I am a very visually-oriented person, so this makes GNOME very difficult to use. I find myself constantly selecting the wrong items, even though removing the icons doesn’t actually change their position.

But as if that wasn’t bad enough, the “usability” team has taken the KDE approach to the problem. Rather than setting an obvious and sane default (i.e. enable icons in menus), there is a checkbox to enable the icons again. Brilliant! (not)

So you can go to System → Preferences (the first item in the menu, in case you prefer to navigate visually with icons like me) → Appearance (the second item in the menu), and under the Interface tab, you can check the box “Show icons in menus” to get the menu icons back, which gives temporary relief.

Like many GNOME features, this one is only partly implemented. GNOME’s new ‘feature’ also removes stock icons from buttons, and the above option does not put them back (well, seeing as though it is captioned “Show icons in menus” I don’t see why it would, but if you’re going to take the KDE approach, you may as well go the whole hog and add another option still).

At first, I thought this was a bug in Ubuntu Karmic (I am running the alpha on my desktop right now). While there’s nothing like being able to have the suspense of not knowing whether your computer will boot up in the morning, I thought this was preposterous. After I found out it was an intentional change (167 KB PDF), it now seems that it’s plain baloney.

Among the new features and UI is an option to make a connection “Shared to other computers”. This is basically a dead-simple NAT (Network Address Translation), or Internet connection sharing, built right in to NetworkManager.

To enable this, you must follow three steps:

1. Install dnsmasq on your computer. (On Ubuntu, you will want to install the dnsmasq-base package.
2. Make sure your WAN connection (i.e. Internet-connected connection) is all configured (e.g. with DHCP or a static address) and working.
3. For your LAN interface (which might be a second network card or a wireless card), select “Shared to other computers” in the IPv4 Settings tab.

If everything works right, NetworkManager should have auto-configured a subnet and DHCP server on your LAN interface, and is ready for sharing your Internet connection. Easy peasy!

I tested 3D, and I got this interesting effect when running glxgears with compositing support enabled:

glxgears seems to be transparent. Don’t know what the purpose of it is, but it looks kind of pretty. Although not as useful as cairo-clock, which has been around for yonks.

Would make a nice Ubuntu marketing slogan.

From some initial Googling, I nearly died when I found out I’d have to compile some GATOS driver to get some form of TV-out. Today, however, I stumbled across a set of three commands that worked for me with no such recompiling necessary:

xrandr --addmode S-video 800x600
xrandr --output S-video --mode 800x600
xrandr --output S-video --set tv_standard pal 

Those instructions only apply to RandR 1.2–powered boxes (i.e. Ubuntu 8.04 and above) — if you have an earlier version, I have no idea what to do. Upgrade.

The above code will set your TV-out to 800⨯600. For some reason, 640⨯480 does not work for me.