Ubuntu – Window Manager for TV

Ubuntuwindow-manager

I have Ubuntu installed on my computer, which is hooked up to my TV. I have tweaked some of Gnome's settings to make it easier to use from my couch (display larger fonts, increase the size of the mouse, etc), and it kind of works ok. But there are a few problems:

  1. A lot of windows that show up don't expect to have large font in them, so the contents get all garbled, and I have to resize the window (IF the window is resizable…)
  2. There are still some UI items that are really small, such as scrollbars, and I don't see any settings to make them larger. This would be my biggest complaint.

I already know about MythTV and Boxee, and that's not what I'm looking for. I am looking for a better way to use my PC from 10 feet away. I'm NOT looking for a way to turn my Linux box into a TV.

Are there any window managers out there that work better with 10-foot user interfaces? If not, are there any different themes I can use? Any more settings I can tweak?

EDIT: I am also trying to avoid reducing the resolution, because I still plan on watching hi-def videos on this thing.

Best Answer

Definitely you should try xbmc. It is what boxee was forked from. Its plugins allow you to do quite a lot, including for instance watching youtube.

To use a normal desktop from afar, you can increase the DPI setting of your wm (Gnome), but the best way I guess would be decreasing resolution. If you'd then like to watch videos from your filesystem, one way could be to have a second X server running, with xbmc only. Then you could easily switch between them using <Alt>+<Ctrl>+Fn key combinations. Another plus of that is that no popups from your running desktop would appear while watching video.

Once you have xbmc installed, to run it in a new X server, do the following:

  • switch to console with <Alt>+<Ctrl>+F1 (or ...F2 etc.)
  • log in and issue

    startx $(which xbmc) -- :1

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