Category: GNOME

GNOME Summit control-center summary

With the summit almost finished, here’s a quick summary of what we came up about control-center development for 2.22 and beyond.

  • There should be no distinction between a11y settings and others, a11y should just be part of the “normal” settings, like we did for the preferred applications capplet in 2.20.
  • libslab (the library from gnome-main-menu used for the control-center shell) might need to be, either part of control-center itself, or a desktop/platform library. For that, it would need an API review, as well as the removal of Bonobo (used for unique application).
  • Should keyboard shortcuts be part of the keyboard capplet?
  • A11y keyboard in keyboard capplet?
  • Proxy settings might be better placed as part of NetworkManager configuration, given NM allows now the distinction between system-wide and user-specific settings.
  • about-me, in its current form, seems quite useless, so it might be a good idea to use it as a configuration point for online desktop.
  • What to do with typing break? It might either be kept on the keyboard capplet, or moved to screensaver preferences, or enabled by default with a much friendlier 1st time configuration dialog.
  • We’re adding a localization capplet, which will contain settings for time/date, timezone, keyboard layouts and language.
  • New screen capplet containing screen resolution, screensaver and xrandr settings?
  • PulseAudio integration
  • Rename sound capplet to multimedia and add video device support?
  • Some of the settings in control-center might be very useful if available from GDM.

Related to the discussion, and seeing all the icons that are in the systray, it would probably a good idea, now that there’s a discussion about a new panel, to have, in the new panel, separate systrays, each of which would be for specific categories (hardware, normal applications, temporary status, etc).

If anyone’s interested in participating in the discussion, please join the control-center mailing list and help us make it better.

Encuentro GNOME San Sebastian

GNOME Hispano is proud to announce the “Encuentro GNOME” at San Sebastian (a GNOME hackers/users meeting), in the North of Spain. As previous meetings, this will be a good opportunity for the GNOME Spanish-speaking community to meet and have fun together.

San Sebastian is a very beautiful city in the Basque country (North of Spain), famous because of its beach and the “pintxos” (local name for tapas), located very close to the French border.

The dates are not confirmed yet, since it depends on the availability of the people attending (it’s just an informal meeting to meet together, so we need as many people as possible), but initially 17-18th November are set up. So, if you want to attend, add yourself to the wiki.

Control center plans

At last GUADEC, we had a Control Center meeting to decide, first, the most urgent things for the upcoming GNOME 2.20, and, second, to raise some ideas about capplets organization. Further discussion is taking place in the control-center mailing list, in case anyone is interested.

We are looking for ways to reduce the number of capplets, not just for the sake of it, but because there seems to be confusion and duplication (see the several “Keyboard*” capplets, for instance) in what we have right now. So, if anyone has anything interesting to add, please join the discussion.

Hack week status (Wednesday)

Thanks to hack week, I’m being able to work on projects I’ve had for a long time on my TODO list. So, here’s what I’ve been doing:

  • Started looking at implementing an Atlas application, similar to Google Earth, but combining maps and Wikipedia information to bring a complete Atlas-like application to your desktop, with extra features like routing and others. This is one of my favorites from the TODO, but it needs lots of thinking and lots of reading, so I’m using the hack week to get documented about all that is needed.
  • Atomato is back! This is where I’ve been hacking the most, and I hope to have something to show before the end of the week, although it also needs some thinking about the internal architecture. But it’s going quite quick, so I hope to have something to win one of the Hack Week prizes 🙂
  • I’ve also started a long-awaited task, which is to package OpenStreetMap software using openSUSE’s build service. I just added successfully packages for JOSM, the offline editor, but others will follow. Packages are/will be available at my home project

And that’s all so far, nothing more to say apart from mentioning the little help I’ve been getting from the boys 🙁 Photos on what they did last night to come later, I first have to clean the mess.

Gimmie vs Big Board

Nothing really to add to the flames, so go elsewhere if you wanted some flaming, but all this Gimmie vs Big Board thing reminded me of some similar situations, like Xgl, gnome-session-manager, Ximian Desktop, etc, etc, where software done, let’s call it “in-house”, by companies upset lots of people.

Although, AFAIK, those companies (Novell, RedHat and any others involved in past situations like these one) have nothing to demonstrate about their support of free software (lots of good free software came from them, some developers from them are very well known community members, etc), there is clearly something wrong going on, if every time those “in-house” software projects are announced people from the GNOME community get upset. Maybe it is the companies, not really paying all the attention they should to the upstream projects, or maybe it is the community, which likes seeing conspirations everywhere?

Whatever the answer is, I think we have a problem (maybe not that big, but a problem after all), so we should be doing something about it. Maybe the new release team’s plans can help in some way, like having a central place not only for keeping track of GNOME’s official modules development, but about any new development going on in the GNOME constellation? Also, maybe suggesting the companies affiliated to the GNOME Foundation to get more involved with the GNOME project?

GUADEMY

A quick summary from Guademy this past weekend:

  • It’s been great to know more KDE people in Spain, since we (GNOME Spanish crowd) did just know, very well on the other hand, Antonio Larrosa, who now will not have to stand with 10s of GNOME hackers all the time and shout GNOME!! with them 🙂 All of them were great guys, and some just came recently into the KDE project thanks to Google’s summer of code. But this does not prevent them from being very passionate guys, like Rafael Fernández, with very good ideas.
  • Ismael Olea has cut his hair!!!! It took me a few seconds to recognize him. But as always, it is a pleasure to listen to his crazy ideas, some of which, if I’ve understood them correctly (Ismael is on a higher level than us mere mortals 🙂 are quite interesting for free software.
  • We need a much better Free desktop platform!! (more on this later…)

A big special thanks go to the organizers, who have done a great job, with details that only people from Galicia can have, like having all day a table with fruits, coffee, juices, organizing a great dinner, with typical Galician food and drinks (queimada, which is now an official part of everything organized in Galicia). I hope they have time enough to rest, because it has been an exhausting work for them.

GUADEC-ES 2007

Next GUADEC-ES (Spanish GUADEC) will be held in Granada, the most beautiful city I’ve ever visited, with one of the wonders of the world, the palace of La Alhambra. And not only that, but going around Granada for tapas is one of the best (and cheapest) experience, since you just have to pay for the drinks, the food is for free (a tradition unfortunately lost in other cities of Spain).

And well, yes, there will be GNOME-related talks, if the free tapas didn’t convince you. Are you missing this?

control-center 2.17.5

The Control Center patch party went great, with over 50 unreviewed patches reviewed and, some of them applied. The result of that crazy party (it lasted all the weekend) comes to you in the form of the 2.17.5 release of the GNOME control center, the best release ever.

Most notorious thing is the new categories in the control center shell:

With searching integrated:

And lots of new small features, like new MIME type for theme packages, sound capplet improvements, etc. See the NEWS file for more information.

Control Center patch party

After all the hard work we’ve spent on the new control-center shell, there are though still lots of unreviewed patches in Bugzilla. And since feature freeze is approaching, we have decided to do a Control Center patch party tomorrow (Saturday 6th January) at 5PM UTC on the #control-center channel at irc.gnome.org.

Most important patches to discuss are the ones related with the shell categories (we need a gnome-menus maintainer to settle this down) and THE BUG, but there are lots more. So if you are interested in cleaning up all the rough edges, please join us.