Martin's Chronicles

Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle Wallpaper—Accepting Concept Artwork

2011-11-23T12:06:00.002+01:00

We're a little bit behind and should have started much sooner, so the time is running short. We are now open for submissions for the Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle default wallpaper concept artwork. If you are interested, please submit your work as soon as possible, the closing date is about one month ahead (the deadline will be officially announced next week).

Submit your concept work here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F17_Artwork/Submissions/Wallpaper_Concept

Fedora 16 XFCE

2011-11-12T00:09:00.001+01:00

So, I also updated and here are my impressions :-DXFCE live cd works like a breeze, installation went smooth. I even got wifi (broadcomm) working out of box (suspend works for me too, btw.)! GRUB 2 seems nice, although it associated detected kernels with the newly installed Fedora. Still better than nothing from grub 1 >:-DNow for the system itself. GDM suck. It sucks hard. As soon as I installed some of gnome as deps it started putting gnome instead of xfce to session. It also does not seem to allow for keyboard and language selection. I need to switch to LXDM or try out LightDM soon…XFCE works as expected, after copying old configuration and installing apps I use, almost everything seems to work.

Troubles

I had to disable starting gnome services to get rid of gnome volume and power manager icons. As a result, probably, my ssh keys passwords aren't remembered anymore, even though gnome-keyring-daemon with SSH agent capability is running. I really hate to type 12+ char. long password zillion times during one package update :(

I also had troubles setting up iBUS. I prefer it to keyboard selection as I use it not only to use Czech keyboard layout but also to type Japanese (via anthy). Nothing seemed to work. But after finding im-chooser and selecting ibus there it started to work. However, im-chooser does not seem to be anywhere in menus—its desktop file contains NotShowIn=XFCE;. WTF?!

Also ibus keyboard shortcuts seem to misbehave. Switching to next input method does not seem to work (but just a second ago I managed with it to turn it off and make toggle on/off shortcut not work!?) at all—well, to be fair, I just tried to play with it and it seems to do something: cycle through English - Default Layout, nothing, nothing and nothing?! I'll probably have to fill bug later…

Other than that, I'm fairly satisfied, I even discovered some nifty features in xfce that I hadn't noticed before ;-)

Oh and I forgot to mention—everything GTK3 looks awful. The adwaita theme is awesome at times (check boxes, for example) and so plain/unfinished looking it hurts at others (dark version, buttons, scrollbars, for example). In general it looks like inconsistent half-finished work thrown together just to have a new theme, with some of its components already finished (the parts that look kicking-ass). Luckily XFCE stays at GTK2 still.

Mounting Novel Netware Drives, How?

2011-09-25T12:35:00.000+02:00

Dear lazy web, I figured someone might have some suggestions in this area. I was recently employed (half-time) in education and they use Novell Netware for network drives and I was wondering how to connect to them from Fedora. From what I know the server's SUSE based, uses LDAP for authentication, no IPX, I need to be able to specify context and server IP (the tree-based login currently does not work as the admin does not know yet how to make it work for two separate networks managed by one server). I tried some of the novell-related packages in fedora, but never succeeded in authentication, probably because it's built with IPX support and without LDAP support…

Anyone has any suggestions?

Fedora 16 Verne Beta Wallpapers

2011-09-21T08:30:00.000+02:00

It's been a while since I pushed the updated wallpapers but now I finally got the will to post about it. First see the updated beta wallpaper:

Next, I'd like to remind you that in Fedora 16 we again have supplemental wallpapers and what's more: since Fedora 16 all the supplemental wallpapers appear not only in GNOME's and KDE's wallpaper choosers but also in XFCE's. Enjoy:

The full selection (with original images and info) is available at F16 Artwork wiki page.

Nodoka Concept Art – Noir WIP

2011-08-07T21:35:00.006+02:00

Well, err, it's been a while ;-) And in order not to stall forever I made an attempt to start designing a really, really dark version of Nodoka. Perhaps it would be more fitting to say that I started playing around with Inkscape as I still don't have a clear idea what it should look like… Anyway, here's some preview, I've called it [fittingly] Noir (click on it to see it in actual size):

Hopefully, sometime in the future I'll finish all these concepts and start writing the actual code but seeing how much spare time I have, it seems to be rather distant future… Anyway, comments are welcome and sketches even more so. Get source SVG now!

See an older post for the other two styles concept art.

Fedora 15 Sometimes Really Suck

2011-08-06T15:45:00.005+02:00

Here's a list of problems:

Some GTK3 apps don't start at all (evince does, gedit and charmap does not)
Printing from GTK3 apps doesn't work.
Ugly symbolic icons show up in my xfce try panel (ibus currently).
Printer does no longer offer High quality colour/greyscale options.
XFCE does not save my mouse settings. It gets reset every time I either switch to VT, log out or plug out and back in.

I've never had such serious problems before with any stable release of Fedora since Fedora Core 3 (which was my first). I'm seriously disappointed, especially by the fact that some devs just don't care at all (the first bug blocks a load of useful apps to start, it's nearly three months old, reproduced by more people and still no reaction from the devs). I was even forced to install Adobe Reader to be able to print PDFs. However, it stopped working as well now…

Fedora 16 Verne Wallpaper

2011-07-30T10:20:00.004+02:00

Update: test and give karma to KDE side of things so that KDE won't be left out for Alpha when it comes to default ;-) Thanks to Jaroslav "Rezza" Reznik for doing the quick work!

Alpha release of next Fedora installment codenamed Verne is nearing and so is its Alpha freeze. Hence the Fedora Design Team selected a winning wallpaper design and I packaged it for F16 onward. It's currently pending pushing to stable. If you're on F16 or rawhide you'll be able to install these with # yum install verne-backgrounds-gnome for GNOME, # yum install verne-backgrounds-kde for KDE and # yum install verne-backgrounds-xfce for XFCE. At the same time as the new package hits repos an updated desktop-backgrounds that sets is as default for GNOME, XFCE and LXDE-and-alike (e.g. LXDM) will also appear and so in Alpha this should be default everywhere except KDE (these need some more work first and sadly we didn't realized that when creating a design team schedule for F16).

And for those wondering what is the winning picture, here's a screenshot of it in my F15 XFCE desktop ;-)

As usual, the Fedora Design Team is looking for feedback on this via the usual channels:

You can comment under this blog post and I'll summarize your opinions to the Design Team.
Fedora Design Team mailing list
at #fedora-design on irc.freenode.net, supposing you catch one of the Design Team members there.

Font Rendering in Fedora

2011-07-22T14:42:00.008+02:00

Shortly said, it's not very impressive. But what are the options we have? Can we improve it? Well, there are some font settings that are available. See e.g. this blogpost about making fedora fonts look Ubuntu-like. Although I personally see that as making things worse, there are people who think otherwise. What I decided to do was to skim through most of the hinting options we have and decide for myself what looks best. And of course, provide my readers with some images so that they could decide for themselves.

So, I decided to do screenshots of some simple highlighted html code to showcase more than black-one white ;-) Initially I decided to make 9pt versions (which is what I use) and 12pt versions (which is standard text size on A4 paper) both for the "gui" variant (white background) and "tui" variant (black background). Halfway I got lazy, so I fully completed only the 9pt variant as you can see in the next two images (click on them to see unscaled). The sorting is this: on left side there are renderings without freetype-freeworld, on the right side there are renderings with freetype-freeworld (and thus with subpixel hinting). From top to bottom: none hinting, slight hinting and full hinting. For some reason, medium and full hinting looks exactly the same on my laptop which is probably a bug (it didn't used to), that's why I hadn't included it.

From these few images I believe I can confidently say this:

increasing amount of hinting increases crispness of the characters (can be seen especially for horizontal lines that are often "smudged")
Freetype-freeworld tends to produce better results than freetype for smaller amount of hinting.
Freetype-freeworld introduces colour halo around the strokes.
Japanese is unhinted (I sense problems with autohinter)
Freetype-freeworld has better shapes, more smooth curves and better antialiasing, however it sacrifices crispness of the strokes (especially seen with full hinting)
Freetype-freeworld gives nicer results for e.g. orange on white, yellow on black or dark green black, while freetype gives nicer results for green on white, blue on white or red on black. At this size. I noticed that increasing the size is more favourable for freetype-freeworld.

I also include two shots with 12pt. Both with full hinting, both include whole geany window (app font is 9pt big), the first one is freetype (save xfwm which uses freetype-freeworld in both cases), the second one freetype-freeworld.

Well, decide for yourself what's best for you, but since the blurriness bugs me more than slight aliasing, I'll probably stay without freetype-freeworld and with full hinting.

Nerd Likes And Dislikes

2011-07-17T11:36:00.003+02:00

I've grown up with windows (and Windows) yet, command line in linux became a irreplaceable companion to me and I've grown to like (and dislike) lots of things that probably aren't that common in to like or dislike (for "normal people"). Here's the short, and maybe interesting list.

Likes

C macro preprocessor (I really love this one)
C programming language
Ruby programming language
bash
Autotools
RPM packaging system
Plain TeX
XFCE
midori
mplayer2
XHTML
PulseAudio
NetworkManager
Fedora
Matroska video container
FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)
IBus input system

Dislikes

C++ programming language
C# programming language
Java programming language
CMake
PHP
Flash
Firefox
Gnome Shell
WYSIWYG HTML editors
LaTeX
Symbolic Icons (the new hit in GTK3 based apps)
Social networking sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn (I move invitations to these to my SPAM folder no matter who sends them)
DEB packaging system
Pointless limitations of choices exposed in UI (*cough* *cough* g-p-m, gnome-shell, …)
Too complex UIs (*cough* *cough* KDE)

What about you?

T-shirt? Erm, what?

2011-07-14T12:53:00.003+02:00

So, after seeing nicu's t-shirt meme I felt a strong urge to join it. However, I don't have any other t-shirts than plain black (or at most dark blue) :-D But an idea sprang to my mind – does it have to be t-shirt? Isn't any piece of cloth good? Why not aikidō-gi? And while I am at it, why not add my complete weaponry? Well, here's the result:

Included weapons are: jō (the one I'm doing tsuki with), bokken (wooden sword; well maybe bokutō – what the hell is the difference between those two words?) and tantō (knife). From anime and various samurai films I picked up that tantō should be kept inside the upper part of kimono, but it wouldn't be on the photo then, right? So I put it where samurais used to put their shōto (short version of katana).

Who the heck are modern desktops for?

2011-07-04T12:52:00.006+02:00

This question has been bugging me for a while since GNOME 3. Nowadays in advanced countries, computer education is part of regular school curriculum. Children are taught what is CPU, what is graphics card, what is memory, how to turn on/off computer, how to behave on the net, how to use word processor, tabular calculator, presentation maker, sometimes even databases or easy programming. Unless in really rich school they are taught usually on something like Windows XP, they know the classical desktop. And they are confused by interfaces like Windows 7 and Gnome shell.

I am 24, my first desktop was Windows 3.11 (at school), then I grow up on Windows 95/98/2000 and Windows XP after finally switched to linux. I'm not that old to not be able to adapt, yet after years spent with linux I find the old Windows ineffective (just find something it the long non-categorized menu of theirs or try to run a few apps at once) and just recently I had to navigate Windows 7 with a touchpad. Let me tell you, it was a major pain in the ass. In my family everyone except me now uses Windows 7 on regular basis and they always complain about it. I haven't heard them ever complain about user interface when in Win XP or Gnome 2.

So why do the heck do we need the change that makes an assumption that presenting user with huge icons of every app installed instead of neat two-level categorized menu is more easy to use (it does not take a very bright person to tell that Movie Player would be categorized under Sound&Video)? Why do we need a change that makes an assumption that customization is a bad thing (I believe that different people have different needs and customizing a desktop to certain level can make it more effective to use for them)? Why do we need a change that effectively tells you that having more terminal windows open at once is a bad thing (yes, even though most common terminal emulators have tabs, I still find it more effective in certain cases to have three or four windows of terminal opened at once and nicely tilted on the desktop)? Why do we need a change that hides your favourite apps when not in "Activities" overview?

Who the heck is the modern desktop designed for? Honestly saying, not for me and not for anyone I know personally either.

Vertical Text Layout — How To?

2011-06-23T13:35:00.005+02:00

Over the past few years I have been getting more and more interested in Japanese culture, language, aikido, etc. and as some of you might know, traditionally Japanese text is written vertically (starting at top-right corner). Here's an example of such text in LibreOffice Calc (where I discovered how to do it)

What I don't know how to do, or if it's even possible, is typesetting a book / story / poem in such layout. I am basically looking for two approaches:

LibreOffice Writer way. Here I know how to write Japanese, I even have some nice free, but sadly not libre fonts, but I don't know how to set vertical text layout. Anyone knows if it is possible and if so, how to do it?
TeX way. I've been using plain TeX for ages but I still neither know how to typeset Japanese nor how to use vertical text layout there. Any pointers for both of these are welcome.

EDIT: ad 1. Looks like I have been blind. Thanks to Vorbote for useful links. It's as easy as doing Format->Page->Page->Text Direction = Right-to-left (vertical).

Maybe It's Me Who's "Obsolete"

2011-05-09T22:01:00.004+02:00

Lately I've been thinking that maybe the reason why I don't get along with GNOME 3 is not gnome's fault but rather my fault. Why? Here's a couple of reasons.

I prefer real paper and pen when it comes to math/physics, which however wastes lots of time…
Capitalistic society is kind-of maze-like for me.
In lots of tasks I prefer CLI/TUI to GUI tools.
I have neither facebook nor twitter account.
I prefer acoustic musical instruments to electronic ones.
I prefer to write (x)html/css in text editor, i.e. with all the tags written by hand.
I use TeX.
I prefer classical music to popular music (in a sense of rock, metal, hip-hop, pop, disco, ...)
I find kissing in public place embarrassing if not inappropriate (isn't that personal stuff?).
Sometimes I wish I were born in pre-industrial era in some scarcely-populated forested mountains.
I prefer real books to e-books and still read them (currently I'm reading Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami).
My primary means of e-communication is e-mail, but I prefer meeting and talking with people IRL.
I use mobile phone solely for making calls, writing/reading sms and checking trains' schedules, I don't have a smartphone.
I dislike dynamic web, the most I can fathom is youtube, e-shopping and e-banking.
I think playing with C preprocessor, fortran, ruby etc. is fun. I don't like Java, C++ and C#.
I prefer 2D computer games to 3D ones.
I believe getting a girlfriend is always because in the long run I'd like to marry her. I dislike divorce and "love promiscuity" (i.e. changing girlfriends/boyfriends often), (although on the other hand I don't mind different than usual kinds of set-ups [like gay or lesbian marriage, harem, reverse harem, etc.] and consensual prostitution [i.e. offering sexual services as a paid and taxed product without either party being forced into it])
I believe that the inside is more important than looks in case of (wo)men.
Ok, this list is long enough, isn't it? Time to stop it with: I don't like parties and loud music.

Looking at this list, it seems pretty obvious why I'm frustrated with GNOME 3 and happily switched to XFCE since Fedora 15 (and why, despite me being 23, I still don't have a girlfriend)…

Killing Anybody Is Not a Reason to Celebrate

2011-05-03T22:53:00.004+02:00

In Christianity you have 10 Commandments, one of which tells you not to kill. Buddhism says something along the lines of offering bread to one who throws a stone at you.

Any human being of good will should feel at least a bit sad when another living thing dies. That's part of the reason in some cultures it's considered good manners to thank for food before eating it – not the cook, but the nature (or god[s]).

Yet, people apparently celebrate when someone considered bad is killed. I honestly feel sad and disgusted when I hear of such things. Just how exactly are we better than them (TM) when we're doing exactly the same (forcing our believes onto them, killing many innocent people in the process, and then celebrating when one of them is killed)?

If you want to see better future, start with making yourself better.

That my today's memo.

Another Update to Nodoka Concept Artwork

2011-05-01T19:51:00.003+02:00

With another time spared to working on Nodoka I've finished the GLOSSY style concept artwork. See for yourself:

To remind you, here's the MODERN style concept artwork – this will be the default style once the code will have been written…

Before moving on onto the next stage of development I plan to prepare a special style aimed for especially dark themes but I don't have yet a clear image of what it should like yet so *hint, hint* if you'd like to propose something now's the time *hint, hint* ;-)

PS: The progress indicator (the blue round snake-like thing) in GLOSSY style was real pain in the butt to design to look at least approximately how I'd like it to and the result is quite messy. If there's any inkcape guru who might know some pointers how to make it more easily and cleanly, please spare a little bit of your skills with me ;-)

Change is sometimes good, but…

2011-04-20T15:03:00.006+02:00

…at other times it might not be so. The example of the latter is IMHO the abrt icon. Originally it was something like this:

and now it looks like this:

What I'm getting at, you might ask. Well, the new icon obviously looks much better and more polished but has one serious problem – I have not the slightest idea what the hell does it mean. Not to talk about the tiny fact that e.g. when it appears in my [bottom] panel (which is transparent and bellow it is F15's default background) it looks like nothing more than a strange 'A'. You know, when the old red siren with exclamation mark appeared everyone could tell that something went wrong, now he'll be just confused with what the strange 'A' means.

On a side note – almost all these GNOME3 greyscale icons are IMHO either ugly (good example of this is the new input-method sys-tray icon) or unusable with any other background than what they were designed for. Please, I want my colourful icons in systray in XFCE back, tell me what to do.

On another side note – if I find the time, I'll write a, hopefully short, critique on Gnome 3 default GTK theme Adwaitha which I think has great albeit wasted potential drown in inconsistency (like some widgets are designed very nicely with evidently lots of effort being put into them while others look like half-finished lets-put-something-plain-and-suggestive-here-and-maybe-improve-it-later kind of designs).

Beefy Miracle Lost, But…

2011-04-12T20:21:00.003+02:00

… since the winner is Verne, I believe the time is ripe to finish the old Gears theme proposal from F10:

Java VM Works Again In WebKit

2011-04-09T08:53:00.002+02:00

While there are some people hyped about firefox4 and gnome3 releases I'm silently enjoying my Fedora 15 with XFCE and midori web-browser. And yesterday I finally noticed an update that makes openjdk java vm working in webkit based browsers (chrome, midori, arora, epiphany, …) again:
icedtea-web-1.0.2-2.fc15.i686
So I can finally use midori for everything again. Yay! Thanks whoever who fixed this!

MPlayer2 Experimental Package

2011-03-24T14:32:00.006+01:00

Yesterday I came across a fork of mplayer called simply mplayer2. When I read it supports ordered chapters, I knew I had no other choice but to build it (as there does not seem to be any other distro package for than for gentoo). To my surprise, the build itself takes about 10-15 minutes so apart from figuring out and installing all the deps it was pretty fast process. The resultant SPEC file used to build the package can be found on my fedorapeople space. It uses same executable name, so it cannot coexist with mplayer and I didn't bother working around that.

Some of its killing features include:

Ordered Chapters (finally is this Matroska feature supported on linux!)
Dynamically loads system libraries, including ffmpeg and libass (which among other things means that when ffmpeg is build with multithreading support, mplayer2 is prepared to take advantage of it)
Uses libass for rendering subtitles by default (yay, finally vertical Japanese subtitles are rendered properly)
Does not unpause paused movie when e.g. switching to/from fullscreen, seeking, etc.

Plus it seems at first sight that frame-dropping works without any problems (I always had problems with it in mplayer).

So, I'd like to add, if you want to try it, here's your chance but I warn you that it's not your usual high-quality package you are used to in Fedora ;-) Plus, it does not include gmplayer and mencoder as the devs decided to drop these from the codebase (you can read more about that on mplayer2 faq page)

And on a almost unrelated note, first thing I watched using mplayer2 was 君に届け [Kimi ni Todoke, Reaching You], the live action movie version. I have to say I liked it a lot (I admit that despite being healthy boy, I have a soft spot for East Asian romance often found in shoujo manga) and starting today I have new favourite actress :-D Her name is Renbutsu Misako (Renbutsu is surname), she's twenty and she played Chizuru (one of the main protagonist's best friends, see the picture bellow). For those not being able to read Japanese: she's from Tottori Prefecture (west part of Honshu, about 200km north-east from Hiroshima), she likes guitar and drawing picture books and her special skills are piano and karate. Quite an ideal woman for me :-D

Update: I've been reminded that fedorapeople is bound by the same rules as fedoraproject with regards to forbidden stuff, so until I find a better location you can find only SPEC (that AFAIK does not qualify as redistributing patent encumbered software) there – you should be able to download the source from upstream directly and build the package, right ;-) Have I already said that I hate software patents with a passion?

Update (2011/04/08): I've updated to final 2.0 release. Apart from that the update contains a fix for debuginfo package build, disables mp3lib build (which was producing broken audio for me) and contains a config file (I shamelessly stole the config file laying in source and edited it for fedora needs) which sets pulse as default audio output (alsa isn't performing 100%, sometimes mplayer2 refuses to "unpause" with alsa audio driver).

Make XFCE Rock, Part I. Panel Layout

2011-03-15T21:20:00.007+01:00

Bunch of us are unhappy with the direction of Gnome 3. For us, the best desktop to replace gnome with is probably XFCE. However XFCE isn't as mature as Gnome 2 was before Gnome 3 took over. So here's the idea: make XFCE first class citizen in Fedora. And this blog post is the first (and one of the both most easy most controversial) part of that great task—the default panel layout.

I think the current default layout suffers many shortcomings and redesign is needed. After some initial discussion of what applets we should use I sketched and propose for consideration two layouts. One single-panel and one two-panel.

The single panel layout is very minimalistic and tries to retain good usability within the constraints:

The two-panel layout on the other hand can sport some more applets and thus improve the usability a lot. I believe that the splitting of applets into the panels should be easy to understand/use, functional and look stylish. I obviously see analogy between panel menus and app menus – hence they are in top panel. Similarly for window buttons – they practically work like tabs and we are used from web browsers to have tabs on top.

Next idea is for workspace switcher – it's best to put it somewhere where it is both easily accessible and not getting in the way. Similarly for lock-screen and log-out buttons. Obvious positions for these are corners then and as shutdown button is quite commonly in bottom-right corner (old versions of GDM, LXDM, …) it's quite easy to place them. We use the remaining corner for clock. And finally group together all other applets that use icons. And voila, we have almost dock-like bottom panel (just add some transparency to it and you'll see the similarity). And of course, not to forgot, one of the most important decision here is that window list and system tray should be on different panels as they each tend to take up lots of space.

Feel free to join the discussion either on fedora xfce list, dedicated wiki page or here ;-)

Should I Trust a Digital Thermometer?

2011-03-14T19:35:00.003+01:00

I feel a little ill (it's end of flu season here, but I probably have just some light cold) so I measured my body temperature (in armpit). Thrice. With these values:

35.8 °C,
35.9 °C,
35.7 °C.

Should I trust that? Especially if my colleague has measured himself a normal body temperature of 36.7 °C. I wonder if I just put the thermometer wrongly in the armpit or if it's measuring incorrectly… I wish I had a good old mercurial thermometer to check…

Tiny Update to Nodoka Glossy Concept Artwork

2011-03-12T15:59:00.006+01:00

So, yesterday evening and today after lunch (I was cooking kung pao) I had some spare time so I progressed a little on the nodoka glossy style concept artwork. From the experience I've gained over the years of working on nodoka I have to say that designing scrollbars is one of the hardest part of widget theming… Here's the preview (click on the image to see it in full size):

And as usual, comments welcome, help even more so ;-)

PS: for the people who'd like to complain about blue, windows or mac:

This is concept art. Colours are previews.
Blue is the colour of Fedora.
I like this shade of blue.
Yet I don't like the blue Windows XP theme.
I haven't ever used Mac and I don't know very much the theme they're using, this concept is based on what Andy Fitzsimon once send me ;-)

Unhappy with Gnome 3? Just ditch it!

2011-03-08T15:48:00.005+01:00

What are the reasons to be unhappy? I bet most of you would guess. I'd just like to add that there's substantial difference between KDE 4.0 and GNOME 3.0 release and that is — while KDE 4.0 was just premature release, GNOME 3.0 is broken by design. No amount following minor releases can fix that. Yes, most of the changes to GTK 3.0 are good and enable people to work with this toolkit in a better way, but that's where GNOME 3 goodies ends. Unless you want a highly usable open-source software for tablet, Gnome 3 probably isn't for you.

And as Fedora 15 Alpha is behind the doors it's a good opportunity to try out other desktop. If you liked Gnome 2.x series you're probably left up with two options: KDE, which finally matured to be feature complete again, and XFCE which is steadily becoming better. LXDE seems poorly maintained at the moment so I wouldn't recommend it. And of course, if you, in addition, want a gtk based desktop then XFCE is the only option (right now).

XFCE is surprisingly configurable and with a bit of effort it can be turned from ugly duckling to pretty (and usable!) desktop. Say, would you guess the screenshot bellow is actually XFCE?

OK, I agree, it's not as mature as KDE or Gnome 2.x series but I guess if enough of us put our money where our mouths are we could accelerate its development considerably. As a starter, let's identify the issues ;-)

New Toy (External Sound Card)

2011-03-06T21:05:00.006+01:00

After buying myself headphones from bose I thought it would be good to also replace the crappy integrated audio with something better. After some goofing around I bought Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 Pro:

The good thing is that it, surprisingly, works even in the 5.1 surround setup out of box (on F-15). The not so good thing is that unless you plug it in during boot you won't get anything more than stereo. I wonder why :-D The sound is pretty good, I haven't made any measurements but I noticed a significant improvement both on the sound and noise front (basically, the music sounds better and noise is beyond my recognition level). So basically I'm happy with this buy. Of course, pulseaudio makes life really easy in this case, I wonder how it would have worked without it (alsamixer just crashes when trying to change device, xfce4-mixer does not see the card directly, only via pulseaudio).

However, this also came with a simple remote control and I have no idea how to make it work… Pointers to how-to's for dummies appreciated. Not that I care that much, but would be nice to have it also working as opposed to just collecting dust ;-) Same goes for the metallic volume knob (apparently it could be also handled via lirc).

Two Things in F15 That Are New For Me

2011-03-05T10:33:00.003+01:00

I switched to Fedora n+1 even before Alpha for the first time. Full-time. And I'm not looking back.
I'm using XFCE now and I'm not looking back.

So if I had to find anything positive on GNOME 3 it would be that it brings more attention to alternatives, mostly XFCE. So I propose this: "Let's stop shouting about Gnome 3, where we are not being listened to, and try our luck with XFCE." So I started a wiki page for gathering suggestions (feel free to add yours/start discussion on its discussion page). The goal is: make XFCE rock in Fedora 16.

Why I Think Gnome 3 Is a Dead End

2011-02-28T11:55:00.002+01:00

In short because it's cat-dog. What I mean is – what is the new gnome target audience? To me it seems like it tries to satisfy everyone which obviously cannot work. Let's look at the potential users who might want to use it.

Newcomers. Imagine a computer virgin. He buys a computer (like he would buy say a television) already preconfigured and pushes the power button. Now what should he do when it is fully booted? How to present the workspace to him? I think "start" button from windows wasn't a totally wrong idea – the user sees it and thinks: "oh, I'm probably supposed to start here". The menu itself however was always badly executed. Too many applications with strange names, sometimes even in categories.

Gnome shell uses activities button instead of start button which is probably a little bit less suggestive but should give away pretty easily what it does. And instead of menu you're presented with table. Again filled with zillions of icons and non-familiar names like firefox. What the hell is that? And the user is lost. Now one thing that I don't completely understand is the need for activities button at all if there was made a decision to keep desktop clean of icons. The desktop could be well used for presenting the user with what he can do. However the main point is how to present him the apps. Surely a big globe labeled "browse the web", two heads seemingly chatting labelled "chat with friends" or notebook with pen writing something on it labeled "write a document" would give the user much better idea what to do than firefox wrapped around globe labeled "firefox", blue connected heads labeled "empathy" and stylized oo-writer icon labeled "OpenOffice.org Writer".

Furthermore, the less options the user is presented with, the better. He does not need to be presented on his workspace with 10 different apps doing the same thing. The maximum that could be presented to him is some sort of artsy icon labeled "personalise your workspace" with all the settings. The settings would, as its label suggest, let him stylize his desktop look and for slightly more knowledgeable users let them choose whether they want to browse the internet with firefox or chrome (for example) or how early they want screensaver to kick in in case of inactivity.

Also, since people use their notebooks increasingly also for presenting, setting up dual head should be almost one of the easiest things on the world. User plugs in an external projector/monitor, dialog pops up that he did so and how he wants to set it up – clone or extend his current workspace. Nothing more, nothing less.

He is also the type of user that will probably not work on multiple things at once, however e.g. when writing a document he'll switch to and fro between the composer window and one or other window with a reference he uses. This needs to be done also suggestively and ideally without zooming out/in. Probably some sort of semi-intelligent sliding.

As you can guess, gnome-shell tries a bit to appeal to these users but it's stuck up half way because of the following groups.

Windows/Mac Escapee. This kind of users already know how to use a computer, have some favourite apps and are expecting to be more or less able to keep their current work-flow. Gnome shell breaks that and will probably scare them away.

Power users. Working with many apps at the same time, relying a lot on terminal, customizing their desktop to best fit their needs. These will be annoyed with how gnome shell works. It slows their workflow, shuts them off of some settings they've been using for ages (like turn off display on laptop lid close) presents them with unnecessary animations. I don't know how for others, but for me gnome-shell makes e.g. writing a code (which in my case requires switching to and fro between terminal, file manager, gedit and web browser) pain it the butt.

Still from the design it seems like these people were thought of as well when making gnome shell. But that's the problem. It stopped halfway. It tries to be both for power users and newbies and ends up neither. Sorry, but I really can't see a way to satisfy both camps and that's why I think gnome 3 is bound to fail. And it's going to drag Fedora 15 down with it (being the default DE). But only time will show whether I'm right or wrong.

Disclaimer. This post contains only my personal opinions and it does not represent any usability studies or interest groups' positions and as such it might be utterly wrong, so the best you can do is to disagree with me and wait a few months/years to see who was actually wrong :D

Keeping up with Fedora 15 and XFCE

2011-02-27T23:03:00.004+01:00

Since my last blog post about xfce (to which I switched because gnome 3 is broken by design for me) I've been able to get more comfortable there and even fixed some of the issues as you can see on the next screenshot.

I have to say that I "adjusted" to xfce much faster than I thought I would and I'm even not looking back. Yes, there are still some gnome apps (like the gnome volume control or evince) that I keep using but overall my desktop is pretty much "degnomiffied" now. I especially like how quick things work in xfce when compared to gnome. But here and there I still run by a problem, especially given that I'm on pre-alpha release of fedora ;-) So let's remind ourselves what the current set of problems is.

Thunar lacks tabs. Ok, I can live without two-panel layout (drag-n-drop between windows saves the day), but living without tabs is really pain in the butt. Someone should explain the thunar devs that this is a killer feature that must be present in all modern browsers, be it web browsers, ftp browsers or file browsers. Furthemore, thunar does not seem to be on friendly terms with archive mounter. How the hell am I supposed to access the mounted archive after I mount it?

Window Buttons lacks ability to manually sort the buttons. It surprisingly annoys me a lot when the buttons are ordered differently than I'd like them to be…

Setting up dual head sucks. Not only it somehow refuses to set-up a manually added (but supported) mode, it also does not offer any other layouts than clone.

Java does not work with webkit based browsers ! You know, seriously, there should be at least some minimal regression testing before new java is pushed. I use it a lot, in F14 it works, but in F15 it's broken again. No java in midori, no java in chrome/chromium, no java in epiphany. You know, I really hate that I have to keep firefox only to be able to use java :-(

Either no XFCE or no sound. New gdm does not let you choose session, however startxfce4 from runlevel 3 leaves me with no sound. And thanks to complex dependency chains I'm now unable to update half of my system in order to be able to both use xfce and have sound working. Help appreciated.

Is it plymouth or systemd that's half-broken? Looks like the system is able to boot within about 34 seconds (at leasts that's what systemd messages tell me), however then nothing happens (runlevel 3 without rhgb quiet). Pressing enter gives me tty login. In runlevel 5 (again without rhgb quiet) works ok, but runlevel 5 with rhgb quiet makes the boot be about 1.30 minutes long… Furthermore, boot.log is empty. Nice…

At least, after I updated kernel and xorg packages I got full colour depth displayed again. Feels like Fedora 15 Alpha is close :-D

It feels nice to be almost on the bleeding edge :-)

What's Up With Nodoka

2011-02-27T22:26:00.005+01:00

It's been a while since I've written something about nodoka and as some questions keep flowing I decided to write up a short status update. Let's start from the beginning. When gtk3 started to get into Fedora during F14 development I updated the engine to work with it. However as time and gtk3 development progressed the themeing was completely rewritten in a way that basically warrants a complete engine rewrite to make it work properly.

So I'm afraid I have to disappoint you all as you'll have to live without nodoka for gtk3 for still some time (basically until I find enough motivation and time to port it). Of course if there'd be a volunteer(s) who would port the engine code and/or rewrite at least one of the themes to work with gtk3 that would be greatly appreciated.

However, I've not been completely stale either. Since I'll need a rewrite for the gtk3 version as well I slowly resumed on the design part of things and updated a little the glossy style. Here's what I've got so far, comments are welcome.

And here's the other style concept work (that I completed some months ago) for comparison:

Nitpicking on XFCE

2011-02-10T11:18:00.004+01:00

As you might have noticed together with switching to Rawhide I've also switched to XFCE recently. Now that I'm quite used to it and have set it up in a way that it looks almost like my previous gnome set up, there are still some things that I don't like (or I am just dumb enough to don't know how to get rid of them :D).

So let's start with an obligatory screen-shot of my current desktop.
And now to actual complaints ;-) Beginning with the things that are on the screen-shot. I cannot drag-n-drop window buttons between themselves. I used this a lot in gnome to resort the windows for the ordering more functional than (like keeping the mail client always on the furthest left), I does not seem to be able to do that with xfce. Next comes the clock applet. I've found three none of which is perfect (one does not show date, another one does not have transparent backgrounds) with the one displayed being best. But as you see it's a bit cramped. IMHO there should be some space between the time and date, or an option to display it along side, not one above the other…

So, that was the top panel, now for desktop. For some reason right-clicking on the desktop peaks the cpu load and takes a while before menu appears (only for the first try, subsequent tries are reasonably fast). But the main issue are the filled rounded rectangles behind icon labels and way too big grid – I don't want only the wallpaper behind the icon labels and I want the icons to be closer together (while still this big). Another problem is when clicking on an icon it always opens thunar instead of the default file manager.

Now for the things in bottom panel. As I recall the workspace switcher behaves a little bit odd when setting up – when you switch number of rows of workspaces it takes effect only after re-logging which is a bit confusing (one is led to believe that it does not works only to be confronted with a working 2-row set-up after next log in).

Next is thunar. It seems to be a nice file manager but it lacks two killing features that were added in recent gnome releases to nautilus – tabs and two-panel browsing. While tabs are just more efficient substitutions for multiple windows, two-panel browsing makes moving and/or copying files around really pleasant. I hope the devs have it on their to-do list because, as I wrote before, using nautilus in xfce is kind of suboptimal.

And probably my final complaint is about setting up dual head. At home I have plasma TV which I can connect to via VGA cable. The problem is that while it supports 1368x768 60Hz resolution via this connection, it reports only 1024x768 60Hz, so I have to add that mode manually via xrandr. So far this is OK, this way it worked before in gnome as well. However even when I add that mode, the xfce config utility stubbornly refuses to set it up. Sigh. And to top it, there does not seem to be any way, in gui, to set the two monitors (integrated display and TV in this case) to be say next to each other. They're always over themselves and again I have to use xrandr directly to set the layout correctly.

And so that's probably all. And despite these little issues, I think XFCE is a really nice desktop environment almost ready to harbour all escapees from Gnome 3 in Fedora 15 ;-) In short, fix these above mentioned issues and it would probably be fully ready ;-)

F15 Alpha Wallpaper — Package Review Needed

2011-02-02T22:33:00.005+01:00

So, it's the time of year again, alpha freeze approaches and first version of wallpaper is being packaged and thus I need someone to do a quick review. I could do a swap review if desired.

And here's an obligatory screenshot (yes, it is rawhide and no, it is not gnome, it is xfce).

Comments on the wallpaper are welcome (as well as pointers on how to make it appear in xfce background chooser other than adding manually).

EDIT: Thanks to Tim Lauridsen the package is now reviewed :-)

Back to the Future – On Rawhide Again

2011-01-31T21:24:00.005+01:00

So, I decided to give Rawhide a go and installed it as my second system (and thus replacing F12, because I skipped F13). So, here are some thoughts.

Given my position on gnome-shell (I really don't like it) I decided to give a go to something lightweight, so I downloaded lxde nightly build. Aah, it was a disaster. Whatever display manager was supposed to start was crashing, so I had to log in to tty and run startx manually. That worked, luckily. I didn't like the booted desktop environment one bit, but lots of other bits so I installed it to hard-drive. Of course, it haven't fixed the booting issue.

So I tried to set it up as I'd like, but eventually gave up. Few weeks after that, I downloaded Desktop live and booted. My impression was: "have my PC turned to next-gen TV, err home multimedia center?" Still I decided to install it (to replace the lxde try), but no luck – due to a bug in anaconda, it thinks it's not live image…

So I've done it the harder way. Reboot to lxde, log-in, update, group-install gnome, install system-switch-displaymanager-gnome and set display manager to gdm. Nice, after that I finally got working graphical log-in, although during boot error message appears, that something cannot find root, but apparently it works. Let me add a little side comment here: the boot sequence is totally useless. Even if I escape from the graphical plymouth progress indicator, not boot messages appear. Whatsoever. How the hell am I supposed to tell that the booting actually is still in progress and not hogged up on some service?

But back to the main theme. So I logged in to gnome-shell (to my disappointment same looking as on desktop nightly) and tried it to use for a while. And I have to say, what was bad is even worse and the most important things I wanted (useful and quick way to switch between windows in one concrete task) are still not there. Desktop/task visualisation got small with no windows indicators on it whatsoever, so how the hell am I supposed to tell to which task do I want to switch? If I had to summarize my impression of gnome shell, it would be probably disappointment with trying to make PC from work tool into a tool for consuming, i.e. gnome shell would be awesome if it was a user interface to next-gen home media center or tv, but it's irritating when you actually want to work using it.

Next, not succeeding in finding a way to switch back to the old-school gnome, I group-installed xfce. I'm pretty impressed how fast and responsive these light-weight things are. On the flip side I had to get rid of gmixer to have only one sound-controlling applet in system try (why the hell do they still ship gmixer when pulseaudio mixer is now superior to it in more than one way?). Next I had a little trouble with configuring the panels – no spacing thingie, desktops do not show in two rows until next log in, there's no way to make them transparent… Texts bellow icons on desktop have some weird solid color background and there seems to be no way to turn it off, I cannot resort window buttons in "Window Buttons" panel applet, there seems to be no way to turn on compositing… But overall xfce seems to be usable.

I even switched, for the time being, to sylpheed mail client, which was installed by default on lxde spin. Even though its icons are rather ancient, the user interface is clean and easy to use and it seems much faster than evolution. But there still seem to be applications from gnome that I need like empathy, nautilus (yes I got addicted to two panel mode pretty hard), rhythmbox.

So in short, unless gnome-shell is postponed again, so long and thanks for all the fish and count me as new xfce user :-D

Oh, and btw. despite being still pre-alpha, rawhide is actually working pretty well (apart from annoying occasional graphic errors, new black&white gnome try icons [see the picture bellow] and unfinished gtk3 theme)!

EDIT: Actually I just found that compositing is possible with xfce so I have the bottom panel transparent again and windows have shadows :-)

EDIT 2: And now I have found how to rid myself of the weird looking frame around system try and how to add expansible space into panel so I have the bottom panel spanning whole screen again. Nice, I'm starting to like xfce more and more.

Nothing's Perfect — Funny SPAM Detection

2011-01-27T12:23:00.003+01:00

I've been itching to share this experience with everyone for a while now, but never got to actually write it. You know, I'm using gmail and I am receiving hundreds of emails (from mailing lists, bugzillas, real people etc.) each day (and for that reason I have a lot of filters to keep them sorted). And a tiny amount of these are SPAM. Sometimes google fails to detect obviously SPAM as such and I can understand that, however it is almost ironic how some perfectly sane and legitimate mails end up in SPAM folder. Ever since I noticed a mail from my thesis' advisor in SPAM folder I check every mail there. And among those that almost 100% end up there while they shouldn't are mails to webkit-dev mailing list from people with @google.com mail address. Funny, isn't it?

New Books to Read

2011-01-24T15:33:00.007+01:00

I wouldn't usually write in my blog about new books I bought, but today I bought two books that I think look a bit weird together :-D First was an award winning novel Kafka on the Shore by Murakami Haruki, another one was one of your usual second volume of shōnen (for boys) harem (with lots of girls centered around male protagonist) manga Negima!. So I took that as an opportunity to test out the so-called "Auction" mode of my new compact camera (yeah, I don't have the money to buy something really good like Nicu has ;-)) Casio EX-H5 (black version). Here's the photo:

And as a bonus a few photos taken from where I live (as you can notice, the image quality isn't very good, but I couldn't expect more for the prize >_<):

Upstream vs. Downstream—Clash of Visual Identities

2010-12-17T22:45:00.005+01:00

In the past eight years or so, Gnome Desktop enjoyed more or less small yet steady improvements that have brought it to where it is now—IMHO one of the best desktop environments. However, along with the side push from the over-hyped release of KDE4, there has been a growing number of people who wished for a major change, instead of steady improvement. Their efforts are to be realized in GNOME 3 which will most likely be in Fedora 15. Let alone, for now, the tiny problem that this messes up my workflow in a way that it is much less efficient albeit much more eye-candy-ish. That's not the point of today's post. Today I want to focus on the problem of visual identity.

It is understandable that with such a big release upstream seeks even more aggressively to promote it. Along with the visual identity. And thus there is a request for Fedora 15 to use Gnome 3 wallpaper for Gnome 3 desktop. And here comes the problem—upstream wants its visual identity, while downstream also wants its own visual identity.

For a linux distro the ideal case is that across all flavours, the visual identity is the same. The work-flow, style, etc. remain DE specific, but widget theme, window decorations, panels, wallpapers, icons, fonts are consistent through them all. Of course I doubt there is any community around a specific distro, except maybe Canonical when they put their money into it, that can achieve that.

On the other side of the spectrum is upstream ideal case where all distros look the same. However this is in direct clash with the above ideal.

So how to solve this for Fedora? In past releases we have proven that we are able to make part of that identity—wallpapers and everything connected with them. And do it once per release. Should we now yield and use upstream defaults for F15, for GNOME? Should we treat them special? Remember, KDE4 wasn't treated specially back then. Why should GNOME be now?

While I understand why would upstream developers want that, I still think they should focus on promoting something different than visual identity. Yeah, they ought to use a consistent theme for that promotion, something that is available on all distributions as at least a second choice, something that "smaller" distributions without well-established design team could use. Something that we could call the canonical visual identity. However, they should not push it onto distributions. I think that if we are able to create a visual identity, or part of it, for Fedora specifically, we should, irrespective what anniversary any of upstream projects have, create and use it. As it is the visual identity that leaves the first impression and you should be able to tell just by looking that you're running Fedora when using defaults. And that's the memo, now shoot me :-D

PS: And of course, as part of Fedora, we should be the first to actually achieve the ideal of having a cross-DE single visual identity created fully by a community and the ones to push any changes necessary to make it possible upstream (not like Canonical who just like to reinvent a wheel instead of improving the almost-wheel).

PPS: Yes, Fedora is all about upstream, but IMHO that makes sense in bug reporting/fixing, feature implementing, etc., not in default settings.

Fedora 15 — Wallpaper Submissions Open

2010-11-30T21:22:00.004+01:00

With Fedora 14 out of the door we are working on the artwork for Fedora 15 Lovelock. Our first step, as usual, is gathering general artwork concepts. Do you have an idea how could Lovelock wallpaper look like? Feel free to submit concept art on our wiki! The theme is lovelock, let you fantasy run wild. And don't be shy! This is initial concepts phase, so even if the actual submitted artwork is very rough, if the concept is strong, there is high possibility it would be used. The deadline for default theme concept submissions is Tue 18 January 2011, 18:00 UTC.

Supplemental Wallpapers

Just like with Fedora 14, we would like to create a set of hand-picked wallpapers that we would package and thus made available easily via yum (or PackageKit). If you know about a good freely licensed image that could be used as an wallpaper don't hesitate and submit it! The procedure for submission is on our wiki.
The deadline for supplemental wallpapers submission is Mon 7 March 2011, 23:59 UTC.

I Voted

2010-11-22T20:41:00.002+01:00

Vote too!

A Musical Piece of the Week, No. 0: J. S. Bach — Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor

2010-10-26T20:45:00.006+02:00

So, I've been thinking about trying to start a new section of my blog dedicated solely to music, mostly serious music. Each week (hopefully), I'll pick a musical work (like symphony, fugue, concerto, etc.) which I enjoyed in the week and try to write a few words about the author, about the performer(s) and about the musical piece itself. I hope some of you'll enjoy it and that I also learn something new trying to find the info ;-) In order for you to be able to listen to it, it'll be solely music that can be found on youtube, sometimes sadly still flash-only. So let's start it off, and what can be better way than to start with, in my opinion, the best (known) composer in all the human history (so far)—Johann Sebastian Bach and one of his greatest compositions, Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was German composer, harpsichordist, organist, violist, violinist of the Baroque period. He is considered to had brought baroque music to it's ultimate maturity. When reading that many of his numerous Fugues were not actually a work of many weeks spent with composing but rather an improvisation on a given theme, I stand in awe. They're really complex and freaking hard to learn to play. Most of you have probably heard Toccata and Fuge in D Minor, BWV 565 (it was e.g. used as a opening theme for one of the french animated series about humans and their history, I believe the "Once Upon a Time... Man" one but I'm not 100 % sure), but that's not the piece I'm going to talk about today, even though it's also for organ ;-)

Another few notable pieces that pop to my mind for other instruments are the Brandenburg Concertos for Chamber ensembles (usually string ones, but there's also flutes used in some of the concertos, for example) or the Well-Tempered Clavier for solo keyboard (in baroque usually harpsichord, today usually piano) or the unfinished The Art of Fugue, considered by some music historians as pure intellectual practise.

While Bach's compositions are of great intellectual depth, technical difficulty and artistic beauty, in his days he was conversely considered not one of the best composers, but rather one of the best organists. But indeed, he certainly was a great virtuoso, especially on the organ, but also on harpsichord (which he was among the first in the world to use as a solo instrument) and violin. The number of musical pieces he wrote is huge — just a list of them takes up more than 16 A4 pages… He died in 1750 at the age of 65.

Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582

It's a work for organ and while presumably composed early in Bach's life it's definitely one of his best works. Robert Schumann described the variations of the passacaglia as "intertwined so ingeniously that one can never cease to be amazed."

The first part of this work is, as the name suggests, a passacaglia. The passacaglia is a musical form with origins in Spain in 17th century that is usually of serious character and which is usually series of continuous variations around a ground bass theme. The term passacaglia itself, in Spanish pasacalle, is derived from Spanish pasar (to walk) and calle (street). Quite a fitting name, I'd say. You'll probably get the meaning easily after hearing it once — listen to the initial bass theme which is then repeated over and over throughout the whole piece. Passacaglia is similar in form to chaconne (Bach also wrote an awesome one, for violin as part or Parita No. II D minor, BWV 1004, later adapted by various composers for other instruments as well).

This particular passacaglia has a total number of 20 variations. Most scholars agree that the structure is such: first the passacaglia builds up to its climax in twelve variations, this is followed by an intermezzo formed by three quiet variations to finally end up the passacaglia with another 5 variations.

It then, without any break, flows into it's second part — fugue, in this case double fugue. Fugue is a contrapuntal composition (formed by two or more musical lines that sound very different and move independently from each other but sound harmonious when played simultaneously) in two or more voice built upon a theme that is introduced at the beginning and recurs frequently during the course of the composition. It is usually divided into three parts: exposition (opening of the fugue, the theme is introduced and all voices has entered), development and recapitulation (contains the return to the main theme in the fugue's opening key). That it's double fugue means there are actually two themes that the fugue is developed on. In this piece, the first half of the bass theme from passacaglia is used as the first theme for the fugue, while the second half is used as the second theme for the fugue. Witty, isn't it ;-)

As Bach has been dead for some time now, the copyright on his works already expired and they are in public domain. You can download the musical score (legally and for free) for this piece at International Music Score Library Project.

Ton Koopman

Ton Koopman is a conductor, organist and harpsichordist born in 1944 in Netherlands. He studied organ, harpsichord and musicology in Amsterdam and specialized in Baroque music. Throughout his career he had concentrated on Baroque music and especially Bach. He recorded complete set of Bach cantatas and organ works and is now concentrating on works composed by Dieterich Buxtehude, who was a great influence to Bach. He plays on historical instruments and aims for authenticity. Some of his organ interpretations have however drawn criticism for their overuse of ornamentation.

Personally, I deem him to be one of the best organists but I tend to like slower tempos than he uses for many of the pieces I have heard him play, on the other side, his articulation is very clear and he seems to be able to nicely draw out all the voices present in a composition.

And of course, not to forgot, here're links (actually on youtube it's saved as two videos):
Ton Koopman — J. S. Bach: Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582, Part I. Passacaglia and
Ton Koopman — J. S. Bach: Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582, Part II. Fugue

This Made My Day…

2010-10-21T10:24:00.003+02:00

I've just received an e-mail from my university saying that the date of my promotion ceremony (for Bachelor's degree) has been set to 24.11.2009. Well, luckily I don't need to invent a time machine, since I already were there at that particular date (and time and place)…

Some Things Suck

2010-10-17T13:45:00.002+02:00

Like trying to stuff usable desktop on a CD… No thanks to that the time of day animation wallpaper won't be installed by default in Fedora 14—because some spins went oversize. So, first in order to help fix the oversize issue, please log in to bodhi, download the new update, test it and give karma. And second, those who would like to use the animated wallpaper, it can be installed via laughlin-backgrounds-animated-gnome (after the package is in repos, or by downloading it, and it's deps, from koji).

Fedora 14 Laughlin Wallpaper Ready

2010-10-14T00:31:00.005+02:00

I've just finished packaging the latest editions of F14 wallpaper done by Máirín and filled an update ticket. The changes include additions of time of day animations for the gnome version (AFAIK other DEs does not support this feature). As the final freeze approaches and as we'd like to verify it actually works everywhere we need your karma (even better if you log-in to bodhi before giving the karma points). So please test this update and give karma. Since there are about zillions of sub-packages here's a quick intro what is needed to test what:

laughlin-backgrounds-single — contains single screen images, one per screen ratio (16:10, 4:3, 5:4). The image here is used as noon image in the time-of-day animation.
laughlin-backgrounds-gnome — contains other images needed for time-of-day animation and stuff needed to be able to use it in Gnome. Requires laughlin-backgrounds-single.
laughlin-backgrounds-kde — contains stuff needed to use it KDE. Requires laughlin-backgrounds-single.
laughlin-backgrounds-extras-single — contains images for Supplemental wallpapers.
laughlin-backgrounds-extras-gnome — contains stuff needed to use Supplemental wallpapers in Gnome. Requires laughlin-backgrounds-extras-single.
laughlin-backgrounds-extras-kde — contains stuff needed to use Supplemental wallpapers in KDE. Requires laughlin-backgrounds-extras-single.
laughlin-backgrounds — installs the default wallpapers both for Gnome and KDE, i.e. just requires laughlin-backgrounds-gnome and laughlin-backgrounds-kde.

After you'll install the package and set the background, you'll probably see something like this, which means it works (this screenshot was taken at 00:45 AM, so it depicts the night version of the wallpaper):

New Murrine in Fedora?

2010-10-11T13:50:00.004+02:00

As requested in a bug report I'm pushing the 0.98.x series of Murrine Gtk+ engine into Fedora. With this we'll get support for the newest Murrina themes, however as there are lots of changes, I decided, after long thinking, that in accordance with our updates policy it would be acceptable to push it to F14 and onward, if I manage to squeeze it in before the final freeze. Which means — I need positive karma points for you to be able to use themes like these:

Fedora 14 Beta Artwork Goodies

2010-09-17T11:10:00.003+02:00

Fedora 14 Laughlin Beta release is approaching at an amazing speed and so does the Fedora Design Team work on the release artwork. Just before the freeze we got an updated package with the latest and greatest iteration of the default wallpaper and with 15 supplemental wallpapers in. Here's a preview of what the beta wallpaper looks like:

This isn't a final iteration and we're looking for your feedback! Do you think it's awesome? Or not? Do you think that there are some problems? Do you have suggestions for improvements? Don't hesitate to contact us! If you leave a comment here I'll forward it to the design team, but you can also give your opinions at #fedora-design at irc.freenode.net or at design team mailing list.

Now for the supplemental wallpapers. The full list of those that are included is in a dedicated wiki page. They are ready to use in both gnome (as usual you need a package ending with -gnome) and kde (package ending with -kde) and we hope to make them ready to use in LXDE and XFCE as well in the future (if people know how to do it, so I won't have to figure it myself, it would help a lot ;-)).

And now for the most important part — how to get them? If you're on F14 or rawhide it's as simple as running
# yum update
for the default wallpaper and
# yum install laughlin-backgrounds-extras-gnome
for the supplemental wallpapers ready for use in gnome and
# yum install laughlin-backgrounds-extras-kde
for the supplemental wallpapers ready for use in kde. Both will pull in also laughlin-backgrounds-extras-single where the actual images are stored. The packages can be downloaded from koji otherwise.

There's also bunch of updated splashes for firstboot, anaconda, grub, syslinux, ... See them in a dedicated wiki page.

What I still don't like on gnome-shell

2010-09-17T10:43:00.002+02:00

I try to periodically try out gnome-shell which is supposedly going to be the base component of our default DE (desktop environment) in Fedora 15. And each time I try it (at least once per Fedora release) it's better, but for some reason I still don't like it. So here's a post where I try to point out a few things I don't like about it. But let's start a bit more positive. Despite me not liking dark styles, the gnome-shell in F14 is finally looking slick and no major design gliches are present. Good work gnome-design team! Also, even on my Intel GMA 945 the animations are smooth and there're no apparent delays that I could blame on slow graphics.

Running new application can be speedy as well unless you don't know its name. You know, typing first few letters of firefox gets you to firefox really quick, but when you start searching by hand it get's tedious — the menu has absolutelly no sorting into categories… But that's not a big issue, as long as you properly set up your favourite apps (after all, in my usual setup I also use menu rarelly) :-)

And now for the few bad things

I'm the type of folks who like to have their favourite apps launchers always on screen, in gnome-shell I need to first zoom out to be able to run an application.
Despite the app icon+name in top panel being finally clickable, gnome-shell still thinks window=task which is inherently wrong and makes switching e.g. between two teminal windows or between main evolution window and message composing window terrible. I hope the developers finally get the hint and start treating virtual desktop as equivalent to task.
No panel widgets. Which means no weather applet, no CPU and network speed graphs, no always visible task switcher (you have to zoom out to be able to visually identify task which you want to switch to).
Notifications. Part of the idea is cool and works great — like when setroubleshooter notifies me of an encountered problem by sliding in a notification from bottom of the desktop, and keeping it in the stack after it disappears. However I haven't found a way how to remove it from the stack other then clicking on some action in the notiffication which obviously does not work e.g. for rhythmbox notification where the only actions are next and prev…

My simple desktop

2010-09-07T15:32:00.004+02:00

In order to relieve some stress from studying for my next exam I decided to participate in the show-your-desktop-on-the-fedora-planet thing.

So here's the screenshot:

Highlights:

Gnome of F12, dual-booting with F14 where the desktop looks very similar
Simple gradient on top panel, semi-transparency on bottom panel.
Exploiting nautilus to show my school timetable on desktop (this is becoming more and more broken with every other release of fedora…)
Rather tidy desktop with just a small number of icons, favourite app launchers assorted in bottom panel.
One of the candidates for the default F14 wallpaper as background image.
Six desktops, task based usage.
Echo Perspective icon theme.
Nodoka for metacity and gtk.

Nodoka GTK Engine 0.7.5 Released, Status Update on 1.x

2010-08-23T18:12:00.004+02:00

A few moments ago I released gtk-nodoka-engine-0.7.5 tarball, built it for fedora and submitted as updates. There are more changes and not all of them are bugfixes, hence the jump from 0.7.2 straight to 0.7.5. For Fedora users the changes are smaller as the bug fixes were already present in the packages. Here's the changelog:

I did some improvements to build system, one of which fixes upstream bug 39 (people from BSD cannot use GNU extensions to 'install')
I fixed greying out of checkboxes in tree-view (red hat bugzilla #513454)
This version adds support for GtkScale trough-side-details and fill-level (red hat bugzilla #477941) and support for selection and hilight coloring for separator (red hat bugzilla #478443)
It honors GtkEntry::transparent-bg-hint (red hat bugzilla #489111) which means you'll get transparent entries in firefox.
I also implemented support for 'entry-progress' detail which means you'll have e.g. page loading progress in epiphany or midori, when shown in location bar, looking finally nice.
Finally, I ported the engine to GTK3 and to keep same tarball for GTK2 as well, it was needed to drop support for GTK+ < 2.18.

Please test the fedora packages for possible bugs and give feedback in bodhi, thanks:

I've been also slowly updating the 1.x branch, more specifically the initial widget design for MODERN style and mostly finished it. Here and there some finishing touches would be needed (like I'm not 100 % satisfied with the horizontal versions of the progress bars and scales and notebooks other than with tabs on top), but that's for later phases. When I'll have some more time, I'll start working in initial widget design for GLOSSY style (or maybe I shall call it GLASSY) which should appeal to people who like glass. Of course, comments are welcome and direct help even more so, source SVG for the MODERN style is in git and is always current. Finally, here's a PNG preview (click to show in original size):

Note for people who don't like the blue – I picked my favourite shade of blue, which is incidentally from echo icon color palette, and used it in the design as SELECTED color. It does not necessarily mean I'll end up using this particular colour in the final theme, and it also will be configurable via the Appearance Preferences->Customize Theme->Colors->Selected items. I'm not sure where (and if) this will be in Gnome 3…

And a note about used font: for some reason, I don't recall exactly which, I started using the SVG preview of the font I sketched the other day. The main problem is that it has only one size, no bold, and nothing other than letters of English alphabet and number 1 :-D But surprisingly it looks pretty decent (even though the bold is faked by adding borders to the letters in inkscape…), IMHO.

The WebM Problem

2010-08-19T12:03:00.006+02:00

Well, lots of people are hyped about the WebM format (which is basically some kind of matroska based [btw. can be (de)muxed properly with new matroska tools] container, VP8 video codec [which was recently opensourced by google and thus is available in fedora] and Vorbis audio codec) which is understandable as it brings open standards to the web and you can play it even with a fresh install of fedora (well, since it was introduced only recently, this is true since the now-soon-to-be-released F14 Alpha).

And to lead the way, youtube is supporting it. But there's a huge but. On youtube it's available only if you enable html5 beta testing, by far not all videos on youtube can be played without flash and out of this subset only even a smaller number of them have been transcoded to WebM, so as a result if you are lucky, you'll play almost anything, and if you're unlucky, you'll either keep getting messages about missing flashplayer or missing h264 codec :( And to add to that, google is being ass and instead of querying the browsers for support, it uses user agent sniffing and thus effectivelly bans all other browsers than opera/firefox/chrome/safari/internet explorer from html5.

Someone should tell the web developers that there are zillion browsers out there that have support for advanced web features comparable to that in opera/firefox/chrome and that user agent spoofing is broken by design (unless you target it the otherway round &ndash send some quirks to browsers that are known to be broken). It's not a hard thing to masquerade my midori as firefox or safari, but I would prefer if I hadn't have to do that…

The Awesome New Features of Midori 0.2.7

2010-08-18T01:41:00.004+02:00

After a rather longish time a new release of midori is out and among other things it has a feature I never expected it would have implemented this early. Unless I'm mistaken, midori is the first browser that supports delayed tab loading on startup out of box (I'm aware of some extension for firefox which does something like this). You just need to set it in your preferences. Yay, this speeds up browser startup about zillion times as I keep a lot of tabs open. Well, it could use some improvement – currently you need to hit reload to load a tab, it would be nice if they loaded when selected.

Next, long awaited feature, are improvements to location bar. It can now search through bookmarks and it supports multiword search. Another bunch of useful improvements.

There are also two new Vala extensions – history list and external applications. The first one is an interesting feature that adds behaviour similar to how alt-tab works for windows to ctrl-tab for tabs. Since I usually have many tabs open, but frequently switch only between few of them, this looks like a huge usability improvement.

The other one is another long awaited thing – since webkitgtk does not support ftp protocol, we'd just got error messages instead of ftp listings, now midori fires up gftp. Unfortunately, without passing it the uri. So I looked into the code, quickly get acquainted with Vala language (really easy if you know some object oriented programming language and C), switched gftp for nautilus (gftp is a bit overkill to me) and fixed it to actually open the location. It's like two lines change:


diff -up midori-0.2.7/extensions/external-applications.vala.nautilus midori-0.2.7/extensions/external-applications.vala
--- midori-0.2.7/extensions/external-applications.vala.nautilus 2010-08-16 21:31:14.000000000 +0200
+++ midori-0.2.7/extensions/external-applications.vala 2010-08-18 01:34:04.000000000 +0200
@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ public class ExternalApplications : Mido
    Dialog? dialog;
    bool launch (string command, string uri) {
        try {
-            var info = GLib.AppInfo.create_from_commandline (command, "", 0);
+            var info = GLib.AppInfo.create_from_commandline (command, "", GLib.AppInfoCreateFlags.SUPPORTS_URIS);
            var uris = new List();
            uris.prepend (uri);
            info.launch_uris (uris, new GLib.AppLaunchContext ());
@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ public class ExternalApplications : Mido
                     WebNavigationAction action, WebPolicyDecision decision) {
        string uri = request.get_uri ();
        if (uri.has_prefix ("ftp://")) {
-            if (launch ("gftp", uri)) {
+            if (launch ("nautilus", uri)) {
                decision.ignore ();
                return true;
            }

Hopefully this will be configurable in the next release (so that I won't have to patch the source code :D).

These new things also have the flip side though – occasional crashes. I haven't got time yet to inspect them, but I suspect the new vala extensions or changes to location bar to be at fault.

Some progress on Nodoka

2010-08-15T18:07:00.006+02:00

So, lately when I need to rest a bit from more technical work I usually do a bit of designing. And today I completely rethought how I shell approach the nodoka gtk-engine rewrite. First I decided that because it's rewrite and will be a really big change, I'll use 1.0 version for the final product. Next I've done some initial project planning which differs a bit from what I've been doing until now (design a widget, implement a widget, design a widget, implement a widget, …). You can see it on 1.x Brainstorm Page. During the past few days I also progressed a little with the initial widget design for MODERN style. Here's a preview (click on it to see it in original resolution):

You can grab the SVG from git.

Note that the actual coding is still far from here and might take a while. I also have some hopes for gtk3 widget-draw and I'll probably wait with actually writing the engine till I know what the new gtk3 API for drawing widgets will be. But comments/improvements on the style, submitting of new styles, … are more than welcome.

Nodoka ported to GTK+ 3

2010-08-07T16:13:00.004+02:00

Yes, I've finally updated gtk-nodoka-engine so that it supports GTK+ 3. It was rather time consuming (because of that I went to sleep at 3:30 AM) but easier than I initially thought it would be. Plus I was able to maintain support for GTK+ 2.18 and newer (which is in Fedora 12). Today I went a little more further, added the entry-progress rendering, I had in my TODO list since this was introduced, and uploaded the resultant packages (for F12 only gtk2 version, for F14 both, I don't have F13 to build packages for that) on my fedorapeople space. Here're quick tables of the packages (all the packages are either i686 or noarch):

Fedora 12

gtk-nodoka-engine	GTK+ 2.0 Nodoka Engine + default theme
gtk-nodoka-engine-extras	More themes for GTK+ 2.0 Nodoka Engine

Fedora 14

gtk2-nodoka-engine	GTK+ 2.0 Nodoka Engine + default theme
gtk2-nodoka-engine-extras	More themes for GTK+ 2.0 Nodoka Engine
gtk3-nodoka-engine	GTK+ 3.0 Nodoka Engine + default theme
gtk3-nodoka-engine-extras	More themes for GTK+ 3.0 Nodoka Engine
gtk-nodoka-engine	Metapackage, pulls in both gtk{2,3}-nodoka-engine packages
gtk-nodoka-engine-extras	Metapackage, pulls in both gtk{2,3}-nodoka-engine-extras packages

I'm planing on testing these packages on my laptop for some time and if I don't discover any regressions I'll officially release 0.7.5, submit the gtk3 version into fedora as well as update the gtk2 version.

Any testing is welcome, the packages are easilly rebuildable from the srpms (which you can easilly find on my fedora people space) for any fedora starting F12 and any architecture. If you encounter any problems, be it build issues or bugs in the engine, feel free to nag me in comments section :-)

The Biggest "F14 Feature" Is Here!

2010-07-30T12:14:00.003+02:00

Yes, fedora SCM (source code management) system finally moved from the aging CVS to the modern, fast and efficient git. I express my sincere thanks to all who participated in making this change possible, you rock! I've already made my first changes using this new system, and it is simply awesome, especially if one has a previous knowledge of git (which is however not required to properly operate the repositories). Looking at the F14 Feature list, I think this is one of the best features of this release cycle.

F14 Laughlin Wallpapers Package

2010-07-27T23:20:00.006+02:00

So, at the today's design team meeting we decided on the wallpapers for Laughlin Alpha and I've packaged them. The packages are available at the usual place until they get into fedora (review request). For gnome you'll need laughlin-backgrounds-gnome, for kde you'll need laughlin-backgrounds-kde, and in addition, in both cases you'll need laughlin-backgrounds-single. The packages are built in F12, but should work on any reasonably new Fedora ;-)

And here's a screenshot from my F12:

Please contribute to the F14 artwork by giving us feedback, preferably at a dedicated wiki page.

2010/08/01 UPDATE: the packages are now available in F14 and rawhide.

Doing 'The Wrong Thing' (TM) Again…

2010-07-14T13:12:00.004+02:00

So, I still have a bunch of exams at school I need pass through and instead of studying I'm playing around. This time I designed quite a strange and very early work in progress sans serif font. It has only letters of latin alphabet and three Czech diacritic marks. And of course, it's not a font but just a SVG file with font design idea :-D

The original idea was to design a font that would look good in computer interfaces, hence I targeted a rather small size for starters. But as I played with the shapes it evolved into something, for good or bad, more complex. The strokes are not constant width which is quite unusual for sans-serif font… And of course, I wanted the font to look good to me, which explains lots of the oddities of it ^_^. During the designing I noticed that it's much easier to start from simple shapes (like even succession of lines) that approximate the shape at target resolution and then slowly improve the detail so that the glyph looks good when zoomed in as well. Here's a preview:

In case someone would like to play with it I've put the source SVG on my fedorapeople page, you can consider the licence to be CC-BY-SA or even Public Domain for the time being (it's just a sketch, no real font) so do pretty much anything you want with it, but it would be nice if you showed me results of such playing, if any ;-)

And one thing to add: font design is quite tedious, especially if you are a complete newbie, just these few glyphs took me a few days of work :-D

When things just don't work

2010-07-11T23:14:00.003+02:00

I have to admit that Fedora 12 has been the most usable and stable distribution I've ever used. Sans one broken HAL update and one broken mplayer update, there weren't any bigger problems since about its beta! However, and I feel a bit disappointed about it, Fedora 13 does not continue in this way. Every time I run a full update on it and try to stay with it, issues appear (not always same issues). And hence I always return back to Fedora 12 where things work, but where I miss some nice features from Fedora 13 like two panels in nautilus. The current set of my issues with Fedora 13 goes like this:

wifi connection seems to pseudo-randomly disconnect (looks like it happens only when some network-heavy transfers, like torrents, are in process). This is even a more pain because after disconnecting it simply refuses to connect again unless I turn the hardware switch off and on… And yes, it's using an open source driver, but proprietary binary blob firmware (broadcom BCM4318 chip), so I'm not sure if reporting a bug would lead anywhere (especially given the rather random nature of the first issue)…

xorg seems to randomly just stop repainting itself, sans mouse cursor. It happened twice, always after trying to unlocking screen when laptop lid had been closed. Again, as this does seem random, and I have no idea how to reproduce it, filling a bug would probably lead nowhere. Killing X just changes the background from default wallpaper to solid black (of course, with fully working cursor, and probably even working, though not displayed, gui)…

evolution is a sucker. After the last batch of updates it keeps asking whether I want to mark messages as read even in subfolders. Even for folders which do not have any subfolders! Furthermore, every now and then it pops out an error message about not being able to store folder [mem].{folder-name}, blah, blah. And to add to that, it does not display images in rss feeds (not sure about html mails, I haven't tried it). I'll probably fill bugs about some of these issues later. And to add to all that, it does not offer an option to store gpg keyphrase during session.

It's a good thing I always keep two working systems at the same time. Thanks to that I always have a place to return to (and I sincerely hope that Fedora 14 won't be the same pool of issues like Fedora 13 is, otherwise I'll be stuck with EOLed release for the first time since I started using linux).

CJK Glyphs Fun

2010-07-07T20:45:00.008+02:00

I self-study (which is very ineffective, because there is no one to push me forward, so I slack too much) Japanese. And with the language comes a different character set from what I already know (latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets) and that is a set of two kana – ひらがな [hiragana] and カタカナ [katakana] – (which I already more or less learned and am able to read and write them, though not as fast as latin, but maybe faster than Greek :-D), and a selected number of Chinese characters, in Japanese called 漢字 [kanji, in Mandarin Chinese it's hànzì, in Korean hanja], literally it means 'characters of Han' (han means Chinese people, Chinese language). And sometimes when I see Chinese, Japanese or Korean writing I get the urge to decipher what it means. With Korean it's usually easy, today I was deciphering "brown rice vinegar" on a bottle with it I bought:

First of all, all the characters are very clear to read, so if you have Korean alphabet around you'll quickly decipher them one by one. First character is composed of ㅎ [h] 여 [yeo] and ㄴ[n], creating a 현 [hyeon], next is composed of ㅁ[m] and 이 [i], creating a 미 [mi]. Together these two make 현미, in hanji 玄米 (this exact writing and meaning also has a japanese word genmai), meaning brown rice. Next character is composed of ㅅ [s], 이 [i] and ㄱ [g/k] making 식 [sog], and the last one is composed of ㅊ [ch] and 오 [o], making 초 [cho]. Together they make 식초, in hanji 食醋 (this writing does not correspond to any word in japanese, where vinegar is 酢 [su], 醋 [su] is another variant for vinegar in japanese, though apparently not in common use), meaning vinegar.

But when it comes to Chinese or Japanese, especially if written in (semi)cursive style, things get hard. I bought a tea today and tried to decipher its name, which was written in Traditional Chinese in semicursive style:

It took me about half an hour to find the first hànzì, because as you can see, in regular script (which is close in shape to what is usually displayed on computer, but is nicer) it looks like this:

In simplified Chinese (which uses simplified variants of many hànzì) it's 铁观音 [tiěguānyīn] and it means something like "Iron Goddess of Compassion".

And as a bonus to end this blog post about my afternoon here's a picture of I-am-not-sure-if-it-is-Japanese-or-Chinese written on my tea kettle:

The only character I'm able to recognise is 茶 [cha in Japanese], tea and maybe 月 [tsuki in Japanese], moon.

And sorry for the poor quality of the pictures, that's the best I can manage with my mobile phone…

F14 Artwork Update

2010-06-29T20:21:00.002+02:00

It's more than a week since my last blog about F14 Artwork, so I thought I put together another status update. This time there have been two new similar submissions from mythcat and one from wonderer:

You can view all the so far submitted concepts in a dedicated wiki page. If you have a concept in mind don't hesitate to submit one, there's still time—the deadline for submissions is 6th July.

If you'd rather submit images for the supplementary set of about 6–8 images we're going to put together for Fedora 14, you can submit them until 19th August. The instructions how to do that, as well as already submitted images (there's a whole lot of them already!) is at a dedicated wiki page.

F14 Artwork Update

2010-06-21T21:22:00.003+02:00

So, it's been a week and a half from my last post about F14 artwork so I thought I'd make some waves in the pool again. So let's start with showing new artwork that was submitted:

The first two images are from Mythcat the other one from Kyle Baker. I was pretty intrigued by Kyle's design so I played with it a little (and real quick) and came up with something IMHO ugly but maybe interesting:

As you can see there are great images, less great images and just "plain" concepts at this phase, so don't hesitate to submit yours! The name that is supposed to inspire your imagination is Laughlin. Go ahead, upload your concepts to wiki and tell the design team about it in our mailing list. You still have time up until 6th July (slightly more than fourteen days since the date of publishing this post).

Make Your Contribution to F14 Artwork

2010-06-10T23:14:00.005+02:00

Yes, now is the right time to make a contribution to F14 Artwork even if you don't have much confidence in your own artistic skills. We're in a concepts submission state for the main artwork and it's the idea that counts there. The deadline for submissions is July 7th, which is a month from now, so you still have some time. We keep track of the submissions on a wiki page created for this very purpose and it's considered good manners to also make note of it on the design-team mailing list.

If you don't want to aim for the main theme, you can alternatively submit a wallpaper for inclusion in additional set (You can even submit other's people work. The details how to do that will be on the following wiki page when everything is ready ;-)). We're aiming at selecting about 6 to 8 wallpapers we consider good and we'll be selecting from what will be submitted on another wiki page. Deadline for this one is further away because it's not for concepts but for already finished works—it's August 19th.

So, don't be shy and help making the F14 Artwork even more awesome!

Midori—Now Almost Feature Complete for Me

2010-06-07T11:57:00.005+02:00

Starting today, it looks like Midori is going to be my only webbrowser (previously I've also kept Chromium for pages with that send themselves compressed which wasn't supported by older webkitgtk/libsoup combinations and firefox because the open java didn't work in webkit) because the only feature that's missing now is password saving and that's not a showstopper for me. So here're some highlights of what you can get with the latest and greatest stuff that's in Fedora 12 (and a bit of customizing):

Simple, highly usable and effective UI

Do I need status bar? No. Do I need menu bar? No. Do I need the browser controls+bookmark bar to take up lots of horizontal space? No. Do I need a home page? No. Do I need to have both reload and stop buttons displayed at the same time? No. Do I keep many tabs open? Yes. And here's precisely the type of UI that aligns with these answers:

AdBlock

These days, browser without AdBlock just gets in the way. I don't want to be distracted by ads I'm not going to click at anyway. With a sensible set of filters, Midori's advertisement blocker works very well and is shipped with the browser itself.

FlashBlock

See one of my older posts on this. This one drastically reduced CPU usage when using midori, as many pages are using flash now and flash is known to be hungry for CPU cycles :D

Netscape Plugins

Browser without support for netscape plugins is predestined to fail. That's why firefox supports them, that's why chromium supports them that's why midori supports them. But among these is also the java plugin and especially the open one was in past years not exactly just working everywhere. But with the (rather biggish) update I did yesterday, java plugin is working for me in midori as well. The miracle combination is:

midori-0.2.6-1.fc12.i686
java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin-1.6.0.0-38.b18.fc12.i686
webkitgtk-1.2.0-1.fc12.i686

Session Saving

One of the biggest showstoppers for me using epiphany is this feature. Any browser that does not have an option to save session on exit is practically dead for me ;-) Midori fares well in this area, maybe even better thing would be to load the saved pages on demand to speed up the start. Especially with 30+ tabs open, starting even the fastest of webbrowsers is taking a loooooong time. I heard that firefox has an extension for that so lets hope midori will gain this functionality in the future as well.

Another related feature is trash bin. I can reopen closed tabs. Nice to have in case you close some tab accidentally.

Speed

All I want to say here is that midori is one of the fastest browsers I've ever use especially in comparison to firefox…

HTML5 Media

I've been always critical of the path firefox has chosen with support for the audio and video html5 tags. They just bundle some codec libraries with firefox. While this might be a good solution for windows platform (you know, they don't have package managers to download the deps for them) it's IMHO essentially wrong.

When you implement a media player you do not bundle every possible codec with it but use an already working media framework like gstreamer, directshow or phonon. And that's the way webkit people are going—webkitgtk makes use of gstreamer, qt-webkit makes use of phonon, chromium port makes use of ffmpeg,… One of the pros of this approach is that you don't need to install new version of webbrowser to support new codec, so when google released WebM, all that was needed was building the needed libraries in fedora, write a gstreamer plugin, release, package, update and you are done for everything that uses gstreamer, midori included. So we now have WebM support in midori, while firefox users still need to wait :-p And as a bonus, we don't have to care about the result of theora vs. vp8 vs. h264 browser war—webkitgtk supports all (if you have the needed codecs installed which probably anyone who watches video on fedora have).

From what I've seen on youtube, the VP8 codec can provide high quality but it seems even more CPU intensive than h264—I can barely watch videos on youtube in h264 in 720p, but I cannot watch those that are in VP8 and 720p.

Manageable Search Engines

included in address bar. I don't need a separate search bar. But I do need more searches than just google and I want to use keywords so that I just write say 'j 先生', hit enter and it does a jisho search for word '先生' (sensei, teacher, master, doctor).

What's missing?

Good question. For me it's password saving, ssh certificates handling (I probably cannot log in to koji) and ftp protocol support—I don't mind that ftp browsing is not implemented in web browser, but opening nautilus (or another file/ftp manager) with the specified location would make things much more convenient.

Some Impressions on LGM

2010-05-28T10:17:00.004+02:00

Ok, first let me same I'm totally awful with writing kind of what-did-I-do blogpost and at the same time both Nicu and Pierros are making a really good posts about what we do here (with some of the best photos Nicu and Pierros took included)…

My first first impression of Belgium was not that great — I'm pretty used from Czech Republic to get easy everwhere, there're "online" infotables about trains departures/arrivals on train stations, the subway in Prague is really easy to follow (I'd say it follows the KISS principle, like gnome does), and to add to that everything here in Belgium is in French (which I know nothing about) so I was a bit at loss when trying to travel from Charleroi to Brussels and then to our hotel. But at last I was successful.

It really is a bless to have Pierros with us — if it were not for him, I would be constantly lost in the city (somehow my sense of direction in big cities is terrible) ;-) Both Nicu and Pierros are really awesome companions and they're showing me lots of new stuff I have no idea about (like the Belgium beers). Btw. speaking about the beers, I'm totally "insesitive" in this area and most beers I've tried taste very similar to me :-D

But back to the conference itself. Yesterday's morning lectures were the more technical ones which is probably not a best way to start a graphics meeting, but they were pretty interesting. Lots of python, some C and even Scheme based scripting language (the Script-fu and Tiny-fu from gimp). The most interesting talk for me for that part of day was A first outline for a UI for a fully GEGLed GIMP. As I understand it it's a new type of workflow and format that is kind of chain based — you take the initial image and apply various edits, effects and other operations like the old way, but the difference is that it does not change the image itself. Those of you familiar with quantum physics or generally a [noncomutative] operator algebra over some space could see it as taking an image (member of the space in question) and applying various operators on it. And the point is, you apply it only on screen, in memory it's still being interpreted as a sequence of operators applied on the image. So you can insert another operators in the middle, delete some of them, without breaking the rest of the chain. Lots of possibilities. I really look forward the time when this will be included in gimp releases ;-)

The lunch was fairly good, and we've met some interesting people there. It's a really great oportunity to talk with various people during the lunch break. In the afternoon there were some interesting presentations like How to get contributors to your Free/Libre/Open Source project from Vietnam and Asia or How to Run an Art School on Free and Open Source Software. Btw. Hong Phuc Dang who was doing the presentation about Open Source in Vietnam is really enthuiastic about the FLOSS software as you can see in the video she put up (sadly it's in flash, but it should be acessible form lgm site some time in the future hopefully in more open format). And of course, we've had our presentation with Nicu, seems the audience liked it, but we're regretting that we forgot to say some of the things we wanted to say…

Today, I'm a little sad that we overslept and missed a good part of the Diffusion Curves in Inkscape vector drawings, there was an interesing presentation about LibreDWG and I'm looking forward some presentation later today about fonts and typography.

Flash Block in Midori

2010-05-26T18:26:00.005+02:00

So, I've been reading a bit on epiphany on live.gnome.org and noticed, that you can block flash via user scripts. And since midori also support user scripts I loaded userscripts.org tried a few a lo!, one of them works exactly as I expect. Just go to Flash Block for Chrome, click install and save the opened .js file to ~/.local/share/midori/scripts/. It should enable automatically, if not, go to the Userscripts panel and tick it on. For it to start work, page reload is enough — there's no need to restart browser ;-) To whitelist youtube, just add 'youtube.com' to var exclude array at the beginning of the script. Supposedly it also works for silverlight, but as mono is banned on my laptop (no sound reason, I just don't want to use apps that they're in some weird language combo of java and c++ which furthermore need virtual machine running), I cannot verify whether this is true or not.

And on a completely unrelated note: I successfully managed to arrive at the hotel in Brussels I stay during LGM, and had a nice walk around the city with nicu ;-)

Why I'm Still On F12?

2010-05-20T11:43:00.004+02:00

First, let me warn you that this is not an objective and exhaustive review of Fedora 13 but just a (hopefully) short list of things (both bad and good) I noticed while trying to use it and to add that most of the issues I'll talk about are bugs/odd features in upstream, so not Fedora's fault.

Evolution

I think it's fair to start with an app that I use most and that is most likely Evolution (especially its e-mail component). The UI is reworked and I'd say it both looks better and is more usable, it's almost pain to return to F12 Evolution's interface. On the flip side, IMAP backend has also been rewritten (or so I've heard) and it hits a dead end here and there and because of that, using Evolution isn't very smooth and joyful. So in short, with future releases there is high probability Evolution will be significantly better that what's in F12, but currently it's one of the pieces that blocks me from advancing to F13. Plus, I forgot to mention, Evolution lost the option to keep gpg passphrase stored during session.

Intel Video Driver

Well, this one's a little bit of pain. I've grown quite used to F12 which has been damn stable so fast, so X or even the whole notebook frozen was a big surprise. Seems the frozenness of whole system have been already fixed, but last time I were in updated F13 (about a week ago), I still managed somehow to endup with half-frozen X — I move with mouse, switch to tty, kill apps (without any graphical response though) or kill X completely. But only full reboot fixed it for good.

Nautilus

Another UI change. Generally it seems cleaner, but what irritates me is that I cannot keep the entry-like input for paths — I seem to be able to access it only via ctrl-l and after entering the path, it reverts back to the button mode. No good, no good.

Webkitgtk

This where the most goodness (from my point of view) went, albeit not exactly as I'd prefer it. Thanks to hard work the guys over at webkit and epiphany, epiphany now can store passwords, but as epiphany does not have sensible session saving (why the hell do I need to kill it to save session?) [and for some other reasons] I use midori, which however it does not seem to know how to save passwords (in web forms, not in web auth pop-ups). The rest of the goodness (I know about) is same for both browsers — html5 youtube flawless support (only fullscreen seems to be missing), html5 video tag finally has handler, sites (like anidb) which serve pages in compressed format are now supported and java applet (I've tried only the openjdk one) is almost working.

Gnome-keyring

In one word it behaves strange. Sometimes the keyring that should get unlocked at startups refuses to unlock, sometimes I get asked for new password for 'default' keyring, which however never gets created… This is incidentally also the last thing that shows when trying to start up gajim. The good thing is that thanks to this I started using emapthy with a chat theme from one of my favourite anime durarara >_<

Conclusion

Well, there are still some hick-ups that keep me from transferring from the probably best fedora release so far (F12) to F13 to feel the new awesomeness, and one thing to keep in my mind is: don't be lazy and finally fill the bugs you've encountered!

Gnome Shell in F13 — Better But Still Not For Me

2010-05-15T13:18:00.003+02:00

So, as F13 is just behind the door I have it installed, but I don't use it as my primary system as there are some regressions (which I'll maybe talk about in some other blogpost) that keep me out, I've decided to give gnome-shell another shot. This time I've been able to put up with it for about few hours, but there are certainly improvements. First of all, the design is definitely much better, and the ugly glowing blue something is replaced by more-slick-than-not button-like rounded rectangles and the overall feeling is better.

On the flip side, when I focus a task (under which I mean equivalent to virtual desktop), it still is equivalent to focusing a window which is IMHO totally wrong. E.g. when I type a mail message I occasionally need to switch to main evolution window (in which I navigate using mouse), which however buries the new message window so deep that I need to either alt-tab to it (can take some mind-processing time, especially if there are more windows on the desktop) or zoom out and select the new message window. There also appears to be no fast way to switch between tasks. Again I either need to use the suboptimal alt-tab or zoom out. Basically these two things are the main killers for me using gnome-shell. But it bugs me — am I the only one who under 'task' usually means more than one window? E.g. a task that you could call programming for me usually means that I have either gedit or eclipse window open, one or two terminals and nautilus among which I frequently switch and furthermore I often switch between this task and 'net surfing' task (API references, tutorials, etc. are usually in (X)HTML format)… Gnome-shell make this type of workflow especially painful.

And they say there's global warming...

2010-04-02T09:51:00.005+02:00

... yet this year it seems more like global cooling:

I've taken this picture with my mobile phone (hence the bad quality) just a moment ago. It's totally unexpected to find snow looking out of my window after waking up at the beginning of April...

PS: I am convinced that there is global warming going on, however I am not convinced men plays a significant role in it ;-)

Gajim and LaTeX — How?

2010-03-12T13:48:00.003+01:00

Dear lazy web, I've been using this feature IIRC in F10 and F11 but I cannot seem able to get it working with F12. I wonder what package(s) I'm missing... I have use_latex in gajim's settings activated and I have texlive-collection-latex-2009-2.17133.fc13.noarch, texlive-collection-latexextra-2009-2.17127.fc13.noarch, texlive-collection-latexrecommended-2009-2.17134.fc13.noarch as well as texlive-dvipng-2009-3.1.12.16044.fc13.noarch (which should AFAIK be more than equivalent to texlive-latex-base and dvipng mentioned in gajim itself) but still no luck. Maybe someone might guess what I'm still missing?

Alternatives to The Alternative

2010-03-08T20:36:00.004+01:00

For some time now (some years to be more precise) all the open source world have been spinning around firefox when it comes to web browsers. There are even forks (ice weasel or something like that) or whatever they call it because a) it's apparently good and b) it's apparently not enough free (as in FLOSS). But as many of you who follows my blog know, it does not suit me for various reasons. One of the problems I see is too complex GUI, not very well integration into gnome (this one improved a lot during past releases), sluggishness, XUL, direction towards implementing useless stuff (like personas) instead of bringing actually useful extensions (like adblock) into the browser itself, localization handling (why the hell are languages treated as extensions?!!!). Firefox was originally supposed to be something like lightweight and speedy version of mozilla, but it's no longer truth.

When I first switched away from firefox I used epiphany, then webkit came along and I started testing it on midori, which in rather short time became my main web-browser. And then Google Chrome / Chromium came along and caused a little revolution (compare the simplistic Chromium with one toolbar, mostly occupied by some magic input field, with no menubar whatsoever with default firefox setup). Not only in UI, but also in stability — something on a page freezes? A (flash) plugin crashes? No worry, it will bring down only the tab in question, the browser itself remains working. And not to mention it started the competition in javascript speed.

The main purpose of this post is to shortly describe the three open source alternatives to Firefox I mentioned above and give a quick overview in what are they good and in what they aren't.

Epiphany

The main principle behind epiphany is (for good or bad) KISS (keep it simple, stupid) which already suggests in what it might be good and in what it might not. It's a very lightweight browser with a rather simple UI, it has a reasonable set of extensions (like AdBlock or Certificates management), search (via google) implemented in location bar, it's fast and very well integrated in gnome. On the flip side, it does not save session unless it crashes. Which is a major pita, but last time I checked, the authors were against implementing it. And thanks to it using webkitgtk engine, it supports html5 youtube (you'll need Fedora 13 version of webkitgtk, the one in Fedora 12 is too old). Alas, with the switch to webkit from gecko support for ftp were dropped, java is not (yet) supported, and some of the features (like password saving, or managing certificates) stopped working, but it's steadily getting better and I believe in Gnome 2.30, there will be no regressions compared to the older gecko version and tons of new features.

Midori

Another lightweight webkitgtk based webbrowser. As it uses same engine like epiphany, many things that I said about epiphany can be said about midori too — it's fast, it supports html5 youtube, java does not work, ftp protocol is not supported, web auth is integrated with gnome-keyring (thanks to libsoup backend) and it has the awesome webinspector. In addition, it comes with session saving, adblock, trash can for closed tabs, spellchecking in multiple languages, identity masking, and quite powerful means for UI optimizing (like it can hide menu bar, can display tabs on side as a list, can disable close button on tabs [they can be closed with middle-click], can hide status bar — location bar is then used for showing the hyperlinks destination, ...). And to add to that, it has customizable search implemented into its location bar – not only you can can search what you want on whatever search engine you've added, but you can also use keywords (e.g. when I write "j 友達" it will show me the word in jisho, "gi fedora" will redirect me to google images search for fedora etc.).

I could probably go on with this praise — after all midori is the web browser that suits my needs best and has the most usable / effective UI (IMHO) that I've come across.

Chromium

Well, I guess this one does not need much introduction. It's the opensource version of Google Chrome, it's based on webkit/chromium port, has a really simplistic, effective and usable UI — unless you open too many tabs. Then it becomes hell none of the zillions extension helped me out of. Plus, as the UI is heavily customized, it does not fit very well into gnome desktop, but I'd say it's really well designed. As I already mentioned, there are zillions of extensions (probably less than for firefox but still too much for me to be able to know even a tiny fraction of them) which can improve the already very good browser, and among which is not missing adblock and flashblock ;-) I quite fancy the xkcd view one. And like with other webkit based browsers — awesome webinspector, awesome speed, but also no ftp and java. Session saving and tabs undeleting is a sure thing, the already mentioned "magic location bar" works similarly like in midori.

It's possible to get html5 youtube working, but not with Fedora packages (for understandable reasons; I suspect though, that after it matures enough to get into fedora proper repos, there'll appear also something like chromium-nonfree in rpmfusion to fix that).

(note about the chromium title bar — if I cannot have chromium looking nice with plain gtk, I'll at least look at something that I fancy ;-))

HTML5 Youtube — Now in Fedora

2010-03-02T20:10:00.004+01:00

I'm finally back to rawhide (the frozen one — i.e. Fedora 13; dual booting with F12 as it is still not over too stable :D). And since I follow webkit commits I noticed a while back that thanks to some of the work in the webkitgtk tree, html5 youtube should work [in theory]. So today I started epiphany, enabled html5 youtube and tried a video. A lo! it works:

Finally! Youtube without flash, with low CPU usage and actually working. Oh and as a sidenote: pages (like anidb) which send themselves encoded are now supported as well. Webkitgtk based browsers are becoming first class citizens finally. Java is the last non-working thing I'm aware of and work on it is also on it's way. Seems like I'll be able to get rid of firefox (which I still keep because of the problems with java) for good (or bad :D) in F13.

New Fedora 13 Goddard Backgrounds Comming!

2010-02-18T11:59:00.009+01:00

UPDATE 1st May 2011: If you wonder why this rather old post appeared on fedora [design] planet, it's because I discovered a typo in one of the post labels and fixed it, and the planets think the post got updated... Sorry about the noise.

Yes, it's the time of the release cycle again. The time where new wallpaper comes to your machines. Well, strictly speaking not yet but the design-team decided on the default wallpaper for Goddard (Fedora 13) Alpha and I've packaged it, prepared a scratch build and put it up for review. The division this time is like this:

goddard-backgrounds — installs everything (and a kitchen sink ;-P)
goddard-backgrounds-gnome — the default wallpaper for Gnome
goddard-backgrounds-kde — installs the default wallpaper for KDE
goddard-backgrounds-single — contains images for single screens
goddard-backgrounds-dual — not yet present but will contain dual screen images
goddard-backgrounds-extras-{single,dual,gnome,kde} — not yet present but if we put together extras wallpapers this is where they'll reside; the division is same as for the default ones

I hope this division is final (I really feel we need naming guidelines for this stuff as so far with every release we used a bit different naming scheme :-( ) and will be used without problems for all future wallpaper releases as well. Oh and here's a screenshot of it in action:

Update: Oh, and... One of the magic ways how to install the gnome versions without much hassle is this:
Start terminal, then

$ wget 'http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/getfile?taskID=1994836&name=goddard-backgrounds-gnome-12.91.0-1.fc14.noarch.rpm' 'http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/getfile?taskID=1994836&name=goddard-backgrounds-single-12.91.0-1.fc14.noarch.rpm'
$ pkcon install-local *goddard-backgrounds*

The '*' are there because wget saves the package as getfile?taskID... :-( Don't forget to remove the downloaded packages afterwards.

Yum-presto + University internet connection isn't a very good combo

2009-12-07T14:19:00.003+01:00

Well, yum-presto is all cool and awesome and all, but with the lzma compression in F12 it's rather slow with rebuilding the rpms... Which means that with internet connection that can be found on many universities (up to about 10~11 MB/s when downloading from fast mirror) it's slowing the package download considerably. Here're the data from today's update.

<delta rebuild>                                          |  79 MB     04:02     
Presto reduced the update size by 65% (from 79 M to 28 M).
Package(s) data still to download: 136 M
Total                                           4.5 MB/s | 136 MB     00:30

Now, I wonder whether I should keep it or remove it (as half of time I use slow connection and the other half fast connection)...

YouTube and HTML5

2009-11-30T20:35:00.006+01:00

So, I've noticed there's a html5 testing page on youtube. It won't work in gecko based browsers (it's not ogg theora) but it works on fully updated fedora 12 using a webkitgtk based browser (e.g. midori or epiphany; chromium builds still don't support video tag and I don't know anything about the webkit version in qt). The difference is great. Although not everything works as with Flash based youtube, some basic functions like pausing, seeking and such are already working smooth. And what's best is that the implementation is fully opensource (sans usage of patent encumbered codecs), does not crash as often (maybe does not crash at all, but I haven't done any rigorous testing) as adobe flash does and eats about half of the CPU compared to flash and nothing in paused state (while flash still eats CPU even when the youtube video is paused). I just hope the implementations will keep going forward an will make it's way away from just one testing video to full implementation.

The HTML5 enabled video (i.e. you don't need any browser plugins enabled, but you'll need some gstreamer stuff from rpmfusion [gst-ffmpeg] if you're using webkitgtk): http://www.youtube.com/html5

and the same video using flash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uofWfXOzX-g

Very quick update: I've just noticed that when you hover over the video previews in the columns on the right side of the page, the hovered video will play in fast speed. Neat.

And another quick update: Right-click on the video and you can download it! I cannot wait for the day this will be the youtube.

Answer to: Why is my design blurry?

2009-10-28T14:14:00.010+01:00

Short answer – unlike paper, display is a discrete medium.

Long answer, bellow.

When you prepare designs that will be printed, or when you are painting on paper, you usually do not have to care about some "pixel" grid. Thanks to the small size of dots when printing or the small size of paint particles when painting, you don't have to worry about fitting them in a grid, either because there is no grid at all or because the particles are much smaller than an eye could discern. On the other hand, displays have rather big grids, with resolution usually about 100 dpi, which means there are 100 particles per inch. You can easily imagine that with such small resolution, people with good eyes easily notice when something is not aligned to this grid, or isn't smoothed (we call it antialiasing).

For inkscape, cairo and other similar libraries and applications we can visualize the pixel grid like this:

The black lines represent coordinates used by cairo, inscape, ... while the squares inbetween are the actual pixels. Now imagine you'd like to draw a blue rectangle on (1,1) with width = 6 and height = 4. If you pass these numbers as its coordinates it will look like this:

This is fine, as the rectangle nicely fits into the grid. Such a rectangle would look crisp if displayed in 1:1

Now, if you decide to draw it with 1px wide border at the same coordinates with the same dimensions, how it will look like? Will the border be drawn outside the original rectangle or inside it? Neither is correct:

As you can probably guess, this will look blurry as the border ended up in between the pixels and thus is misaligned. You can correct this by shifting the position by 0.5px and making the dimensions smaller by twice the value:

If you now compare the two cases in original size, I think anyone can see (at least with the help of magnifier) the difference:

This work very similar for other shapes as well. It's important to bear in mind that the imaginary line in terms of coordinates marks the boundary of fills but the center of borders and that the grid lines are inbetween the pixels. You have to position your drawings appropriately in order to look crisp.

But what about fonts? See my previous post to see the main problem with them. Sadly inkscape does not offer better smoothing than greyscale for fonts, so you have to either use gimp, or align each letter manually (tedious).

Mark the difference (ugly fonts in Fedora?)

2009-10-26T14:27:00.005+01:00

So, in my previous post there started appearing discussion about fonts antialiasing. So I though it would be better to spin off this discussion in a post of it's on, installed freetype-freeworld (which improved drastically fonts in chromium, but did nothing with gtk), fired up gimp and created this (click on the image to see it in its original size if it looks blurry):

The first line is no antialiasing, no hinting, the second one is antialiasing only, the third one is antialiasing+hinting and last one is antialiasing+hinting with forced autohinter. Looks like no hinting or autohinter is what can be achieved without installing the package from rpmfusion, while the third line needs the package with patented stuff in. Apparently, no antialiasing isn't a solution – we're not living in stone age, antialiasing without hinting is blurry and autohinter works good only for small sizes, on the other hand, the hinting without autohinter breaks on simple japanese… Make your own image about what's best.

And as a bonus: hinting without autohinter in chromium

autohinter in midori

Dunno how you, but I see the autohinter as best working for me.

Gnome-shell…

2009-10-24T12:28:00.004+02:00

… or the Adventures of an Advanced User in a Wonderland. So, yesterday, more than 24 hours ago, I've turned on gnome-shell (in F12) with the intention to try work with it and prepared pencil and paper with the intention to scribe down what's good and what's bad on it. And now the paper (approx A5) is full of what's bad and only one note of which I'm unsure whether it's good or bad. That basically means that I either hope that this experiment will drastically improve before it will be made default in gnome, or will depart to the nether world.

To easier grasp how my usual workflow looks like here's the screenshot:

As I use my laptop for multiple purposes I have, after years of improving, ended up with tasks driven desktop sorting – one desktop for school/physics stuff, one desktop for graphics design, one desktop for programming, one desktop for web browsing, one desktop for various background things like mail client, music player, gajim, xchat and one desktop for the rest (e.g. for playing a movie). This very roughly correlates with the activities in gnome-shell so one would think I find this part of gnome-shell an improvement. Sadly the number of activities always reset to one on log-in and the desktops aren't sorted in the keyboard switcher (ctrl-alt-arrow) the same way as they look when zoomed out.

Plus, I don't have anywhere the small version of the desktop so unless I zoom out I have to remember in which desktop I am to be able to quickly switch between them. With this tightly connects missing task bar. You know I've already decided that I want these 3 applications/windows to represent one activity – that's why I have them all on one desktop. But to mouse-switch between them I still need to zoom out and oversee all the desktops. This becomes effectively very annoying when e.g. working with mail client and composing a mail while checking one of the other relevant mails, or checking an irc conversation relevant for the mail.

Another thing directly affected by that is practically impossible drag&dropping between applications (especially if the source app is maximized on desktop). But now back to switching between apps. You can object that I can use alt-tab. Yeah, that's good if I use keyboard, but when I'm browsing web or designing an icon, I'm more likely to hold mouse in my hand and rest the other hand away from keyboard. Plus, when I actually can effectively use alt-tab, the grouping of windows of one app (in my case usually terminals) makes the list on one hand shorter, on the other I have to use second hand (for arrows) to be able to select between that. Fail! I want to be able to switch between windows on one desktop with just alt-tab and don't want windows of the same kind but from different desktop mingle with that.

Another thing that I noticed is that rhythmbox cannot be minimized to systray and the systray icon actually thinks it is minimized all the time. It does work though with liferea and transmission. And it's rather annoying that partly thanks to the missing taskbar some actions like adding torrent from webbrowser to (already running) transmission does visually does nothing and I have to switch manually to the transmission window to finish the action. Similarly, opening an url from e.g. chat does not notify me, that a new browser tab has been added (in current gnome, midori task starts to bling in taskbar, whether it's one the current desktop or not and I can easily switch to it).

Let's move on now to another action (up until now, I've mostly talked about working with already opened applications) – starting new apps. The most annoying thing is that to start a new app I have to either zoom out first or use the alt-f2 app starter, which however does not suggest anything, so I have to type whole name. No one-click icons available somewhere in the panel. Oh, yes, there's a sidebar, which however looks odd, cannot be moved to the bottom and totally does not fit the rest of the theme. Plus it apparently have different favourite applications than the activities UI.

Next, when I want to open app on specific desktop, using mouse, I have to zoom out, select the desktop, zoom out, select the app and if it's already running, use right-click and hit open new window. Ugh. How is that effective compared to clicking on the destination desktop and then on the application launcher in panel? If I use keyboard, I have to search for the desired desktop first, which isn't exactly nice when all the desktops are lined up in one line then hit alt-f1, write (does not need to be whole) the app name (nope I cannot navigate through the favourites) and select the correct app to launch. I wonder how can I open new instance though... Furthermore, the 'APPLICATIONS | more' combo looks more like combo-box entry I have always urge to click on the 'applications' and write something there. What a surprise that's actually non-clickable!

And now the favourites – it took me some time to figure out that I need to right-click on the currently running app and select add to favourites. Does not seem I can reorder them to easier navigate through them :-( Plus I don't see a way to add an application that is not currently running to the favourites. Furthermore, gajim resists adding to favourites and instead disappears from the list completely if I try to add it (you can notice it on the screenshot too).

This should about summarize my findings about application/window management efficiency. So let's move on to the UI. I'll try to make this shorter. Date/Time applet is missing date (I have to click on it to find it), I don't seem to be able to navigate through the calendar using keyboard, there are locations missing, no weather. I miss various applets like CPU speed monitoring, network speed monitoring, trash (yup, I like to empty the trash by right-clicking on the panel applet if I'm currently not in nautilus) and lock-up (I use this so frequently that having to go through the user menu is suboptimal for me). I cannot recognize which of the things there are click-able... That's a totally broken design, usability-wise. I cannot move the "panel" to the bottom, which is where I prefer to have the systray. I don't see anywhere what keyboard layout I'm using. Do I have to actually write something to get to know whether I'm using US or CZE layout? Epic usability fail! The fonts does not seem to respect my settings for subpixel hinting and ignore it completely. The applets in systray are too far from each other, the black/white colour combo isn't too my liking, but I cannot change it. The odd blue mists/rectangles aren't exactly nice either… I'm not sure if it's because my intel graphics is suboptimal, but shadows, especially those of tooltips are badly misrendered and actually odd as well – why is window shadow smaller than window?

Oh and one last thing – I've quite a few times zoomed out by mistake by moving the mouse to top-left corner. Can I disable it somewhere?

Summarized, gnome-shell isn't for me as it both looks ugly to me and greatly decreases efficiency of my work. Sorry guys, but I would much rather appreciated if you fixed e.g. gtk2 limitations in theming (non-transparent backgrounds for entries, progress bars and tooltips to quote a few) in gtk3 than working on this rather dubious experiment.

Echo Icons - Lighting and Shadows

2009-10-17T23:08:00.006+02:00

So, with sketches for hard-drive for Echo Perspective,

I've started to wonder how exactly we've used the top-face lighting in Echo and how it looks in real life. Looking at the current Echo guidelines (mostly done by me) it looks like this:

And when I sat down and thought about this, it actually looks a bit weird. So I've spent today with estimating (and in case of perspective projection also observating) lighting of cubes and balls and their dropped shadow. I imitated Echo lighting to be approximately caused by light positioned at (3,-3,5) + some amount of homogeneously dispersed light if the cube occupies [0,1]x[0,1]x[0,1] space. Of course, in Echo we don't use realistic lighting and shadows but something that makes the icons more usable. The result looks like this:

So, I wonder what do you folks reading the Fedora (Design) Planet think? It's still not too late to adjust the guidelines for Echo Perspective, albeit for "Old" Echo it would mean that out of blue many icons would violate such guideline…

Nodoka Rework Update II

2009-10-08T20:53:00.004+02:00

Following on my previous post, I've finally got around to do some more updates to my nodoka rewrite and blog about it ;-) This time it's about the Entry widget. While last time I complained "only" about difficulties with exterior focus in Button widgets this time around it's many times worse even.

First of all, exterior focus behaves slightly different from how it behaves in Button widget, so I had to do another slightly different workaround for Entry. Well, it took me some time before I "reverse-engineered" the behaviour to work with all exterior-focus, focus-line-width and focus-padding settings as I'd like it to, but I seem to have figured it out. This is probably connected with the fact that focus for entry is drawn via the draw_focus functions only if its exterior, so I had to skip this one and render the focus along when drawing the actual widget to keep at least some consistency in the code.

To make engine coding for entries even harder, the state_type sent to the drawing functions is wrong when the widget is insensitive... That makes another, albeit simple hack :(

And because of the way entry is implemented in GTK, there are up to four GdkWindows (one main for the whole entry, one for the text, and up to two for side icons), which aren't transparent and furthermore filled not with what's behind them but with base colour, one has to: repaint the background to be hopefully the correct one (which of course breaks when the entry is on toolbar with gradient) and from the inside windows check their relative position to the main window and paint the entry once more (to allow nice smooth rounded corners and bigger paddings for inner focus). This means you either sacrifice design or speed, I sacrificed the speed, but am seriously playing with the thought of introducing an engine option to disable this hack for gtkrc designers that prefer speed and are willing to give up some of the design freedom.

Now this is all nice but there are (at least) two applications that are even worse -- evolution and epiphany has their location/search bar composed of actually two entries and some icons and "guessing" from the inner entry where the outer one is is beyond my willingness to implement... Luckily enough, evolution behaves pretty decent with wide range of settings and epiphany got fixed in 2.28.

And now some screenshots:

As you can see it's still miles from done, but I try to keep it fully functional (and as much bug free as I can). For those who actually would like to test it I recommend building from git but there's a chance I'll put my locally built testing rpms on fedorapeople if there would be enough requests ;-)

On a completely unrelated note, I've just discovered freely (and legally) downloadable new recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos in FLAC. Yay, kudos for the Czech Radio. Actually I've been listening to the Czech Radio D-Dur station live broadcast (ogg 256kbit) for quite a few days now and I am both more than happy with both the quality of the selected music as well as the quality of the broadcast (further more in OGG Vorbis!). But back to Brandenburg Concertos -- I'm about half done with the listening and I have to say that while the style seemed a bit unusual at first it won me over after a one or two movements and I consider it one of the better Brandenburg Concertos recordings I've heard.

Constantine Beta Wallpaper

2009-10-04T20:41:00.003+02:00

We've prepared wallpapers for Constantine Beta, and we look for feedback, preferably on the Fedora Design Team List. You can comment on my blog too and I rely your opinions to the design team then. Installing it is as easy as
yum --enablerepo=rawhide install constantine-backgrounds for GNOME or
yum --enablerepo=rawhide install constantine-kde-theme for KDE. We also have prepared extras (only for GNOME now):
yum --enablerepo=rawhide install constantine-backgrounds-extras. The default wallpaper looks on my Rawhide as this:

the extras can be seen in the gnome-background-properties bellow (the universe slideshow is from gnome):

blogs.fp.o

2009-10-04T12:11:00.003+02:00

So, I've discovered a Fedora Project run weblog site and I'm wondering what's the state of it. Since the url does not include publictest# I guess it's not a testing instance, so I've created a blog there :-D Does anyone know if it's ready for starting to use? And since it's supposed to be for fedora contributors I wonder about 15MB limit for media -- people would probably like to post screencasts and such things are big, so the 15MB limit might be used up quite fast and I'm not sure if fedorapeople space is a good place to store supporting media for their blogs on...

Broken deps: libass.so.3

2009-09-28T21:18:00.005+02:00

A short notice for all those who have Fedora 10 and are getting the broken deps message during update because of libass.so.3. Be assured that this is not intentional and that I've made a mistake by pushing the libass update to stable updates too soon, as there are some troubles over at rpmfusion preventing a successful vlc build. I apologize for the inconvenience. Please be patient, the needed vlc update will come ASAP, until then please skip the libass update.

UPDATE: I noticed vlc was successfully built, so as soon as the build is pushed to the repos, this problem will be gone :)

Kanji/Hanzi lookup problem [漢字検索の問題]

2009-09-27T22:29:00.004+02:00

Dear lazy web, I've been having troubles finding a certain kanji (respectively its computer counterpart which is its byte representation in any charset, usually unicode) and since the Fedora Planet is read by an audience that includes native Japanese/Chinese I figured someone might have better means for finding the answer than I have. Here are two pictures of the said kanji with its reading in a compound word, the kanji I have problems to find is the left one and throughout the internet it's usually substituted with 聶, which however has on the top the ear radical (KanXi: 128) instead of the grass radical (KanXi: 140):

I've tried to find it (with zero luck) in various kanji/hanzi online dictionaries ranging from jisho to cojak .Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Math, anime and my (crazy) head

2009-09-22T13:18:00.005+02:00

Being an undergraduate (I've recently completed my Bachelor's degree and am currently starting with Magister degree studies) in physics I tend to take interest in things where math is concerned, even when it is just a snapshot of a math test I notice during watching anime... A few moments ago I came across this:

The title roughly (my Japanese does not go much further beyond being able to look up kanji and some basic everyday-life phrases) translates to "First year, first semester, midterm exams, math I.", the first problem is something like "Collect similar terms and put them in order in the following expressions." and the fourth problem goes like "Factorize the following expressions." Well, from this I can guess that the math level on first year of 高等学校 (high school, students are around 15 years old) in Japan is roughly the same as in the first year of střední škola (high school, students are as well around 15 years old) in Czech, although I've never seen such answers to these types of math problems... Well, it's from anime and it's quite usual there to go a bit overboard, but nevertheless it gave me a good laugh.

On a similar note, over the past week from time to time I've been trying to find various derivations of Lorentz boosts in general direction in hope to come up with an elegant one. Today I've finally managed to find one that is purely mathematical and based on the assumptions that a) general Lorentz boosts does not contain space coordinate rotation and b) Lorentz boosts in a given direction form a one-dimensional sub-group of the Lorentz group (which is isomorphic to O(1,3)), whose another sub-group is the group of rotations O(3). Lorentz group is a group of (linear) transformations that preserve the Minkowski metric

Limiting only to transformations that do not contain time or space inversions (and thus in matrix representation they have determinant equal to 1 and the "time-time" component greater than 0) I get a continuous subgroup SO(1,3) and can further derive limitations imposed on the matrices forming it's Lie algebra (so(1,3)). It turned out, as expected, that the 4x4 matric has a 3x3 antisymmetric submatrix (the space rotations), has zero trace (because determinant of the group representing matrices is 1) and the remaining elements are symmetric – which also leads to (already known) fact that the dimension of this group is 6 (three space rotations and Lorentz boosts in three mutually orthogonal directions). Note: I use geometrized units in which c=1 and otherwise the remaining elements wouldn't be symmetric, but differed by a factor of c^2.

From there, finding the matrix describing the Lorentz boost in general direction is simply a matter of filling the symmetric elements of the matrix representing the so(1,3) algebra (and leave the other elements 0) and making an exponential out of it. Further one can replace the coefficients describing the direction of the boost and hyperbolic sines and cosines by the usual gamma factor and three-velocity components to get the usual from of the transformation.

I really like this derivation – even though it's rather long compared to other derivations I've found or came across during past week, it's purely mathematical in nature and does not require knowledge of the Lorentz transformation for frames in standard configuration.

Nodoka Rewrite – initial code builds and works

2009-08-14T23:15:00.004+02:00

So, don't expect much. Just that I've finally got to making first piece of the Nodoka rewrite work. I've spent the whole day today figuring the GTK internals of button focus drawing and finally managed to get a result that works as I want it to work with all the gtkrc settings I can think of.

First, it's totally misleading that when interior focus is turned off, position and dimensions of widgets change (even though the canvas on which we draw remains same) between focused and unfocused states... Took me some time to figure out how exactly this happens and how to get rid of it from the point of view of drawing functions. All the GtkWidget::x/ythickness, GtkWidget::focus-line-width, GtkWidget::focus-padding and GtkWidget::interior-focus feels sort of like black magic to me… Also to preserve some compactness off the theme, while maintaining good configurability of the focus ring I've introduced focus_padding engine theme to allow bigger paddings for inner focus while maintaining same widget dimensions. I still need to handle the two different padding settings in style functions properly instead of letting the drawing functions handle it...

Well, to not only talk, here are some screenshots. As you see, nothing but button is implemented, so it's not really a good candidate for updating your gtk-nodoka-engine, but in case people want to try it or hack on it, the source is available.

Echo New Icon GTK Ready

2009-08-12T16:27:00.006+02:00

I've finally got the design from my previous blogpost implemented. Writing gtk applications in ruby is as fun as in C, but making the widgets behave (especially in terms of positioning/size) as I'd like them to seems unbelievably hard. My workflow was this time a bit different from usual, as I was just adding the widgets one by one, with the help of glade researched what to set and how in order to be where they are and when the layout was ready implemented the signals. LOL, the result file was, despite being only 150 lines long, pretty hard to read. >_< So next step was to properly outline the program design – most importantly I've prepared myself a diagram with widgets relations – and implement it. Of course, the source is now much more readable, but also a bit long – not counting the licence at the start, it's about 240 lines.

Next I was thinking what is the best way to present it to user. Burying it in menus is suboptimal, having to launch it by hand isn't exactly useful as well, but adding it to nautilus' pop-up menu (just like e.g. nautilus-open-terminal extension does) feels about right. The problem is, of course, that nautilus extensions can be written either in C or python, but my app is in ruby. The decision what do wasn't hard – writing ruby bindings to nautilus extensions is out of my league and I'd like to keep all the echo-artist scripts architecture independent if possible, so I went with python. I'd say I like ruby more, but at the same time I must emphasize that making conclusions based on 40 lines of code is out of question :-) The nautilus extension is available in git as well. Now, I've prepared packages for people who want to start using it already at put them in my fedorapeople space because I don't want to update the echo-artist package in Fedora repos until it is in good enough shape.

I've prepared a short screen-cast to showcase the new functionality:
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Download the video to see in your favourite video player.

Echo New Icon GUI Script Design Idea

2009-08-09T19:54:00.004+02:00

In Echo Project we strongly recommend to create new icon using the echo-icon-new script which does some of the work, that an artist would need to do, behind the scenes. Today I've started thinking about writing a GTK version of the script so that the usage would be even easier. Here's my initial design idea of the GUI (click to see in original size):

Now, two issues arise:

How good is this layout from usability POV?
As I've never done GTK app, how to actually create this layout, preferably in ruby?

Both feedback for the first question and help for the second question is appreciated.

Constantine Wallpapers Package

2009-08-04T15:50:00.004+02:00

UPDATE: The packages are now in koji. Per frequent request I've moved Constantine Statue to default from extras.

I've just put together initial packages for Fedora Constantine release. Their contents is based on the initial feedback we received on the design-list. The packages are on my fedorapeople page and this is what will your background selector have after installing both of them:

Feedback welcomed preferably on the design-list, alternatively you can comment in this blog post. To further clarify, the two wallpapers (mosiaco and underwater mosaic) that are included in the main package are our current candidates for the default wallpaper. Please note that they are very early work and in the final release will look a lot better ;-) The rest that is in the -extras package are wallpapers that we are considering as extras – in Fedora 12 we are going to include four additional wallpapers targeted at specific audiences.

Change default font sizes rather than DPI

2009-08-01T19:00:00.004+02:00

it's easy and most likely the correct way to change your font size

Nodoka Widget Drawing - Starting From Scratch

2009-07-28T21:31:00.006+02:00

I know everyone will hate me now, but I've decided to break my current development of gtk-nodoka-engine-0.8.x and start working on it from scratch. I don't know what was the real push to do that, but I felt I needed to support wider configurations in the engine (with future in mind), develop more consistent, usable and pleasing look and feel and write the drawing code in a way that would be independent on the toolkit. As for the design itself as inspiration serves basically the widget design on iPhone (and OSX in general), current nodoka, the 0.8.x sketches and existing implementation, Chromium and much more.

For faster tuning of the gradients I've wrote a simple GTK application filled with sliders... And I later extended it for showcasing and testing drawing code of the widget. Forgive me for not publishing the source code, because it's total mess. The widget drawing code will eventually go to gtk-nodoka-engine, so I try to keep that part less messy, but creating the gui, writing event handlers, ... has been made in way that it just works (TM)...

I have to say that it's pretty interesting to write GTK applications using all the GObject and GtkWidget magic, and I've come to a deep understanding of why it's mostly inevitable to use tools like Glade to design more complex GUIs. The app currently looks like this:

The top left image serves for tuning the fill gradient settings, with the four sliders right of it I can control the base color and transparency, the other five sliders are for the actual gradients settings. With this I've finally came up with something I was satisfied with for button and added entry (because it often combines with button). The result is such:

Now, even though current GTK (AFAIK) does not directly support button groupings, it is possible that in the future such feature will be there, so I decided to have the drawing code prepared. Since the drawing code is independent on widget toolkit, I can simulate everything I want in my small app, which is why the bottom part of the app was added. It has an drawing area in which I draw the widgets (currently buttons only) and a button which serves as a reference for testing various states. You can notice, that I have grouped the buttons by three – that's to test all the various cases that can happen: button is first in group, button is last in group and button is in group but is neither first nor last.

Next feature not implemented AFAIK anywhere else than pango (and perhaps other text rendering libraries) is complete writing style support. That means not only the left to right, then top to bottom (used e.g. in Latin, English, ...) and right to left, then top to bottom (used e.g. in Arabic) cases covered by CSS, GTK, ... but also top to bottom, then right to left (used e.g. in East Asian scripts) and top to bottom, then left to right (used e.g. in Mongolian). At one point this was part of CSS3 specification, but for some reason it has been dropped. Anyway, because in code it means only implementing two new cases which basically means only using different transformation matrix, and thus should not affect speed of the rendering, I decided to implement it.

Thus in the preview in the app, there are actually four button groups – the top one is usual LTR, with the left button being treated as first, the one bellow is usual RTL, with the right button being treated as first, and bellow the left one is top to bottom, then left to right case, with the top button being treated as first and the remaining is top to bottom, then right to left case, again with top button being treated as first.

The lighting follows "paragraphs flow" – meaning that for horizontal text the light shines from mostly from top, and in vertical text depending on the flow either from left (Mongolian) or from right (Japanese). Now it would be even greater if I could add some text to the buttons to test how it would look with it included, but I don't know how (or rather I am too lazy to study pango from scratch and quick google search does not seem to reveal any nice pango tutorials)...

And now some video of the buttons "in work".
Your browser does not seem to support video tag
Download

The True Meaning of "Open"

2009-07-23T19:22:00.006+02:00

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.

There are ‘extremists’ in the free software world, but that’s one major reason why I don’t call what I do ‘free software’ any more. I don’t want to be associated with the people for whom it’s about exclusion and hatred.

— Linus Torvalds, Linux Magazine, via Open Source to Go!

I can totally identify myself with what LT said. I'd say that hatred is actually one of the worst emotions the mankind has. It blinds your rational thinking, makes you do things for which other people will dislike you, and in the end it will destroy yourself. To quote from Buddhist text:

Not by hate is hate defeated;
Hate is quenched by love.
This is the eternal law.

— Dhammapada, v.5

While I deem this to be a little far-fetched (as love is also blind) it basically grasps the core of the problem. Hate is not defeated by another hate. You won't defeat Microsoft by hating them. Well, they pose themselves in the role of the archenemy of Linux, but that might change. Our ultimate goal is not to defeat Microsoft and their Windows, the mantra of open source is about being open to others, sharing your ideas, your code. There is nothing about "fight" or animosity. It's a grave pity that with expansion of Linux, people not believing in this mantra appeared and our communication channels are being slowly infested by posts filled with hatred, animosity, personal insults and trolls.

We should all remember that the world open does not contain these emotions. By showing hatred or animosity towards others you are distancing yourself from being open, you close yourselves in your shell and that will eventually lead to your loss as to the loss of the thing you originally wanted to protect.

I believe similar ideas are in the core of many Asian martial arts. For example in 合気道 (合 – ai – joining, unifying, harmonizing, 気 – ki – spirit, life energy, 道 – dō – way, path) you have to became one with the enemy to master the techniques. The goal is not to the beat the attacker, the goal is to disarm (or dispose of if you wish) the attacker without hurting him.

Similarly by contributing to open source and not showing hatred against our "enemies" we can become stronger and in the long way win the "war". And winning here does not mean that open-source will be everywhere, it means that those who oppose us now will acknowledge us either as partners or as equal competitors. We do not need to lower ourselves to their level to "win".

Anyway, the basic premise of today's blog-post is that being open also means being tolerant and cooperative. These stands on a much higher moral level than hatred, FUD, … They are also vital for keeping the open-source community healthy. They are also one of the reasons I use and contribute to Fedora. It's four foundations contain these — freedom, friends, features, first.

Firefox 3.7 New Design

2009-07-21T19:46:00.004+02:00

Well, quite an unexpected post in my blog... In Chromium's Tips and Tricks section I noticed an article entitled First Look: Firefox 3.7’s New Design. After briefly looking at the Vista Aero look I went WTF! I just cannot seem to find this semitransparency in windows nice... But well, I scrolled down and down and down until noticing the Win XP version which I deem to be the best. Well, if such UI gets implemented on linux as well, it would definitely prompt me to try using firefox again, as it's basically Chromium UI with tiny changes in ordering and separate search entry (I prefer search to be integrated in location bar though).

The UI is very effective, as I have discovered when using Chromium over these past few days, and I think it's been a high time for the redesign. For once I have to praise the guys at mozilla for doing the right thing ;-) It's would be shame, though, to not note that midori introduced this kind of UI as well with it's recent 0.1.8 release (although as an option, rather than as the only setting). It's a prove that Google's decision to introduce their own web browser will lead to benefit of users of other browsers as well.

AdBlock in Midori!

2009-07-17T23:08:00.002+02:00

I must have been lucky today... First I installed chromium and now, after trying out latest git snapshot of midori, I've discovered, it can actually block ads (via the included, by default disabled 'Advertisement blocker' extension)! Well, it's pretty lame still as I noticed it only blocks google ads (probably because of missing filters) and adding filters seems to not work (not that I have any filters anyway) and there are loads of 'FIXME' comments in the source code, but I cannot wait till it gets finished :-)

Now, if only I knew how the 'Mouse Gestures' extension is supposed to work (if it works at all), it would totally make the day even more awesome!

And thus the browser war hath started

2009-07-17T12:44:00.005+02:00

Behold heathens, new web-browser hath descended upon the land of Fedora. Witness the few steps needed to deploy at FergyTech. The ultimate battle for superiority may begin. Who shall be the winner?

Well, that somehow summarizes my exitement. I wonder which browser I'll end-up with in Fedora 12 :-D For now, I am using simultaneously Midori (webkitgtk)

Epiphany (xulrunner)

and Chromium (webkit/chromium)

now ;-)

Btw. I just recently used firefox once again because of some download which worked only via firefox (I don't really know why though) and the page had an enormous amount of adds... well... to be fair... I got used again to displayed adds with midori (it's not possible yet to block adds in webkitgtk), but the experience with firefox was about five times worse... The amount of windows that popped up was just terrible... Well, I'd say that using firefox without AdBlock is in a sense equivalent to taking a stroll into underworld >_<

Maybe, I'll write a short review about those three above mentioned browses (plus epiphany 2.27 snapshot which uses webkitgtk instead of xulrunner) when I gain more experience with Chromium (so for now I'll keep the awesomeness of midori's location bar only hinted in the screenshot above ;-).

The mess that libass is

2009-07-13T19:05:00.003+02:00

With 'recent' inclusion of proper ASS/SSA subtitles support into gstreamer via libass, it became a necessity to package this library separately. There seems to be one official upstream at sourceforge, but mplayer ships it's own patched version of libass, vlc as well and to make the mess even bigger, there's greg's version... As I've taken upon myself the task to provide this package for fedora, I'm trying to find the best solution to this but I don't have a single clue what the best approach would be there. Also, we seem to be on the head of separate packaging of this library separately (I've found debian, ubuntu and gentoo packages) and it would be probably good to solve this issue before other big distros start to package it and make the mess even bigger...

The gentoo package seems to be 0.9.6 unpatched, debian includes mplayer's batch patch against 0.9.6 and ubuntu is pretty much identical to debian...

Now vlc's patches seems to be taken from mplayer + one or two other fixes, however the greg's version deviates further from the official 0.9.6 version and is not API compatible with previous versions. All of those include critical, as well as non-critical, fixes and feature enhancements. Now the question is what to do about this mess? Yes, I could do the same as gentoo and just wait till 0.9.7 is released (and who knows how long will it take), or I can follow debian and just add the mplayer patch and make a note in the spec file where it originates from. That would be both an easy workarounds leading practically nowhere.

I could also review in full all the changes that the patches/greg's version carry, try to understand what does what and back-port fixes as well as submitting the (smaller) patches upstream.

I could also switch to greg's version in rawhide and hope it will not break anything... It seems almost all development is happening there, but on the other hand I'd rather not use git snapshot... Although after quick look at his changelog, it seems he might be releasing 0.9.7 soonish...

Ideally vlc and mplayer would switch to system libass, greg's version merged with upstream and do a release and everyone would be happy...

Now the basic question, are there people willing to help in any way with solving this issue?

UPDATE: The mess is beginning to clean up now. The official page now suggests Greg's git as the main version and I have been told that mplayer has plans to link dynamically against this version as well and vlc is switching over to this one as well. This means that I'll switch to greg's version in Rawhide in near future as well and if it works well, I'll use it also in stable releases.

Notification Bubble's Colour

2009-06-21T15:42:00.004+02:00

Dear lazy web, I've been pondering for a while how to correctly implement notifications bubbles coloring. Yesterday I've threw together a simple patch that reads the colour from gtkrc (the same way the upstream default theme does). It solves a problem with text not being readable on bubbles when using dark themes. The problem is, that the bubbles apparently have same colours like windows, whereas I'd like them to have same colours like tooltips. Does anyone knows whatever to target in gtkrc theme in order to achieve that goal?

Current look:

After patch:

My Desktop

2009-05-30T23:39:00.005+02:00

First I have to say that Fedora Desktop keeps improving with each release but there are still corners in which some love is apparently missing. So, to have assorted list of what I use and what I don't like about it I've decided to create a short post. Let me emphasize that I use my laptop both for school and for fun and it has only Fedora on it.

My usecases

school duties – writing various homeworks, thesis, e-mail and IM communication, research on internet
fun – watching movies, listening to music, ripping audio CDs, surfing web
fedora – coding, design, packaging, using various web services

What I use to get things done

Communication

The communication channel I use most is e-mail. Somehow I've always found all webmail's not good for me (with the best so far being probably yahoo mail, closely followed by gmail) so I use desktop client. In past I've switched away from thunderbird – it didn't fit in my desktop, it tended to download same messages multiple times, I had to install enigmail extension to get gpg working, I wasn't comfortable with it,... And now I am using Evolution. Well, it's a great application and handles and manages my mail very well, but it's slow, slow, slow and once again slow. Plus, there are zillions of functions I will never use... So I am currently looking for a nice replacement, my requirements are:

Handles POP3, IMAP and SMPT
Translates gmail's lables to folders
Knows how to handle GPG
Can remember my passwords
Has nice gnomeish simple GUI with icons coming from icon theme
Handles HTML mail as well
Integration with some system-wide contact book would be better than having it's own...
Can preview attachments inside messages
Can handle thousands of messages without significant performance loses
Can gracefully handle multiple e-mail accounts
Is FLOSS

I so far didn't find any that would fullfill all the points above. Do you know of any?

For instant messaging I use jabber, icq and msn, where the latter two via jabber transports. This means I have quite wide range of possible clients to use. Over the ages, I grew accustomed to gajim – and it's latest versions can even render math expresions using LaTeX. The only con I see with this client is that it tends to start slow and opening messages windows isn't fast either...

Occassionally (usually when I need to discuss something quickly with other design-team members) I also use IRC. I never grew accustomed to this service and have had some serious issues setting it up... Luckily, Empathy can handle this pretty gracefully (as oposed to X-Chat which seemed almost impossible to set up).

The rest of the web

So, in the past I've been using firefox (I was used to it from Windows, so I naturally picked it up when I switched to linux). And as I grew more accustomed to linux and gnome world, I've also grown away from firefox. Towards epiphany. I've been a happy user of this fast and simple web browser, until webkit revolution. My primary browser is now midori, for pages that don't work with it epiphany and for testing purposes I also have an unstable build of epiphany. WebKit feels faster than gecko and also is better integrated into the linux environment, plus the webkitgtk development has been really rapid these past few months. I cannot wait the moment I could switch from gecko altogether. As of now, the problems that are still blocking it are inability to access anidb from webkitgtk based browsers and inability to authenticate to koji.

For flash I use swfdec, but it's still a no-go if you expect a rich flash experience (which I do not). I use it mainly for some simpler flash-enabled websites. Youtube is best with totem's youtube plugin ;-) I use liferea for RSS and Atom feeds.

Homeworks and thesis

Well, to cut it short, I use TeX (csplain if you care about the details) for this purpose and the source files I write in gedit. This seems to be a killer combination, even to such extent that the only application from office suites that I keep installed because I occasionaly use it, is gnumeric... And, to not forgot about actually viewing various documents, I use evince. Works like a charm for PDFs, postscript and DJVU, which are the most common electronic document formats I view. Also, not to forgot one of the most improtant things for a physicist, gnuplot is the best application for making high quality plots.

Coding

Somehow, I feel like a do-it-all-in-notepad type of guy, because I do all the code writing in gedit. I think it's a great and powerful application, but from time to time I tend to think that some IDE goodies might help speed things up... But everytime I try to import my stuff to eclipse, it ends up with a totally nonworking disaster. I haven't tried anjuta for quite a long time though, maybe it would work better.

As long as version control systems go, I am fairly acquainted with CVS and GIT (and like the latter much, much more) and from time to time I also use SVN or HG, but I've never grew accustomed to these two.

Design

There's not much to say, appart from great thanks to lkundrak for providing us with the greatest and latest version of inkscape. Yep, you guess right – inkscape is doing a tremendously good job when working with vector graphics and the development seems pretty active too. Thanks to it's great abilities I use it not only for icon design but also for various other things like drawing images to accompany my thesis (because it can render LaTeX formulas and can export images to postscript, it's really helpful).

From time to time I also use gimp, but I am not much into raster graphics so I am not very skilled with it.

Fun

Well, ranging from soundjuicer through rhythmbox to totem and mplayer there is not much to complain about... Great applications working great, although rhythmbox somehow does not feel as much gnomeish as other applications to me...

My most favourite applications

Well, these are applications I definitely want to mention because I am really satisfied with them (in no particular order)

Epiphany
Midori
Totem
Inkscape
GEdit
Sound Juicer
Nautilus
mc
git
PackageKit

And which are your favourite applications?

My most used applications

There are also some applications that are running almost all the time I am logged in. These are

evolution
rhythmbox
midori
epiphany
liferea
gajim
gedit
gnome-terminal
nautilus

Scars on Humanity

2009-05-10T22:47:00.007+02:00

Er... I don't usually blog about the what-am-I-thinking stuff (partly because my blog is aggregated on Fedora Planet and I don't want to be like certain others who frequently post about non-linux related stuff...) but somehow I couldn't help it this time. This post is gonna be about mostly about racism and related things so if you consider that topic to much controverse or unfitting, just skip the rest.

You might ask why? Well, I've recently picked up an interesting anime called イヴの時間 (Time of Eve) placed in a probably-not-so-distant future and focused on social problems with androids (human looking robots). And it striked me how much the problems depicted there have in common with the various you-are-different-therefore-we-must-lynch-you types of behaviour. In the aforementioned anime the main theme is the striking difference between how the androids feel (yes you read right, there is much more to them than just looking like humans, they also have emotions and such) and how they are treated (as mere machines).

I think this 'treat' is somehow interconected with mankind's whole history. Some of the prominent examples of this behaviour include (to more or less extent) the witch hunt from middle ages, mass Indian murdering when conquering over Americas, black slaves and subseqent hatred towards black people, Hitler's move against Judaism and in the current times I'd mention fear of Arabic people or animosity towards Gipsies. And looking through movies it's pretty much common to depict aliens and/or robots as a threat to mankind (and I think the reasons are pretty much the same as in the previous examples).

Now, I think all this stuff 'is complete balls' (to quote Stephen Fry). I mean I laugh at rasist jokes, I laugh at religion-related jokes, I laugh at jokes about physicists (which depicts us as unsociable, being only men or ugly women, totaly impractical...) when I find them funny and I don't care whether they are 'politically correct'. I think the whole political correctness thing is a totally wrong approach. Because it's encouraging precisely what it tries to fight against – discrimination. One of the examples from my country is usage of two different words for Gipsy people – cikáni and romové. Ever since these people came into the Bohemian and Moravian lands they were called by themselves, as well as other people, cikáni (or cigáni) and now this precise word has been labeled as politically incorrect or even racist. Since their official nationality is 'romská' they are to be referred to as 'romové'.

And to what end? To singling them out. And IMHO that's a problem. Well, yes, these people are socially problematic because they are used to different lifestyle, but have you people ever heard of tolerance? I mean it's wrong to force our lifestyle onto them. When I approach these people I try to act without prejudice. I don't care if the person I am talking to is Czech, Slovak, German, Gipsy, Vietnamese, whatever. The things I care about is whether we have something to talk about. Differences are a good thing and especially cultural and lifestyle differences makes the culture of human kind much more rich. We should learn from each other, listen to each other, not clash.

But to draw some conclusion from this random not-much-connected stream of thoughts... The law in most western countries makes it hard to not discriminate precisely because antidiscrimination paragraphs. If you do not accept a Gipsy/woman into a job because you found a better Czech/man for it you are risking you'll be acused from discrimination. With that thought in mind it's not easy to not discriminate. But yet, one should try to. Don't let the outer differences blind your mind. It does not matter if your friend, lover, employee, teacher, ... has black or white skin, whether he's native or foreigner, whether they're man or woman, whether he's Christian, Muslim or atheist, whether he's handsome or ugly, ... Don't think in groups, think in individuals. Black people have nothing in common save the colour of their skin (and some other characteristics in looks) and there's not a single reason to approach them differently because they are black. It's the stuff you don't see that matters. Also, don't discriminte positively – hiring women just to make the female/male ratio in your company 1:1 is an utmost craziness!

Anyway, these are just my thoughts... you are completely free to disagree with them ;-)

Erm... After re-reading what I've written... Arrr... I suck in philosophy and I think this small wandering into that strange land will have been for a long time the only one (luckily for you for not having to read this nonsense as well as for me for not having to embarrass myself)...

EDIT: Well, to put something linux related... the community around FLOSS is actually a pretty good example of how things would idealy be. We are people from around the whole world, with different nationalities, different beliefs (both in political and religious sense) yet we are able to work and communicate together and produce great things like Fedora. But even there there are times when things go wrong. One of the recent example is one of the negative feedback we received about the Leonidas Beta wallpaper. About the reactions was one of the kind I talk about in the above text – a concern that we have a symbol of worshipping ancient gods (temple) included in the wallpaper. A typical thing I don't give a damn about. Just imagine a world where drawing a temple marks you a public enemy. Indeed a sad imagination.

And now for something completely different:
The 3 most probable causes for extinction of mankind are IMHO:

Selfdestruction
Genetic degeneration combined with global pandemic
Pollution (mainly of air and water)

Have a nice day ;-)

Leonidas – Lion for Single Screens

2009-05-09T11:48:00.004+02:00

Well, a lot of people complained that we dropped the lion head from the default Leonidas backgrounds. Let me state it clear, even if you complain about it now it won't change anything. The decision for that was made quite a long time ago and the reasoning is pretty much based on the feed back we recieved and some deeped thinking. You know, the lion head takes up to about 3/4 of the screen and pretty much everything that is above it is either unreadable or hard discern... Now, while the image is nice a cool, it definitely does not make a good default.

But now back to the main topic – I've added the images with lion for single screens. They're not available in rawhide yet (and due to the freeze won't be for some time), but they're already in koji. I hereby request that people test those. For the default ones the main package is leonidas-backgrounds and needs leonidas-backgrounds-common and leonidas-backgrounds-lion-dual. For the lion ones the main is leonidas-backgrounds-lion and leonidas-backgrounds-lion-dual. In case you'd like to test the if the Beta wallpapers are working, leonidas-backgrounds-landscape package is for you.

Random Leonidas Goodies

2009-04-19T18:17:00.008+02:00

The Leonidas (Fedora 11) release is drawing near and I am currently using it as my primary system (with the Fedora 10 release as backup). And so I thought I'd highlight what improvements I find especially useful/interesting to me.

Intel Kernel Mode Setting working

And that means flawless transition from plymouth to gdm. Plymouth still hasn't been updated to the Leonidas theme, but I am eagerly waiting since I've seen some screencasts of what might it look like. But back to the KMS. I have intel graphics and on F10 this has been disabled which meant that in order to have nice graphical boot I needed to pass vga=0x318 to kernel line in grub. It had the drawback that while the screen resolution is 1280x800, the resolution used for plymouth was 1024x768 which meant no nice transition to gdm. This is no longer true in Rawhide and as soon as plymouth starts I'm having 1280x800 res. until the time I shut the laptop down. And what's more, gdm nicely fades in over the plymouth which is really cool.

IntelKMS feature page says it's 87% complete, but for me it's now working flawlessly (and recently even metacity started being fast again with compositing manager enabled). Kudos to everyone who worked on these two things for Fedora 10 and 11!

Booting faster and faster

Yes, after selecting my usual set of services (combination of server and laptop services) and enabling ext4 I can clearly see some improvements in the boot time speed over F10. It's not the same time as the 20SecondStartup feature advertises, but it seems to be a little over 30s which is pretty good with my slow disk and the kind of services I start.

And again, kudos for the people working on this. Since around Fedora 8 the boot time gradually improves for me. Keep up the good work. But even then there are still things that need attention, like slow logging into the desktop (partly due to having a lot of things in panel) and still slow (a few seconds) X start. So I am eagerly awaiting what Fedora 12 brings ;-)

Internal USB camera finally working

Yes, that was the last piece of hardware I have that wasn't working in Fedora. It's some weird one and in Fedora 8 or so I was even trying to get it work myself (without success) but now it works out of box. Kudos again for the work being put even into these parts of linux :-) I'd still like to know, how to turn it off, the always shining green light isn't exactly comfortable at night...

Touchpad tapping

While I am in the hardware section I though I'd mention this. I use touchpad mainly at train and consider tapping and scrolling to be one of the most important featrues. Unfortunatelly in F11 it is disabled by default and I was over too lazy to try to enable it (since at least in all previous releases it required either installing non-official package or edditing some config scripts). But today I've decided to google for solution and found a not-so-much-advertised really easy solution. There's a new touchpad tab in mouse preferences which makes touchpad configuration fast and easy.

"Updates updated"

It seems there are two interesting improvements coming for the update system. One makes the graphical updates via PackageKit much better experience, as shown in hugsie's post. Looks like I'll finally switch from yum update to PackageKit updates, it now shows all the info I like (like what package is currently being downloaded/updated/cleared...) plus it shows update info (like changelog or stuff from bodhi).

Another one is Presto. This is great especially for people with low bandwidths because what it does is basically using diffs instead of whole rpms. Note that each repository need to have this feature enabled, because if you don't have a place to download diffs from, you'll endup downloading whole packages. The coolness is that, thanks to downloading only diffs, usually a lot less of download is needed (usually about 70% less).

Updated webkitgtk

Well, one of the things I cannot leave out is webkitgtk. The webkitgtk guys started doing regular releases (as oposed to nightly builds) and Rawhide is pretty much kept in sync with them. This basically means much stabler webkit than in F10 (and currently even stabler than firefox in rawhide). Next, the all the coolness of webkitgtk download comes bundled within as well and we can expect more cool features, like integrated spell checker, in near future as well. I'd say webkitgtk is progressing nicely.

Some days ago I've also read a short post about open media coolnes in Firefox 3.1(3.5). Well, while the mozilla guys make it sound like they're leading the wagon here, they're rather more or less on par with webkitgtk. Just open this page in midori and in firefox and see for yourself. Except for the fact that they have an ugly check for exact gecko version and thus hide one of the goodies from webkit users (even though it would most likely work) the rest works there:

That said, webkitgtk has still a long way to go before it can be the only web rendering engine for me. Maybe I'll put together a list of features I'm still missing there, but that's for another post ;-)

And much more

Yep, I've highlighted a few features/improvements in Leonidas that I noticed and deemed interesting enough to write about them, however the Feature list for F11 is much longer. To name a few others I find interesting: Automatic Fonts and Mime Installer, DeviceKit, Ext4 Default Filesystem, iBus or Brand New Volume Control.

New Leonidas backgrounds

2009-04-13T21:20:00.007+02:00

So, based on some Leonidas Beta artwork feedback and a new proposal from Samuele we've chosen a totally different approach for the upcoming Leonidas release. Updated packages with more or less final design will hit rawhide probably tomorrow. And I thought I'll advertise the change... So here's what the new background looks like on my Fedora 10 (sorry for the mess on desktop, I need to clean it up a little…):

We have also prepared a little surprise for dual-screen users (actually it was in the original design, but we decided to not put it on single screens because it's too complex):

And for the people who liked the Beta artwork, I've put them into leonidas-backgrounds-landscape (sub)package so that you don't have to add them manually.

Backgrounds for Leonidas - Now in Rawhide

2009-03-11T20:06:00.007+01:00

Just a quick note that the beta backgrounds for Fedora 11 Leonidas are now in the Rawhide repo. All you need to do to get it is yum --enablerepo=rawhide install leonidas-backgrounds. Here are screenshot from my Rawhide installation:

Quick apology (regarding comment moderation)

2009-03-02T22:27:00.002+01:00

Due to spam, I've enabled recently a comment moderation on my blog. But I forgot to set an e-mail adress for notifications. And as a result, I've just discovered about 15 pending comments (some as old as 16.2.) out of which 4 were not spam. Apologies for all the people whose comments stayed so long in the pending state. I hope it will not happen again :-)

We've gone a long way…

2009-02-22T23:14:00.005+01:00

… but we are still far from finish. I am talking about Echo Icon Theme. Its history is long and full of twist and contributors. It started as a personal project by former RedHat employee Diana Fong and it was targeted as a replacement for the aging bluecurve icon theme. The original draft looked like this:

The icon set quickly gained popularity among Fedora user base, but contributors were few, development slow and we missed the important part of making it default in Fedora (because it was not complete enough). This question of completeness has been haunting us ever since.

It's nostalgic to see what were my first contributions – I had practically no experience in graphics, but wanted to see the set improved. Here you can see my very first sketch:

As you can see, it is not-so-ugly icon with well distinguished shape, but with totally different style, as were pointed out by the Art members at that time (Luya and Nicu will maybe remember ;-)). I've finally ended with this:

I'd say, not bad for a first try, but this icon is no longer in Echo... I've replaced it much later with desing more consistent with our new apporach to echo.

The slight shift in design is nicely seen e.g. on these icons:

And now we're even starting something even more different – Echo Perspective. Here are some expamples of the initial progress:

Well, you might ask why starting anew when there are already great themes like tango or oxygen, what will happen to the original Echo and much more, why don't we rather join tango, … We cannot give you straight answers. It happend so that we like Echo and would like to see it being default in Fedora sometime in the future, but we also need to keep up with others – and that means perspective projection. We believe that neither Echo nor Echo Perspective is a lost case and that there are reason strong enough for us to continue working on these, but you might disagree. Well, at least, with the perspective theme, we can share a lot with tango or oxygen. Even though we have different style, the shapes can now be very similar and it should not be hard in the future to easily adapt echo-perspective icons to tango or oxygen guidelines.

And how far have I gone? In short very far. In longer – from an ocassional contributor to main contributor and practicaly the Echo Icon Theme project leader... Also as you can see from the images above, my inkscape skills have improved a lot ;-)

As you can see, on my very example, it's not actually hard to join Echo. Yep, the standars were risen a bit, but so was the infrastructure and we can call our project mature now. And we will be happy to welcome new contributors. Don't be shy and share your work/ideas with us. We will in turn help you to became a full-fledged Echo Icon Theme contributor :-) Fedora-art-list is the right place to start.

Comments Moderation

2009-02-16T10:26:00.003+01:00

Due to the vast amount of spam I've been recieving recently in comments to my blog posts, I've decided to enable comment moderation. This means all new comments will be reviewed by me before they are showed in the comments. Sorry for the inconvenience. I promise I'll filter only spam :)