Category: JDS

Remote GUADEC

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 🙂

New home for JDS community RPMs

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 🙂

Step back in time

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…

gcalctool colours

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.)

Accessible theme thoughts

[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?

jdshelp.org

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.

Big (GNOME) deal

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!