Ubuntu Unity: A Geek’s Guide
Until recently my laptop ran Ubuntu 10.10. I’d tried 11.04 and decided pretty quickly that I hated Unity. It clearly wasn’t ready for prime time and the inability to configure it how I liked really put me off. With 11.10 and plenty of sites putting up their “Unity’s actually okay now” posts, I thought I’d take the plunge.
I’m glad I did because Unity is now actually a nice usable desktop. Especially if you value your screen real-estate and, on my ageing Samsung NC10, I certainly do.
It’s clearly geared towards novices though and, if you’re an experienced Linux user, that probably put you right off trying it. After using it for a while though I’ve found, that with a few choice tweaks, it’s not far from the desktop I’ve always wanted in Linux.
Separating Skype and PulseAudio
Earlier: Skype and PulseAudio
Skype and PulseAudio have never really seen eye-to-eye on my netbook. Maybe if you have some kind of magical super computer that can manage more than 1.6GHz you don’t have this problem, but for us mere mortals it’s a pain.
PulseAudio is hammered into Ubuntu pretty hard by 11.10. Removing it, as I have discovered, tends to break certain things and leaves you entirely without any method of volume control. Yes, I know you can hack something together with keyboard shortcuts, but I like the little speaker icon. So PulseAudio is something I’ve grudgingly learned to live with.
Skype is not quite so grown up. In fact, I believe this applies to any kind of microphone usage where PulseAudio is immediately infected with a nasty case of “the stupid” and gobbles your CPU leaving none left for the application actually doing the recording. Read more