Category: GNOME

New releases of gtk-engines and gnome-backgrounds, in time for GNOME 2.14.2. Maybe just because it was a bank holiday on Monday, but I actually managed to get these out before the deadline (I suppose it helped that UTC is now an hour behind too…). Nothing too interesting, but these are stable releases after all!

Incidentally, gtk-engines (stable) has only two trivial/enhancement bugs open against it, and gnome-backgrounds has no bugs against it. Does this make gtk-engines the most stable module that has executable code in it? 😉

gtk-engines

http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/gnome/sources/gtk-engines/2.6/

Overview of Changes in 2.6.9 (since 2.6.8)
==========================================

* Fixed bugs:
	Bug 341694 - Crash in d4x (Industrial)
	Bug 334557 - Compile errors with gcc 2.95 (Clearlooks)

gnome-backgrounds

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-backgrounds/2.14/

Version 2.14.2
===============

* Use po/LINGUAS - based on the new guidelines
* Release for GNOME 2.14.2

Translations

Mindu Dorji (dz)
Benoît Dejean (fr)
Åsmund Skjæveland (nn)

It’s always interesting to see how Open Source is depicted in the Press. The Metro this morning had an interesting article (and seemingly well informed too) on the OLPC, in which it mentioned that the laptop would not be running Microsoft or Apple software, but would be using something else instead.

“After discussions with Apple and Microsoft, Negroponte, a professor at Boston’s MIT, rejected both operating systems in favour of the free, ‘open source’ Linux, where users can tinker with the software.”

My first thought was that this completely missed the point of Open Source (not to mention ommitting “Free Software”). My second thought was perhaps this is actually broadly speaking what FOSS is about (if you take “tinkering” to mean being able to change the source code). Lastly I thought maybe it would have been more accurate to say that developers can tinker with the software. After all, could a “normal” PC user expect to be introduced to Linux and suddenly be able to tinker with everything?

I happened to try the Ubuntu live cd on my work laptop this lunch time, which makes for an interesting comparison since it normally runs Windows.

One of the most striking things is how inefficient GNOME’s use of screen space is compared to most Windows applications. The main culprit is the fact that the default icon size is 24×24, but also there is a lot more padding around interface items. I opened up OpenOffice (which is using Gnome icons and themes), and I have two toolbars taking about 20% of the screen…. The same goes for nautilus, not to mention the default icon size is huge compared to Windows. You don’t realise how much space you are wasting until you try making the icons smaller.

The other problem is the default font size on GNOME is 10pt, and one of the first things I do is turn it down to 8pt. Sure, when we have high resolution displays we will want these font sizes, but most people are still living with resolutions less than 1280×1024.

I realise the ideal solution would be to make the icon sizes resolution independant, but I doubt that is going to happen any time soon. Is it time we reduced the toolbar icon size and the amount of padding around buttons?

I understand there are good reasons for these ‘large’ sizes; accessibility and usability being two of them. However, I always get the impression that GNOME looks more ‘childlike’ because of the large icons and excessive padding. We have the large print themes for a reason…

Last week I set myself a challange to resolve one GNOME (or Gnome) bug every day. I mostly concentrated on the theme manager, as Sebastien told me I could be maintainer (I think he was fed up of my persistant nagging of patch reviews!). This is how I did:

• April 25th Tuesday: [Bug 138795] file dialog forgets last browsed to or installed from location
• 26th Wednesday: [Bug 139692] Some characters cannot be given as the theme name
• 26th Wednesday: [Bug 331836] Missing Escape -> Close binding (in Theme Preferences)
• 27th Thursday: [Bug 317375] theme-manager (saving) sometimes needlessly asks whether to overwrite
• 28th Friday: [Bug 339157] [Patch] Use po/LINGUAS – based on the new guidelines
• 28th Friday: [Bug 330302] Saved themes should remember wallpaper
• 29th Saturday: [Bug 324751] Firefox menu [Simple theme bug]

I also resolved bugs 104210,
98641,
81018 and
111356 on Sunday 30th.
So, all in all I managed 6 consecutive days of bug fixing. Not bad I thought. Just imagine if once a month everyone spent a week sorting out and fixing bugs…

For those interested, I’ve also recently fixed these bugs in the theme manager:

• [Bug 170058] bzip2 location hardcoded
• [Bug 99535] [ui-review] Theme manager UI issues
• [Bug 314658] Theme chooser main window too wide for 800×600
  (Same as [Bug 331741]: If the text description for a theme is too long, it stretches out the window to an unusable point.)

Testing and feedback would be very much appreciated. I’d also like to have any suggestions on how to improve the theme manager UI, especially since I would like to implement support for GTK+ colour schemes that will be available once GTK+ 2.10 is out. At last we might have a theme manager that isn’t quite so stale and neglected.

I tried the Ubuntu Live CD on my iBook, and it seems that suspend works very much better than on Fedora (where it doesn’t work at all). Unfortunatly, the Ubuntu kernel doesn’t seem to include the bcm43xx driver I need to make the wireless work. It also doesn’t include GNOME 2.14 (no, I’m not going to use a beta release).

So, does anyone know of a current distribution for ppc, that has suspend working, and includes the broadcom 43xx driver? I don’t want to have to compile anything myself, because I need my laptop to “just work”, and it’s compiling speed is just far too slow!

Dave, We haven’t forgotten the deadline!

If you’d like to support the bid to host GUADEC 2007 in the UK, please enter your name on the
Support the Bid list! I’ve already put many of the names that have e-mailed me with support, but please check to make sure your name is there!

Another late tarball? Well, you may get this one in 2.14.2, or I may actually get time to do the 2.14.2 release before the deadline.
*sigh*

The only note worthy things in this update are the updated translations, which where:
Ihar Hrachyshka (be), (dz), Yair Hershkovitz (he), Gora Mohanty (or),
Dan Damian (ro)

http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-backgrounds/2.14/

efd539aec1e30c205e81481e9a57e696  gnome-backgrounds-2.14.1.tar.bz2
0791c01a2f8d3540c20755c5b0b41620  gnome-backgrounds-2.14.1.tar.gz

Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, here is a preview of the excellent collection of backgrounds that Andreas, Lapo Calamandrei and Jimmac helped create.

And they’re included and installed in Fedora Core 5 by default! There is also a larger package of many backgrounds from art.gnome.org available as an optional extra – just find themes-backgrounds-gnome under GNOME optional packages.

The GNOME meet up in Cambridge last week was fun. Thanks to everyone who came (including the debian gate crashers!). It also finally pushed me into installing Linux on my (ppc) iBook.

Since Fedora Core 5 had just been released, I downloaded the DVD iso and burnt it before the trip. Installation seemed to be OK, and I even managed to get the AirportExtreme card to work after some persuasion. Still seem to have some issues with suspend though, and occasionally it doesn’t get through bootup.

I did notice that Fedora seems to have shipped the 2.7 development branch of gtk-engines, which is slightly annoying since my decision that it wasn’t yet ready for production (hence there hasn’t been a 2.8 stable release yet!). They seemed to have patched it a fair amount though, so I look forward to some bugzilla activity soon…

Just a quick reminder there is a GNOME meetup in the UK this Saturday, at 3PM in the Kingston Arms (beer + free wifi), Cambridge. Everyone welcome!

I realise it’s a bit late in the day, but if people who are hoping to come could put their names down here, it would help give some indication of how many to expect 🙂

gnome-uk are having a meetup to celebrate the release of 2.14. It’s going to be a little late, but that’s just to allow time for people to install and try it out of course!

Everyone is welcome – April 1st, 3PM, Kingston Arms, Cambridge

Feel free to drop me an e-mail to let me know you’re coming!
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