Today, during the afternoon, I poked around with the JDS Live CD again - and found a few more interesting stuff. The “New Server” dialog found in older versions of Nautilus has been greatly improved - I think some ideas from this can be implemented in the “Connect to Server” dialog in Nautilus 2.6x.



The “Unlock Screen” dialog that comes with xscreensaver in JDS is also a lot less scary - I have been speaking about getting rid of the older dialog (with a “computer on fire” image) for quite a long time. Good to see that someone finally implemented it.

However, the administrative tool in JDS, YAST takes a long time to load - and some options do not make any sense for a Live CD. For example, there is a menu item called “Install drivers”. I clicked it, and YAST asked me to insert vendor CD-ROM. It is (a) not a very helpful message (how am I supposed to know what vendor ?), and (b) in a Live CD, you can’t insert a CD into the drive, unless you have two drives. The JDS devs could have simply removed this menu item for the Live CD version - it’s usually as easy as deleting a .desktop file.



Also - there are also some wierd usability issues with the GNOME theme used by JDS. The image below shows the top-right corner of an out of focus window. Can you see the maximise/minimise/close buttons ? I had to squint my eyes real hard to locate them (OK - I wear eyeglasses - but I don’t have any problems with seeing things at close range). Seems strange - for the Sun folks have contributed heavily to the GNOME Usabilty Project.



My final conclusion wrt JDS Live CD is that it is a great idea - but poorly implemented. Actually, someone at Linux.com has the same thoughts about JDS 2. It’s a real pity.

Icon for Blender

The icon that comes with Blender wasn’t looking very good on my GNOME menu. So I designed one myself. I think this one looks slightly better.