Posted by Jim at February 23rd, 2006

I like to keep some form of GUI on my desktop even in unix. Basically, I want to click and point when I’m working on the inessential stuff–stuff that I don’t want to specifically configure. Thus I’ve set things up so that I can click and type in a password rather than manually start things.

Kind of like in Windows or Macs.

Except… In those operating systems they allow for the possibility of children existing in the house. They probably deliberately test for what random button pushing may do to your computer.

Abby and Rebecca love to push buttons on my computers–even the FreeBSD computer, an operating system more commonly used for servers than childrens’ toys. They like pressing buttons, moving the mouse, and making the menus move.

In particular, they like changing the theme to the logon screen. Some of the themes suck. For example, one of them should be named “Almost Completely Black.” I am not sure who would want to use that one–presumably people who can see finer distinctions of color than I.

GDM (the GNOME Display Manager) makes language preferences available as well. With very little messing around, a person can change the language preferences to Turkish or Estonian.

I don’t speak Estonian. Or read it.

Ditto Turkish.

And Bulgarian.

I’m thinking that fencing in a portion of my basement sounds good right now. Do you suppose there’s a tax deduction for that?