Last week, we reviewed the Aspire One, Acer’s entry into the netbook market. The small but powerful device comes preloaded with either Linux or Windows XP, and we reviewed the Linux version. Even though most people will never need to go beyond the default Linpus Linux offering on the One, more advanced users will quickly hit the wall Acer set up: it has more or less completely locked down the Xfce 4.2.2 installation on the One. This bothered me – this is a powerful machine, so I want a powerful operating system. I went for Ubuntu 8.04.1 – read on for a few thoughts on how well GNOME’s user interface fares on a small-screen device such as the One.
My preferred course of action was to ‘unlock’ the default Linpus installation. While this unlocking process is documented quite well on the AcerAspireOne.com community website, it’s not a single process per se; you need to unlock several things, and Acer hasn’t exactly made it easy. Somewhere in the process I made a mistake, and before I knew it, I was receiving HAL errors that proved unfixable. Fed up, I decided to go with Ubuntu. The installation and optimisation process is well documented and easy enough to accomplish. This gave me the default Ubuntu desktop on my One, and I figured I would share some screenshots with you so you get an idea of how GNOME handles smaller screens.
I obviously made a few changes to the default desktop (apart from theme and icon pack changes) to make GNOME better suited for small screens. Most notably, I set all fonts sizes to 9pt, and chose my favourite typeface (Trebuchet MS). This greatly reduced the size of various labelled widgets and menus, saving precious screen real estate. The sans-serif Trebuchet MS happens to be very readable at smaller point sizes. To reclaim even more screen space, I disabled the text underneath toolbar buttons.
I also reworked the two-panel layout, something I always do anyway on GNOME. However, I did opt for the single-icon menu instead of the Applications/Places/System trio, for obvious reasons. The small menu takes some getting used to, but it’s not that big of a deal.
I didn’t exactly have high hopes for GNOME on smaller screens, but with the above changes, it is very much usable. I was afraid Evolution would be completely unusable, but using the vertical layout, it is actually quite pleasant to use:
As Linpus already showed me, OpenOffice.org works really well too:
Most GNOME settings dialogs have no problems whatsoever…
…but some aren’t exactly working well and need some love.
And, well, let’s just say not all applications like being on a small screen.
Overall, using GNOME on such a small screen is not an unpleasant experience, but it does need some work here and there when it comes to settings dialogs. It is up to the distributions to make proper panel layouts and font choices for their netbook variants.
near-vanilla gnome works pretty well on a tiny screen.
Bugs should be filed for those apps that still take too much space and are not resizable.
Why should bugs be filed for individual applications? The fault is with the underlying platform because GTK does not have any notion of resolution independence.
Thank you, Thom, for this eye-opening little article. Very well written and supplemented with screenshots so we can get a good idea of your points. I’m quite impressed.
I wonder if using Matchbox as an alternative interface in Ubuntu would fare as well — or better — on such a small screen. As far as I remember, it’s still in the Ubuntu repos.
I find that Gnome does a good job of converting high resolution monitors into 800×600 mid-90s monstrosities. KDE 4 is moving in this direction too and I don’t like it. I don’t understand why we have to waste so much screen real estate with crappy widgets. And here’s a case where it actually does matter. I’m glad you managed to make it work, but I’m honestly surprised, because in the past, I’ve had trouble making GTK stuff fit on a small screen (my first Linux experience was on 800×600 in late 2004 [old monitor] and half the dialogs wouldn’t fit on the screen).
That is how a high-DPI screen is supposed to look. If the font is set to 72pt size, the character cell should be exactly one physical inch. Not more, not less.
If you want 6pt fonts, then set the font to 6 or 4 or 2 or whatever you like.
And yes, I do go around telling old people that they are doing it wrong when they set Vista to 640×480 on their 20″ monitor.
I think you mean pixel, not character cell. A character cell would be the box containing the entire character.
That’s exactly what he meant. You obviously don’t want a pixel to be exactly one inch.
It’s not the fonts…I can deal with that. It’s the layout of everything else. It’s just so big and you can’t do anything about. I didn’t get a high resolution screen so that I can look at the moral equivalent of 800×600. Other environments let you adjust font sizes and the like so that, if you so choose, you can make it look like 800×600, but Gnome basically decides for you that clearly you want to have terrible use of screen real estate and the only option is to hack the themes yourself. And that still doesn’t fix the problem of apps that waste empty space.
The Gnome components should be the same size no matter what your screen resolution is. I agree with the Gnome defaults. Start out big, that way everyone can read it, then let them make it smaller.
Get a thin-frame theme, there are several. Make your task bars smaller. Set the font sizes smaller. All of that can be changed.
There’s no way to fix the themes without editing a config file in /usr/share/themes. There’s almost no documentation for theme configuration, or it is well hidden. You have to use trial and error. Compare that to KDE or Windows where you can easily control theme settings. Especially on Windows you can control the sizing of various components.
I didn’t mean that you should fix the theme, although I suppose that you could. It’d be easier to use a theme editor tool. I know there are some.
I was suggesting using a different theme entirely, one designed for small sizes.
I have no idea what you mean when you say “apps that waste empty space”. That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe you mean the iconbar in GNOME applications? No that can’t be it, you can turn that off in the Appearance preferences.
Here is what I use on my Ubuntu laptop just right now (screen resolution is 1280×800):
1. Clearlooks Compact theme for GNOME (google it).
2. Fonts “Sans” (or “Monospace”) of size of 7.5 points with “best contrast” rendering.
3. Toolbar buttons – “Icons only” setting.
The result is more compact than Windows.
there are plenty of compact themes around.
setting fonts to 8 and using a compact theme from gnome look have a pretty good time fitting almost everything on my eee 701.
Oh please! This is small? Check out this one:
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-August/027326.ht…
2.8″ is small! 😉
Kind regards,
now that is EXACTLY what the freerunner needs.
i can’t wait to get paid so i can pick one of those bad boys up.
This is they way I have my laptop set up, I have a single panel, but instead of the single-icon menu I installed the SLAB menu and I am currently using that. I heard there is a new version of it in Ibex so I am anxiously waiting for that as it is more similar to what Linux Mint uses.
Thom,
how would you say the XFCE in Linpus was before you Ubuntized the little fellow? Were you able to fit the config dialogs in the small screen?
What Xfce configuration dialogs? By default, you couldn’t access any of them
.
Using the terminal, you could run xfce-setting-show, but it didn’t fit on the small screen at all.
I went with for the 1GB RAM 120GB HD version, which means my Aspire One came with Windows XP installed. I just finished installing Ubuntu 8.04.1 and the updated madwifi modules. Sound (speaker) works, webcam works, blinking lights work. I don’t have an SD card to check out the card readers. My preferred font is Liberation Sans, but I also went with 9pt. Next up: finding a suitable travel case.
The AspireOne looks solid and has good specs to boot.
You can always keep Linpus on the Aspire and use a thin client software to run the XP OS
http://www.aikotech.com/thinserver.htm
@Thom Holwerda
I also prefer Trebuchet MS for desktop usage, but default X11 hintstyle (which is set to 3) looks very bad with any font, to make it look really good You need to set hintstyle to 0.
You may also use Trebuchet MS instead of other ugly fonts such as Arial on web sites using ~/.fonts.conf settings.
Here is the difference between htinstyle 0 and 3:
http://toya.net.pl/~vermaden/gfx/hintstyle_3.png
http://toya.net.pl/~vermaden/gfx/hintstyle_0.png
Regards
vermaden
OT: You might want to change spearator to separator in your screenshot.
It was fixed long time ago mate:
http://osnews.com/story/19770
… but thanks
Thanks for the tip, vermaden, made my fonts just a little better looking. I’m always hunting for better font rendering, so thanks for the tip!
You are welcome.
Has anyone tried a tiling wm like awesome or wmii on a netbook? Systems with limited screen real estate always seemed like the most obvious place to use a tiling wm to me. I have been thinking about getting an aspireone, eee 1000h, or msi wind, but am still waiting.
I ran ion at 1024×768 for a year or so and it worked okay.
Screenshots at 800×600:
Tiled stuff: http://apex.homelinux.net/img/1.png
Firefox: http://apex.homelinux.net/img/2.png
It really needs more horizontal space, but netbooks have that.
Well.. using the gimp on any screen is unpleasant…
I still can’t comprehend how anyone could “design” that interface. It’s like two programmers got together and built something without looking at it.
Does the default OS have better battery life? Or, does Ubuntu handle that fine?
I think Ubuntu is slightly worse, but after the battery optimisations as listed in the howto, it ain’t all bad.
My preferred course of action was to ‘unlock’ the default Linpus installation. While this unlocking process is documented quite well on the AcerAspireOne.com community website, it’s not a single process per se; you need to unlock several things, and Acer hasn’t exactly made it easy. Somewhere in the process I made a mistake, and before I knew it, I was receiving HAL errors that proved unfixable.
You might want to try this:
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=1256
I really don’t understand why would anyone bother about touching the linpus once it’s possible to make it work in non-restricted (geek) mode. To me, this linpus linux is the best distro i have seen lately : fast (i can’t believe how fast it can boot), effective, functional. no need to search google, forums to make fundamental things. a lesson for all the freaks at debian, ubuntu, etc.
The reason it’s so good is just because it was optimized for this system – which is because it was sold on it. Any linux system could be that good.
Anyway, I installed Kubuntu because I use this laptop to demo KDE, and I wanted the latest KDE on it…