monline

Apparently Ubuntu changed the startup process significantly in Karmic, since GDM is now not started by a startup script in one of the the /etc/rc[0-9].d directories, but something else. Even the /etc/init.d/gdm filesystem entry was changed: it's now a symlink pointing to /lib/init/upstart-job. The latter is part of the upstart package which has the following description ...

There's a nice Python script for the job at linuxquestions.org written by Seamus Phelan. I've tested it, found a few problems and fixed them.

There're quite a few howtos on the topic already, but most involve a lot more steps than what I've found. If you need a quick&dirty way to connect to the already running GDM, here's how to do it (ssh into the server and run as root):

Now you can use your VNC client to connect to the VNC server which is most probably running on the standard 5900 port.

If you're into reading manuals, then start with "Using GCong" in the "GNOME Desktop System Administration Guide". It has almost all the info that I'm going to describe here. However if you're just interested in how to set up global Gnome defaults (ie. defaults for all users), then read on.

Gnome Panel has a built-in clock that can display weather information as well. If you enable the display of temperature and/or the weather in the clock applet's preferences (and set a location too), then hovering the mouse over the weather or temp. icon will show a detailed description (including wind speed) of the current weather in your area. There's also an "apparent" temperature at the end of the line that starts with the text "feels like". Eg. yesterday my reading said: "34.0 °C, feels like 36.6 °C". I've always wondered how this "feels like" value is calculated.

Just found out about this: "Zenity is a tool that allows you to display Gtk+ dialog boxes from the command line and through shell scripts. It is similar to gdialog, but is intended to be saner. It comes from the same family as dialog, Xdialog, and cdialog, but it surpasses those projects by having a cooler name." Seems to be pretty useful. The original project homepage is at GNOME Live.

The phenomenon is nothing new: there're at least a dozen bug reports on gnome-panel eating up CPU and/or RAM.
Eg.:

• #461106 - gnome-panel starts consuming 75% or more of the CPU and becomes unresponsive
• #187540 - gnome-panel freeze when 8 windows are open when the panel is vertical (and here's a related forum thread)

For the last couple of weeks I had an issue with Gnome Screensaver: it locked my screen and despite me moving the mouse or pressing any keys, the unlock dialog would not appear and the screen stayed blank (since I had the "Blank screen" selected in preferences). On every action (keypress or move of the mouse) the cursor appeared briefly, but only for the split of a second.

From time to time it happened to me (and a couple of my colleagues) that after a successful login to our Ubuntu server my Gnome Panels would not appear. It took not too much to discover that starting with a clean HOME directory solved the issue ... however it was quite annoying and building up a new HOME from scratch and copying stuff from the old HOME one by one ... not too much joy. Last week I had enough and tracked down the problem by removing stuff from my HOME one-by-one til the issue was gone.

Gnome's default file editor is gedit. It has builtin encoding auto-detection thus if you double-click a text file, chances are high that it'll recognize the encoding of the file properly. However if not, you can start gedit with the --encoding command line option.