GUADEC 2007 – 346 days to go!

Yes, we’re already getting ready for the next Guadec. In case you’re not up to speed on the details so far, the venue has been booked for the 15th – 21st July 2007.

We know this may clash with another developer conference, but those details have not been confirmed yet. There are several reasons why we are holding it later than other years, one of which was that many students are unsure of their commitments until the end of July, and asked if it could be later.

Paul visited the venue (Conservatiore, Birmingham, UK) yesterday and took some pictures. Discussion is currently taking place on the gnome-uk list, but may move over to the guadec lists soon.

Foundation Membership?

What does it mean to be a foundation member?

My personal response is that it’s a recognition of the time and effort I have put into GNOME related projects, whether it be helping out at LinuxWorld, administrating art.gnome.org, or writing patches for gnome-theme-manager and helping to maintain the gtk-engines, gnome-themes and gnome-backgrounds modules.

I have a feeling my original reason for wanting to become a foundation member wasn’t quite so honourable. I needed a gnome.org mailing address to use for the frequent communication I was doing on behalf of my administration work on art.gnome.org. Since then it has grown to mean more to me, in terms of acceptance and appreciation. I can’t believe it’s been just over two years since then, and I’m still here, even more active and involved than before.

It would be interesting to find out other people’s reasons for becoming foundation members, and even how they got involved in the first place. I spent some time asking people this at Guadec, and it was quite enlightening on the subject of how to encourage people to get involved. One of my conclusions based on the experiences I have had, is that no matter how hard you encourage someone, they will not become committed unless they have enough self motivation. Free and Open Source development is all about doing things to make your own life better. If it’s not for this reason that you get involved, then I doubt you will ever find satisfaction in what you work on in any Free Software project. Maybe we should focus less on trying to encourage developers, but more on trying not to discourage them. If they’re good open source type people, then they won’t need much encouragement, but they certainly don’t need discouragement.

So many things…

So, I haven’t blogged since before GUADEC, and what a lot of things have happened!

Guadec itself was excellent. It was great to meet so many new people, but also catch up with old friends. The most frightening thing for me is having to do it all over again next year, but instead from the organisers perspective. It’s going to be in Birmingham, UK. If you’d like to get involved then you can either contact me, or get on the gnome-uk mailing list.

LugRadio Live was last weekend, and again it was a chance to meet new people and old friends. I hadn’t been before, but I was organising the GNOME stand. I’m never quite sure what the stands should aim to do, and what we as a project get out of it. We had a few laptops, but it was a pretty relaxed atmosphere and we didn’t have anyone tied to the stand. We have LinuxWorld in London coming up soon, and I’d like to know of any volunteers who might be available to help out. Again, the mailing list is probably the best port of call if you’re interested.

On the software front…

There have been several releases in our development series of gtk-engines. We have now made excellent progress towards our goal of converting all the theme engines to use cairo. This includes a new engine (Glide) to eventually replace Smooth, and also the new-look Crux engine (work in progress) courtesy of myself (coding) and Lapo Callemandri (mockup).

I’ve also been hacking on gnome-themes. We had a little informal meeting at Guadec about it, and decided to chuck most of the old and ugly themes away. If there is demand, then I will run off a tarball that contains the old themes so that you can still install them. The themes that are left are Clearlooks, Crux, Mist and Glider, as well as the accessibility themes. As I mentioned, Crux is getting a revamp, including new icons, and Mist is also going to get some updated icons (although they’re not available just yet).

Unfortunately, I haven’t had time in between all this to revamp the theme manager. There have been a few improvements of note, such as it’s now easier to install a theme, and you can save the current background when you save a custom theme. The main problem with the theme manager at the moment is that the UI just doesn’t scale very well. With any luck, I’m going to take a fresh look at it for 2.18.

Button Names

I’ve been working on a patch for bug 167045, and all works well and good, except I cannot decide which buttons to put on my dialog. Here is the dialog so far:

The “Close” button seems a little odd, but an “OK” or “Cancel” button would be even worse. Does any one have any suggestions?

New Releases

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)

Software you can tinker with

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?

Low Res Gnome

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…

A Bug A Day…

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.

Linux on the iBook

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!