Release 2.21.5 for gnome-control-center and gnome-settings-daemon are now ready for your testing pleasure. This is the first release of gnome-control-center depending on the standalone gnome-settings-daemon (which was previously part of gnome-control-center), which is also used by the new GDM.
Testing is largely needed, so please report bugs/suggestions/patches to either the gnomecc-list or Bugzilla.
Today’s packaging day at openSUSE, a good opportunity to get your hands dirty with the openSUSE build service, which allows people to build packages for many SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian versions, and to get your favorite piece of software packaged for your favorite distribution.
The action is taking place for the whole day at #opensuse-buildservice in irc.freenode.net. Also, if you prefer to get in contact with fellow GNOME packagers, #opensuse-gnome is the place to go, in the same network.
Some hints for people wanting to attend:
In the last few days, we have been working on packaging PulseAudio for openSUSE Factory (what will be openSUSE 11.0), and here are the first results. This page contains instructions on how to run and test it, and Cyberorg‘s blog contains more information and screenshots.
This starts to mark the end of our beloved esound, although GNOME still needs some work, which is one of our next steps, helping upstream GNOME in fixing all the issues.
I left last night jhbuild compiling all GNOME modules, included meta-gnome-proposed, to find this morning it failed on libtelepathy because of missing darcs in my system. Installed it and watched it work until it came to another module needing bzr, installed again, and then, a few minutes later, another module complained about missing mercurial. And so far, so good, but this makes 6!! (if not more, it’s still compiling 🙂 ) version control systems needed to compile GNOME unstable, that is: CVS, subversion, git, mercurial, darcs and bzr.
While I have nothing against people writing/using their own tools for whatever they want, it started to look to me, exaggerating, of course, like the Linux distro market, where, if we continue the trend (fortunately, the number of distros is not increasing, like it did a few years ago), we’ll be having almost a distro per Linux user. So, although I don’t know in detail all of these VCSs to really understand why they all exist, is this really needed? Wouldn’t it be better to have 2 or 3 very good VCSs that fit most people’s needs? If not, I’ll write my own 😀
Since SUSE announced the opening of its distro, openSUSE has been taking steps to evolve to a community-driven distribution, and today, another step has been taken with the creation of the openSUSE board. As you can see in the newsitem, the first board has been appointed by Novell, but in the future the board will be elected by the community. And as a proof of the success it’s going to have, the first board includes our Federico!
A friend of mine, who is preparing an exam for working for the government in Galicia, has OpenOffice.org as the selected office suite. While this is great news, that public administrations go the free software route, it is a problem, since she’s asking me about good documentation, and, given my minimal knowledge of OpenOffice, I haven’t been able to answer her questions very well.
So, dear lazyweb, what documentation should I point her to? Helping her means helping getting free software better accepted in users-centered environments (that is, if she’s having problems finding good documentation, lots of people might be in the same situation, given that she’s not the only one preparing exams for the Galician government), so please, where is there good step-by-step documentation for OO.o?
After a long time thinking about it, I’m finally decided to use a computer as my media center. I already have a DVD recorder, which uses Windows as OS and, of course, which fails a lot 🙁 , and that every time it loses the signal for a single millisecond, it hangs, and you have to reboot it by plugging it out. Also, I’ve been using a USB hard disk, which has “media center” capabilities, but which doesn’t accept all video files I have, even though I first test them with mplayer on my Linux box, where they work. Also, I use only once in a while my HI-FI system, given I listen to music on the computer most of the time. So, it’s time for a change, and for removing lots of wires and hardware from my living room 🙂
But I still have some doubts that, I hope, dear lazyweb can help me solve:
Any other pointers, ideas?
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.
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:
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.
I have been invited to do a presentation about Mono next week for the people from NavarraDOTnet (a group of developers of .NET in Navarra). I was asked for ideas for the poster for the conference, and I suggested using Rupert. They forwarded my comments, along with a description of what Mono is (a Free version of .NET), to some Art students with no knowledge about Mono, Linux, Free Software, etc, and just using this information, they did this:
A great job indeed!
