desktop November 2006

desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org

24 participants
15 discussions

New Fedora GTK Theme
by Andrea Cimitan 02 Jan '07

02 Jan '07

Hi community, I'm Andrea Cimitan (aka Cimi), a gnome themer from Italy. :) Probably you had known my name in gnomelook.org, there I'm Cimi86, and I've created a lot of themes like Murrine GTK2 Cairo Engine (http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=42755, http://cimi.netsons.org/pages/murrine.php) and Candido Themes. I was thinking about a new proposal for Fedora Core GTK look. Do you know that Ubuntu has "Ubuntulooks" as default theme engine, so I thought "Why Fedora couldn't have Murrine?". Feedbacks on gnomelook.org and polls on Ubuntu Forums hilight that Murrine is the favourite Engine of Linux Desktop users. That's why I'm proposing to you. Murrine is a new-conception GTK2 Cairo engine, it was a fork of Clearlooks code with a lot of improvements and bugfixes: its best feature is surely the "options" through which the users can easily change the look of all the themes (There's a GUI here: http://cimi.netsons.org/pages/murrine/configurator.php) The engine is completely without bugs (it features support from gnome devs like benzea that helped me in the bugfix process) and it is is incredibly fast, nearly 50% faster than Clearlooks-Cairo and more if you compare it to Ubuntulooks. I think fedora could _at least_ add murrine to a repository, and then I can provide a fantastic color scheme for the fedora desktop. This is my proposale, I'm absolutely available to support you and to start a good discussion on it. I'm sure you will take care of these ideas so we can start a constructive thread to support or against it. See you!! Cimi - Andrea Cimitan

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Fedora Community anbody?
by Thilo Pfennig 30 Nov '06

30 Nov '06

As things are today (see thread Re: directions in Fedora desktop project), it seems if users who want to contribute to Fedora but want to contribute would have to make a community version of the community project Fedora. I am not saying that I think that this sounds good or makes sense. Generally said I would like a project that takes the software that Fedora has and built a community and distribution of its own. So this project would not have to follow any of the considerations that Red Hat or Fedora Board has ever taken. I would enable everybody to contribute, again. So something like Fedora Unity but with a different flavour and sure no Fedora in its name or logo, although following some Fedora paths in future development. As I have heard making branches of Fedora should become easier. Maybe this would be a choice? Thilo -- Thilo Pfennig PfennigSolutions - Wiki-Systeme http://www.pfennigsolutions.de/

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directions in Fedora desktop project
by Thilo Pfennig 30 Nov '06

30 Nov '06

Hi all, I would like to take the chance to try to convince on a last attempt the Fedora project to change its path. The problem starts if you try to find the right list to post such an article. There seems to be no list for discussing the Fedora project!? There are the more or less readonly or readprotected lists, there is a general fedora-list, one for martketing,... - This list is the best guess I could make although I assume desktop means desktop enviroment. Anyway, I just want to post this now. My general criticism is that Fedora is not a real community project. This can clearly be seen by the mailing list structure (as the future of Fedora can not really be discussed by the users). Fedora has stated to be a meritocracy ( http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ#head-b9eb81965c2ef7b97979c8b3a9ba587b52da… ). There is a system of Ambassadors. Different from Ubuntu one can say that it is generally not wanted that users take the distribution into their own hands and make their own marketing. Who is ambassador? "Ambassadors program is a meritocracy, so the ones who have shown that they are actively doing the right thing will be best candidates." The basic principle in Fedora is distrusting the users. Fedora is affraind that users would do marketing or do other things that hurt the organisation. The strange thing is that Fedora initially was ment to be a community project. If one would take this approach seriously we would have to start a community project for the community project, as Fedora contains of free software and take the power away from Fedora Foundations and Boards. I can not think of anything more stupid as to create a community project and than to try to destroy the community by separating them into different categories - also stating officially a meritocracy as wanted status. Where as community and meritocracy can not be combined. In the book "wisdom of the crowds" one can learn how intelligent masses can be. Fedora has managed to keep the positive influense of the crowds out effectively. Some measures I (again) like to criticize are: The wiki policies: * I think Fedora project is more or less the only wiki of all oepn source projects which does not allow anonymous contributions nor contributions by simple registered users. * Who every wants to contribute has to give Red Hat non-exclusive rights to relicense his or her content * Fedora chose to use the OPL which is deprecated by the invenstors of the license and has a bad reputation. Choosing this license does mean that content can neither be shared with other documentations or the Wikipedia who whose the GFDL nor with any new projects that use the successor licenses of OPL (Creative Commons). This in fact means that no one can use the content of fedoraproject.org in other projects, nor does anybody can import any conten from orher projects to fedoraproject org. So this means redundancy, that means less sharing. * The action that had taken place and the decision where intransparent and not discussed in the wiki, it was expected that people would read the mailing lists. On the marketing approach I think Fedora has a very hard job against Ubuntu and that is not just because Ubuntu is giving live medias for free but also because it is unwanted that users show activity if they do not plan to become official ambassadors. This is why I have installed Ubuntu on many machines for private users although I myself like to use Fedora much more. My guess is that Fedora could easily have 10 or 20 times more users if it would change policy. What I constantly asking myself is why Fedora does not want to eb successful? Do such policies come from Red Hat where one is used to exclude people because of company policy? I think today in distributions or software is is all about communitities, the software itself, the companies do not matter. The software or distributions who gets the most attention and love from the community will succeed. Users and developers tend to switch their favourite software more and more often, so most people will not have one distribution that they advocate. They advicate what they use and like. I can also talk about myself: I would never become an official Ambassador of any distribution but I love to do all for the software I really like. Fedora does not trust people like me. Why should I trust Fedora? Why should I use Fedora? Right now I use it because it is technically the best Linux distro that I know. The community in Germany really is quasi non-existent and I am not allowed to make small corrections to the Fedora wiki that I know are there for months (and I do not want to search for anybody who has signed the CLA to inform him), That is just plain stupid. Does Fedora Board want people to create a community project for Fedora? Does this make any sense? I mean Fedora was made out of Red Hat to allow easier contribution (as one goal) - actually I do not think it is easier to contribute to Fedora now as to contribute to RHEL. Fedora is very old school from its approach, distrusting its own users, not letting lose of control,... I think that it is sad to see such a good distribution sunken in organisational congealment. I think a huge switch in policy needs to be made. I know many Fedora users and Ex-Fedora users think the same. Maybe Fedora gets a little push from Novell that acts even more stupid, but in the long run I'd like to see Fedora moving differently And: No, I don't want to be an Ambassador, I like to see less Meritocracy and more Anarchy to revive Fedora. In Germany Red Hat traditionally was weak and in my Linux group in my home town no one uses it and I also have never met anybody who uses it as well. And I really can not stand behind Fedora and recommend users to use it, till all those things will not be cleared up. I wanted to get this post out for months and like to see if things will change or at least are discussed. Thilo see also http://vinci.wordpress.com/2006/06/06/frustrated-about-fedora-policies/ -- Thilo Pfennig PfennigSolutions - Wiki-Systeme http://www.pfennigsolutions.de/

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Smaller menu space?
by Eli Barzilay 29 Nov '06

29 Nov '06

Is there a way to get the whole menu in a single entry point? Something similar to the way it used to be back in the Good Old Days. (I'm trying to minimize screen use on a small desktop, and I rarely use the mouse so there's no use for wasting a quarter-screen-wide portion of the panel on three labels.) -- ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay: http://www.barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!

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Multiple gnome sessions/panels on console and on VNC
by Eli Barzilay 29 Nov '06

29 Nov '06

Starting gnome-session in a VNC session is impossible if it's already running on the console. I can run gnome-panel on the VNC session, but that has lots of problems -- for example, the desktop switcher refuses to appear in the VNC session, and a panel that I have on the bottom-right corner of the (1024x768) screen in the VNC session makes the same panel on the (much bigger) console screen hop over to the same position which is now in the middle of the screen. I've even gave up on any useful corner panel (reverted to the ancient Sawfish pager thingy instead) -- and there are still an annoying problem: every time the VNC session is closed, the panel is trying to resurrect itself on the console, which leads to an error dialog that there's a pannel there allready -- and requires clicking OK about 120 times for it to go away. Is there any sane way to use Gnome on both my console and a separate VNC session? (I don't believe that I'm the only one left that is crazy enough to have two sessions running on a single machine...) -- ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay: http://www.barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!

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Icon Theme
by Leo 29 Nov '06

29 Nov '06

Hi there, The Tango project has become the one true style guide for free software theming. A few heavy weight apps such as gnome, inkscape, gimp and openoffice.org are or will be using tango style icons. The project's developers are of high profile and the quality of the icons is without doubt the best. I followed a few Tango_Fridays¹ in irc #tango and was much impressed. As you can see in Tango_Fridays¹, more and more upstream apps will be adopting their icons. Today I visited the EchoDevelopment² after a few months, my feeling was not good. But my biggest concerns is that although Echo is using tango naming specs, its style (perspective, color palette etc) is different. This will put Fedora in a situation as Bluecurve does - inconsistency across the desktop. Inconsistency will definitely compromise usability. So what's the way out? Changing Echo to fit into the universe of tango style icons? Put Echo on hold and use tango for Fedora 7? Please comment. Thank you! Footnotes: ¹ http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Fridays ² http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/EchoDevelopment?highlight=%28echo%29 -- Leo

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(fonts) wikipedia challenge
by Rik van Riel 27 Nov '06

27 Nov '06

It looks like with all the fonts from FC6 and Fedora Extras, I can display almost every font from http://wikipedia.org/ Almost! There still appear to be 4 fonts missing from Fedora that are used on the wikipedia front page. We also lack some glyphs in for example the Canadian Aboriginal Syllable, as used by the Inuit and the Cree (and others?). I remember when Linux had no truetype fonts and almost no special fonts (10 years ago), so I am impressed that we have gotten this far. Right now I'm at that "so close, yet so far" frustrating feeling. Does anybody know if there are freely redistributable fonts available that would allow us to render the remaining languages out of the box? Is anybody willing to help search? Is this a worthy goal for Fedora Linux 7? :) -- Politics is the struggle between those who want to make their country the best in the world, and those who believe it already is. Each group calls the other unpatriotic.

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New Fedora Theme (GTK2+Metacity) (Download, Fixed index.theme)
by Andrea Cimitan 24 Nov '06

24 Nov '06

Here it is... Requires "Murrine Gtk2 Engine" version 0.31 otherwise you will have no gtk2 look. Please use with the added metacity. Notes: Under development... It's just a simple theme to see Murrine capabilities... To customize the look you can do in two ways: 1)Install Murrine configurator and edit with the GUI (recommended): http://cimi.netsons.org/pages/murrine/configurator.php 2)If you want less roundness edit gtkrc of the theme and set roundness to 3 (clearlooks roundness) or 0,1 to a squared one. set glazestyle = 1 for a "curved" hilight on glaze instead flat ones. See attachments for the archive. Best Regards -- Cimi - Andrea Cimitan http://cimi.netsons.org

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New Fedora Metacity for Murrine
by Andrea Cimitan 21 Nov '06

21 Nov '06

After fixing last (for the moment) bugs in murrine (thx Matthias Clasen) I've done a simple metacity to fit the theme: http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/4841/fedorametacityuh6.png Hope you like this. -- Cimi - Andrea Cimitan http://cimi.netsons.org

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New Fedora Theme (GTK2+Metacity) (Download)
by Andrea Cimitan 18 Nov '06

18 Nov '06

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desktop November 2006