Bob: > I am using latest Solaris 10 as of August. I have been using > Motif/CDE on Solaris since 1993 and used olvwm before that. With the > latest CDE pages, there is now a "deprecation" warning that CDE will > soon go away. Even though CDE is way behind the times, it has been > quite useful for me and allows making full use of my system. > > So I decided to give JDS/Gnome a try. After three full days of trying > to configure this desktop environment to allow me to do what was so > easy in CDE, I am becoming quite frustrated. There are many issues > ranging from software crashes, to ease of use, to just plain > scalability.
It's great to hear that you are trying out GNOME. Please be patient with the new look and feel, and continue to ask questions when you feel you aren't making progress. > The issue I want to address in this email is the scalability issue. I > usually use 8 virtual desktops with a pretty heavy application load. > It seems that Gnome is restricted to a Windows '95 paradigm showing a > tab in the bottom pane for each running process. I have not been able > to find a way to configure it to work any way else. It is driving me > crazy. In CDE I have the whole screen to keep track of running > applications, and usually just a small part is necessary to make sense > of it all. In Gnome, not enough is displayed in each application tab > for me to even see what the application is. > > Please see the following image to see what I mean. > > http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/solaris/pane-pain.png That does look ugly. Note that the area of the panel which shows the running windows is called the "window list" applet. There are a few options: 1) Right click on the panel and select "Preferences". Increase the Size to over "60" pixels and you will find that there a 2 rows in the panel for showing running applications. Set size to over "90 pixels" for 3 rows, etc. If you are having trouble getting to the panel Preferences, it is probably because the existing panel applets are filling the panel. To get to the Panel preferences you need to right click on an area of the panel where there is no applet. So, right click on the vertical bar to the left of the "window list" applet, make sure "Lock to Panel" is not checked, and move it to the right a little bit. This way you can create a little space where there is no applet, where you can right click to get to preferences. A bit ugly, sorry. 2) Create a new panel. Click on an area of the panel which has no applet (like I explain in #1 above), and select "New Panel". This will add a panel to the top. Right click on this panel and select "Add to panel" and add a "Window List" applet to this panel. Set it up so it uses the full width of your screen. On your bottom panel, remove the "Window List" applet by right clicking on the slider to the left of the "window list" applet and select "Remove from panel". By doing this, you have a top panel which has the full width of the screen for showing your running applications, rather than the smaller area available in the bottom panel. You can also increase the "size" of the top panel as described in #1 above to allow multiple rows. This is a good option if you find doing step #1 above alone looks ugly. 3) If you right click on the vertical bar to the left of the "window list" applet and choose Preferences, then you enter the preferences for the "window list" applet. Try out "Group windows when space is limited" or "Always group windows". This will cause all "Terminals" to appear as one button, which you can click on to get a "drawer" that shows all terminals. Also, make sure "Show windows from current workspace" is clicked and not "Show windows from all workspaces". > Is there a way around this other than wholesale replacement of > standard Gnome components (such as the metacity window manager)? Here are some suggestions on how you can configure the GNOME panel to better support showing lots of running programs, if that's how you like your environment. I'm sure if you play around with the configuration you will find other useful options as well. Let me know if this helps. Brian
