Just for fun on a Sunday afternoon, I decided to pimp out my boring GNOME desktop. Viola, a radical transformation (notice the minimal system monitor below the menu bar):

Here’s a list of the components:

1. The “New Wave” GTK theme, from the “Gnome Themes” package, available here.
2. The MacUltimate icon set, with the system menu icon from the Mashup set.
3. Avant Window Manager for the RocketDock, available from Ubuntu repository.
4. Conky for the desktop system monitor, using this configuration. Available from Ubuntu repository.
5. “Speedometer v1″ wallpaper from Customize.org

Ok, enough procrastinating on homework.

The other day when I logged in on my Ubuntu installation, I received a rude shock: the file manager (Nautlius) would not load, so my desktop remained a bright, response-less green. Not only that, but 80% of my other programs would start and immediately crash with no warning, and no error output. None of my settings would persist. The only perceivable error that I received was one regarding a lack of permissions, which really threw me off.

Since I had just recently installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu, I thought part of the problem might have been due to my old applications settings that I had not removed from my separate home partition. As it turns out, these were not the problem: the mysterious crashings were all due to the fact that my home partition was full, so my applications could not write to them, resulting in a permission error if lucky and silent death otherwise!

After calming down and apologizing to Ubuntu for the names I’d called it, I realized that somewhere I vaguely remember this happening to me before… you’d think I would have learned my lesson the first time. Anyway, the moral of the story is to keep an eye on that disk space. I’m sure savvy users will have already installed Conky to do so for them — as for me, I think it’s high time to do so.