livecd hacking
by Colin Walters
I've done some work on the Live CD kickstart images, available here:
http://submind.verbum.org/~walters/livecd.git/
(Until Jeremy returns from vacation and can review patches to be put in
the main livecd git repository)
The most important change so far is to create
"livecd-desktop-minimal.ks" which is then used as a basis for:
livecd-fedora-desktop.ks
livecd-fedora-kde.ks
livecd-online-desktop.ks
Rather than each thing duplicating a lot of code for the livecd init
script, etc.
The online-desktop is just a stub right now while I fix up some issues,
but I've booted the livecd-fedora-desktop successfully
(livecd-desktop-minimal.ks also boots...into twm! Retro.).
Admittedly I haven't tested the KDE one, but moving forward this
unforking should help us to identify changes common between them which
seem like good candidates for comps or Fedora package changes.
Sebastian, since you were the last person to touch the KDE bits, could
you have a look at these changes?
I also added a number of improvements to livecd-creator, the git log has
the gory details.
15 years, 6 months
speech recognition for simple commands
by Marius Andreiana
Hi,
Are there any plans on including speech recognition in Fedora? (using
sphinx4 and at-spi maybe)
I'm looking only to simple commands translation (click, page up, close
window...), not full speech recognition.
Thanks,
--
Marius Andreiana
15 years, 7 months
f8 desktop livecd
by Colin Walters
Hi,
Some people may not know that in Fedora 7, there was a difference
between the DVD and the Live CD. What happened is (as far as I
understand it) David Zeuthen took a look at things, and exercised a bit
of editorial control by using the kickstart file - ship NetworkManager
enabled by default, for example. This is exactly what Fedora as a
desktop needs; a place for people who care about the experience as a
desktop to do those quick fixes that may be hard to change in the Fedora
base.
So, following a quick huddle with a few people from the Red Hat desktop
team, we decided to make this LiveCD kickstart file a bit more of a
project. Actually, the project already exists:
http://git.fedoraproject.org/?p=hosted/livecd;a=summary
So this mail is just to say that this project exists (and I know a lot
of people didn't know about the difference), and will move forward. For
Fedora 8, it would make sense to more prominently distinguish this
version as the Desktop version.
Ideally of course, this project will be minimal - for example, the work
to make NetworkManager usable on servers makes sense, and should
continue.
15 years, 7 months
modemlights applet
by Matthias Clasen
Ever since upstream gnome-applets made the modemlights applet depend
on gnome-system-tools, we used to include the old modemlights applet
from gnome 2.9 in the gnome-applets package. This is obviously
problematic, since that code is not maintained at all, and it refuses
to build against current kernel headers now. Therefore, I have dropped
it from the gnome-applets package in rawhide now.
There are some options for people who really depend on the
modemlights applet:
- start maintaining the old modemlights applet and package it separately
- convince upstream to make the gnome-system-tools dependency optional
- package gnome-system-tools for Fedora
- make sure that the ppp that is going to appear in NetworkManager
meets your needs
Matthias
15 years, 7 months
F8 desktop features
by Matthias Clasen
Given that test1 is around the corner, I thought it might be a good idea
to give a little status update on the features that the desktop team has
been working on for F8:
NoMoreXFS - Done.
Bigboard - In test1, run god-mode 1 to turn it on and play with it.
Bluetooth - bluetooth printer support is in test1. Remaining Bluetooth
features are still being worked on upstream and will appear in rawhide
over time.
LaptopImprovements - the bulk of the keyboard and suspend/resume work
is in hal-info-20070725 and hal-0.5.10rc1 which narrowly missed test1
and will appear in rawhide soon.
PolicyKit - missed test1 by a few days, will appear in rawhide soon.
PulseAudio - not in test1, the changes to make PulseAudio play nicely
with fast user switching are done upstream.
CodecBuddy - not in test1.
NetworkManager - not on by default in test1. The necessary changes are
being worked on upstream, and the feature page says 70% done. I
heard that a 0.7 release might happen around test3 time, I hope we
can get a usable snapshot earlier than that.
BetterStartup - not targetting F8, since it depends on kernel features
that will not land in time.
15 years, 7 months
KDE 4 Beta 1
by jos poortvliet
Dear people,
The KDE project is about to release it's first beta for KDE 4. The package
tarballs are available, to allow distributions to package it. We would like
to know if your distribution will have packages available at or soon after
the official release date, so we can mention it in the announcement.
If so, please provide us with a link or location where to find those packages.
If you won't have packages right away, you can tell us when they will be
available, so we can mention that.
Thank you for your coöperation,
The KDE promo team
kde-promo(a)kde.org
--
Jos Poortvliet
KDE-nl
http://www.kde.nl
http://www.kde.org
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
A: Because it destroys the flow of the conversation
Q: Why is top-posting bad?
15 years, 8 months
Making Fedora Default Theme (release independent stuff)
by Martin Sourada
Hi,
I am new to this list and subscribed mostly because I posted a message
to art-list recently [1] that contains things that should be discussed
at desktop-list as well. It's about making default theme for fedora -
that means making our gtk/qt(4) theme, metacity/kwm/emerald theme,
notification-daemon theme and maybe more. It should be release
independent. There are some questions that need to be answered first. I
attach the original message for more info. I'd like to ask you for your
opinion about it.
Thanks,
Martin
References:
[1]
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2007-July/msg00023.html
15 years, 8 months
An idea about representing groups of programs as one entity
by Rogue
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Hi All,
Recently I had a brain-wave (or brain damage if you will) and came out
with an idea of extended menu items.
I tried to formulate my ideas in a blog entry[1] that I posted a few
days ago and was hoping to take it up with a usability group.
I would request you to please read the blog entry since I have put
together some screen shots too on it.
The idea is simple:
1. A lot of applications can be identified as providing the same "feature"
2. In my menu items i see the "feature" as compared to a list of
applications
3. This "Feature" item can either be drilled in order to get access to
the various "feature-providers", or can be clicked to launch the
"preferred" application
4. You can configure your preferred application via the
preferred-applications UI.
I am not sure if such an idea has already been discussed here or not. If
it has, then I would appreciate if someone can point me to the archives
that contains the discussion, so that I might be able to better
understand the pros and cons of such an approach.
thanks,
Rogue
[1] - http://roguexz.blogspot.com/2007/07/problem-of-many.html
p.s.: I posted the same mail to the GNOME Usability list and haven't
heard anything!, so I thought I shall try to refine the idea out here
first before I take it back upstream.
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15 years, 8 months
Fedora 8 Boot Process
by Brian Tate
I was reading the feature list for Fedora 8 and was disappointed when I
came across the "Better Startup Experience".
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup
After reading the "Plan for improvement" section, I find it
discomforting such a major change will be done to the existing very
working/stable rhgb boot process.
1) Do away with the grub menu by default
Why? That is the first question that came to mind. A large number of
linux users dual-boot multiple OSes. It also is useful when you have
multiple kernel versions installed; if you set the time-out to 3 seconds
do you really notice it?
2) Switch to graphical Mode in initrd, draw an animation....
I have an animation now in rhgb, and as a bonus I can see all my
services loading if I hit the "more" button. I trust this feature will
not go away?
3) rhgb goes away
?reinvent the wheel?
This sounds a lot like the useless Mac OS X boot sequence in which a
little circle is animated in the middle of the screen. That tells the
user nothing what is going on in the boot process and is a pile of crap.
Almost as brilliant as the Windows Vista loading screen.
I'd be curious to hear others thoughts on this; I can't be the only user
out there who likes to know his system is indeed booting up and what it
is doing. Is this really the direction we want for the fedora-desktop
environment? Simply cloning other OSes poor user interface decisions?
15 years, 8 months
