I recently purchased one of the Acer Aspire notebooks. It’s small enough that I don’t feel like Sisyphus dragging a rock up the mountain, but large enough to actually be useful. I got it home, wiped Windows, and set about installing Ubuntu 10.04 on it.
I like 10.04. It’s still got the Gnome 2 environment, which I find to be a great balance between usability and attractiveness, and I’ve absolutely no need to upgrade. However, the Aspire uses a newer Atheros AR9485 wireless card, and it’s not supported under the 2.6.32 kernel.
Crap. That means upgrading to 3.0. That means upgrading to Ubuntu 11 and losing Gnome 2 for the mess that is Unity. Do let’s start gnashing teeth and listening to Elliot Smith records now.
I did scads of research, and there is simply no way to get Gnome 2 working under Ubuntu 11. There’s a fallback configuration for Gnome 3 that looks a bit similar, but it’s not the same. The panel is stubbornly resistant to customization, and GTK2 themes don’t work. That’s irksome, because the Clearlooks engine was one of the cleanest and most attractive interface setups since Motif.
Then I came across references to Mint Linux. Mint is a fork of Ubuntu, but the developers appear to hate the whole Gnome 3 atrocity as much as I do. The difference is that they actually went and did something about it.
Well, two somethings, actually. The first is a simplified version of the Gnome 3 shell called Gnome Classic.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Still, it’s not the same, and while the panel is a noticeable improvement, there are only a few GTK3 themes (which draw the actual application backgrounds and windows), and none allow for much in the way of customization. The whole thing still feels like the Gnome developers didn’t trust users, so they took as many choices away from us as possible. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be, and I’m not alone in that opinion.
Mint gives us another option, however. A Spaniard by the name of Perberos took it (literally) upon himself to do a fork of Gnome 2 that works under kernel 3. It’s called MATE, and it’s bundled with Mint as a default choice.
Look familiar? It sure does. There are still a few rough edges, but the whole thing looks and feels just like Gnome 2. The main menu is different, but I’m growing to like it. If not, the old Gnome menu is available as an option. All the old theme engines work as they should, and performance is excellent.
I have only a couple of minor gripes, and they’re really minor. There’s no battery applet for the panel, but that can be rectified by installing the xfce4-power-manager. I’d like a trash icon in the panel, but that’s hardly a deal-breaker. There are some inconsistencies in the interfaces for some applications, but I expect that to be sorted in short order.
Installation of Mint was dead simple, perhaps a bit quicker than Ubuntu. There were a few minor issues, but they were easily fixed. The main one is with the video driver. The Aspire uses the ATI HD 6250 chipset, which is supported by an included driver. However, 3D acceleration is fairly anemic. Mint gave the option of installing the proprietary driver from ATI, but when I rebooted, I was stuck with a huge manufacturer’s watermark reading “Unsupported Hardware” in the lower right corner of the screen.
Run the following script (as root) to excise it:
#!/bin/sh
DRIVER=/usr/lib/fglrx/xorg/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so
for x in $(objdump -d $DRIVER|awk ‘/call/&&/EnableLogo/{print “\\x”$2″\\x”$3″\\x”$4″\\x”$5″\\x”$6}’); do
sed -i “s/$x/\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90/g” $DRIVER
done
You might notice that I was able to get a green background for selected items in the Gnome 3 screenshot. That’s not a separate theme. While the developers did their best to obfuscate the process, you can change the default color by running:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-color-scheme ‘selected_bg_color:binky’
Replace binky with a hex value of your choice (including the leading “#”), or one of the named colors from xcolors. Other aspects can be changed by replacing selected_bg_color with the appropriate qualifier. The actual configuration files are in /usr/share/gnome-shell if you want to go poking around.
Mint shares repositories with Ubuntu, so if you want to use Unity, it’s available as an option. The more I play with it, the more apparent it becomes that the interface is geared towards touchscreens and tablets. There are a few aspects that can be tailored to individual preference, but the whole shebang still feels like the hood’s been nailed shut for users’ own good.
I hope they open up configuration options for the interface, because if I could move that dashboard to the right, I might just warm up to it.