Essentially what happens is that when I leave my desktop for a while, under specific circumstances, and often, on returning and moving the mouse or using the keyboard, the pointer would come back  on screen. However, this only works on one of my two screens.

The unlock dialog does not show up and it seems that there is no way to get back in.

In the past, I would log into the terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1 or any function key through to F5 or so) and

This would of course kill all processes owned by me and is therefore unpleasant at best and have you losing a bunch of work at worst.

After a brainwave yesterday (as detailed in the aforementioned post), I decided to check the status of the screensaver and killed just those processes. Happily, this gives me my desktop back. However, my gnome-shell had given up which I had to restart

Unfortunately, I did not get the windows into the original workspaces since everything just got dumped into the one workspace but it is better than having to kill everything off.

EDIT: I just realised that the screen saver of course no longer kicks in and I had to restart it

Luckily, working in Linux means that I can spread each stream of work into the various workspaces.

Now GNOME 3 makes things a little more complicated with the dynamic workspaces but I’m learning to use it to my advantage

However, with Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot and GNOME 3, I seem to be running into an issue regularly…If I leave my computer for a while, it doesn’t unlock correctly. The screen remains black and I can’t move the mouse to my second screen and the unlock screen doesn’t show up.

Thinking about it, it seems like there might be two screen savers being started but I shall investigate that tomorrow. I have the same issue at both work and home so it is more likely to be related to Ubuntu + GNOME 3 or something about the way I set things up.

I  usually resolve this by logging into the console and here a neat trick for killing all our processes in one fell swoop.

Another thing I have been doing a bit more of recently is gaming which involves rebooting in Windows.

Both of the above leaves me with a restarted workspace. Starting up the applications pops them all into the same workspace. Chrome is especially a nightmare. I might have 135 open tabs but they are in about 6 windows spread across four workspaces.

It is annoying to have to distribute these things out each time.

After having done much research, I have not been able to find a clean automated solution.

There are two half solution that I have found however.

The first one is Devil’s Pie and for a graphical interface gdevilspie. According the website for Devil’s Pie, it is “A totally crack-ridden program for freaks and weirdos who want precise control over what windows do when they appear. If you want all XChat windows to be on desktop 3, in the lower-left, at 40% transparency, you can do it.”

Unfortunately, that is exactly what it is. If you pre-determine where you want your windows to be, you can use this very useful application. However, that is not quite what I want. I want the current configuration to be remember. Exactly like how Chromium remembers which tabs are in which order in which windows and their position on the workspace, but for multiple workspaces.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any way to save the current state.

There is however, another tool I found scouring the web.

libwnck-3-dev is what I installed on my Ubuntu box. There are two key commands here

This will list all the windows across all the workspaces. To get more information on a specific Window,

The XID is the number returned next to each window from the first command. The post that I  mentioned above has a nifty tool attached that saves the window positions and can also restore them using wnckprop.

However, it saves them based on the Window title. This of course doesn’t work for Chromium or such Windows that changes the title each time you change the tab.

However, if the save is the last command you run and the restore is the first command you run after opening up the windows, it can restore the windows into the correct workspaces.

With the idea of the dynamic workspaces in GNOME 3, you might have to initialise the workspaces first but it is better than spending five minutes after logging in each time re-arranging windows…

This explains why, for a long time, I used a fairly bland desktop environment. My desktop itself was just pure black with no wallpaper. Ironically, I would remove all the icons, so it would be pure black and nothing else.

This should have tipped me off on my own desire for design. I thought my desire for black stemmed from the “good old” days of DOS when the screen was black and my love for the linux terminal. As an aside, I used to reconfigure the terminal windows in X to have a white on black background as well - so much better for the eyes. In fact, I still don’t understand why everyone uses a white background for terminals and such like. Paper was white because that was easier. There is really no reason for the screen to be white too…

Now, this was before I bumped into Enlightenment (at this time, it was E16) and to put it bluntly, I was captivated. This was absolutely gorgeous. Fairly unusable since I was used to GNOME and of course Microsoft Windows. I thoroughly enjoyed this until it became more of a distraction…

I ended up reconfiguring GNOME to be prettier - in fact, I had the Mac OS X theme for a while which I enjoyed.

I then dabbled with E17 and it was absolutely gorgeous - E16 paled in comparison. I ran into a bug where some java applications would jump a few pixels when changing the decorations. This was a real pain since I was developing a Java application at the time. I spent an entire day trying to “fix” this before I realised that it was E17 screwing it up and not my code… :-(

More recently, I thoroughly enjoyed Compiz with the shaky windows and such like - I just always wished that I could actually throw a window and watch the momentum carry it that extra distance.

Nevertheless, this bridged the gap enough to E17 to keep me happy for a little while.

Last week, I dabbled with E17 again to see if the issue with Java was resolved. To my surprise E17 had changed more or less completely - it was bridging the gap between a window manager and a full fledged Desktop environment.

However, there was a problem. It looked like I couldn’t get it back to its old glory of absolutely fantastic graphics without some effort in configuration. One other issue I ran into was that maximising a screen would fill it up across both my monitors. Another thing I could configure but then, it all seemed like too much effort.

E17 gives me the feeling that this is where user interfaces will end up - it automates so many of the things that makes it quicker to do anything. However, it still lacks some of the “basics”.

E17 is a very good example of a UI that tries to conform to what I call the “Invisible Interface” which I will be writing about later.

To bring it all back to now, I found it a hassle to go through all the available themes for WordPress for the Company Blog as well as my own.

I used to take great pleasure in going through dozens or hundreds of themes and picking ones that I liked but after doing it a few times (for Firefox, Thunderbird, my phone, GNOME, GDM and my flat), it gets a bit repetitous.

Now, for a wish. A website that pulls in all the different themes for all over the world for everything. A one-stop-theme shop. Here, I could go through and pick a general theme that I liked and download it for all the applications, my phone(s), mp3 players (and of course, taking it to the next level, all the gadgets at my flat).

That gives my life more uniformity. Perhaps this is something that Designers could take on… Say Hugo Boss, and design something that even matches your clothes, shoes, hair - everything.

That way, you could have your own unique branding… and while you are at it link it into Gravatars and you are also instantly recognisable

Now for the issue of privacy - I think I best leave that for another day.