Thomas Wood

Six more GUADEC videos online, including a video of the lightning talks session. Quite a few of these videos where from the Recital Hall, where the sound quality wasn’t great, but I hope some people find them useful.

 Lightning Talks.ogg
 Zaheer Abbas Merali - GStreamer - more than just playback.ogg
 William Jon McCann - Building a Modern Multi-User Desktop.ogg
 Philip Van Hoof - An E-mail framework for mobile devices.ogg
 Lennart Poettering - PulseAudio and GNOME, or: what’s coming after EsounD?.ogg
 Bastien Nocera - Bluetooth and GNOME.ogg

[edit: fixed the links]

As art.gnome.org contact, I often get questions about whether someone can use GNOME some icons in their project. Most of the time I have said please contact the author, but I would like to try and work out an agreed interpretation of the GPL for artwork.

I’ve started a thread on gnome-themes-list, and would be grateful if people (especially any lawyer types) could give any more insight.

My bother recently told me he had connected his 160GB external hard drive to his N800, and now he’s written a short tutorial on how to do it.

.

I’ve always wanted to try a USB keyboard on my n800, so looks like I need to get him to make me one of those cables. Yes, I’m sure you can buy them somewhere, but I love Heath Robinson style electronics

I was hoping to refresh the set of wallpapers in gnome-backgrounds for GNOME 2.24. Cimi thought this was such an excellent idea, he jumped the gun and set up a contest: http://www.cimitan.com/contest/. I’m not such a big fan of contests, since the “issues” we had with the splash screen contests in the past. However, I think this time we may have hit on a good solution to the past issues.

I want to keep the quality and usability of gnome-backgrounds high, so please do read the style rules if you are thinking of submitting an entry. We’ve had some great submissions so far, but definitely could do with more options!

The runners up will take pride of place on the new art-hub, which will replace art.gnome.org.

Desktop:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
91 cd
75 ls
49 svn
45 ssh
37 vim
37 make
13 ./test-notes
11 svn-prepare-ChangeLog.pl
11 ./openmoko-messages
11 ./openmoko-dialer

Laptop:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
91 vim
53 sh
52 svn
47 cd
40 ls
31 find
21 git
18 ssh
11 su
11 make


I’ve mostly been working on non-ui related components for OpenMoko recently (working on the package management system, opkg and it’s associated packagekit backend), which gave me a chance to step back from the GUI applications and take a look at some of the areas that could be improved. I posted some of my thoughts on the openmoko-devel mailing list (thread here) and got some quite interesting and encouraging responses.

So, I set to work building some patches. Here are some screenshots of progress:

Phone numbers and contact photos in the address book contact list

Currently work in progress, implementing “Add to contact” in call log

I’m also hoping to get a few theme tweaks in as well. Here’s another game of spot-the-difference (hint, not anything in the number display). And it actually does make it look a lot smarter on the device’s small screen.
changes to

I need to find an artist to help me improve the GTK+ theme. Firstly the gradients really need to go because not only do they look ugly with the banding from the 16bit display, they also cause significant performance problems. If anyone wants to help me out, please do drop me an e-mail, or discuss on the openmoko-devel list.

Well, since no one stepped up to take over maintaining art.gnome.org, I decided I really needed to sort it out. I keep getting requests such as “why hasn’t my background been approved yet” and “please delete this submission”. So I have a new idea, that hopefully isn’t so high maintenance:

Hopefully, it will better serve GNOME artists and help encourage people to get involved in GNOME. If you feel like contributing, sources are in GNOME svn: http://svn.gnome.org/svn/art-web/branches/art-hub/

At London LinuxWorld in October 2006, we had a stand promoting and discussing the GNOME project with visitors. As part of that stand, we collected ideas from people about what they liked and disliked about GNOME. While doing a spot of spring cleaning, I came across the dozens of post-it notes that people had written their suggestions on. Shame on me for not getting round to typing up the suggestions until now, but it actually makes for even more interesting reading to see what features and bugs have already been fixed.

1. Browse mode as default
2. Desktop search
3. GNOME Evolution - pressing space bar marks messages as “read”. Button to go to next unread message
4. Good menus
5. Good integartion, smooth
6. GNOME-VFS is too specific
7. Software I can use without thinking about it! Love it!
8. Need IDE with good debugging support
9. Centralised location for editing application associations
10. Better thumbnail cache use. e.g. delete thumbs not used for 30 days
11. Needs to be more geeky
12. GConf on NFS-homed rollhout (universtity) between Solaris/GNOME
13. Good - slick system; Bad - missing certain functions
14. File save expansion sucks
15. Tabs in nautilus
16. GNOME ROS MY SOX
17. It’s Free!
18. Make windows codecs easier to use and install. WMVs, DVDs, & co, should be a single install tickbox
19. Evolution - autosense IMAP/IMAPv4: who the fsck knows what the server is running, or cares?
20. Make all desktop configuration scriptable
21. Evolution: please implement “Reply and file” (to specific mailbox)
22. Memory consumption
23. Evolution: (Imap) please replicate locally as the tickbox says!
24. (Love) Gstreamer integartion
25. Scaling all desktop icons simulatonsusly
26. (Love) Inkscape
27. Does everything I need
28. F-Spot rules
29. Keyboard navigation in panel menu
30. I like GNOME because cute guys work on the stand
31. Configuration of GNOME
32. It actually works! Yay!
33. So simple my 9 year old neice can use it! Keep it simple
34. It does things my way
35. Reset option for panel to restart from scratch
36. Easy to install RPMs via Centros
37. “Expose” & Just Works
38. Why can’t I double click top-left corner to close a window (like Win, KDE, CDE, etc)
39. Tomboy notes are cool!
40. I (heart) GNOME ‘cos KDE sucxors!
41. KDE FTW
42. Extremely user friendly
43. More examples in developer documentation, e.g. graphics
44. Windowing is too chunkey, want more elegenat interface
45. No alarm clock?
46. Memory footprint. Library precaching
47. I like how the menus are organised!
48. I want to sync a Palm Tunsten T5
49. DVB/T Freeuen card doesn’t work or is not easily configurable in Totem.
50. File->open new users want a text field to click in before typing a filename

(Personally, I think number 30 is best)

Some good progress on Opkg and it’s PackageKit backend recently. New features such as autoremove and tags have been implemented in Opkg, and PackageKit can now take advantage of them. I’ve also increased the PackageKit method coverage by including description searching and group search, amongst fixing various bugs and improving internal feedback mechanisms.

Opkg now has a mailing list for discussion on future development and current issues.

Here are some screenshots of the GTK+ PackageKit frontend using Opkg as the backend:

Current method coverage shown by pk-backend-status:

Listing packages in a group using the gnome-packagekit frontend:

Searching on the description field and filtering to only view GUI applications:

Slightly off topic, but of interest to OpenMoko/OpenEmbedded developers, is the new Poky SDK, which Rob wrote about. The Anjuta plugin is particularly interesting, because it significantly shortens the development cycle when cross compiling.

I haven’t written about work things for a while, but I’ve been working on a couple of things, including Opkg (a new package manager based on the un-maintained Ipkg), and a PackageKit backend to use it with.

And this weekend (starting at the beer event on Friday night) I will be at Fosdem. See you there if you’re going!