Ubuntu 7.10: Tweaks make it smoother running

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It didn't take much to get rhea running smoothly again after the upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10. The first thing I did was ignore the shiny shiny and turn of all visual effects. That seemed to help tremendously. I then began to change the desktop elements into something I liked that also was reasonably light on the system:
  • selected a simple JPEG wallpaper via MacWallpapers,
  • selected Clearlooks controls (the latest version to ship with Gnome 2.20)
  • picked up and installed Humanoid-OSX
  • and selected the Mist icon set.
Once all that's done you have the following reasonable desktop (below).


You're looking at an NTFS volume in Nautilus from the days when rhea ran Windows 2000. It stopped running Win2K when I swapped out the original motherboard for the current one, and Win2K stopped working because the drivers for the old motherboard wouldn't work with the new one. However, the Linux distribution installed on it at the time, SuSE Professional 9.3, continued to operate and booted right up on the new motherboard. From that point forward grub was modified to boot Linux only, and it's been that way ever since. This version of Ubuntu reads and write NTFS, and I am quite happy to report that it does indeed. I'm now deleting old cruft and getting ready to backup what's left, then I'll reformat the partition under ext3. Oh. And in case you're curious, it was originally purchased with Windows ME installed. After 48 hours of Windows ME I dropped in a second drive and installed Windows 2000 and SuSE professional in a dual boot mode and never ever ran Windows ME again, except for certain very specific applications. Rhea really is a bit of a Frankenstein's monster. All it needs is a pair of neck bolts.

I'm not complaining about Ubuntu 7.10's inability to run fill-tilt graphics on the box, but the ability to tailor the distribution to meet the capabilities of the platform while providing useful work. In spite of its beta-ness it's quite usable and now quite fast, again.

Comments

  1. Propman6877October 02, 2007

    Bill - Noob question, but how to install the button widgets on top of the bland Mist ones?

    ReplyDelete
  2. damianOctober 05, 2007

    How did you got color inside the file browser window?

    Thanks and I love your blog.

    ReplyDelete

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