Change is sometimes good, but…

…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…

… 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

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

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

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 ;-)