JDPFu.com 2024

If you use virtual machines as much as I do, continue reading. If you don’t, then you’re experiences with Gnome3 will probably be very different from mine.

Which Version of Gnome3?

Gnome 3 is available as an ISO for x32 and x64 versions of Fedora or OpenSUSE. I haven’t used any RedHat-based distro since around 2000, but I have used OpenSUSE in the last decade. I grabbed OpenSUSE x32 version of Gnome3. Get it here. The download took about 2 hours. I was unable to find a bit-torrent which wasn’t over a week old and my local University (usually the fastest mirror possible) didn’t have it available. Since Gnome3 was released a few days ago, anything older than than 2 days would be bogus or a beta version, not what we want.

Virtualization

I use virtualization around here. In fact this desktop is running inside a virtual machine and so is this web blog. Out of 6 physical machines here, only 2 could be used to run Gnome3 with GPU acceleration. Really, only 1, since the other runs MS-Windows (if you work in IT, you need at least 1 MS-Win PC). I did not load Gnome 3 onto physical hardware. I used a VirtualBox 4.×. Good support under a virtual machine is mandatory for me.

Machine Settings

I used a VM running inside a physical machine with a Core i5 w/ 6GB RAM and discrete ATI graphics. Plenty of power for a desktop. The VM environment was given plenty of resources.

• 2 CPUs
• 1.5GB of RAM
• 8GB of SATA HDD (no swap)
• 128MB of Video RAM + 3D acceleration (had to enable/disable 3D)

Live CD Run

I connected the ISO to the VM, so it would boot. This method of booting is 20x faster than using a real CDROM/DVD to boot. The ISO is on a real HDD, so access performance is usually really, really good.

The initial boot took much longer than expected. It recognized the 3D acceleration provided by VirtualBox. The menus were sparse. There was no ability to right-click on the desktop, which I found a little scary. I’ve been right clicking on the desktop since 1993. I knew that running a Live CD isn’t the same as running an installed OS, so I used gnome-shell-search, I guess that’s what that search tool is, to find all programs named “install.” 3 desktop icons were displayed. I double-clicked on the appropriate OS installer and waited. And waited and waited. This machine is usually extremely quick. When the installer window was finally displayed, the fonts and buttons didn’t look right. There was swishing. I suspect the issue was with the virtual 3D acceleration – does it matter what caused the problem – this wasn’t going to work since none of the text was readable.

From that point on, waiting at least a minute between keyboard or mouse clicks was necessary. After waiting 10 minutes to regain control, I decided to terminate the virtual machine, remove the 3D accel capabilities and start over.

Installation

This time, the 3D acceleration capabilities to the Virtual Machine were disabled. Boot from the LiveCD took about 45 seconds and I was warned that Gnome3 capabilities would not be available. Fine, I just want to install the OS and get a feel for it anyway. Before doing the install, I looked around for about 5 minutes to see a plain Gnome setup. It looked like a really stripped down Ubuntu or even a stripped down Lubuntu. Since all the menus were known to me, I didn’t bother looking too much. It seems that without 3D acceleration, there isn’t anything new to see. I did notice that minimize and maximize buttons were missing from every window border. I can do without the maximize – never use that, but I use minimize all the time. In fact, I use minimize more than I use the X button. I’ll need to make the middle mouse button be min and right click for any other needs if I decide to use this environment. I guess.

I opened an xterm and a gnome-terminal (yuck). Even the xterm had too much flash around the outside, added by gnome, for my tastes. After finding the installer buried a few menus deep, where it should be, I selected to install the OS and was greeted with a warning that 4 fonts needed to be downloaded for the install to work perfectly. Huh? Picking non-standard fonts for a GUI installer seems a little short-sighted to me. Nice first impression.

OpenSUSE sets up a root account during the install. I’d forgotten about that since I use Ubuntu-based desktops and servers. Ok, choose a timezone, partitioning, etc. Reboot. Before the reboot can start the VM again, I kill the VM, edit the settings to remove the LiveCD, then reboot. Usually, I forget to do this. ;)

The reboot recognized that 3D acceleration wasn’t enabled. It prompted for a password, but I didn’t see which account (root or my personal userid) was used for the login. A few seconds later, the need for updates from the package manager popped up. Without 3D Acceleration enabled, this environment still looked like a stripped down Lubuntu install … without min, max or right-click on the desktop abilities. This is not very useful to me due to my current habits. Time to reboot the freshly installed OS with the 3D accel enabled and hope for a better outcome than I saw earlier.

With 3D Acceleration

I rebooted with 3D acceleration enabled. The desktop automatically logged into my userid – no password needed. Yuck. This isn’t MS-Windows folks, I want a login with a password to be necessary.

Activities and then Applications pulled up a large list of application icons in the main part of the window. Some I knew, others were new to me since I don’t really use Gnome apps. I figured that I should give them a chance – nothing is better than email, so I clicked on that app. A window was displayed, but it was unreadable. Seeing the window title, I think it wanted a password to make system changes, but since I couldn’t read the text (it was all swishy), I closed it. Opening 10 other applications produced similar results. None of the text was readable. The only application that seemed to work was the Places – a file/director browser. It was unclear what happened to the windows when I went back to the Activities selection. The icons were added to the favorites list on the left – using up 10% of the window area. I guess that is part of the new-way-of-working that Gnome3 is all about. I’m curious, but not so curious that I’ll setup a partition on a physical machine to boot into.

My main desktops all run inside virtual machines. Exactly how am I supposed to make use of this new, fancy tool? I can’t. I have older machines that I could load it into, but none of those have recent graphics cards, so what would be the point? My most powerful systems are running virtual machines, lots of VMs.

General Thoughts

I’ve wiped Gnome3 from my test VM machine. It isn’t ready for use, at least in this format, inside a virtualbox VM. VMware Player or Workstation may work better. I don’t know.

The Gnome developers have missed the point as far as I’m concerned. Just because a new hardware capability exists, doesn’t mean it needs to be used everywhere. Sure, make use of hardware capabilities, but only where they make sense and with a graceful fallback.

When you force the minimum hardware beyond what many users have, you run the risk of building another OS/2. If you don’t recall, OS/2 needed 2x the average amount of RAM installed in each system. Sure, it would run with only 4MB of RAM, but nobody would use it with less than 8MB. It wasn’t usable, jut like Gnome3 isn’t usable under a VirtualBox VM or any KVM, Xen, ESXi-based VMs.

I think the new Linux GUIs are missing the point. We don’t run Linux for eye candy, we run it to get work done.