Month: August 2010

It’s time to participate in the GNOME i18n survey

If you happen to be one of the GNOME Translation Project language team coordinators, and you haven’t done so yet, now is the right time to participate in the GNOME i18n survey conducted by Gil Forcada on behalf of the GNOME Translation Project!

The rationale behind this survey is that the GNOME i18n community (which the language team coordinators are naturally part of) wants to know better each other, so that the GNOME Translation Project can improve the overall experience of translating GNOME, as Gil outlined in his survey email. Some of you may remember that there was a similar survey conducted by an Ubuntu i18n community in the past which greatly inspired this effort.

On August 13, Gil sent out a plain text file with survey questions to all coordinators’ addresses we could gather. Nevertheless, only a fraction of coordinators have responded so far, so once again, in case you are one of the majority, please don’t hesitate to take a few moments to fill out the questionnaire! Or if you know any of those coordinators, please ping them! Yes, it’s quite important!

For those of you interested in knowing what the survey questions are, you can find them attached in the aforementioned Gil’s email, and a final draft is available on live.gnome.org. Also keep an eye there for results.

Living with legacy hardware

In case your hardware still consists of very legacy NVIDIA chips like GeForce2 or GeForce4 and you are experiencing some problems running X server on Fedora 13 with the now and for some time default nouveau driver (like screen freezing after a period of time with an apparent need to hard restart), you can still switch to the old nv driver and refrain from using either an extremely basic VESA driver, or a legacy proprietary driver produced by NVIDIA. (Which, looking at rpmfusion.org, doesn’t seem to be packaged for Fedora 13 to provide a support for GeForce2 etc. I’ve read something about compatibility issues with version 1.8 of the X server, but I haven’t looked into that further.)

One of the drawbacks is that you will have to live without hardware acceleration, since only software acceleration is provided. (Okay, these chips weren’t GNOME Shell-ready anyway.)

A quick memo on how to accomplish that switch on a fresh Fedora 13 install:

First, you need to create your own xorg.conf file, since this isn’t delivered anymore by latest distribution releases. In order to do that, install the system-config-display package, and then run:

system-config-display --set-driver=nv

Simply setting the desired driver in the xorg.conf file, however, is not enough, because the nv driver is interfering with nouveau, so you will likely get this error message when trying to run the X server:

The PCI device has a kernel module claiming it.
This driver cannot operate until it has been unloaded
(EE) No devices detected.

Fatal server error:
no screens found

That means you need to disable the nouveau driver e.g. by modifying your /etc/grub.conf file and adding the following at the end of the line starting with kernel:

rdblacklist=nouveau nomodeset

Then you can simply reboot your system and that’s it, you should be done.

Sylpheed FAQ revision 2.2 released

Sylpheed FAQ revision 2.2 released on 2010-08-09
================================================

New revision of Sylpheed FAQ has been officially released from the Sylpheed Documentation Project to reflect changes in the upcoming Sylpheed 3.1.

You can view the FAQ either as a multi-page or single-page HTML document at:

http://sylpheeddoc.sourceforge.net/en/doc_faq.html

Or download it together with source DocBook XML files in a .tar.gz or .zip archive from:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sylpheeddoc/files/

The source DocBook XML files are also available in the Project CVS repository, see:

https://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=cvs&group_id=20952

Changes over the past 4 months
------------------------------

* New Q&A "Can I run multiple instances of Sylpheed?"
* New Q&A "Execute command for my dynamic signature seems not to be working!"
* Updated Q&A on environment variables
* Updated Q&A on automatic name completion
* Updated Q&A on Sylpheed plug-ins
* Other minor edits throughout the document
* To better comply with the GFDL license, the source DocBook XML files together with the plain text copy of the GFDL license and appropriate legal notice are now distributed in tarballs with each documentation release, and the exact way of how to obtain the source files is mentioned explicitly in the document; thanks to Ricardo Mones for pointing these legal issues out

All other information on the Sylpheed Documentation Project including how to contribute to the documentation effort is available at:

http://sylpheeddoc.sourceforge.net/

Contributors to this and previous releases
------------------------------------------

Paul Kater, Jens Oberender, Francois Barriere, Olivier Delhomme, Petr Kovar

Enjoy!

Interested in helping Pan?

Usenet may not be as popular as it used to be years ago, but this worldwide net definitely still has its users. According to Wikipedia, it was established in 1980, so Usenet users observe a nice anniversary this year. Given its popular stance throughout the Internet history, there exist, without much surprise, many FLOSS solutions to access Usenet, or to work with the NNTP. Using GNOME software, you can accomplish it e.g. with the official GNOME PIM Evolution.

And then there’s Pan, quite minimalist, HIG respecting, easy-to-use newsreader for GNOME, that has been developed for a decade. Unfortunately, owing to the limited time resources of the main Pan developer Charles Kerr (whom you might also know from the Transmission project), the Pan development has slowed down considerably during the last two or three years, and it’s now officially in hiatus.

The community around the newsreader will hopefully be able to organize itself enough to resume and continue with the active development in the Pan official repository hosted on git.gnome.org. Luckily for Pan users, there’s a competent developer K. Haley around who has been working on Pan during the last few years, although not in the official repository.

Anyway, what the project now needs is, preferably, a bunch of volunteers with interest in Usenet and NNTP who are willing to lend a hand and get involved in the project.

The much needed roles include:

  • a developer with experience in C++, to help out with the Pan main development, to review and accept patches that got accumulated during the years in the “Pan” product at bugzilla.gnome.org,
  • possibly a developer who may be willing to  take over the maintainership in the future, once it is needed, or in case K. Haley will resolve to participate in the project not as the maintainer,
  • bug triagers, patch reviewers, testers,
  • people who are willing to work on user documentation and Pan website that might be migrated from its current location, and which is in serious need of getting up-to-date; I, for myself, am willing to work on these and will appreciate any help,
  • translators who are thankfully willing to work on Pan without break, as the last commits to the official Pan repository are those from the GNOME Translation Project members,
  • users, users, users.

If interested, please contact the Pan community that gather together on the following mailing lists:

Naturally, as with other FLOSS projects, every help and every contributor is welcome. TIA.