Category: GNOME

2006-03-09  Thomas Wood  <thos@gnome.org>

        * gnome-splash.png: New splash screen for GNOME 2.14.
        Created by Andreas Nilsson <nisses.mail@home.se>

Less than a week to go now… 🙂

It was excellent to be at FOSDEM this year, and brilliant to meet so many people. The talks I attended included the opening talk, gpl3, gnome-meeting, GObject/design patterns, svn, xul, project ridley, GScore and cairo and jdub’s closing talk. The only downside was the real lack of reliable network connection.

Many thanks to the GNOME-FR guys who found me a place to stay, and put up with my english (and occasional very bad french!).

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RMS probably saying something against Software Patents

Jeff Waugh trying to sound intelligent

Vincent (vuntz) and Sebastien (toady) have a romantic meal with the rest of gnome-fr

Spot the geeks! Vuntz and Benjamin (benzea) can’t resist the temptation to get the laptops out in the pub.

Olivier reverts to an Alternative OS to get the laptop to work with the projector for Toady’s talk…

Ross, Iain, Vuntz and others all pay attention to Kristian explaining project Ridley and GTK 2.10

Jeff convinces the world that GNOME’s way is The Right Way.
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Just a quick note to say I will be at FOSDEM too. I’ll be very interested to meet any other GNOME users from the UK. Hopefully I’m also going to have a few informal meetings with people about gtk-engines, gnome-themes and the website.

Hopefully I’ll be on my new Jabber ID most of the time, so if you need to catch me, it’s <thos at jabber dot org>.

The call for invitations to host GUADEC 2007 has gone out, so…

• We need 10 people as organisers
• We need sponsorship
• We need someone where to hold it

We’ve already mostly agreed that Birmingham is the most likely location, and Paul Cooper has identified UCE as a possible candidate.

We now need names for those people who are willing to put the time and effort in to organise it. If you are willing to get involved in this way, then please let us all know by posting to the gnome-uk mailing list.

If you’re a GNOME user in the UK, gnome-uk needs you!

So it had been proposed that we run another splash screen contest for GNOME 2.14, and that task was put to me as maintainer of art.gnome.org. It was also suggested that we run the contest for a GDM theme and default background, and not just a splash screen.

However, I have decided that I will not be running a contest (even despite already getting the art.gnome.org configuration ready). This is because of several reasons:

Firstly, it has always been a very difficult contest to run (too many people with differing opinions), and the winner has always brought out negative comments, and hardly any positive ones. The splash screen contests started as a marketing exercise, but I have never felt very good about the publicity it generated.

Secondly, the splash screen is now seen in so few places. All the major distributors replace it with their own branded graphic. It hardly seems worth going to all the trouble for something that probably only developers will see.

Thirdly, it is very likely that the splash screen will soon be redundant, so it hardly seems worth while running a contest for it.

And lastly, we just had a competition for the GUADEC logo and website, so I suspect people might be getting a bit fed up with competitions by now.

However, Andraes has volunteered to do a new lean and simple splash screen, which would hopefully reflect the excellent work that has gone into speeding up GNOME start up. In fact, it may even only appear on your screen for less a few seconds, so you probably wouldn’t even notice it anyway (it disappears in less than two on my desktop currently). We might even make it generic, so that we don’t need a new splash screen for 2.16, if there still is one by then.

gtk-engines 2.7.4

New gtk-engines released yesterday. I’ve worked on many new cairo improvements to Crux. Spot the difference between the pre-cairo and cairo-enabled versions below. (Hint: cairo version is on the left!)

Sources

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gtk-engines/2.7/

b0f27c0f6d5f610ca445a3d82d5779da  gtk-engines-2.7.4.tar.bz2
7ced6d4e09a4dc546af2de1757093bea  gtk-engines-2.7.4.tar.gz

Overview of Changes in 2.7.4 (since 2.7.3)

• Not compiling any animation code in clearlooks anymore
• Crux updated with radio and check buttons drawn using cairo
• Crux updated with progress bar bars drawn using cairo

gnome-backgrounds 2.13.90

New gnome-backgrounds released yesterday. The final set of new backgrounds is as below:

Sources

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-backgrounds/2.13/

1cf95ffd6519acd758c836eeb3036198  gnome-backgrounds-2.13.90.tar.bz2
94cb5e76ad5cb0be40980f67957feb7d  gnome-backgrounds-2.13.90.tar.gz

So maybe tarball due reminders arriving the day after the tarballs where due isn’t all that usefull?

Subject: TARBALLS DUE: GNOME 2.13.5 Development Release
Delivery-date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 10:01:06 +0000

(They where due on the 16th)

For entirely seperate reasons however, the gtk-engines and gnome-backgrounds tarballs I had planned for 2.13.5 were not out in time. There weren’t too many fixes in gtk-engines so it doesn’t harm too much. I was going to update gnome-backgrounds with this selection of backgrounds:

Comments welcome, but it seems it’s already getting late for 2.14 unless this goes in now. (And I assume this wouldn’t break the feature freeze…)

I posted to the gnome-uk list asking if there was any interest in holding GUADEC 2007 in the UK. It would also be nice to hold a mini GUADEC in the UK in 2006. If you would be interested (or be willing to help out) in either of these ideas, please join the mailing list and show your support.

After 399 days and 11 hours of continuous service, a power cut finally took out my little server, orion. Orion hosts my web pages and e-mail, as well as several other people’s e-mail and web pages. It also functions as my development server for art.gnome.org.

Almost 400 days of uptime – I think that just goes to show how stable Linux is. I suppose I ought to finally get round to cleaning it down a bit!
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On a slightly different note, for some unknown reason I’ve had sound events enabled in GNOME recently. Today I had to restart X on several occasions, and was subjected to the current GNOME login sound. Please, can anyone with some decent musical skills create a replacement? I don’t know the history of the current sound, but it sounds like something out of the 80s…

New unstable release of gtk-engines last night. Lots of bug fixes to the clearlooks engine with this release, so please upgrade if you are using a previous development version.

Overview of Changes in 2.7.2 (since 2.7.1)

• Numerous Clearlooks bug fixes (including #315562, #323218, #323218, #325168)
• Patches and fixes for bug 321140 to hc, industrial, mist, redmond, smooth and thinice engines (cleanups for compiler warnings and removal of unneeded code)

Sources

• gtk-engines-2.7.2.tar.bz2
• gtk-engines-2.7.2.tar.gz