Today I completed my patch for the message of the day feature in gnome-session, based on comments added to the wiki.
So now, if libnotify is available, it will use that for displaying the message of the day. Apart from that, it monitors the /etc/motd file, displaying again its contents whenever it changes.
As soon as gnome-session is branched, I’ll submit the patch. For the time being, it’s here (added files here and here).
The other day someone mentioned the need for taking more advantage of the UNIX features in the desktop. Specifically, message of the day, talk/wall/finger were mentioned, in a need to take advantage of the multi user features we have. So, since I agree with what was said, I went through the addition of showing the message of the day (/etc/motd) at the beginning of the GNOME session.
Since it adds new strings and features, this can’t be added for 2.12, so I’m posting it here to get some comments (like if all distros use /etc/motd) and hopefully post it for inclusion after 2.12 is branched. The patch is here.
I have just read in PC Actual about Dygra Films‘ latest film, Midsummer Dream. Well, so the interesting thing, apart from being the 2nd film made by these studios, pioneers in the 3D animation film making in Europe (and in Spain, of course), is that the article said the rendering farm used by Dygra is composed of Sun machines running Debian.
Another film to add to Linux’s CV, after Madagascar and others.
As Philip says, the desktop platform for 3rd parties is not as attractive as it should be, given the fragmentation on two big, and incompatible for the most part, development platforms.
And it sucks that politics are involved, since that’s the only reason I can think of about glib, for instance, not being used in DBus, adding the need to copy/paste code from glib to DBus code or rewrite already existing/well tested code. This introduces the need to be updating the code in DBus whenever a bug is fixed in the GLib one, and, most important, fails short in the code reuse philosophy free software is supposed to promote.
Of course, this is just a small detail compared to Philip’s cool integration ideas, but I think a good common platform could help in solving all those integration problems.
So yeah, please let’s have some form of committe or something that approaches a similar KDE people committe to try to promote more the code reuse between the 2 desktops, trying to share as much of the platform as possible. Then, once the basics are shared, we’ll just have two different ways of writing desktop applications, just like there are several different ways on Windows (Delphi, VB, C API, Java, etc).