Thomas Wood

Lukáš Lommer has been helping out a lot with art.gnome.org recently, including updating the site and writing patches. He’s also been writing about (amongst other things) some of the changes we’ve been making to the site. We’re now thinking of doing a “version 3” of the site, with all you favourite web 2.0 style features.

We have put some of our ideas on the wiki page, and Lukáš has sent a mail to the art-web mailing list. If you’re interested in helping and you’re a keen PHP developer, please get on the mailing list and let us know.

In case anyone wasn’t paying attention, we’re having a patch party tomorrow from 5PM UTC (that’s 6PM for most of Europe, and about lunch time for America). We will be going through all the un-responded bugs (129) and un-reviewed patches (89) in bugzilla, and making sure they’re up to date. This will also be the last chance to finish off any new features before the feature freeze on Monday.

If you’ve ever wanted to get involved in GNOME here is your chance! We really need more people to keep on top of things in the control center, so please pop along to #control-center on irc.gnome.org tomorrow and help out if you can.

I have a very troublesome crasher in gnome-theme-manager right now. I would really appreciate if anyone could look over it with fresh eyes, as I still can’t figure it out. I have traced it back to something in gnome-theme-info.c, as somehow junk is getting put in the hash table of icon themes, but I can’t find out why or how.

The bug report is

here, and it is fairly easy to reproduce.

Please please, someone help me solve this mystery!

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/softwarepatents/

I’m never sure how effective online petitions are, but people may be interested in this one since it is on the UK government site (and you have to be a UK citizen to sign it).

Unfortunately it looks like GNOME 2.17.3 was released with the old version of gtk-engines. So if you want to try out some of the new colour scheme support you will need to install the latest version yourself.

And we’re also still waiting for the colour scheme reset bug to be fixed in GTK+. There is a patch now, so at least we have a workable solution.

Hoorah, Rodrigo has made an unstable release of gnome-control-center.

I even managed to fix two more issues this weekend, bringing quite an impressive number of new features in this release.

So, since 2.17.1, these are some of the changes in gnome-theme-manager:

• Fixed crash in D&D of themes (Thomas Wood) (352490)
• Open transfer dialog with transient parent set (Thomas Wood)
• Added a colours tab to change gtk-color scheme setting (Thomas Wood)
• Fixed leak (Thomas Thurman) (378680)
• Cleanup some of the install code (Thomas Wood) (325300)
• Allow installing a theme from a directory (Thomas Wood) (326103)

What Rodrigo didn’t mention in this list was that bug 325300 was actually to do with handling metacity, gtk+ and icon themes in the same archive. Previously, it wasn’t possible to install icon themes unless they were in their own separate package. The code I committed this weekend will check for an “icons” directory in the theme package, and will install it into ~/.icons if it looks like an icon theme. So finally, complete GNOME theme packages are looking like a reality.

The other thing to note is that the colour scheme tab still requires the patch attached to this bug to be applied for any sort of “revert” feature. I’m still undecided on how to store/save user defined colour schemes. It would be nice if gtk+ themes were able to define their own set of complementary colour schemes too, but at the moment only a default scheme can be specified. If anyone has any suggestions on how colour schemes could be stored nicely, do let me know.

I wanted to print some address labels last weekend. I fired up OpenOffice.org, selected the correct brand template, and typed in the text I wanted. I then wasted an entire page of labels. Grrr.

After several failed attempts to get OOo to cooperate, I tried gLabels and was very impressed. It has a clean, simple interface, and I have lots of nice labels.

I have committed the work I’ve been doing on the new colour schemes tab for the theme manager. I’ve also updated Clearlooks in gtk-engines to support colour schemes, and Ben Berg has updated the Industrial theme. I’m hoping to update the remaining themes pretty soon.

So, I would like as much testing and as many suggestions as possible. There is currently one critical bug in gtk+ that means the colour scheme can’t currently be reset (unless you restart your application).

There are two other problems that will definitely be fixed before the final version. Firstly, it will need to detect if the selected theme actually supports the colour scheme options (which partly relies on the above bug being fixed). Secondly, I will create some logic to prevent the user setting the text colour to the same as the background colour. These are fairly easy fixes, but I just haven’t got round to them yet due to lack of time. Patches are very welcome of course!

N.B. For anyone with an old checkout of cvs, you will need to check gnome-control-center out of cvs again. This is because Rodrigo has added libslab as a virtual module inside gnome-control-center, and it will not be updated by just running cvs update.

Looks like Ross beat me to mentioning it, but I finished off the Contacts 0.2 release on Friday. I won’t publish the entire changes list again, but I’m definitely going to make sure the next release isn’t in another years time as trawling a years worth of ChangeLog entries is not fun.

I’m particularly looking for new translations and hope to do a new release fairly soon. If anyone takes the time to do a translation, please feel free to send it to me!

http://projects.o-hand.com/contacts

I have a patch in bugzilla to suppress the annoying “icon not found” popup message.

The gnome-panel maintainers are unfortunately very busy people (that is, Vincent Untz is a very busy person!). Could anyone take a look at my patch and make a positive comment so Vincent can be sure it’s a good patch?!

We have a serious problem with understaffed modules. We need to encourage as many people as possible to get more involved, and we can do that by reviewing patches and helping people who really want to make our software better!

So please, help get this little tiny patch approved, and make GNOME just a bit more polished.