Just a quickie. You want to know which file holds your GNOME2 desktop icon layout, sizes, emblems, and so on?
Look no further than $HOME/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home*
I assume Mate (being a fork of Gnome2) has somewhere similar. GNOME3? No idea.
So prior to yesterday, my new and clean $HOME had not seen any X session at all. No freedesktop defined XDG base directories.
Then I logged in and…
So as hinted yesterday, GNOME2 + pekwm. Here it is, in three simple steps. Continue reading
So I’m calling it. I think my systems are back up to speed – indeed, I’ve not had a failure in weeks now. I’ve been running my desktop from a spare account for a little while, and I think I’ll migrate this setup to my primary account and let the file cruft begin solidly again!
My setup is… gnome2 (thanks linuxmint, debian edition) with pekwm as the windowmanager (that’s /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager to you, gconftool), and xcompmgr to give me nifty compositing and real shadows on menus (so far, I’m toying with “xcompmgr -c -r 8 -l 1 -t 1 -o 0.6 -f -D 0.01 -I 0.1 -O 0.1″ 
It’ll be nice to have my real $HOME as the foundation of my desktop again!
So, dear reader[12], you may have noticed that it’s been a month since the last update in my $HOME rebuild, and may be wondering what’s going on. I have had ongoing issues, so here is the summary, broken down per-machine… Continue reading
rebuilding $HOME: Days 3 through 6
I was intending on building up my zsh(1) and mutt(1) configs before tackling the rebuild of my desktop – the original catalyst of the idea.
But since I was rebuilding my account from across a nearby spare account, I thought I’d use it to take a peek at gnome3 and Unity, and so did “apt-get dist-upgrade” my Ubuntu 11.04 install.
…
A broken update later, I figured I’d install from scratch, and have gotten distracted these last few days with exploring XFCE, LXDE, Unity, Gnome3 and KDE. I’m testing them in a spare account, so as to not clutter up my main $HOME with cruft too quickly while I learn the ropes.
I gotto say, KDE has grown on me. I think its interface is a horrible hodgepodge when it comes to usability – especially out-of-the-box usability, but behind the stab-your-eyes-out bling, it’s really quite feature rich, and I’m all but thinking I’ll be moving to it. The real question for me is how many of my existing gnome-ish apps do I bring with me (eg: rhythmbox, pidgin), and how many will I adopt the KDE equivalents (konsole probably, dolphin…
Assuming I *do* go with KDE, mind you…
Like I said, KDE has grown on me, but I’m not quite sure yet if it’s a beauty spot, or merely a wart. (or indeed, a tumor. Itz not a toomaaaa!!
Interesting times indeed… full reviews will come later? =)