{"id":1794,"date":"2012-07-01T12:48:25","date_gmt":"2012-07-01T18:48:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=1794"},"modified":"2012-07-01T12:48:25","modified_gmt":"2012-07-01T18:48:25","slug":"is-it-xubuntu-or-is-it-windows-95","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=1794","title":{"rendered":"Is it Xubuntu or is it Windows 95?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Or some bastardized mishmash of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and Windows 98?<\/p>\n

Actually it’s my writing laptop with a definite oldschool look that gives me a chuckle every time I use it.<\/p>\n

For the record, this is Xubuntu 12.04.<\/p>\n

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\nIt all started when I was bored and upgrading from Xubuntu 10.04 to 12.04.\u00a0 Contrary to the way things usually work when upgrading Ubuntu versions, it actually worked and I didn’t have to reinstall anything.<\/p>\n

And it was then that I noticed that the editable Xfce4 menu function… well… actually worked!\u00a0 I remember back in the heady days of using Gnome 2 – before Gnome decided it wanted to be the desktop environment that absolutely nobody fucking uses any more – Ubuntu included a little utility to edit the Gnome application menu.<\/p>\n

When I switched to using Xfce4, I noticed that there was a similar utility.\u00a0 Shame it didn’t work.<\/p>\n

But now… hey!\u00a0 Look at that thing work!\u00a0\u00a0 Work so damn well that as a gag I reconstructed the Windows 95 Start menu.\u00a0 And since I actually LIKE using menus, icons and hierarchical file structures, I kept it.\u00a0 Then I went overboard.\u00a0 I found and installed a Windows 3.1 window manager theme and used the settings available in Xubuntu to make the window controls look exactly like they did in Windows 3.1.<\/p>\n

A step backward, I know.\u00a0 But a double click on the left corner closes the window anyway.<\/p>\n

Next I downloaded some windows-95-like icons.\u00a0 This was kind of hard to do actually, and it took a while before I was able to get the icons looking sufficiently 16-bit and out-of-date.\u00a0 Another trick I used was to turn off font-smoothing AKA anti-aliasing.\u00a0 I also selected a font that looks wonderfully, horribly old-tech.\u00a0 Oh, and the “Redmond” theme helps tremendously.<\/p>\n

I even customized Firefox (no, despite the IE icon, it’s not Internet Explorer I use for browsing) so that it resembles good old fashioned IE4.<\/p>\n

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\nAltavista isn’t playing along nicely with this whole 1990s, 16-bit computing “ZOMG it’s a Pentium, your 486 is ancient!” theme.\u00a0 I will write them a letter.<\/p>\n

And did you notice how I completely replaced the Xfce4-Settings-Manager applet with a folder containing launchers for various setting apps that I’ve cleverly called the “Control Panel”?\u00a0 So very Win95-ish.\u00a0 Makes me want to load Encarta and maybe even venture out on the Information Superhighway!<\/p>\n

And now that I have all this old-timey glory, I can write my lame-ass blog posts for you to enjoy here in this modern age!\u00a0 You can probably enjoy this on a phone or even on a pair of eyeglasses whipped up by that new Google company.\u00a0 Bah.\u00a0 When I was your age, Bicycles had one huge ass wheel in the front and that’s the way we liked it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Or some bastardized mishmash of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and Windows 98? Actually it’s my writing laptop with a definite oldschool look that gives me a chuckle every time I use it. For the record, this is Xubuntu 12.04. It all started when I was bored and upgrading from Xubuntu 10.04 to 12.04.\u00a0 Contrary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,6,26,398],"tags":[408,254,252,409,10],"class_list":["post-1794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-linux","category-ubuntu","category-windows","category-xfce","tag-16-bit","tag-geekdom","tag-windows-3-1","tag-windows-95","tag-windows-98"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1794"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1799,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions\/1799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}