Category Archives: Agave

Agave, Ubuntu

Experimental colorscheme packages for Ubuntu Breezy

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I took a little while this afternoon to sit down and try to teach myself a little about packaging software. I’m of the general opinion that software packaging should be left to the experts so that things can get done right. In fact, this is one of the things that makes Debian (and by extension, Ubuntu) great. The packages are all of high quality and available in a central repository. Before moving to Debian I was a Red Hat user (around version 9 — before Fedora and the extras improved things dramatically), so I’m well aware of the mess that comes from every user offering homemade packages on their websites.

Nevertheless, I’ve been getting a fair number of requests from people who want to use colorscheme but don’t have the necessary expertise to install it from source. And I’d really like to get more people using it and giving me feedback. So I’ve made a couple experimental colorscheme packages for Ubuntu Breezy (i386 and amd64). Hopefully this is just a temporary stop-gap measure until the software gets packaged for more distributions.

I make no guarantee that the packages will even work. Nor will I guarantee any support for them (remember, I don’t actually know what I’m doing — I just whipped those up in an afternoon). So I don’t particularly condone using them, but if you want to use the application and can’t get it installed from source, it’s an option.

Agave, Tools

Colorscheme 0.3.90 Released

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Well, I’ve finally made another release of Colorscheme. I had put it on the back burner for a bit while I was doing a bunch of work on cairomm and gtkmm. But now I’m back working on it with a vengeance. A big part of why I’m excited to be hacking on Colorscheme again was my decision to switch from subversion to git. Subversion is a decent program and a huge improvement over CVS, but it just doesn’t feel quite right. I feel like I have to work around it. With git, I’ve felt much more comfortable. Granted, it’s pretty rough yet in spots, but it’s come a long way from what I thought it was going to be. The main motivation for moving Colorscheme to git (instead of bzr, which I would have otherwise chosen) was the fact that the cairo library is moving to git, so I wanted to get a feel for how it worked, with a view toward moving cairomm there as well.

I still have a bunch of things to figure out — the most important being: How do I host the git repository so that it can be easily accessed by other people? Right now I’m just rsyncing my local repository to the download/release area, so theoretically people can clone my repository over plain http and work on it locally, but there’s no good way for potential contributors to commit to it or to host their own repositories at the project site. Granted, this is sort of a theoretical issue yet, since I don’t have many contributors other than translators at the moment, and repository access isn’t as critical for translators.

But back to the topic at hand: the new Colorscheme release. There’s a bunch of new stuff in this release, including:

  • Added basic drag and drop support
    • You can drop from any application that provides an application/x-color
      target (such as the Gimp color selector)
    • You can drag a color from Colorscheme to any application that accepts a
      text target (e.g. Gedit) or an application/x-color target (e.g. the
      Gimp or the GNOME desktop background)
  • Added the ability to export your favorite colors list as a Gimp Palette
    file
  • Remembers your last viewed color and automatically loads it on startup
  • Remembers your window size between sessions
  • Added support for pasting a textual description of a color from the
    clipboard. Supported formats include hex string style colors (e.g.
    #FFFFFF) and all named colors that are understood by Gtk
  • Add support for selecting multiple colors in the favorites list for
    removing multiple colors at once
  • Removed dependency on GnomeVFS
  • Added dependency on GConfmm

This release is indended to be a preview release leading up to an official release of 0.4.0, so please test it out and report any bugs you find. Translations are very welcome as well.