Tag Archives: gnome

Gnome-screensaver is a bit of a pain in it simplicity

One of Gnome’s main philosphy is simplicity but in this endeavour, some things are a pain! For instance, Gnome’s pictures screensaver doesn’t let you specify what directory to look for pictures or photo’s to display (nor has the neat zooming and paning features of Xscreensaver’s Glslideshow). It expects all your pictures to be in a directory named Pictures in your home directory and this isn’t an easily configurable option, and it seems to not look for pictures in any sub-directories of the Pictures directory (all the pics need to be in one directory).

But you can use the xscreensaver’s screensaver with gnome-screensaver:

http://philcrissman.com/2006/07/25/howto-add-your-xscreensavers-to-gnome-screensaver/

So once again I can use the Glslideshow screensaver without having to disable Gnome’s screensaver and configuring xscreensaver to auto start when I login. The only problem with this is I need to use the xscreensaver-demo command to configure xscreensaver’s screensaver. If you do this make sure you don’t start the xscreensaver daemon.

Mac4Lin

Make your Linux Gnome Desktop look like a Mac:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mac4lin

Instructions here:

http://www.howtoforge.com/mac4lin_make_linux_look_like_a_mac

This is what my desktop like before:

Desktop Theme Before Mac4Lin

And I got this far and gave up:

Mac4Lin

I’m all praise to the folk who put all the work into this. But, having a Apple logos on my Gnome desktop just seems odd. If you want to get a desktop that looks like a Mac go for it, but at least for me I don’t see the point in making my Linux desktop look just like a Mac. If I want a Mac I’ll get a Mac (and probably run Linux on it).