Roy S wrote:
>__/ [ Bruce Scott TOK ] on Tuesday 03 October 2006 16:04 \__
>
>> Roy S wrote:
>>
>>>Conky eye-candy
>>>
>>>,----[ Quote ]
>>>| Making Ubuntu look better is something that many of us are interested in,
>>>| but can we justify the performance impact? Fortunately, with Conky, we
>>>| can: It looks cool AND it shows you important information on your
>>>| desktop.
>>>`----
>>
>> I think there is too much of this nowadays in Linux... resource hogging
>> eye candy that not only doesn't help but gets in the way.
>>
>> BTW can you tell me how to get rid of color (ANY color) in xterms? I
>> can't find it in the manpages (nothing in there about the prompt, and
>> nothing telling about an option to run them b/w).
>>
>> I basically stick to an old SuSE where color wasn't in there by
>> default. I use a very soft/neutral background and find anything bright
>> distracting. Even boldface is distracting.
>
>Are you running a greyscale desktop? I very much doubt it because this would
>mean working in 'colour-blind mode'. Either way, YaST enables you to change
>the palette to project different colours (or none). It can be altered in all
>sorts of way. The function is actually there.
It's full color, which I of course use in line drawing (computational
results).
I don't want to control this through the OS, which is why I like the
defaults which don't overdo the color (or ridiculously wasteful
backdrops like in Knoppix... fortunately it was reasonably easy to
figure out how to turn those off).
>I don't know about changing colours in xterm, but with consoles you can
>achieve just about anything (any colour), window decorations aside. You can
>also customise bash to use little or no colours, e.g. by aliasing some
>common commands like /ls/, which _may_ highlight with colours by default.
These I know about... it was easy to disable the color in ls.
>But colours are your friend, IMO. Colours makes information more condensed,
>so your mind can receive more data without motion of the eye or head. Think,
>for example, about colouring replies (multiple levels, different colours) in
>a newsreader.
Colors get in the way while reading text (did you _really_ like those
used text books with all that stuff highlighted?).
My problem this time is the prompt. Yellow. Unreadable. But bright.
A big distraction. The xterm manpage details everything (it seems to)
except the prompt! I can see how color-coded window borders would help
if you have a lot of xterms open... I tell them apart using their
titles however (best default is to have $host:$cwd displayed there).
On all that other stuff (background, borders, cursor, typed text, etc)
there are nice CLI options so you can set it all up with scripts.
On the SuSE everything is at least passably OK (I have SuSE here because
it is the institute's default and you get lots of local support). I
would have installed Knoppix or Kubuntu by now were they not such hogs.
I can tell that from the laptop's fan. Before (SuSE 6.2), it only ever
turns on when I do number crunching. Under Knoppix it gets triggered by
basic X usage. Under Kubuntu it is always on, and the CD drive runs
loud and hot (this may be some sort of compatibility issue). With the
old SuSE the resource usage is in the 16 MB range, and I am able to take
230 MB core RAM with my own calculations (code development), and play
games with nothing swapping. When I am working on papers (emacs, tex,
xdvi, sometimes also gv and acroread) the fan is never on and the laptop
runs cool.
--
ciao,
Bruce
drift wave turbulence: http://www.rzg.mpg.de/~bds/
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