now, I have a lot fewer hoops to jump through.

For what it’s worth, the trick is to use the “-A xx.xx.xx.xx” option (or the “ipserver=xx.xx.xx.xx” in /etc/fstab if you’re doing it like I am). That tells the ncp code to use UDP instead of IPX. You still have to supply the server name, though.

Nifty. Damned nifty. Removing complexity is a good thing.

If you’re still seeing the border around the center column, and there’s no pretty picture above the new logo, make sure to refresh your browser window. Holding down ‘Ctrl’ and tapping the ‘R’ on your keyboard usually does the trick. If it doesn’t, then you’ll need to clear your cache somehow.

I only mention it because I’ve been taking all sorts of queries in the last two days from people who tell me “it looks all messed up,” or some variant thereof.

I’ve been moderately discontent with the website design here for well over a year. One thing I believed the site needed was some actual imagery, and yesterday I came across some nifty PHP code that allowed me to display a randomly selected image.

My first attempt involved just tucking a rectangular image in the upper left corner, and adjusting a few things around it to make it fit. It was a fine bit of geek-fu, but Dawn pointed out what it looked like: an ugly, geeky hack. The layout was completely destroyed by this monstrosity I’d perched on its corner.

After considerable discussion and tinkering and websurfing, I set upon the path to what you see now. I removed the border around the center content. (Internet Exploder never rendered it correctly anyway, showing a thick black border where a grooved grey border should have been.) I extended the center column upward. I added a relatively subtle tiled background to the sides. I created a logo. And then, I put the image rotator code back into service as the background for the page element in which the logo lives. Other bits of tinkering included moving the random tagline and rearranging the navigation columns.

What I have now… ain’t half bad. In fact, I’m quite pleased. A heartfelt “Thank You!” to Dawn for helping me realize this new design!