The first package I pushed to openSUSE was Notify OSD (Canonicals Notification Agent/Bubble) with a small patch for extended features (skinning/theming) maintained by Roman Sukochev. This patch is popular and wasn’t merged with Notify OSD because it ‘breaks’ the spec of Notify OSD that states it shouldn’t be skinnable/themable on Ubuntu.

Now I’ve packaged a lot of dependencies… cracked and patched GTK with a patch taken from Ubuntu, spended hours of mind crushing frustration…. but finally it has landed! The first ‘Indicator’ has landed… Often known as “Ubuntu Me Menu”, under openSUSE it will be known as ‘indicator-me’.

This screenshot was taken on openSUSE Factory 11.4 Milestone 4. It’s a clean install with Sonar and the only tweak is the Faenza-Dark icon theme, which I also packaged and pushed to openSUSE:Contrib.

Top right corner… Indicator ME on openSUSE. It works… I won’t backport it and will only maintain it from 11.4 forward. I’m doing this for personal reasons, mainly to become an alternative on a localized openSUSE Spin that will be named ‘openSUSE IBERIA’, which was already taken into openSUSE-Project by Javier Llorente.

The main reason to bring this to openSUSE and into IBERIA is tightly related to the fact that most people on the Iberian Peninsula use Ubuntu, so we find the best approach possible to offer something as close as Ubuntu and hopefully even a better offer when it comes to localization. We don’t want to make of openSUSE a ‘clone’ of Ubuntu, instead we want to make the openSUSE experience more close to what people already use.

I’m also going to post a small pic of the same software, this time with Canonical’s Radiance Theme, which introduces a small ‘tab’ like visual on the bar. This theme is awesome… regardless of what people think of Ubuntu and Canonical… This is the kind of polishing that makes Canonical successful, not just the ‘marketing’ many point and even despise.

Indicator ME as landed… soon others will follow… My plans are to submit this pieces of software to GNOME:Apps, and not to push as default, but instead offer them at the distance of a ‘zypper in package’ to the openSUSE users out there. And at the same time, since the libraries behind it are also packaged… be more attractive to developers who might want to use them. I see no loss neither an identity crisis on openSUSE by providing more packages and alternative software to improve users Desktop experience…

Future work (after indicators):
* Synapse Launcher;
* Unity (depending on some wild dependencies and some progress in understanding cmake).

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