The new control center shell (from Novell’s SLAB) is now on for GNOME 2.17.
As you can see in the dialog, it looks a bit ugly, not only because of the missing icons (my setup’s fault), but because there is only one category (“Preferences”). So, next step, categorize the capplets.
BTW, I couldn’t get CVSROOT/modules from GNOME CVS, so until I fix it, you’ll have to download by hand slab/libslab and put that libslab directory into gnome-control-center source tree.
With all the talk about the GNOME desktop integration lib, one of the things I had wrote down is the inclusion of notifications (proposed for Freedesktop.org) in GTK. This is something lots of desktop applications might take advantage of.
So, what do people think about it? There’s even a bug about it.
I have been doing a bad job on getting people interested in Atomato, mainly because of my lack of time for working on it. But now this is going to end, with the creation, yesterday, of the Atomato mailing list. If interested in the project, please subscribe, and if you sent me some mail in the last months about it, it would be great if you could resend it to the list once subscribed (if not, I’ll forward those mails to the list myself in a few days, once all interested people are subscribed).
Update: the web interface seems to not work at all, not even the admin interface, so the only way to subscribe to the list is to send a mail with the subject ‘subscribe’ to this address.
Since I retired from the development of GNOME-DB (mostly because I haven’t used a database for years) and left Vivien the liberty to do what he wanted, the project has been improving over time, and with the latest 2.0 beta release the libraries are in a very good shape. Lots of missing features have been added, API has been greatly improved, which makes it suitable for all kinds of application developers. So expect some more DB-love (GNOME Office, Glom, etc) in your GNOME desktops in the upcoming release cycles.
Some people I know very well from the Spanish free software community,
and which are now involved in university, have asked me to forward the
below announcement, to ask people to participate on a survey. It’s not
yet another survey, it is one in a series of projects from that university to study how free software works, which I think is interesting for GNOME. They have already done some GNOME studies, for
instance:
http://libresoft.urjc.es/Papers/index_html
http://libresoft.dat.escet.urjc.es/cvsanal/gnome2-cvs/
Find below the official announcement, I’d be grateful if you could do
the survey.
Dear FLOSS developer,
MERIT at the University of Maastricht along with the University Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid) are studying how developers contribute code to Free /Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. This is an extension of our previous research projects such as flossproject.org, flosspols.org, flossworld.org, and libresoft.urjc.es.
In this study, we are looking for survey respondents like you, who contribute to at least one of a small number of projects that we have selected for the study.
Therefore, we would like to ask you to participate in a small survey and to fill in our questionnaire, which you will find online at
http://libresoft.urjc.es:9999/Survey/
To fill in the survey takes not more than 10 minutes of your time.
Of course, all personal information will be kept strictly confidential, no personal information will be revealed to third parties, and the information obtained will be properly aggregated and anonymized so that no data about named individuals will be published. We also would like to point out that this study has only academic and no commercial purpose, and the resulting analysis will be freely available.
Rishab Ghosh ,MERIT (Board member, Open Source Initiative)
rishab@dxm.org
Ruediger Glott, MERIT
Ruediger.Glott@INFONOMICS.unimaas.nl
Gregorio Robles, URJC
grex@gsyc.escet.urjc.es
Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, URJC
jgb@gsyc.escet.urjc.es
We have been discussing about the best way to reduce the overcrowded preferences menu, that is, the number of control center applets. The ideal solution, which we are discussing on the Control Center mailing list, is to have a new control center shell. More news on that soon.
The other things we discussed was about merging some of the applets, since some seem redundant. A good example is the keyboard capplets, which are 3!:
So this looked like the best candidate for the first merge, so after some discussion, two of them have been merged in the mockups below:
The a11y bits were not merged, mainly because the a11y guys seem to think it is better to keep it separated. And merging it with the already crowded keyboard preferences dialog seems a bad idea, given the a11y capplet has its own tabs, which would be inside the keyboard prefs capplet tab.
Any comments, suggestions, etc, please send it to the Control Center mailing list.
It is now official: there will be a GNOME hackers meeting in Zaragoza, Spain, September 30th and October 1st. As with previous meetings, the intention is to get more hackers for GNOME and, for the people already involved in GNOME, to meet together and do some collaborative hacking sessions, like the crazy one at Vilanova Park. Thanks go to our friends at Hispalinux, who will be letting us use their venue in Zaragoza for the meeting, and to Dani Baeyens, the man behind the idea.
More info on the wiki.
While in Boston, I learnt more in detail about openSuSE’s build service. It allows people to build packages for any software they feel like, and is not reduced to support SuSE OS only, but other distributions (like Ubuntu and Fedora right now) also.
So, for testing my brand new account, I added a new package to my Home project, nautilus-actions. It was an easy task because I had the SPEC file already done, and had only to modify a couple of lines to adapt it to latest nautilus-actions release. I didn’t even have to build the packages myself, just adding the needed files to the repository (much like how CVS works) and triggering the builds on the server 2/3 times until it built correctly. Right now, I’ve got packages only for SuSE distributions, but I’ll add shortly Ubuntu and Fedora targets to the repository.
Very happy to see WSOP going quite well (although a bit sad that my friend Carmen’s application wasn’t accepted), and having more women get into the GNOME project. I have though one complain (if you can call it so) to make, which is, why a separated planet for them? Wouldn’t it be better to have them on Planet GNOME? That way, I guess, they would feel much more integrated in the project than being on a separated room.
If there is no strong reason to have a separated planet, please, put them in our planet, we really want them to be part of the project since the beginning.
Very interesting read from Federico. And I am happy to say one of the complains spotted in that doc:
It would be nice if there was a system-wide notification option, so we could send /etc/motd to every user logging in
is already implemented. There’s even a bug about it. It just needs to be committed to CVS/SVN.
Another one:
An application like kwrited. No, seriously, GNOMErs on my company don’t get notified by shutdown +nn or wall unless they have open terminals
It seems pretty trivial to me to add that to the motd implementation and use the same notification mechanism.