Some Things Suck

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

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):

Fedora 14 Beta Artwork Goodies

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.

F14 Laughlin Wallpapers Package

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.

F14 Artwork Update

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

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).