LinuxWorld London 2006

It’s been nearly two weeks since LinuxWorld London. It all started at 6am on the 25th October, with myself and Michael taking the Event Box to London on the train through the rush hour. I think both of us have arms 2 inches longer now. It would be really great if the event box had wheels!

I think it was especially good for GNOME this year, as we had a mini “wall of love”, which people were able to stick up their likes and dislikes about the project. It was almost like an off-line bugzilla at some times… maybe that’s an idea for next time!

Wall of Love

We also gave out plenty of Guadec leaflets, and collected details for people who were interested and wanted to be kept informed. I also managed to talk to a few people on other stands about various Guadec things they might like to get involved in. Many thanks to Andreas Nilsson for his work on the flyers, which looked very nice professionally printed.

Guadec Flyers

I had also quickly done some mini app posters, briefly detailing some information about key applications in the GNOME desktop. These were very useful for pointing out some examples of software GNOME provides, as well as great for people to look at! I hope we can definitely make some more of these. We also had a supply of Ubuntu CDs magically appear on the stand, that we gave to people who wanted to try GNOME out.

I also got to speak to many people who were using gnome in various ways. LinuxWorld is very definitely the place to target SMEs and individual contractors. By the end of the expo I nearly had the sales script down to a tee. I’ll write it up at some point.

I was invited to the LinuxAwards because GNOME had been nominated in the reader awards for best project. Unfortunately we didn’t win, but Michael Meeks (very deservedly) won the Individual Contribution award 2006. I was a bit skeptical about the event when I first knew about it, but it was an interesting evening overall. Chatted with Michael Meeks and Jono Bacon about various things, including how things get done (or not as the case may be) in the Free Software sphere. Michael mentioned the amount of bureaucracy in GNOME was becoming a problem. He mentioned getting a cvs account for a colleague as an example. He told me that when the GNOME project started, it was much easier to get things (such as getting cvs accounts) done. I agree to him to a certain extent, but I think a some amount of bureaucracy is inevitable when a project gets as large as GNOME is. We just need to make sure all the gears are well oiled!

Many thanks to the everyone who came and helped out on the stand this year:

  • Michael Wood
  • Ross Golder
  • Simon Elliott
  • Karl Lattimer
  • Aiden Delaney

Karl, Michael and Ross
Day 1: Karl, Michael and Ross (if you can spot who’s who)

Simon and GNOME
Day 2: Simon and GNOME

Lastly, thanks to my collegues at OpenedHand who came along and who I press ganged into helping pack up the stand, and Pippa who helped me get the event box back home.

Ross and Emmanuele
Emmanuele Bassi and Ross Burton enjoy the stand before I tell them they have to help pack it up

As Michael said in his own excellent write up, bring on GUADEC 2007!

GNOME 2.16.1

  • gtk-engines 2.8.1: Visual improvements to Crux engine; new “contrast” option in Industrial

  • gnome-themes 2.16.1: Added missing 24×24 icons from the new Mist and Crux icon themes

  • gnome-backgrounds 2.16.1: Just a few translation updates
    </ul>

"Get More Themes"

I just noticed that GTK+ 2.10 has a GtkLinkButton, so maybe I can get to close bug 323323. My ideas is to add a link on the gnome theme manager to link to www.gnome.org/themes (does not exist yet!), that will point to art.gnome.org/themes

I think this would give the perfect excuse to clean up art.gnome.org a bit, and get rid of some of the old/ugly/broken themes. My goal for art.gnome.org would be a moderated high quality art resource, safe for work and safe for family. Hopefully (if I can fix bug 325300) then it can just have “complete” themes, covering all aspects the theme manager does.

What do people think about art.gnome.org? Is it time to give it a clean up, and point it in a clearer direction? I think it needs a unique selling point, and that should be that it only has very high quality themes.

Updates? Updates?

I used to think that the endless round of updates, and consequent moaning about them round the office, was a Windows only thing.

So, am I the only person who is getting irritated by the constant (nearly every day?) updates from Ubuntu? Would it be so difficult to roll these up and only release them once a week or something?

More confusion

Now, thanks to
this thread
, the Clearlooks theme <b>will</b> be the default GTK+ theme in GNOME 2.16, but it will <b>not</b> have the glossy scrollbars. So, Clarius is no more, and Clearlooks no longer has glossy scrollbars.

For those of you who like the blue glossy scrollbars however, do not despair! You can get your favourite scrollbar colour back by removing the comment mark on line 52 of $PREFIX/share/themes/Clearlooks/gtk-2.0/gtkrc. And we will be adding a seperate Clearlooks-Bling (or some more appropriate name) theme to gtk-engines soon, so Richard can add any other “less-than-conservative” changes without upsetting any the default Gnome theme.

Clarification

Just for clarification…

The new “default” theme in GNOME 2.15, called “Clarius”, is exactly the same as Clearlooks, except for the scrollbars.

The Clearlooks theme has glossy blue scrollbars, where as Clarius does not. This was the result of feedback from several members of the community about the new clearlook-cairo additions.


  

gtk-engines 2.7.8 [unstable]

gtk-engines provides a central location for commonly used GTK+ engines.
It currently supplies several engines and default themes for those which
have one.

Many thanks to Andrew Johnson, Benjamin Berg and Benjamin Otte for their contributions to this release.

This will probably be the last release before 2.8.0, and we have now
achieved our goal of converting all the engines distributed in
gtk-engines to use the cairo graphics library, including:

Crux, Clearlooks, HighContrast, Industrial, Mist, ThinIce, Redmond and
Glide (a temporary cairo replacement for Smooth for the Glider theme)

Besides this goal, there have also been numerous improvements to the
engines in this release cycle, including:

  • the creation of a shared library of common functions, macros and
    sanity checks

  • vigorous testing to ensure the stability of all the engines
  • and many, many visual improvements

However, there are still likely to be a few bugs left, so please do file
any issues and problems you have in bugzilla.

Sources

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

5eece46b655fcf027d6b3775ef105bcc  gtk-engines-2.7.8.tar.bz2
4cf37b279a5a0530dbba8d0310c96dbd  gtk-engines-2.7.8.tar.gz

Overview of Changes in 2.7.8 (since 2.7.7)

Highlights in this release include:

  • Add paranoia and deprecated configure flags
  • Improve HighContrast (HC) engine inconsistent state check mark
  • Use the base/text values for expander arrow in HC (fixes invisible
    indicator problem)

  • Improve visibility/contrast of checks in HC
  • Fix broken Clearlooks menu on panel check
  • Implement a focus rectangle for GtkEntry
  • Many other visual improvements to Industrial

See the ChangeLog for full details of other smaller fixes and enhancements.

Fixed bugs in this release:

  • 349575 – C89 Fixes (Last C89 Patch to close bug)
  • 350606 – Location of G_GNUC_INTERNAL breaks Solaris build
  • 351057 – Leak in clearlooks_style.c