Crashed Pips - Computers, politics, emetic trash

I’ve just installed bits of Ubuntu Netbook Remix on Hammond (the Eee PC). And my God, is it beautiful. Just look at it! Look at it!

And look at what it looks like when a window is open! Look at it… it’s unbelievably slick!

Note how smoothly the window picker slips into the Firefox window! It’s stunning!

That said, it’s by no means perfect, yet. The installation process is rather messy at the moment, but by the time Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex appears (in October) it should be a painless process. At present, one has to

1. Add the repository to /etc/apt/sources.list
2. Disable Compiz
3. Install all the packages EXCEPT ume-config
4. Add maximus to the session startup script
5. Rearrange the panels
6. Log out and in
7. Set the theme to Human Netbook
8. Add favourites and launch them to get rid of the irritating star emblem
9. Set the wallpaper to something prettier, but set it to “Center” or “Stretch”, otherwise it will be ugly
10. Restart the computer and hope nothing breaks

However, after that, everything appears in the shiny newness you see here. However, there are still a couple of rough edges:

What’s wrong here is that there’s nothing there to stop the icon labels if their text overflows into the space occupied by the icon immediately below. Here’s another caveat:

The problem here is that the scrollbar has badly misplaced itself - outside the box. However, this strangely manages to look artistic, somewhat like one of those silly installations at the Tate Modern.

What you see here is ume-launcher, Canonical’s answer to the default Asus Eee launcher. Personally, I think it beats the Eee launcher hands down.

There’s also the window picker applet at the top, which is specially designed for small screens, and maximus, somethig that maximises every window to make the best use of available screen space.

The reason it all looks so pretty is because of the new system it uses. It’s called Clutter, and uses OpenGL to render truly stunning user interface graphics. Somewhere on the Internet, there is a demo floating about of a GDM theme using Clutter - it looks simply stunning. The animations for ume-launcher are still a bit messy in some places, but my God are they beautiful.

It easily beats the Eee’s ugly default launcher, in my opinion. But there are still a few things I think wouldn’t go amiss in ume-launcher:

• Customisable menus
• A search box in, say, the corner of the ‘window’, above the shortcut to the home folder, which links to Tracker
• (Very) occasionally, maximus plays up and doesn’t maximise windows properly.
• A better file manager than Nautilus. Howsabout something using Miller columns, to make things more space-effective?

Other than these small gripes, I’m finding it difficult to fault, even at this early release. I suspect the final version that will appear with Intrepid will be even more shiny and wonderful.