ok, a tad slower. just a tad.

By basd on Aug 22, 2010 | In linux, jolicloud

jolicloud desktop with added conky, compiz, cairo dock, google gadgets

I warned ... me. I would customize this Jolicloud thing until I slowed it down.

...

And I did. Of course, this elderly e-Machine is still 100x faster than when I boot into the native, now extremely kludgy WindowsXP.

I know where this is going -- next I will be scrapping the jolicloud desktop because I want widgets and want it to look just like my lxde or kde plasma desktop and ... oh, well, I'm incorrigible.

But, the main thing is I've loaded up with a bunch of stuff and, hey, it's better!

I added cairo-dock (said I would) and it's a really good addition on Jolicloud. Warning, the cairo-dock packages in the Jolicloud "robby" install are deficient. Need to do a Ubuntu search and get the actual cairo-dock respositories for Ubuntu Jaunty.

At first I had a black rectangle on the screen where cairo dock runs, even though I was selecting the OpenGL version. Not so good. (Also, for some reason the hotspot for cairo dock is not at the margin, it's a bit up the screen from the bottom -- don't know why.) (later: Fixed, just had to go to "advanced" in the setup and move the location ...) And then I had trouble getting the setup system to save changes to the icon size -- I do not want jumbo icons, I want tiny ones!

So ... then I added Compiz (and the repositories in Jolicloud's Robby release are adequate for this). Well, the black box obligingly disappeared and I now have a nice Mac-like pop up menu system. And of course, the default compiz window effects. (Add the compiz icon to cairo-dock and it's easy to mess with the settings.) Added a ton of default add-ons to cairo dock, like, for instance, the standard linux menu system. Wahoo.

BTW, if you were trying to follow this info and aren't that familiar with linux -- you do need to execute compiz and cairo-dock if you want them to run. (They can be set to auto run at start up, but right now I am in test mode and want to be able to get rid of them by logging out. ) So, you know, <alt><f2> will give you the command line launcher.

Okay, so my computer is now a tad slower. But, hey, I'm running LastFm, truecrypt, dropbox is spending an hour uploading a file (will explain all this in another post) and now I have compiz and cairo-dock running in the background. So, I'm making this computer work. A bit of slow-down in application startup is to be expected.

BTW, this is not a netbook, and while its old it does have a nice NVIDIA card in it -- which, by the way, Jolicloud managed to set up, along with Nvidia's setup app. So, I might not have as good luck with compiz on, say my Gateway netbook. Especially as I have had no luck with Compiz or even KDE plasma on it. Will report later on that. One computer at a time ...