onsdag 20 februari 2013

Why I use Mint and not Unity

I just reinstalled my computer an had once again have to re-evaluate what desktop appearance I wanted. It was not a very easy choice to make.

I like the Idea of the Unity desktop, so I used it the first couple of days. However I could not stand the dash-launcher to take more than 2 seconds to start when I wanted a program. So I switched to Gnome-shell for a while (again, I hoped that the issues I had before would be gone). But Gnome-shell crashed all the time, so I tried Mint for the first time. And here I am.

I've noticed some people think of Mint being to slow, and using Unity because of that. Strange however that my experience is the opposite. Maybe that has to to do with what hardware you use, I do not know...

Mint running on my Ubuntu desktop

Here is how to install Mint on your Ubuntu computer :). The only thing to do is to run:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable

then

sudo apt-get install cinnamon

And you have Mint installed. It is only to change session next time you log in.

--Edit 2013-03-20--

I finaly realised Mint is to slow to. So it now seems like I am using openbox for a while

Remote desktop on my Raspberry Pi

Since I don't have a screen a hdmi-cable and no TV I've used to just acces my Pi from an ssh shell in my terminal. I don't have any practical use of accessing my raspberry visually, when all functionality I need can be used through the terminal. When I first started my Pi i disabled the X-system so it should not use unnecessary resources.

I did it anyway, just for fun. Here's how:

First i installed a vnc-server on the raspberry pi according to this tutorial (on my Raspberry Pi).
sudo apt-get install tightvncserver

Then to run the server i simpli ran
vncserver :1 -geometry 640x480 -depth 24

That was not according to the video but it worked anyway. It started a x-server on :1 with the given dimensions and a color depth of 24 bits. Now with the server up and running all I had to do was to connect to it from my laptop.

To get the ip-adress from my Pi i used ifconfig.

ifconfig

According to this link, the standard vnc-server for Ubuntu (that I use) is vinagre. So I installed it (on my desktop computer):

sudo apt-get install vinagre

And then start it. Configurations was quite self-explainatory. Here's how it looks

 And tataaaa! A running vnc-client on my desktop.