darkness

So how’s about that Linux desktop!

I want to play my MP3s. XMMS isn’t installed. Instead I have Rhythmbox. OK, I’ll give it a go. It’s supposed to be the GNOME version of iTunes. I forgot a problem I have with Rhythmbox: it doesn’t show you files, it shows you artist/album. I mean, I have many problems with Rhythmbox (and iTunes, I suppose) but this one is a real show-stopper for me. I need to see my files, not the ID3 tags you’ve read, most of which are completely useless. I’ve got lots and lots of MP3s, and a great majority of them I’ve never tagged (because I have too many to tag up to my standards). I also had to go to the GStreamer Fedora repository to get MP3 support, of course. I recognize that Red Hat/Fedora isn’t really responsible for the lack of MP3 support. Doesn’t necessarily make it any less annoying. You kind of wish they’d just put in a repository file for someone’s MP3 plugins, even if they leave it enabled=0, but I digress. To really please me, Rhythmbox crashed in the middle of scanning my MP3s—not even the big directory, either. So Rhythmbox gets kicked to the curb.

I went to install XMMS and found “Beep Media Player” (BMP) instead. Installed it, looks fine. In fact, I think it looks nicer than XMMS, I just can’t place how it is that it looks nicer. I suspect it has something to do with using GTK2. The equivalent of the XMMS Status Plug-in for BMP is bmp-docklet (horrible color scheme on that page, BTW). No package I can find for it, except maybe NewRPMS’ bmp-extra-plugins package for FC3 which has more dependencies than I care to meet. I suspect it’ll be fairly trivial to package.

Thank god I can finally play MP3s. What’s going on here? Shouldn’t this be a lot easier? Why does Rhythmbox absolutely suck for my needs? Am I so far removed from “regular users”? Sigh.

I’ve found a few more things about Metacity I want to change:

• I really need to make sure focus never gets stolen. I think what I’m going to do when making a decision about focus for a new window is:
  • If there’s no “normal” window on the screen with focus, give focus to the new window.
  • Otherwise, no focus for the new window, but put it next in the stack to be alt-tabbed to.
• Clicks need to not raise the window when I’m using sloppy focus.
• I need the little informational box showing the list of windows when I’m cycling and I need the temporarily-raise-while-cycling behavior you only get when you use the “cycle without box” hotkey.

So I’ll probably hack on that tonight… after I set up e-mail, which has gone far too long.

I fired up Nautilus because I wanted a GUI file manager. It’s fast and I think it’ll be suitable, though I’ve grown quite used to Konqueror. (Reprise: maybe I should switch to KDE?) Tip: turn off “spatial mode.” They’ve got some good arguments for why spatial mode is technically correct in terms of giving the user a consistent view of objects on the system, but I’ve been using file managers for years and I don’t really treasure the idea of having a separate window for each fucking directory. Some of us have directories several (say, seven or eight from /) levels deep that we use on a regular basis. Use gconf-editor to turn off /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser. There are plenty of other settings you can play with in there too, of course.

Firefox crashed on me today too. I’m not totally sure it wasn’t my ipw2100 driver, which seems to be behaving a bit aberrantly as well. (At least, that’s what I blame. I figure it’s the most likely thing to be going wrong. Either that, or IPsec is having problems, or the kernel itself is having problems, or… one of these other daemons is having problems.) I’m not terribly impressed with some piece of software here. I’m just not sure which one(s) to blame.