desktop December 2009

desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org

18 participants
19 discussions

upwards and onwards
by Matthias Clasen 13 Mar '10

13 Mar '10

F12 is almost done ! I think we have produced one of our best releases yet. Thanks to everybody who has helped making it a great desktop. As always, there are many exciting new things: Abrt, Bluetooth networking and sound, Dracut, Empathy, IPv6, Thusnelda, etc. But we have also put a lot of effort into making this work well and look sharp. And it shows ! There are certainly still bugs to be found and fixed, and we will spend some time after the release mostly focused on handling incoming bugs, probably until around the time that GNOME 2.28.2 is released (right before Christmas). Even so, there are some changes to the Desktop spin that I want to make early in the F13 cycle, and that I want to outline here: - Drop the CD size limitation and target a larger usb stick. We have discussed this in the past. The main motivation for this is that we have to fight every release cycle to make things fit on a CD, and we don't have room to include our default office suite or example content. - Include OpenOffice instead of abiword. OpenOffice is the premier open source office suite, and abiword is on the current live CD purely for size reasons. - Use shotwell as the default photo management app instead of gthumb. This may be a bit of a surprise for some. Shotwell is a relatively new application, that is in Fedora only since F12. I have mentioned it on this list before. The 0.3.0 release that has just come out is very close to the feature set that we'd ideally expect to have in a default photo management app. It also starts very fast. - Remove remaining Bluecurve icons from fedora-gnome-theme. This will probably leave some holes in the menus, and we'll need help from artists to fill those. - Include example content. We've wanted to do this for a long time, but CD size limitations have always prohibited it. Now we can do it, but of course, we still need to collect good material. If you have proposals for suitably licensed documents, movies, music, etc that are interesting, cool or just funny, let us know ! It might also be a good idea to include some promotional material that could be of use for Fedora ambassadors. If you have proposals in this direction, let us know as well ! Beyond these organizational changes to the live image, I think a focus of our feature work for F13 will be around software installation and updates. Some of our thoughts for how installation and updates should ideally behave can be found on the wiki: http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/UpdateExperience http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/InstallExperience For application installation, Martin Bacovsky has already started working on an online application database that is tied to pkgdb: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-October/msg01083.html Some of us will be at FUDCon in a few weeks, where we can hopefully discuss these ideas in more depth. Matthias

9 11

deja-dup Desktop Backup tool
by Rahul Sundaram 10 Mar '10

10 Mar '10

Hi, Are there any plans to include a good backup tool for the desktop by default? I have put up deja-dup for review if anyone is interested in checking it out https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=540761 Frontend for duplicity (which uses rsync library and gpg keys for encryption) written in Vala. It is a simple backup tool for GNOME and integrates with Nautilus bookmarks etc. Features: • Support for local or remote backup locations, including Amazon S3 • Securely encrypts and compresses your data • Incrementally backs up, letting you restore from any particular backup • Schedules regular backups • Integrates well into your GNOME desktop Rahul

5 9

packaging tidbits
by Matthias Clasen 05 Jan '10

05 Jan '10

Quick reminder, there have been some changes in the packaging guidelines that affect many desktop packages: - the standard icon cache snipplet has been reworked: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:ScriptletSnippets#Icon_Cache - scrollkeeper-update calls are no longer required: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:ScriptletSnippets#Scrollkeeper It might be worth cleaning those things up in passing while updating packages. Matthias

2 3

HAL removal Feature page
by Bastien Nocera 05 Jan '10

05 Jan '10

Heya, I've created this page to track the removal of HAL (hopefully) for F13: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/HalRemoval Could you please check your package and add them to the list if: - they rely on HAL or libhal - they rely on gnome-vfs2 (which still requires HAL, and is deprecated) - they rely on libgnomeui (which requires gnome-vfs2) We're only tracking Desktop spin applications, and applications you'd expect to see installed on GNOME desktops. Cheers

4 4

Re: Focus Follows Mouse
by Rob Riggs 28 Dec '09

28 Dec '09

"Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote: > On 12/20/2009 11:09 PM, Rob Riggs wrote: >>> But please make it easy to set my preferences. Please >>> bring a little Christmas cheer to the Gnome world and make "Window >>> Preferences" part of the default Gnome desktop installation again! > > Correction forgot to add Add/Remove Software there.. as in > > If it's not in the menu in F12 on you system you can either go System > --> Administration --> Add/Remove Software type control-center-extra in > the search field and hash it.. Yes -- that's the part I am asking the Fedora Desktop team to fix. It should be put back into the default install (control-center) instead of being relegated to the obscure control-center-extra package. Rob

1 0

Tracker 0.7.x?
by Debarshi Ray 21 Dec '09

21 Dec '09

Tracker 0.7.12 was released a few days back and upstream is planning to start making stable releases after Christmas. Are there any plans to update Tracker in Fedora (13 or 14) from the ancient 0.6.95 that we have now? Thanks, Debarshi -- One reason that life is complex is that it has a real part and an imaginary part. -- Andrew Koenig

1 0

Focus Follows Mouse
by Rob Riggs 21 Dec '09

21 Dec '09

Hi all, This is an editorial comment for the Fedora desktop developers. I've just done my first Fedora install since 8 or 9 with Fedora 12. Why is it now so difficult to set up "focus follows mouse" under Gnome? Click to focus is just annoying. It sucked for me when "click to focus" became the default, but I could live with finding the desktop preference and setting it. But it makes this user really annoyed (Grrr!) that I have to ask about it on some mailing list, install an obscure package, and change the setting. I get the feeling the the desktop developers think they know better than the user. Look, I *can* work either way -- I live with "focus follows mouse" on Windows. But this is one of the key reasons that Linux is my primary desktop -- it sucks less and "focus follows mouse" is one of the big reasons for that, especially when using multiple desktops. Point and type -- not point, click, type. (Yes, I know it can be changed on Windows.) It is especially annoying when not only does focus require a click, but that click also raises the window. I want focus and raising to be separate operations. There are plenty of operations that work much better with the focus window not being on top of the window stack. Forcing the window I want on top is a PITA that focus follows mouse avoids. I don't care to impose my preferences on anyone. I am not asking for "focus follows mouse" to be the default (though that would be my preference). But please make it easy to set my preferences. Please bring a little Christmas cheer to the Gnome world and make "Window Preferences" part of the default Gnome desktop installation again! Thanks, Rob

2 2

gnome-applets
by Bill Nottingham 16 Dec '09

16 Dec '09

Why is this a mandatory package at this stage of the desktop? Unless I missed something, we don't ship any of these applets in the default panel config, and it's not required by anything on a normal desktop install. Bill

4 4

GObject-introspection enablement
by Bastien Nocera 15 Dec '09

15 Dec '09

Heya, I've fixed gir-repository building, and am currently building gnome-bluetooth with introspection support. If you have a library or program that provides introspection, it would be nice for you to enable it. If you run into any problems, feel free to poke at people on the #fedora-desktop channel on GIMPNet, or drop a mail here. Cheers

3 2

Fedora release criteria completely revised
by Adam Williamson 11 Dec '09

11 Dec '09

During FUDCon, we've been working on revising the Fedora release criteria. John Poelstra had already fleshed out a structure and much of the final content, and we've been revising and tweaking it in conjunction with QA (myself, Will Woods and James Laska), release engineering (Jesse Keating), anaconda team (especially Denise Dumas and Peter Jones) and desktop team (Christopher Aillon and Matthias Clasen, who provided suggestions at an earlier stage). The new structure is based around a general page and specific pages for the Fedora 13 Alpha, Beta and Final releases (which have been written generically so they can easily be converted into pages for F14 and all future releases just by copying and pasting). You can find the criteria here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Criteria https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Alpha_Release_Criteria https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Beta_Release_Criteria https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Final_Release_Criteria they should contain everything you need to know. We based most of the criteria around testing that was already being carried out but with no formal policy basis, with additional suggestions from the anaconda and desktop teams. We will follow these criteria for the Fedora 13 release process. So if you can see any problems or potential trouble with any of this, please do reply and let us know! Desktop team - can you please let us know of any additional things that you would expect to be working at each point during the release cycle? Note that only things that *must* be working at each point should be listed on these pages, not nice-to-haves. You must be able to commit to the idea that, if any criterion on the page is not met, we would slip the release in question. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net

3 5

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

desktop December 2009