Wednesday, December 4, 2013

GNOME desktop

This post started just to share part of my desktop theme with you.
Actually, what matters most to Unix administration is just a terminal window :-)
It took a while but nowadays I'm happy to have gotten rid of GUI administration long ago.
 
By the way, to get a Gnome desktop out of a text-only installation, IPS is there to help. From my experience, any warning or error message can be safely ignored and just be sure to reboot the system after the additional software get installed.

# pkg install solaris-desktop

But the desktop installation is not quite so simple like that if your intention is to have a result that matches exactly the effect of desktop installation right from the start.

First the grub2 boot menu doesn't get automatically adjusted.
It will continue to list something such as:

 # bootadm list-menu
... boot loader configuration files is: /rpool/boot/grub
default 0
console text
timeout 5
0 Oracle Solaris 11.3

To change it you can try the following:

# bootadm set-menu console=graphics
# bootadm set-menu splashimage=/boot/grub/splash.jpg
# bootadm set-menu foreground=343434
# bootadm set-menu background=F7FBFF

But you'll soon notice that it's still not enough.
While the system is being loaded the text console is still visible!
So we need to address this as well with the following kernel argument:

# bootadm change-entry -i 0 kargs="-B console=graphics"

Once a desktop is available, my goal is to have a gnome-terminal or terminator that looks like the ones in the following images. One important detail not visible here is that their backgrounds are around 75% transparent, something I like very much, needless to say that I occasionally take advantage of compiz additional transparency (alpha) if I want to better see through. Of course, their launchers can be customized with additional options specifying the desired size and position. I particularly like terminator because of its powerful ability to split its window into multiple gnome-terminals. In addition, I also like to run a GNU screen on each terminal in order to decouple each shell process from its terminal.
Instead of too many words, following is my suggestion. In particular, note that I strive to the minimums for Window Border which I don't like to loose too much screen area and performance. As such, for resizing the window with the mouse it's easier to grab it from the bottom edge, of course.





As a complement, consider also the following topics:
    
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