RMMLite

Last night, I decided to upgrade Ubuntu to 11.4.  Long story short, that was a mistake.  An hour of back-tracking later, I had re-installed 10.4.  I plan on sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

11.4 is buggy, to put it mildly.  There’s some conflict with the drivers for my Nvidia card, and the system locked hard several times.  I once enjoyed hand-configuring Slackware installations by hand, but my zeal for that faded years ago.

The Unity interface is laggy, cluttered, and counter-intuitive.  While I can understand why some might find the Gnome interface to be bland and utilitarian, the OSX-looking dock on the left side just eats valuable screen real estate.  Frankly, I can’t tell what its exact purpose is.  In some ways, it acts like WindowMaker’s dock, but it also serves as a redundant menu.

Speaking of menus, the original Gnome panel is also there, but most of its functionality has been removed.  It appears that it’s meant to host the application bars for open windows, an approach that gets very confusing when multiple programs are running.  There appears to be no way to drag-and-drop programs to to either panel to be used as quick launchers.

Simple routines (like a “run application” dialogue) are replaced with an awkward search engine, and the whole thing feels pasted together.  I can’t imagine this being easy for new users.

To make things worse, I lost my copy of RMMLite at some point during the backup process.  As it turns out, it’s no longer supported.  That isn’t such a surprise, considering that the Karma hasn’t been manufactured for about six years.  Still, I thought it’d be easier to find a replacement copy.

I tracked a backup down on an old hard drive, and if you need it, here it is.  It’s self-executing (./rmmlite.jar) under newer Java implementations.  On older ones, the syntax would be: java -jar rmmlite.jar.

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