Re: Questions from new user

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

Hi there,

Toralf Lund wrote:

> I am fairly new to GNOME, and have a few questions about the way things

Not uncommon :)

> work. Actually, some of them may probably be viewed as criticism of how
> the panel is designed, but I hope nobody gets upset about this.
> 
> Anyhow, what I wanted to ask was:

I have snipped the bits I can't answer at all. These are guesses
at the rest:
 
>   1. Is there a desktop pager application that runs in a separate
>      window? I find that the pager applet is too small to be useful, or
>      it makes the panel too large, depending on how you configure it.

I think this may depend on your window manager. At a guess, if you
are new to Gnome you are running Enlightenment, but you may not
be. Are you? What version of Gnome are you running? Click on the
"about" option of the panel and that will give you the version 
of your panel. (Why doesn't 'About Gnome' give the Gnome version,
btw? It brings up info about your system rather than about Gnome.)

>   2. Why can't I use the pager to move windows between the desktops? Or
>      can I? Is there an alternative pager where this is possible?

I don't use pagers, but from what I've seen discussed on the list, 
this should work! I do recall something about older versions of
enlightenment not liking to switch between desktops, though.

>   3. It it possible to display the task buttons in a scrollable list or
>      window rather than having them resized to fit in. The latter
>      approach makes the whole task list rather useless when you, like
>      me, have the habit of having at least 20 windows open at any given
>      time. Of course, this habit is one of the reasons why I'm using
>      Linux in the first place.

If you mean a list of what windows are currently open, then an
alternative (which is a bit of a jump just for this, but still) is
to use Window Maker. (I don't know about Enlightenment). Clicking
on the third button when not in a window produces a list of what
windows are currently open and on which workspace. If you click 
close to the edge of the screen, the list appears half on the screen,
half off, and scrolls out to be visible when you move the mouse to
the edge of the window, rather like the autohide feature of the
panel. This keeps it out of the way until you want it. I have 
thirteen windows open myself at the moment, some with very long 
titles, so I can see why you're asking :)

>   4. Why can't I put the panel in the middle of the screen? Not that I
>      want it there, it's just a matter of principle.

You will be able to in the next version of Gnome, I believe. That's
the version currently in CVS, which is what really brave people who
like debugging run.

>   5. Can anyone explain how gnome-linuxconf is supposed to work? In
>      particular, what is meant to happen when you select an entry from
>      the list of configuration tasks? - It looks like selecting a task
>      that has been displayed already has no effect.

I don't use gnome-linuxconf. As I recall, the documentation for
linuxconf is in what I call "a funny place": /usr/lib/linuxconf/
rather than a man page. If it doesn't behave the way that suggests,
then you might want to have a look at http://bugs.gnome.org, 
look through the gnome-linuxconf package list of bugs, and if it's
not there, send a bug report. There are directions on this at
the site, or you can use the 'bug-buddy' program, which makes it
a lot easier (and is really cool and in the event of a crash even
produces a list of helpful debugging info).

>   6. Is there an application similar to SGI's iconbook/iconcatalog? I
>      find this a lot more convenient to use than large, deeply nested
>      menus. For those of you who don't know this application, here are
>      some excerpts from its manual page:

I didn't follow the terminology of this too much; but are you asking
how you can create icons that live somewhere very obvious which you
can just click on to run? This is certainly possible, and like
everything else in Gnome, there's lots of ways to do it.

I like a tidy screen (well, as tidy as possible with thirteen windows)
and so don't use the drag-and-drop method of putting links to things
straight onto the desktop, but this is detailed in the user's guide.
(Some older distributions didn't include this for some reason: use
the help-browser and if clicking on user's guide or about Gnome says
"you may not have this installed", check that gnome-users-guide
exists on your system.)

You can create launchers for different programs via the panel: right
click on the panel to find the 'add new launcher' option. It requires
that you know the name of the program you want to run, as you would
enter it on the command line. So 'gnomecc' instead of 'control center'
and so on. 

You can use the menu editor (in Utilities) to add things to the
user menu (not the system menu unless you are running as root).
Again, you need the command-line version of the program name.

Or various window managers have facilities for creating a series of
icons which are constantly available. I know windowmaker does this:
they're stored in the 'dock'. Unfortunately, it's not something I
use, so I don't know how. I forget the other window managers which
do it. It's entirely possible enlightenment does it.

Snipped 7 and 8: I don't know.

>   9. How do I select the keyboard "language"?

Do you mean you want to type in characters from other languages
on a keyboard that doesn't have the keys, that you want to remap
the keyboard to a different layout, or that you want to change
the language which Gnome talks to you?

There is an entry in the Gnome FAQ (http://www.gnome.org/gnomefaq/)
about the last of those under the title Internationalization and
Localization at: http://www.gnome.org/gnomefaq/html/x867.html#AEN885

I hope some of this helps.

Telsa