desktop January 2010

desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org

12 participants
8 discussions

upwards and onwards
by Matthias Clasen 14 Mar '10

14 Mar '10

F12 is almost done ! I think we have produced one of our best releases yet. Thanks to everybody who has helped making it a great desktop. As always, there are many exciting new things: Abrt, Bluetooth networking and sound, Dracut, Empathy, IPv6, Thusnelda, etc. But we have also put a lot of effort into making this work well and look sharp. And it shows ! There are certainly still bugs to be found and fixed, and we will spend some time after the release mostly focused on handling incoming bugs, probably until around the time that GNOME 2.28.2 is released (right before Christmas). Even so, there are some changes to the Desktop spin that I want to make early in the F13 cycle, and that I want to outline here: - Drop the CD size limitation and target a larger usb stick. We have discussed this in the past. The main motivation for this is that we have to fight every release cycle to make things fit on a CD, and we don't have room to include our default office suite or example content. - Include OpenOffice instead of abiword. OpenOffice is the premier open source office suite, and abiword is on the current live CD purely for size reasons. - Use shotwell as the default photo management app instead of gthumb. This may be a bit of a surprise for some. Shotwell is a relatively new application, that is in Fedora only since F12. I have mentioned it on this list before. The 0.3.0 release that has just come out is very close to the feature set that we'd ideally expect to have in a default photo management app. It also starts very fast. - Remove remaining Bluecurve icons from fedora-gnome-theme. This will probably leave some holes in the menus, and we'll need help from artists to fill those. - Include example content. We've wanted to do this for a long time, but CD size limitations have always prohibited it. Now we can do it, but of course, we still need to collect good material. If you have proposals for suitably licensed documents, movies, music, etc that are interesting, cool or just funny, let us know ! It might also be a good idea to include some promotional material that could be of use for Fedora ambassadors. If you have proposals in this direction, let us know as well ! Beyond these organizational changes to the live image, I think a focus of our feature work for F13 will be around software installation and updates. Some of our thoughts for how installation and updates should ideally behave can be found on the wiki: http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/UpdateExperience http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/InstallExperience For application installation, Martin Bacovsky has already started working on an online application database that is tied to pkgdb: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-October/msg01083.html Some of us will be at FUDCon in a few weeks, where we can hopefully discuss these ideas in more depth. Matthias

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deja-dup Desktop Backup tool
by Rahul Sundaram 11 Mar '10

11 Mar '10

Hi, Are there any plans to include a good backup tool for the desktop by default? I have put up deja-dup for review if anyone is interested in checking it out https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=540761 Frontend for duplicity (which uses rsync library and gpg keys for encryption) written in Vala. It is a simple backup tool for GNOME and integrates with Nautilus bookmarks etc. Features: • Support for local or remote backup locations, including Amazon S3 • Securely encrypts and compresses your data • Incrementally backs up, letting you restore from any particular backup • Schedules regular backups • Integrates well into your GNOME desktop Rahul

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RE: f4l
by Hristo Petkov 09 Jan '10

09 Jan '10

Hi Guys, I am still under f11 and I know that you are talking about f13 and f14 already, but I have problems with the flash for linux on my desktop (it is designed for f7 and obviously does not work properly under f11). Can you convince somehow Adobe to go open-source and to make some professional flash editor. Obviously the flash editor is not exactly do-it-yourself business as most of the other things under linux are. Regards, Christo Petkov

4 6

Managed Desktop...
by Daniel J Walsh 08 Jan '10

08 Jan '10

A couple of years ago, when I introduced the idea of the xguest user in SELinux, I was working on a kiosk user. I have since added lots of other types of confined users. One of the biggest problems I have seen with this is the way our desktop is designed. Our desktop is designed to be what I would call an administrative desktop. Tools like packagekit, setroubleshoot, abrt etc run by default. Pull down menus include lots of tools that prompt me for the root password. If I don't know the root password and am not an administrator of the machine, I should not be given options to run administrative tools in the menu. I played with sabayon, but sabayon has it backwards, in my opinion. sabayon is a blacklist tool. sabayon tries to take away applications from the meno or stop applications from starting. I believe sabayon or another tool needs to be a white list tool. (sabaon++) If we had this tool the administrator or package developer could list the applications that will show up in the menus, and will autostart. Once I lock design the desktop for this type of user, no installation of an application will change the way this type of users desktop looks/runs. With current sabayon, everytime a new desktop feature shows up, I am forced to re-release xguest to remove the feature from the desktop. I would like to see two default user types out of the box, Minimal Desktop, administrative desktop. Administrative desktop, would be what we have now. You install an app that includes desktop files, they show up on the desktop. Minimal desktop, would only have a minimal set of applications, for the user to use. Firefox, Mail Client, Office products, NetworkManager, PowerManagement? Then sabayon++ can add or remove applications from the menu system and autostarting. Then I and other package maintainers could ship desktop users like xguest user, or corporate desktop user and only run the apps that are appropriate to that type of user. The biggest benefit for the SELinux team is we can write policy that is appropriate to the type of user. Currently xguest policy has to dontaudit xguest_t sending dbus messages to packagekit, just because the packagekit client starts by default. If we have the ability to customize my xguest desktop environment, and future proof it, then we can remove the dontaudit. If a xguest user tries to start packagekit client, that would be an audited event. Forgetting about SELinux, I believe this would be compelling to administrators of large networks of desktops.

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Interesting modules for in need of packaging
by Matthias Clasen 07 Jan '10

07 Jan '10

There is a number of new things in the GNOME space that would be great to have packaged for F13, so that we can look at how they fit into our desktop: Emerillon, a map viewer: http://www.novopia.com/emerillon/ Zeitgeist and GNOME Activity Journal: http://live.gnome.org/action/show/GnomeActivityJournal Nanny, parental controls: http://projects.gnome.org/nanny/ Normally, I would probably just do it myself, but I'm a bit too busy with other things this cycle. Any takers ? Matthias

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packaging tidbits
by Matthias Clasen 06 Jan '10

06 Jan '10

Quick reminder, there have been some changes in the packaging guidelines that affect many desktop packages: - the standard icon cache snipplet has been reworked: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:ScriptletSnippets#Icon_Cache - scrollkeeper-update calls are no longer required: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:ScriptletSnippets#Scrollkeeper It might be worth cleaning those things up in passing while updating packages. Matthias

2 3

HAL removal Feature page
by Bastien Nocera 06 Jan '10

06 Jan '10

Heya, I've created this page to track the removal of HAL (hopefully) for F13: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/HalRemoval Could you please check your package and add them to the list if: - they rely on HAL or libhal - they rely on gnome-vfs2 (which still requires HAL, and is deprecated) - they rely on libgnomeui (which requires gnome-vfs2) We're only tracking Desktop spin applications, and applications you'd expect to see installed on GNOME desktops. Cheers

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Reviewers needed
by Matthias Clasen 05 Jan '10

05 Jan '10

I need some kind soul to review at-spi2-atk and pyatspi for me, both of which are part of the new at-spi2 accessibility stack. The bugs are here: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=544629 http://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=544630 Thanks, Matthias

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desktop January 2010