Category: GNOME

At GUADEC 2007, the raw video from cameras was captured directly onto laptops which at the end of each day were copied onto a 500GB hard drive.

At the end of GUADEC, this drive went back to OpenAdvantage and was connected up to the network there. The plan was to allow the coordinators to download the videos and encode them in a suitable format.

Unfortunately, at some point the drive was disconnected from the network. Paul was on holiday for the next week. After that, he started his new job at OpenedHand and was staying in London for the next two weeks. This meant he couldn’t get back to OpenAdvantage to find out what had happened to the drive.

After this, it transpired that the disconnection was simply because of a reorganisation in the OpenAdvantage office. However, the two other 500GB drives OpenAdvantage had bought at the same time as the one used for GAUDEC, had now completely failed. Paul was obviously a bit concerned that the GUADEC video disc should not fail as well.

So, Paul very carefully took the disc back to his house and went in search of some drives to backup the data with. He purchased two 450GB drives and started copying the data. This amount of data takes a long time to copy between two USB drives.

Anyway, Paul was able to bring one of the 450G drives to London where I picked it up. The next task was to decide on compression rates and how to actually created the finished video. The last problem was arranging appropriate hosting and bandwidth. And remember, this all had to be done in our spare time.

So finally, nearly six months on, I have started encoding and uploading the videos. You can find the ones I’ve done so far, here:

http://download.gnome.org/teams/guadec/2007/videos/

They are encoded at a bandwidth that should mean most people on broadband are able to stream them easily. Of course, people are more than welcome to re-encode them and upload to any favourite video sharing website.

One thing you will notice is that none of the videos from the main hall are yet available. This is because the audio level on them is very quiet and only on one channel. I would be grateful if someone could suggest a suitable gstreamer pipeline to fix this.

We all like to have a little grumble about our favourite distribution from time to time. As it happens, I don’t have a favourite GNU/Linux distribution (they all have good and bad points), but with apparently less than 9 days to go until Fedora 8 is released, I really hope they fix the bugs I’ve been having.

Although I use other distributions on my personal computer, I have always kept my work laptop on the latest stable release of Fedora. Mainly because they have historically patched GNOME much less than other distributors and are fairly good at keeping up with the most recent GNOME (and possibly because that is what Mallum originally installed when I joined – apparently we needed to try building Poky on something other than Debian/Ubuntu!).

A week or so ago, I “upgraded” to the development version of Fedora to see if the new version of NetworkManager would help alleviate some of my problems. Unfortunately things haven’t gone quite so smoothly. Here’s a list of things I’ve noticed:

The Good

• Suspend and hibernate on my T43 are now working again. They both mysteriously stopped working after an update to Fedora 7.
• There is a great looking new GDM screen
• The new default web browser home page is a huge improvement. It’s now actually useful!

The Bad

• Power Manager now brightens my display when idle, despite the fact I have explicitly told it not to do anything when the computer is idle. I wish Power Manager would not touch my brightness settings at all, since it doesn’t know anything about the ambient light. (Could be bug 483134)
• NetworkManager now frequently crashes whenever I try to interact with it. It seems this has something to do with the Neo1973 acting as a usb network device. I see the following on the terminal:
  ** (nm-applet:8834): WARNING **: Error getting vendor info from HAL: No property info.vendor on device with id /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_1457_5122_noserial_if0
• The package management application frequently refuses to help me, insisting that another application is using the package database even though there is no sign of one working.

The Ugly

• Sorry about this one, but it’s possibly a little pet peeve. The new GTK+ theme in Fedora 8 is not to my liking at all. It is clearly unfinished (progress bars for example) and the gradients on the buttons look (to me) like blisters on human skin. Not only does it look bad, but I seriously doubt the code quality is as good as the engines in the gtk-engines module. There are a lot of very important things to consider when writing a GTK+ engine, as it will be running on every single GTK+ application. Just look at the number of bug reports and issues associated with Ubuntu’s “Ubuntulooks” engine as an example of what can go wrong (and the original Clearlooks had it’s fair share of very nasty bugs too). The engines in gtk-engines are rigorously tested and very well maintained, so I really don’t see any advantage in using yet another theme engine.

I know this last point will probably upset some people, but I really want to encourage distributions to work with upstream projects when working on themes and artwork. The look and feel of GNOME should not be the differentiating factor when choosing a distribution, so I would love to see more upstream efforts to help provide a better and more consistent visual identity for GNOME.

And please, if anyone can direct me to Fedora’s bug tacker, I would be very happy to file my issues there. Unfortunately, fedoraproject.org doesn’t seem to give me any clue on how I send my feedback to the developers. OK, I’ve found Fedora bugzilla now. Still, please let me know if any of the above problems have already been reported so I don’t end up adding duplicates.

I’ve been a bit quiet on the theme editing front lately, but I have been making progress. I realised that at some point people are actually going to want to edit existing pixmap themes, so rather than making bold decisions to make creating and editing easier I have decided to concentrate on making something that will be immediately useful. So I sat down and ripped off most of the theme parsing code from the pixbuf engine. I also rearranged the internal data storage of the theme editor to use the same structures as the pixbuf engine. The result is that I can now load and display all the information from an existing theme. There are still a few odd quirks, but when it works it does work…

I have even added recent files support with a little guidance from Emmanuele (I got tired of navigating to ~/.themes/foo/gtk+-2.0…). Next thing on my to do list is to clean up the source file structure, autotool it and then have a go at creating my own Subversion repository on svn.gnome.org. Of course, that is also dependant on finally picking a name for the project. I liked “Artisan” from the previous suggestions, but I am not sure it has quite the right feel to it. Following the discussion I had about micro branding with Emmanuele, Chris and Rob at work, I now feel obliged to call it something like “ThemeKit” or simply “Theme Editor”, but that may be a little too generic. Seeing how I just announced a proposal for OpenMoko and named it PhoneKit, I could also be accused of being rather unoriginal in my naming.

I’ve had to think fairly hard about the UI for my little editor. GTK+ widgets are not as simple as they may seem, and can be fairly inconsistent about how they are drawn. All drawing operations have state parameter and some have a shadow parameter, although not all widgets use the shadow parameter.

Buttons for example, do not use the shadow parameter, and are drawn based solely on the state value (Normal, Prelight, Active, etc). Check boxes use the shadow parameter to determine if the box is ticked (shadow in), un-ticked (shadow out) or inconsistent (etched in). There are five possible states and five possible shadows, so simple maths would tell you that a check box could have up to 25 different images. However, only three of the shadow types and only four of the state types are relevant to the check box, so actually there only 12 possible images for a check box.

On top of this, some widgets are drawn with several drawing operations. For example, the scrollbar is drawn with the box operation (to draw the trough) and the slider operation to draw the slider. So to correctly identify where to use a particular image in your theme, you need to know either two or three values (operation, state and sometimes the shadow). Each of these images for a widget is then combined in a group, called a style, which is applied to particular widgets through a style rule.

Now try applying all this information to a GUI. So far this is what I’ve come up with:

Many thanks to those who suggested a name for this project. My favourite so far was Neil’s suggestion of “Artisan”. Well done to Tko for guessing the current name correctly!

There has been some discussion on the gnome-uk list about what we’d like to do at LinuxWorld, London. I’m not going to be organising it this year as having done it for the last few years, I want to give someone else the opportunity. So if you live in or around London and are passionate about GNOME, please consider organising this little event! Just drop an e-mail along to the gnome-uk mailing list to let people know you want to help out.

I had an idea that I have been thinking about the last few weeks and today I finally got round to doing some hacking…

I really need a better name for this little project. If you can guess what it is, please help me.

In response to some of the comments on my last post about Online Desktop:

1. I will be using completely Free Software and just as importantly, Free Services.
2. I will be installing the services on my own server.
3. There will be a solution to enable me to work off-line.

I have yet to hear one problem with Online Desktop that couldn’t be fixed. In fact, the idea of being able to store your settings and files online has been around for years. Now we get a chance to have a version based on Free Software principles. Still sounds great to me!

A couple of interesting things are happening in the world of artwork themes at the moment:

• There was a meeting on the future of GTK+ themeing at Guadec
• Stephan Arts of XFCE is proposing a freedesktop.org specification for Theme Packages
• Bruno is doing a fantastic job at putting together a new website for art.gnome.org:
  
  You can check his progress on this wiki page.
• We have a new appearance capplet for GNOME 2.20:
  
• We have a refreshed Clearlooks theme thanks Andrea Cimitan
• Many more tweaks and additions to the icon theme too from Andreas, Jakub, Lapo and others.
• And there are plenty of discussions about new artwork for GNOME, including a new GDM theme, background and new graphics for gnome-games!

Two reasons I am looking forward to Online Desktop:

1. I wont have to waste time setting up my IM/E-Mail client everytime I re-install my operating system, or move to a new computer
2. I wont have to worry about which computer I saved my documents on when I take my just my laptop away from home

As Andreas noted, at Guadec we discussed a couple of things about what we wanted to do with the various artwork in Gnome. One of the suggestions was to reduce the gnome-backgrounds module and provide a new default background instead. Jakub very kindly offered to take up the challenge and has come up with this first draft:

default-wallpaper-abstract.png (PNG Image, 1920 x 1200 pixels)

So the challenge is to try it out for a week and see if you still enjoy it at the end. Constructive and useful comments welcome.

Not sure yet what license this image will have, so please for the moment assume Copyright 2007 Jakub Steiner. Suggestions on what license would be most appropriate are welcome too.