System Configuration

For those of us who dislike the Ubuntu Unity interface and its ugly dock, there are several options. The Cairo Dock is the most aesthetically appealing to me, with its Mac-OSX-like animations. But do I really need icons that bounce up and down, and dozens of other visual effects – especially when I’m running a lean desktop like XFCE? If you’re in this boat, take a walk on Plank.

The GRUB2 boot loader can seem confusing at first. Instead of one configuration file, there are several. You run one command update-grub to update the configuration file, another command (grub-install) to write the configuration to the Master Boot Record (MBR) on your hard drive. On the plus side, GRUB2 can make life much easier if you’re running a dual or multiple boot system – say, switching between Linux and Windows, or hopping between multiple distros.

Ubuntu lets you share your desktop with remote computers. From the Gnome control panel, select System | Preferences | Remote Desktop. Then access the machine from any VNC client, such as Vinagre (Applications | Internet | Remote Desktop Viewer). But it didn’t work for me initially, although VNC has been around for years and runs on just about every platform. The symptom was that I could log in but then the desktop appeared frozen, and nothing happened when I pressed the keyboard or mouse.

Watching streaming video in Linux can be frustrating. The Flash web browser process (npviewer.bin) consumes a lot of processor time and it significantly raises the cpu temperature. I could live with Flash’s piggishness if it delivered good video. Unfortunately, Flash seems to stutter when you use CPU “on demand” frequency scaling to cut power consumption. On my desktop PC with an AMD BE-2400 dual core, I couldn’t get Firefox in Ubuntu 9.