I tend to have multiple ssh sessions open at once to my multiple *nix machines. However despite all the best attempts to keep some order all the windows tend to clutter up the desktop. Gnome terminal goes some way to easing that pain by supporting tabs but it would be even nicer if I could have multiple consoles all in a single window.
After a bit of digging I came across Gnome Terminator.
It’s a rather nice simple terminal console app but where it wins for me is that if you right click inside the terminal you can split the terminal horizontally or vertically or any combination of both. If you see my screenshot below it will give you a good idea. And yes almost all my machines are names after characters in Stargate!
Chances are that there are already pre-built binaries available for your distribution. At least there is for my Ubuntu workstation so it was a simple
sudo apt-get install terminator
It’s certainly worth checking out if like me you like to have lots of console windows open.
Terminator in action
I had a hard drive failure on my main workstation recently and after installing the new one I decided to partition it with Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.04. That was about six weeks ago and I have only booted into Windows once.
I would consider myself a pretty advanced Linux/Unix user. My first encounter with Linux was in 1995 with LinuxFT and not long after that with an early Slackware release. As the years have rolled by since then I have setup literally hundreds of Linux servers and scores of Solaris and HP-UX servers but Linux has never impressed me on the desktop.
Through one job I had eight years ago I had to use RedHat 6.1 as a desktop OS and I absolutely hated it. The look and feel was terrible. The early GTK widgets were hideous. Gnome was at version 1.4 and it was almost completely unusable. Around the same time I installed SuSE 6.0 on a spare PC at home and while it used KDE by default, it wasn’t much better. Installing fonts was a nightmare and the only decent browser available then was Netscape Navigator which used the Motif Widget set and was a nightmarisly ugly looking beast with which to browse the web.
How things have changed in eight years! A quick roll call of my computer room here at home comes up with the following:
1 HP 9000 running HP-UX
1 Reverse Proxy server running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
1 Web Server running Debian Lenny 64bit
2 Sun Blade 2000 workstations running Solaris 10
1 Apple MacBook running OS X 10.5 Leopard
1 Dell Poweredge running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
1 Main workstation running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Dual booting with Windows XP)
1 Firewall running Smoothwall Linux
And finally:
1 File server running Windows Server 2003.
I’m now down running just one single Windows machine from a maximum of about 8 over the years. And unlike before I don’t think I will be turning back. Most of the applications that I used on Windows were open source to begin with and naturally they have Linux versions. Firefox and Thunderbird being the most obvious two. WINE has matured to such an extent that when I’m no longer comfortable using The Gimp for certain tasks, Photoshop CS2 works under WINE like a charm.
However if there is a problem with Linux it is that there is probably too much choice. Particularly when it comes to your default desktop. I’ve finally decided on Gnome mainly because I couldn’t get Compiz working properly with XFCE. I had a look at KDE4 and I will probably have to wrte a seperate post about it. Suffice to say for the moment I don’t like the look of it one little bit.
So after six weeks I finally have my desktop looking the way I want it to. Gone is the Ubuntu Brown default theme replaced instead with one I liked from art.gnome.org . I’m still trying to find window decorations that I like but for the moment the default Ubuntu one is tolerable.
I still do think however that Linux is still no where even near ready for use as a mainstram desktop OS for the average user. But for the moment I’m finally impressed enough that I can eschew Windows at long last.
Engineer arrived today and swapped out the PSU (again), Mainboard (again) and this time also replaced the CPU.
It’s back in action. Ubuntu is installed and running away happily. In fact I’m using this machine now to type this out.
Now that it is back in action, it is time to put it to the use I had intended. As it has 2GB of RAM this machine is now going to be tasked with being my Virtual Server. My current plan is to migrate the server this blog is running on over to a virtual server. However that’s going to have to wait until the weekend.
