GNOME Do - An intelligent launcher tool for GNOME

GNOME Do is an intelligent launcher tool which makes all your default menus and panels in GNOME redundant. Since last time I had written about GNOME Do, it has gotten only better. Just a glance through the numerous plugins available for GNOME Do will be enough for any sceptic to fall in love with it.

Just to give you a feel of what can be achieved with this marvellous tool, do yourself a favour. After installing GNOME Do in your Linux distribution within GNOME, start it and open the GNOME Do preferences dialog box. Click on the plugins tab and glance through the diverse plugins available for GNOME Do - right from Twitter, to Google tools and more.

Another neat trick is to use GNOME Do as a dock, like in Apple's Mac OS X. To achieve this, the prerequisite is -

Your GNOME desktop needs to run using a composite window manager. You can enable it by opening the System > Preferences > Appearance GUI tool. Then click Visual Effects tab and enable the special effects.

Once you have enabled visual effects, you can use GNOME Do as a dock by simply changing it's theme to "Docky" in the "Appearances" tab of GNOME Do preferences dialog.

The blog I'Been To Ubuntu has a fabulous article on how you can use GNOME Do and a few other packages available in Ubuntu Launchpad repository to transform GNOME into a Mac OS X like Desktop. Really inspiring.

Of course, in Linux, we have another option for a dock such as Avant Window Navigator. Or you can transform your traditional KDE desktop into a Mac OS X.

Can you name a GNOME Do equivalent tool in Windows, Mac OS X and KDE respectively ?

Transform KDE desktop into Apple Mac OS X

One of the biggest motivation for a lay person in buying an Apple Mac - apart from its robust high-end hardware and its OS stability - is its beauty. Over the years, Apple has pioneered new ways of easing the desktop users life with its well designed desktop OS - Mac OS X. Many people who set their eyes on an Apple Mac for the first time will be tempted to buy it.


What if I told you that you can make your Linux OS look and feel like an Apple Mac ?

The panel in KDE with the MacOSX look and feel

Now-a-days a lot of development has been taking place in Linux on the usability front and some of the projects such as XGL are worth the efforts put into it. But for the die-hard Mac enthusiast who would settle for nothing less than a desktop which looks like the original, it is possible with some effort to make a Linux desktop look like a Mac OSX one by clever use of icon sets, wallpapers and themes.

Earlier I had explained how to convert your GNOME desktop to look like Mac OS X. Now it is possible to create an exact imitation of Apple's OS X look using a project called Baghira. In fact Arnaud, a Baghira user has written a very good tutorial to convert your KDE desktop to look like an Apple Mac OS X desktop. The tutorial is pretty detailed in its explanation of the steps and is replete with screenshots.

Mac OSX - Should it use the Linux Kernel ?

A couple of days back, in a news article titled - Monolithic Kernel vs Micro kernel - published on this blog, I had described the intense debate on this between two school of thoughts fueled by Linus Torvalds and professor Andrew.S.Tanenbaum. One of the examples Andy had given as proof of the stability of micro kernel architecture was the popular Mac OSX itself which (according to Andy) runs on top of the Mach kernel which follows the micro-kernel architecture.

Now it is well known that the Mach micro-kernel, from its inception has been ridden with problems both design wise as well as in performance. So there are many people who wonder why Apple still uses the mach kernel with all its design flaws. In fact there is a group in the Apple community who favor transferring OSX to run on top of the Linux kernel instead which by the way is a monolithic kernel.

Daniel Eran has written an interesting article debunking the popular belief that Mac OSX is based on a micro-kernel architecture and goes on to explain that Apple's kernel named XNU kernel is not implemented as a micro-kernel. In fact, he is of the opinion that the original Mach kernel on which OSX is based on is a fat kernel and it was the Mach micro-kernel project which was a failure.

My Opinion

We are not short of robust kernels be it the BSD kernel, Linux or any other. In fact the beauty of the POSIX environment is that one can switch one kernel for the other and with a little effort still build a stable and secure OS which is what makes this OS design of separating the OS kernel from the userland tools such an exciting proposition.