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Indicator ME has landed!

December 7th, 2010 by

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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6 Responses to “Indicator ME has landed!”

  1. Great job! Thanks for doing that work: we do want to make everybody happy with openSUSE 🙂

  2. Anshul

    Awesome job! Ubuntu has some very nice tweaks added to the stock GNOME desktop. I noticed that the border around the Ambiance there is not “circular” and is “rectangular”. I was frustrated by this as well, but managed to patch Metacity through an Ubuntu patch called 13_better_support_for_button_layout.patch. I have the patchedMetacity at :- http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anshuljain/openSUSE_11.3/src/metacity-2.30.1-4.1.src.rpm. This will take care of the rounding issue. If you use Compiz then it breaks again. You need to re-compile Compiz against the Metacity with the patch I mentioned (against the metacity-devel).

    I do hope you maintain your packages for 11.3 as well 🙂

  3. Anshul

    Edit:- This is how the patched Ambiance theme looks on my openSUSE install :- http://www.imagebam.com/image/2f69f0109380559. In the background is a locally compiled Nautilus Elementary Mod 🙂

  4. Andrea

    any hope to have that into OSS repo?

    • Nelson Marques

      That’s a complicated question… I would love to have it available for all the openSUSE users… that’s the main idea. I will push some indicators to GNOME:Apps alongside with the dependencies for their correct projects, but not all.

      I will also keep some patched alternative software on my repository to go with it (ex: nm-applet, empathy, etc).

      And if someone wants to start/help on creating a repository for the Ubuntu’s Ayatana project, I can donate everything I’ve done already.

  5. Markus

    Does this IBERIA project also mean that Kubuntu’s global menu bar patches will be included?
    It’s the only piece I miss in my Plasma Desktop from Kubuntu but since *buntu’s base OS is too bleeding edge for my taste, I like openSUSE