desktop July 2007

desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org

25 participants
15 discussions

livecd hacking
by Colin Walters 29 Aug '07

29 Aug '07

I've done some work on the Live CD kickstart images, available here: http://submind.verbum.org/~walters/livecd.git/ (Until Jeremy returns from vacation and can review patches to be put in the main livecd git repository) The most important change so far is to create "livecd-desktop-minimal.ks" which is then used as a basis for: livecd-fedora-desktop.ks livecd-fedora-kde.ks livecd-online-desktop.ks Rather than each thing duplicating a lot of code for the livecd init script, etc. The online-desktop is just a stub right now while I fix up some issues, but I've booted the livecd-fedora-desktop successfully (livecd-desktop-minimal.ks also boots...into twm! Retro.). Admittedly I haven't tested the KDE one, but moving forward this unforking should help us to identify changes common between them which seem like good candidates for comps or Fedora package changes. Sebastian, since you were the last person to touch the KDE bits, could you have a look at these changes? I also added a number of improvements to livecd-creator, the git log has the gory details.

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speech recognition for simple commands
by Marius Andreiana 16 Aug '07

16 Aug '07

Hi, Are there any plans on including speech recognition in Fedora? (using sphinx4 and at-spi maybe) I'm looking only to simple commands translation (click, page up, close window...), not full speech recognition. Thanks, -- Marius Andreiana

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f8 desktop livecd
by Colin Walters 14 Aug '07

14 Aug '07

Hi, Some people may not know that in Fedora 7, there was a difference between the DVD and the Live CD. What happened is (as far as I understand it) David Zeuthen took a look at things, and exercised a bit of editorial control by using the kickstart file - ship NetworkManager enabled by default, for example. This is exactly what Fedora as a desktop needs; a place for people who care about the experience as a desktop to do those quick fixes that may be hard to change in the Fedora base. So, following a quick huddle with a few people from the Red Hat desktop team, we decided to make this LiveCD kickstart file a bit more of a project. Actually, the project already exists: http://git.fedoraproject.org/?p=hosted/livecd;a=summary So this mail is just to say that this project exists (and I know a lot of people didn't know about the difference), and will move forward. For Fedora 8, it would make sense to more prominently distinguish this version as the Desktop version. Ideally of course, this project will be minimal - for example, the work to make NetworkManager usable on servers makes sense, and should continue.

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modemlights applet
by Matthias Clasen 31 Jul '07

31 Jul '07

Ever since upstream gnome-applets made the modemlights applet depend on gnome-system-tools, we used to include the old modemlights applet from gnome 2.9 in the gnome-applets package. This is obviously problematic, since that code is not maintained at all, and it refuses to build against current kernel headers now. Therefore, I have dropped it from the gnome-applets package in rawhide now. There are some options for people who really depend on the modemlights applet: - start maintaining the old modemlights applet and package it separately - convince upstream to make the gnome-system-tools dependency optional - package gnome-system-tools for Fedora - make sure that the ppp that is going to appear in NetworkManager meets your needs Matthias

1 0

F8 desktop features
by Matthias Clasen 30 Jul '07

30 Jul '07

Given that test1 is around the corner, I thought it might be a good idea to give a little status update on the features that the desktop team has been working on for F8: NoMoreXFS - Done. Bigboard - In test1, run god-mode 1 to turn it on and play with it. Bluetooth - bluetooth printer support is in test1. Remaining Bluetooth features are still being worked on upstream and will appear in rawhide over time. LaptopImprovements - the bulk of the keyboard and suspend/resume work is in hal-info-20070725 and hal-0.5.10rc1 which narrowly missed test1 and will appear in rawhide soon. PolicyKit - missed test1 by a few days, will appear in rawhide soon. PulseAudio - not in test1, the changes to make PulseAudio play nicely with fast user switching are done upstream. CodecBuddy - not in test1. NetworkManager - not on by default in test1. The necessary changes are being worked on upstream, and the feature page says 70% done. I heard that a 0.7 release might happen around test3 time, I hope we can get a usable snapshot earlier than that. BetterStartup - not targetting F8, since it depends on kernel features that will not land in time.

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KDE 4 Beta 1
by jos poortvliet 29 Jul '07

29 Jul '07

Dear people, The KDE project is about to release it's first beta for KDE 4. The package tarballs are available, to allow distributions to package it. We would like to know if your distribution will have packages available at or soon after the official release date, so we can mention it in the announcement. If so, please provide us with a link or location where to find those packages. If you won't have packages right away, you can tell us when they will be available, so we can mention that. Thank you for your coöperation, The KDE promo team kde-promo(a)kde.org -- Jos Poortvliet KDE-nl http://www.kde.nl http://www.kde.org Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html A: Because it destroys the flow of the conversation Q: Why is top-posting bad?

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Making Fedora Default Theme (release independent stuff)
by Martin Sourada 28 Jul '07

28 Jul '07

Hi, I am new to this list and subscribed mostly because I posted a message to art-list recently [1] that contains things that should be discussed at desktop-list as well. It's about making default theme for fedora - that means making our gtk/qt(4) theme, metacity/kwm/emerald theme, notification-daemon theme and maybe more. It should be release independent. There are some questions that need to be answered first. I attach the original message for more info. I'd like to ask you for your opinion about it. Thanks, Martin References: [1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2007-July/msg00023.html

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An idea about representing groups of programs as one entity
by Rogue 28 Jul '07

28 Jul '07

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi All, Recently I had a brain-wave (or brain damage if you will) and came out with an idea of extended menu items. I tried to formulate my ideas in a blog entry[1] that I posted a few days ago and was hoping to take it up with a usability group. I would request you to please read the blog entry since I have put together some screen shots too on it. The idea is simple: 1. A lot of applications can be identified as providing the same "feature" 2. In my menu items i see the "feature" as compared to a list of applications 3. This "Feature" item can either be drilled in order to get access to the various "feature-providers", or can be clicked to launch the "preferred" application 4. You can configure your preferred application via the preferred-applications UI. I am not sure if such an idea has already been discussed here or not. If it has, then I would appreciate if someone can point me to the archives that contains the discussion, so that I might be able to better understand the pros and cons of such an approach. thanks, Rogue [1] - http://roguexz.blogspot.com/2007/07/problem-of-many.html p.s.: I posted the same mail to the GNOME Usability list and haven't heard anything!, so I thought I shall try to refine the idea out here first before I take it back upstream. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFGqx3tceS9IQvx51YRAv9eAJ9QSWp0cR3yKuNME/1DETEK8xZT2QCfdkcV 1AkNP8/5i3j/sQEQOmuvhs0= =pQly -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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benefit of nautilus mime detection warning dialog?
by Marius Andreiana 27 Jul '07

27 Jul '07

Hi, Regarding 3-year old http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138033 What's the security benefit of this dialog? Preventing gimp from opening an .sh file renamed to .png? Each application should handle bad input, e.g. OOo won't crash the system if one tries to open a non-ODF file with it. It's affecting quite a lot of users http://www.google.ro/search?q=%22Cannot+open%22+%22indicates+that+this+file… Why cannot be removed? Thanks, -- Marius Andreiana http://marius.andreiana.googlepages.com

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Fedora 8 Boot Process
by Brian Tate 25 Jul '07

25 Jul '07

I was reading the feature list for Fedora 8 and was disappointed when I came across the "Better Startup Experience". http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup After reading the "Plan for improvement" section, I find it discomforting such a major change will be done to the existing very working/stable rhgb boot process. 1) Do away with the grub menu by default Why? That is the first question that came to mind. A large number of linux users dual-boot multiple OSes. It also is useful when you have multiple kernel versions installed; if you set the time-out to 3 seconds do you really notice it? 2) Switch to graphical Mode in initrd, draw an animation.... I have an animation now in rhgb, and as a bonus I can see all my services loading if I hit the "more" button. I trust this feature will not go away? 3) rhgb goes away ?reinvent the wheel? This sounds a lot like the useless Mac OS X boot sequence in which a little circle is animated in the middle of the screen. That tells the user nothing what is going on in the boot process and is a pile of crap. Almost as brilliant as the Windows Vista loading screen. I'd be curious to hear others thoughts on this; I can't be the only user out there who likes to know his system is indeed booting up and what it is doing. Is this really the direction we want for the fedora-desktop environment? Simply cloning other OSes poor user interface decisions?

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desktop July 2007