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.

Be my friend again, please

I have had like 5000/6000 unread mails on my inbox now for a long time, so in between compilations, web page loading, etc, I started today looking at the huge pile of unread mail. It was supposed to only contain mails from mailing lists, spam and similar things, since I have nice vfolders on Evolution which are the ones I always keep up-to-date. But, for some reason, some of my personal mails were in the huge pile of unread mail but not on the ‘Personal mail’ vfolder, so I started answering mails from last May! from people writing to me directly.

So, if in the last (lots of) months you wrote to me and didn’t get any answer, please, be my friend again, it was a technical problem 🙂 I’m now going to go over all of them and, at last, have a tidy mailbox from now on.

A dream come true

In the 80’s, thanks to the Paris-Dakar rally, the trail motorbikes got lots of success, everyone wanted to emulate the heroes of the desert. But in the 90’s, the motorbike manufacturers started moving away from that kind of motorbikes, making the trail bikes too oriented for on-road driving, very far away from the all-terrain capabilities the machines in the 80’s had. Up till now, you had to choose either a KTM (too, I repeat, too, expensive), or just go for a touring motorbike with off-road capabilities (like my Aprilia Pegaso Trail) and use it in all-terrains, or for an Enduro bike.

Fortunately this is changing, with the release in 2008 of the new Yamaha Teneré:

And, if rumours are true, the new Honda Transalp:

(I hope the real one looks better than in this mockup though 🙂 )

/me starts saving money for the Teneré

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.

Linux Media Center

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:

  1. I’ve tried the S-video output on one of my servers, and it worked great with the S-video integrated in the graphics card. Since I need to buy a new computer for this media center, I assume all graphic cards with S-video output integrated would work the same way, right? That is, I just need to configure X for the TV output, no need to use atitvout or anything similar, right?
  2. For audio output, what would be the best way? Using separate speakers, or buying a cable to connect the audio output of the computer to the input on the TV? I’ve got a very good 5:1 sound system on my desktop machine, but of course I’d prefer to keep it on my “office” room, where I’ll still be listening to music for hours every day.
  3. As for software, I’m going to use MythTV unless someone convinces me there’s something better. MythTV seems to include everything I need (recording, TV, DVD, Music, … even a web browser), and seems to be quite healthy from what I heard.
  4. As for normal computer usage on TV, my previous experience is that it’s quite hard to read the fonts on the TV, and since the only screen the computer will be connected to is the TV, I’m worried I might not be able to do some tasks. On a virtual terminal, on text mode, it’s not perfect but you can read it quite well, but on the graphical mode, it’s quite hard to read. Is there any solution to this?
  5. I have bought a Pinnacle PCTV 400e, which is the only one I’ve found that can be used for the satellite antenna cable I have. I’ve read people with good experiences with this, but I’d love to hear more opinions.

Any other pointers, ideas?

Pisto manchego

The other day I cooked a “Pisto manchego”, and since us, hackers, need to have a healthy life :-), I thought about sharing it, for the GNOME Cookbook, if people like it.

Ingredients

  • Green peppers
  • Aubergine
  • Courgette
  • Onion
  • Chopped tomato (or tomato sauce, if you prefer/don’t have)

    • As for quantity, I’m not good at that, so just put more or less of each ingredient as you want. Some people even do the Pisto without tomato, but for me, it is very much needed.

    Instructions
    It’s very easy, just fry the onion (until it gets “yellow”) and then add the other vegetables, cooking them until they are soft, and removing continously, then add the chopped tomatoes and cook it slowly for 20 minutes or so. Put some salt as you like. Then, just fry 2 eggs (I eat fried eggs 2 by 2, so fry one only if you want :-), and you have a very healthy dish:

    Pisto manchego with fried egg

    (The photo is not mine, the Pisto I cooked was so delicious that I ate it all before getting the camera 🙂

    Spanglish (or Engpanish)

    I’ve always had, since many years ago, my computers (and any hardware) running in English, because, when I started using computers, translations were not always very good, apart from the fact that, specially on Windows, when installing applications in English, which replaced some system libraries, you ended up with a dialog with the text in Spanish and the buttons (or anything else) in English, or viceversa. With free software, this changed, since the translations are usually included with the applications, and, for big projects like GNOME, their quality is usually quite good (it is the case for Spanish).

    But proprietary software is still broken. Last night, a friend came to visit and brought “Colin McRae 2005” game for the PS2. I had played that game in the English version, while visiting my sister in London, but never had seen it in Spanish. So, with horror, I found out that translations can be very very broken. Here are some “jewels”:

    • Custom Rally -> “Rally de costumbre”. It should have said “Rally personalizado”
    • ? -> “Protector”. I don’t remember the English word, but it was for starting a race, and a “protector” is something/someone that protects you, nothing related to starting a race AFAICS 🙂 In fact, before selecting it, I tried to find where I could start racing.
    • Split -> “División atrás” ????
    • But the worst was the co-driver comments. It seems to be just a literal translation of the English version, which ends up in a succession of words with no sense.

    Who did they pay for the translation? This reminds me of the manuals of some hardware equipment, which, when reading the localized version, are very hard to understand, with sentences with no sense.

    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.

    Kung-fu-sion

    Last night I watched quite a good film (the best comedy probably I’ve watched in a long time) that I’d like to recommend. It’s Kung fu (Kung-Fu-Sion called in the “Spanish” translation), and is a Chinese comedy with lots of very good martial arts fighting, and with some scenes very very funny. I had a good laugh watching it.

    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.