Calum’s Wee GNOME Blog

Feels a bit weird not going to GUADEC this year… I blame that guy that we’re sending from New Zealand for blowing the travel budget for the rest of us Luckily Stuttgart is the first GUADEC host city that I’ve visited before anyway, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out too much on that side of things… and hopefully I’ll be able to watch many of the talks via the live video feeds that were so successful last year.

In case any GNOME folks are worried that our low attendance this year are a sign that Sun aren’t interested in supporting GNOME any more, though, nothing could be further from the truth… we have as many GNOME/JDS projects on the go at the moment as we’ve ever had, and with OpenSolaris just around the corner I expect we’ll be ramping up even more. So actually it’s probably just as well we’re not sending so many engineers to GUADEC this year– we’re too darn busy

Dave Southern will now be maintaining his unofficial JDS RPM repository over at Ricardo Wagemaker’s gcclinux.com
site. You’ll find a large number of useful apps for JDS R2
there, with JDS R3 RPMs ready to go as soon as we get around to
shipping it

Gah… spent half the afternoon today trying to work out why all my
autogen.sh scripts were suddenly and silently not generating configure
scripts any more. Turned out that my Powerbook’s clock had reset to
January 1 1904 when the battery ran out this morning (pmud
doesn’t seem to work on my G4, so I can’t predict when it’s going to
happen). But come on guys, some sort of warning message would
have been nice…

In other news, the Centra on the business park has finally seen the light, and is now selling both Diet and sugar-stoked regular Irn Bru. Now if only its Daily Record deliveries were a bit more reliable…

Spent a little time towards the end of last week working with Rich on bug #157962, to get some colour back into gcalctool. We haven’t yet come up with a complete solution, which would involve an option that picked colours from the theme by default (I’m still thinking about that one), but in the meantime you can now copy the cvs-supplied .gcacltoolrc file to your homedir to change this boring old look into something slightly more sexy. (Or, of course, you can invent your own colour scheme to match your GNOME theme du jour.)

For anyone who wants to try the Java Desktop System before buying, Dave Southern writes:

Just wanted to let everyone know, that we now have the JDS Live-CD .iso available at jdshelp.org. A special thanks to Sun for allowing us to post it.

This is the same version of JDS that comes with Tom Adelstein and Sam Hiser’s book, Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop.

As you’ll doubtless recall, v2.0 of the HIG was released a few weeks ago, albeit without a great deal of fanfare.

Unfortunately there was no accompanying “what’s new that I need to know about”-type section, so I’ve quickly hacked one together now that I’ve finally had a few minutes.

[Also posted to d-d-l]

Since I seem to be spending most of my time playing catch-up with GNOME’s increasingly-sprawling accessible themes these days, I got to wondering if going forward we can’t put more of the responsibility on the individual modules to install accessible icons alongside their regular ones.

The current situation just doesn’t seem very workable going forward, if we’re considering accessibility to be a core feature. We don’t expect applications to submit all their icons to gnome-icon-theme for inclusion– they just install their own. A similar process for accessible themes seems like a logical extension to me.

Modules installing appropriate icons into $(themedir)/HighContrast etc. would be one way, assuming it’s actually possible to work out where those themes lives at install time, but that sounds rather ugly. Anyone any better ideas?

Was pointed at jdshelp.org yesterday, which is already starting to build up a nice little collection of rpms for JDS. What with that and the awesome blastwave project for Solaris, there’s quite a little community starting to build up around Sun desktop products at the moment, which is really cool.

News finally broke today of one of another major JDS deal… Allied Irish Bank will transition 7500 desktops in its branches in the UK and Ireland to JDS over the next year.

Of course this is a great win for Sun (the competition was extremely stiff), and since AIB are HQ’d in Dublin it’s a doubly-pleasing one for your friendly Sun GNOME team. But of course we couldn’t have done it without the GNOME community at large… YOU ROCK!

Sun’s Java System Calendar Server connector (aka hydrogen) for Evolution 1.4 on Solaris and Linux was GPL’ed today and is now available in GNOME CVS.

Kudos to everyone who made this happen… hopefully the Evo 1.5 version will be along soon