Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

A First Look at Mylyn

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Finally got around to spending some time with Mylyn, the popular Eclipse plugin that helps you manage tasks and provides integration with task repositories like Bugzilla, JIRA, Trac, and others.

For me the CVS features built-in in Eclipse have always provided a high value day in day out. Integrating with bug tracking repositories is a further step in the same direction allows me to perform queries against JIRA for example to see issues I’m working without going to an external browser. This feature alone makes it worth having this plugin.

Taking that a step farther Mylyn provides intelligent, task sensitive, context switching. That is to say it hides or shows only what’s relevant to the task at hand in views such as the Project Explorer where you might normally browse through hundreds of files. Instead you see only the few files and methods you care about. This adds a certain kind of intelligence to Eclipse, the kind of intelligence I remember a long time when I used IntelliJ (oops, did I say that out loud?)

To learn more I recommend the Mylyn User Guide, which is actually not easy to find like anything else on eclipse.org:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylyn_User_Guide

One oddity for Linux users… Using Alt+Click (mentioned a lot in Mik Kersten’s articles on IBM DevelopreWorks) just didn’t work for me. I kept trying without any luck. Finally I discovered Alt+Click is already mapped in GNOME desktop for moving windows and needs to be disabled. Also I had to hold down the Win key (Windows logo on it) together with Alt+Click and voila it worked! The User Guide has both of these documented.

Posted in Eclipse, Linux | No Comments »

3D Desktop Effects with the Beryl Manager on Ubuntu

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

I’ve known about Beryl for some time but have been skeptical about installing it. 3D effects and other desktop eye candy is cool but it doesn’t trump productivity and stability.

It turned out I was wrong on both of these points. I finally made the move to Beryl and was surprised by the results, which are quite good. Most importantly I’ve since found lots of productivity-related features in Beryl that go beyond “eye candy”. Here is a short list:

  1. Rotating among several desktop workspaces is plain cool but it is also very encouraging towards actually utilizing multiple desktop workspaces.
  2. The animation effects on minimizing and closing windows are not to be estimated as a continuous source of geek-type inspiration.
  3. Hitting F9 displays all active windows in the current workspace at the same time (like tiles) so you can pick the one you want. Hitting F8 does the same for active windows in all workspaces. Great stuff! When many windows are opened I hate cycling through!
  4. Using the “Windows” (Super) key in combination with “h” toggles maximizing the window horizontally. I love this one: a life saver for wide-screen laptop users. Doing the same in combination with “v” toggles maximizing the window vertically.
  5. Alt+F8 initiates resizing a window.

There are many other features I haven’t yet come to but I already feel much better about using a great desktop environment.

I am running a T60 Thinkpad with an ATI card (Radeon x1400). I use the proprietary fglrx driver because the free Radeon driver doesn’t support my card well. Given this my path to Beryl required using Xgl to get the 3D effects. You can find instructions by searching for “Beryl Xgl fglrx” or use this link.

Posted in Linux, Ubuntu | No Comments »