Just tinkering with KDM and having some trouble with theming. I've downloaded the beatiful zxcity theme and set it as my theme for the KDM login, problem is the wallpaper switches back during load.

Just to simplify that, we have 3 stages to our login.

Problem

1. Startup machine, goes through the motions,login screen presented with theme.

2. KDE loading screen pops up and goes through the 5 icons (hard-drive, network, KDE symbol, etc..)

3. KDE desktop presented

Question

I'm trying to get a wallpaper across all 3 of these stages. To do this I need to:

1. Set my KDM theme (done)

2. ????

3. Set the KDE wallpaper(done)

At stage 2 The wallpaper is reverting back to the default grey stripes thing. Ugly as sin.

Could someone tell me where that image is being called from so I can change it at stage 2?

I only recently discovered the different JVM's on the wiki page and thought I'd start tinkering. Its been difficult to find documentation on how to configure Java on Ubuntu though.

Lets say I wanted to change the JRE or JDK that I'm using, I could crack open a terminal and say

sudo update-alternatives --config java

And then pick from one of the installed versions.

If I'm understanding JVM's right (which I may very well be not), You can configure the openJDK to use alternative JVM's (Eg JAMVM) and run it as such

jamvm -jar foo.jar

2 questions,

1: Do i have the concept of a JVM right? As in, is this possible?

2: If so how do i configure the JVM and switch the default to a JVM of my choosing?

How do I run a program in the background of a shell, with the ability to close the shell while leaving the program running? Lets say my UI is having problems or for some reason, I need to boot up a program from the terminal window, say, nm-applet:

nm-applet

When it's started, it occupies the foreground of the terminal window.

Is there any simple way to run the program in the background without needing to leave the terminal open or have it occupy the whole terminal?

On that note, I did find a way to run programs from the terminal and have it allow for other inputs, by appending an ampersand (&) to the command as such:

nm-applet &

But this isn't much use as any processes started in the terminal are killed once the terminal is closed.                                                                        

I've been using ubuntu for a while now and had a bit of a problem a while back with my graphics card and got to messing around with drivers.

Even though I'va had experience (nasty ones) with drivers, I'm still not sure.

What are the differences between the binary and source drivers. Now that question is not as stupid as it reads. I'm aware that binary are..well.. binary and source are compiled scripts you run yourself.

My question is moreso, what grounds would you choose one over the other?

Why is a binary driver more stable and source considered faster?

Just on that note. When I say source drivers, I don't mean nouveau. I mean the drivers you download manually from nvidia and run the scripts yourself.