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Indicators for GNOME2 – Update

February 19th, 2011 by

Canonical has been very active and released quite an impressive amount of bug fixes and features for their Ayatana Project software. I’ve been doing the updates, sent a couple of tiny patches upstream (mainly packaging issues) and with the RC1, I am very happy with the results accomplished.

Regarding this project, I’ve seen news, blog posts and lots of feedback from several distribution users. I’ve found contents in German, Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese), English, Russian and Spanish. For the most I believe everyone is happy this is happening.

During the next week, I’m going to conduct an open-beta for the GNOME2 indicators from which I hope to get some feedback and improve things so that once openSUSE 11.4 is release, those users willing to use this software can do it safely, and off course in an openSUSE way, a rock solid and featured GNOME experience.

I’ve created a pattern which will duplicated in the GNOME:Ayatana repository named ‘gnome2-indicators’ which will install the 5 base indicators on Ubuntu Natty. About this indicators and some previous comments that I’ve seen online, I would like to clarify a couple of things:

* All the software is built on top of ‘openSUSE stack’, so we’re not really converting Ubuntu to RPM’s.
* The patch level applied from Ubuntu is minimum, only the mandatory feature patches were applied on pure openSUSE stack. Some of this features weren’t upstreamed, while others were turned down, so GNOME:Ayatana will also provide the modified software required, this is the case of GTK+ (2.0) which is properly tested and no issues were found against the regular GTK+ stack on 11.4.
* I’ve patched and built applications like Metacity, Empathy and gnome-session to enable functionality with the Indicators. I’m also serving this patched versions through GNOME:Ayatana, without them, there wouldn’t really be a pleasant indicator experience for openSUSE users. I would love to see community contributions to GNOME:Ayatana for all of those that aren’t available yet. Don’t be shy, we don’t bite! (A big plus is that you can actually learn a lot, and the openSUSE GNOME Team is very friendly and helpful. If you really want to help and improve yourself, step forward!.

Now for real… what does the GNOME2 Indicator pattern offers?

1. A 99% working Session Indicator, from where users can perform several session related tasks (ex: logout, restart, switch users, hibernate, etc). The only feature I know it’s not present is the “restart/relog” option after software updates. If anyone want to work this indicator to work with PackageKit / YaST or zypper, would be probably a big plus and significative contribution to openSUSE and upstream.

2. The ME Menu, which appears to be fully functional.

3. A simple clock indicator. This indicator is under very active development, and displays a simple calendar/clock with options to manage appointments (through Evolution). The ‘date/time’ configurations are disabled because on openSUSE we use YaST for it. Except for this, everything seems to be working.

4. Sound Menu indicator… the (in)famous Sound indicator from Ubuntu, which displays an horizontal slide bar for sound volume management and fully integrates with Banshee. Since I’m recent convert to Banshee from Totem because of the development of this project, I’ve also packaged and made available from GNOME:Ayatana two extensions:
* banshee-extension-soundmenu – Enables integration with soundmenu, really a plus/must if Banshee is your preferred multimedia player;
* banshee-extension-indicator – A Banshee indicator. I’ve only really packaged this because it offers integration with Notify OSD, the indicator itself is less featured than the traditional gnome extension.

5. The Messaging Menu – Another controversial indicator… Currently it’s working with Empathy (patched with libindicate on GNOME:Ayatana), xchat, evolution and gwibber. Other applications like pidgin are known to work up to a certain point. This indicator grabs any incoming messaging and alerts the user for it. It’s not really that bad once you get used to it (takes a couple of hours).

Additionally to  this, Notify OSD is also available for openSUSE 11.4, and doesn’t require any extra repository. openSUSE 11.4 ships with a version of Notify OSD that allows the user to skin/theme it in several ways. This behavior isn’t enabled on Ubuntu and relies on a patched refused by upstream by Roman Sokuchev. The development project for this package is GNOME:Apps, and my thanks to Vincent Untz and Dominique L. for helping with the process.

During next week, GNOME:Ayatana will be populated and a free open BETA will be start to gather feedback amongst our users.

A side note… Yesterday an update for Sound Menu was issued by Canonical and it deeply relies on libnotify >= 0.7.0. openSUSE 11.4 will ship with libnotify 0.6.0 and therefore I’m not committing more changes to Sound Menu and will only fix critical issues if found for this package.

After openSUSE 11.4 is released, I’ll start working on implementing this for GNOME3, and hopefully now I will have enough time to try to push them to Factory for openSUSE 12 (or whatever it will be called).

Contributions are accepted in any area not covered by me, or fixing  stuff, and also very important, in the KDE field. About Unity… here’s a riddle: “How can you tell if a ghost is about to faint?”.

nmarques.

Posted in Desktop, GNOME | 9 Comments »

AppMenu-GTK and Indicator-appmenu

February 7th, 2011 by

This is probably one of the most controversial features that has been subject of continuous work from the Ayatana Project. This two pieces of software work as one and allow to export GTK+ application menus through DBus, being the end result: application menus present on the gnome-panel and unity-panel.

This feature requires at least one patch on GTK stack. I’ve talked to Ubuntu devs regarding this patch, and it was told to me that GTK+ upstream had no interest on upstreaming this patch. I’m not the one to comment this move from upstream, but I find it at least interesting that QT has upstreamed an identical patch which includes the same functionality. Since they are competing products (one can replace other totally or partially), such actions only strengthen QT. Adding a bit of speculation and the latest statements from Shuttleworth regarding QT, I wonder if it is to be expecting some ‘wind of change’… who knows?!

For us at openSUSE what does matter is if we can Factor’ize this at least the Menu Proxy patch so we can offer Unity and Indicators at the original form and not crippled. I will request soon this changes to GNOME:Factory and we’ll see what people say, regardless of upstream positions.

This is on-development software, and has some itches, but for the most it works (GTK+ applications), I would expect some polishing in the future from upstream, either way, it’s another option.

Required Patches on GTK:
*  043_ubuntu_menu_proxy.patch
*  072_indicator_menu_update.patch (still figuring if this is actually required and the possible sidekicks of not having it there)

Posted in GNOME | Comments Off on AppMenu-GTK and Indicator-appmenu

Notify-OSD in openSUSE 11.4

February 5th, 2011 by

My first contribution to openSUSE was Notify OSD, which is also a part of the Ayatana Project. On openSUSE version of Notify OSD, I’ve included a small patch made by Roman Sukochev which isn’t was upstreamed but declined on Ubuntu. This patch enabled skinning/theming of the Notification Bubble. Before submitting this package to GNOME:Apps, I’ve talked with Roman which confirmed that he would maintain the patch for upcoming versions of Notify OSD.

This patch handles the skinning of Notify OSD through a text file (~/.notify-osd). I’ve made available an application to configure Notify OSD. This application is known as notifyconf and is available currently on openSUSE:Contrib repositories.

The interface of notifyconf is very user friendly and intuitive. This two packages enable extra functionality not present currently in Ubuntu out of the box. I believe it is important to offer more possibilities to our users.

Installing Notify OSD is done through zypper for example “zypper install notify-osd”. For notifyconf the user is required to install the Contrib repository and install the package ‘notifyconf’ (depends on QT).

notifyconf

Notify OSD replaces the package ‘notification-daemon’ and can be used either in KDE or in GNOME (same for notifyconf). This is optional software for those who want a different desktop experience. I’m thankful to Vincent Untz, Dominique and Peter Linell for allowing this two applications to be a part of the openSUSE Desktop. Also a word of thanks to the Ayatana Project Team for making this software available.

Posted in GNOME | 1 Comment »

A simple clock indicator (indicator-datetime)

February 3rd, 2011 by

I’ve neglected this indicator since the first day because it drove me into package dependencies that aren’t used in openSUSE (we use YaST and not system-tools-backends and friends).

The documentation of Unity suggests that if no indicators are present, Unity will use the notifications from GNOME. This is very interes

ting, but from the debugging I’ve done from the Unity Panel, I’ve found it it scans the indicators directory and loads whatever it finds there. So it will eventually find something. One of the coolest features in Unity Indicators and the one I’m currently working on, is ‘appmenu-gtk’ which removes the menu from GTK+ applications and displays it on the unity-panel. This is interesting and the behavior is actually a bit different from OSX. The window buttons are also placed very close to this indicator.

If we have such feature enabled, I suppose the panel will always pick up at least one indicator which might endanger the fallback to GNOME notification area. I’ve tested this yet (unity isn’t launched properly yet), but if this happens, it will be wise to have the whole stack of indicators. This explains why I had to build also this clock indicator despite it’s wicked dependencies (liboost, not used on openSUSE).

This is how it looks and minimal functionality is already enabled, though configurations aren’t because I haven’t implemented the whole backend, a

nd if this indicators are to reach Factory (which depends mainly on the patching on GTK+ and GDK Pixbuf), there is the need to pass this packages through SUSE Security Team. If the indicators are only to live on GNOME:Ayatana, then we skip this process (running this package dependencies through SUSE Security Team).

Here’s how it looks the current stack of indicators (there’s a couple more packaged, but I’m not using them at the moment, ex: nm-applet patched, indicator-network and friends).

Within the next days, I will I will make a 1 click installer and run a BETA phase for the Indicators/GNOME2.

Special Thanks to Didier Roche, Jorge Castro and Ken VanDine from Ubuntu/Canonical which have been hyper helpful answering questions and helping me accomplishing and overcoming several issue. Also to Malcolm Lewis (Novell/openSUSE) for keeping up with Compiz and other fixes for the requirements of Unity, and in general to openSUSE GNOME Team for keeping up the motivation and giving some awesome pointers in several GNOME related matters. This work so far has only been possible due to the commitment of all this people.

Posted in GNOME | 3 Comments »

Synapse – Semantic Launcher for GNOME

January 31st, 2011 by

Some time ago a openSUSE user mentioned to me if we had synapse available for openSUSE or what was required to have it around. I took a look into it and asked some advice in #opensuse-gnome regarding the availability of libzeitgeist which is one of the requirements to build this piece of software.

Some time ago Federico Quintero has posted a message on the opensuse-gnome mailing list regarding his work on the Zeitgeist stack. The rest of the dependencies for this package are provided by my work on the availability of Ubuntu’s software on openSUSE. From my work I took dee and libappindicator and builded a test package of synapse on home:ketheriel:ayatana. This package is here until I see this dependencies hit factory on time (libzeitgeist, dee and libappindicator). If anyone wants to test it out, go ahead.

I’m not sure of the functionality that should be present on this vala application, but for the time being I’ve disabled the Application Indicator on the build (needs hammering on the linking). I’ll take a closer look once I have some more free time. So far this should be working only for openSUSE Factory and openSUSE 11.4 milestones.

Synapse is a semantic file launcher (pretty much the same as hitting ALT+F2 on a GNOME session) with some crazy looks and a battalion of plugins. Once the dependencies are ok, I’ll maintain this package and push it to the GNOME:Apps repository.

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Posted in Desktop, GNOME | 2 Comments »

Unity on openSUSE: UPDATE

January 30th, 2011 by

Unity works as a plugin for Compiz using the glib mainloop. Currently the development version of Compiz available in OBS X11:Compiz already provides this requirement (glib mainloop) as a plugin. This version and two git snapshots I’ve builded were crashing heavilly, so I’ve decided to take  a closer look into Ubuntu’s packages and build from their sources on my devel project. This has proven wise as their snapshots (2010-11-25) with their patches removed the crashes on compiz.

The patches applied include the new unity-window-decorator which works fine. Here’s a small screenshot of GNOME’s System Monitor using Unity’s window decorator (which relies on a patch on metacity to enable UX Shadows).

The theme for this screenshot is Ambiance (also from Ubuntu) with a changed color scheme. This shot was taken on M6 with the newest FireGL drivers from ATI. I’ve noticed some changes on the blur effects on this driver, but I really can’t develop much.

I haven’t seen crashes on individual components when I test them (ex: unity-panel-service and unity-window-decorator), which seems to be a good pointer.

Currently I’m working out in porting the Unity wrapper and some scripts from Ubuntu to the reality on openSUSE as many files seem to be distributed on the filesystem in very different places. Just to name an example… compiz on openSUSE currently stores it’s profiles and stuff on $HOME/.config/compiz-1, and Unity is searching those files on $HOME/.compiz-1, and as such, fails to find them. This is where I’m currently placing my efforts. This should fix soon the ‘unity’ wrapper.

To make this short… Compiz isn’t crashing anymore or seg faulting, and Unity is picking up the information required from different file locations on the file system. Once fixed, we should have a running Unity for BETA soon.

My very special thanks to Malcolm Lewis for making the integration of Unity with Compiz possible in a very nice way and for fixing many bugs that allowed us to successfully build this packages.

As soon as we have more developments, those will be posted.

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Posted in Desktop, Distribution, Factory, GNOME, Packaging, X.org | Comments Off on Unity on openSUSE: UPDATE

Massive update on Ubuntu software…

January 20th, 2011 by

Screenshot using Radiance Light Theme and default Ubuntu indicator layout.

Some brief updates about the ongoing work towards bringing Ayatana Project software into openSUSE:

1. Software Updates

Canonical recently released a batch of updates which bring new functionality (Indicators seem to respond faster now) and very nice improvements, some of them contributed by down-streamers. From my humble experience I would risk to claim that Canonical is doing an excellent job as an upstreamer. I’ve updated all packages to the latest versions. This allowed to remove some patches.

2. Unity

Unity is now one step closer. For Unity I’ve started to package Compiz git snapshots from the correct branches pointed by Unity documentation. This brought something new to me, cmake. I’ve done this very slowly, reading some docs meanwhile about cmake. My packaging around Compiz is mainly based on OBS X11:Compiz repository, so pretty much all the credits should be for the original project Packagers which done an awesome job. Currently I’m missing only 3 packages to test Unity. Recently with kernel and mesa updates some issues around ATI hardware seem to have fixed for openSUSE Factory users, which enabled in my case FireGL, therefore I can test properly Unity now and check for the integration into openSUSE.

Unity by default uses the Ayatana’s Indicators, and if they are not present, it will fallback to GNOME’s applets. This is very nice and I’m thankful Canonical made it this way. This brings non-Ubuntu users the Unity experience at almost no trouble, since there isn’t actually much patching required to implement Unity.

3. GNOME:Ayatana Repository

GNOME:Ayatana Repository will be populated during the next two weeks with the latest changes and will provide for the time being the Ayatana’s Indicators and Unity. I am currently working around libappindicator stack and it’s Indicators. Currently I’m testing the patches required on the GTK+ stack and this is pretty much the last barrier before going into #STAGE2, polishing and populating GNOME:Ayatana.

It’s not decided yet what packages are going to present on Factory. My wish is to push only Unity into Factory and it’s dependencies, this might not happen for 11.4 as I’m not sure about the freeze schedules and it might be too late already, but since we’re depending on Compiz upstream, we’ll see what happens. Even if Unity isn’t going to be available on Factory, I’m sure we can use KIWI or SUSE Studio to release a small openSUSE Unity Spin.

I’ve also decided that I (typo: previously would) wouldn’t like to see Unity available by openSUSE before the official release from Ubuntu, for which I wish all the success.

Since the very early start that I’ve been using pkg-config as much as I can. According to some information that I collected previously, this would be great for cross-distribution build. Depending on the time and work done, I might make the necessary modifications and enable cross-distribution building on this project, thus, making it available for other RPM distributions supported by OBS. This will require a bit of testing before, so it will be work to be done after 11.4 is released and during it’s lifecycle. Maybe by the time of openSUSE 12 gets released, we will have this project also available for other RPM based distributions. I have no knowledge on Debian packaging, but Ubuntu ships this software and Debian probably has it also available so… that won’t be a problem.

4. Artwork

I am providing on GNOME:Ayatana Ubuntu’s Light Themes (Ambiance and Radiance) and offering a patched version of Metacity that renders those themes perfectly. I’m not changing the original colors from the themes or modifying them in any way. So they might be a bit more of orange and not green.

I’ve contacted some people to ask if they would be willing to donate some artwork to make a small package with Wallpapers, some have answered yes, so I will make a small package with a couple of wallpapers for the traditional resolutions and distribute it alongside with this software as optional as always.

5. GTK2, GTK3 and QT

Implementation of GTK3 will be done within the next days, as I am also considering enabling QT support for KDE users (Indicators only for now).

That’s pretty much the result of the last days of work… more news to come in the nearby future.

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Posted in Desktop, GNOME | 1 Comment »

A brief update…

January 17th, 2011 by

In the last days I’ve been leaving my full attention to Compiz and the famous glib main loop. I’ve made a small perl script to compare my local builds with the ones available on launchpad… nothing too fancy, but it seems to work. During the last days Canonical updated a lot of software.

I’ve decided to start updating the on my test repository to the newer versions. A couple of new packages are required as dependencies (the most impressive one is utouch-evemu, which is a part of Canonical’s Multitouch uTouch stack).

The number of updates is quite impressive, the number of patches (even on some new updates) is equally impressive… I’ve just realized that GTK+-2.0 has been subjected of a couple of fun patches and gobject-introspection is becoming mind crushing… Either way, the work continues, and unfortunately for me I was planning to do a small open beta phase for Factory users soon… but all this changes will require much more work and a lot of packages will have dependency lists updated.

The next days free time will be spent around this massive update, I am sure it will pay off. If anyone is using my test repository on my home project, expect some turbulence during the next days. Since I’m on this, I’m already starting to enable GTK3 wherever I can do it in a safe way, nevertheless, it’s just to speed work for the time being, as much things are changing.

Posted in Desktop, GNOME | Comments Off on A brief update…

Wallpaper Community Pack #1

January 13th, 2011 by

I’ve received some emails and some positive feedback about one wallpaper I used for a couple of screenshot’s I’ve used in the past, including also information requests about where that very same wallpaper could be found. I’m happy people liked my choice.

The wallpaper is question is the following, which can be found at gnome-look [dot] org:

Green Snake HD - by Kmurat @ gnome-art.org

It is clear to me at this stage that Artwork has good demand and it’s a ‘value +’ recognized by many users. Understanding this, I’ve decided two things:

* GNOME:Ayatana will have a small Artwork Package by the Community, I’m currently contacting Kmurat to check if he can change the licence on this artwork piece (with over 20.000 downloads on gnome-art) so I can use it for distribution. Currently it’s licensed as CC BY-NC-ND, in which the NC can be probably a problem. Let’s wait a couple of days and see… Either way for those who asked for the source of this wallpaper, click on the image above.

* I will create a small package with wallpapers from the community and make it available (for GNOME, KDE, etc) users.

My intentions are to include a set of wallpapers (4/3, 16/9 and 16/10) of around 5/7 wallpapers from several artists and community contributors. The first person I’ve contacted regarding this was Javier Llorente, a openSUSE Artwork Team and KDE contributor, which donated and pointed some artwork. I’ve also sent a small email to María ‘Tatica’ Leandro, a contributor of Fedora Design Team from South America asking if she had something that she could share with us for this community package (I did loved some of her submissions into Fedora Art). Additionally, I’m also going to nag Sirko Kemter (gnokii) for a contribution…

Once this is assembled (already have 5 wallpapers) I’m going to package it, run a sanity check and prepare it for distribution…

UPDATE: María ‘Tatica’ Leandro has answered positive to my email requesting for a donation, Sirko Kemter also answered positive.

Posted in Desktop, Distribution, GNOME, KDE, XFCE | 1 Comment »

Kick off for GNOME:Ayatana Project…

December 29th, 2010 by

“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” // Peter F. Drucker

This has been one of the guidelines in my life for quite some time… It started as a curiosity a long time ago with Notify OSD and evolved to full project in openSUSE. It is important to acknowledge at this point the motivation provided by the openSUSE GNOME Team from which I’ve been getting plenty of guidance and help, namely from Vincent Untz (vuntz) and Dominique Leuenberger (Dimstar). Thanks to them, we have now a GNOME:Ayatana Project on OBS (openSUSE Build Service), currently being populated with the support libraries for Ayatana’s Unity and Indicators.

Susan Linton has made a small article for Linux Journal about this project in the past. Though some people pointed to me that it was advertising and excelling Ubuntu… I would like to leave a statement… We’re not taking a hike on Ubuntu visibility, and it isn’t bad at all, on the contrary… In fact it will help Ubuntu, us and many others… specially if some Ubuntu patches are accepted faster by upstream. I hope other RPM distributions will follow the way we, openSUSE, proudly seem to pioneering! From my personal point of view… a distribution ‘distributes’… and despite this software isn’t attractive for some openSUSE users, I’m happy it is available (totally or partially) for all those who want to test it… Wait… you don’t even need to install Ubuntu or changing the platform you run!

Due to several reasons, being the most important of them versioning, this repository will start on the next release of openSUSE in March 16th (World day of Conscience, interesting point). This is also interesting as if YOU are willing to improve a package or submit a package you can now do it to this repository.

This goes with a very huge cookie for Dimstar and Vuntz for taking care of this repository and making sure that everything will comply with the openSUSE Guidelines. You are my personal heroes.

It has been quite an interesting experience to be with openSUSE GNOME team which is full of knowledge and helpful in many ways. I can’t also forget to mention that last week Luis Medinas has taken tutorship of a Portuguese contributor to openSUSE GNOME, João Matias and will provide him the necessary help to integrate him on the workflow of the GNOME Team. My personal thanks to Luis for stepping into this task, which from my personal point of view is very important.

Regarding to Ayatana it is worth to mention that Dimstar provided some valuable help in fixing the dbusmenu package and taking care of the necessary patch submission in GTK and gdk-pixbuf to allow dbusmenu to build with introspection support and generate properly the Vala files required for other packages. This handicap beaten… we’re on the good road for better functionality. This patches also allowed to correct some behavior in some indicators, one fine example of this the ‘Me Menu’ which now displays correctly a  ‘dot’ on the selected status as the screenshot bellow shows:

In the last days, despite it’s Christmas season and soon new year…. I’ve been also working on providing additional extensions to enable some functionality on some indicators. This was the case of indicator-sound, which provides an alternative sound gadget that offers extended functionality with multimedia players. A fine example of this is Novell’s Banshee player which has astonishing out of the box implementation with the sound indicator from Ayatana by a small extension that can be enabled. I’m still wondering why so many people toss heavy critics at this indicator calling it ‘mac styled’… while to be honest I doubt such people have even seen OSX sound applet, which is more or less a direct copy of the one present in GNOME, the vertical switch. Interesting view nevertheless.

Indicator-sound has also been fixed and no longer requires the nasty hack in the previous package. Since I’m not an Ubuntu user, neither I have extensive experience on their Desktop, I’m not sure if the functionality present so far in the indicators is the one offered by Ubuntu. I plan to run a Open Beta on the Ayatana software repository during the last Milestone of Factory to all Factory users to collect more data and improve the packages, at least the indicators, as in the present since I have ATI hardware I don’t have FireGL enabled on Factory, so I can’t really push much on Unity and test it for the time being.

Another subject of plugins was Xchat which is GNOME’s premier IRC client. Novell’s Evolution also got it’s plugin which is found to be partially working. I haven’t tracked yet if there are patch submissions to Evolution from Ubuntu to enable indicator functionality. That’s for sure one of the next steps, and since Evolution is a bit of ‘in-house’, would be nice to have them approved upstream if submitted already, as it would serve openSUSE as well.

Most of this applications, evolution, xchat, gwibber, empathy, pidgin are supported by indicator messages which collects information from several messaging services and places them on a single indicator in a cascade style experience for the user. I personally find it weird as I’m not used to this, but seems nice. Unfortunalty some applications seem rely on patches to be fully supported, like empathy. I hope upstream accepts the patches from Ubuntu (if submitted) and we can also benefit from such changes in our side.

Basically to sum up everything in a short review…

* Indicators are working fully or partially depending on patch level on some applications. If upstream starts accepting Ubuntu patches (some shouldn’t be much of a problem), it will work out for Ayatana software in openSUSE as well.
* Unity – Though it builds already with some compiz packaged from git sources (to include glib mainloop patching), I have no way of testing it, neither I have done integration on it. Unfortunately both my systems have ATI hardware and I have no way of testing it on Factory which seems to be too much bleeding edge for ATI to keep up. It’s stalled a bit, but in the worst scenario will be available a few weeks after the next official release of openSUSE.
* During this wait time… we might see a new release of compiz with the patches upstreamed by Canonical, which will for sure help us also a lot. No need for hurry in Unity at this time.

My personal experience with this project has given me lots of knowledge about OBS, hacking Makefiles and configure scripts… debug skills… and specially I ended up loving the way openSUSE is built and how it works. I would take also this opportunity to make a small statement… all the development so far has been deployed over GNOME 2.32. Much of the software packaged already supports GTK3 and should be easy to migrate it to GNOME3. At the moment, since the next openSUSE release is still based on GNOME 2.32, I’m not testing all this software on GNOME3. It might take a few days/weeks to have it available for GNOME3 after it’s release, though from a personal perspective, what I’ve seen on GNOME3 seems to be overkill! It’s damn nice and I have no doubt GNOME3 will succeed as the ultimate Free Desktop.

I would also like to mention that I’m not testing this indicators with KDE. In case someone wants to do this, please feel free to nag me on IRC (#opensuse-gnome @ Freenode) and leave feedback. I’m focused only on GNOME2 and GNOME3 deployment of this software packages, though I will help in whatever way I can if someone wants to work them out for KDE.

I’m using a patched version of Metacity (patches were submitted upstream) which improves the display of buttons by improving overlaying of images (I think). Look at the sharp corners of the theme in the pic bellow. As always, Faenza Icon theme with Canonical’s light theme Radiance (not hacked). This is another change I hope that goes upstreamed soon.

My sincere congratulations to everyone working on the awesome GNOME3, I’m sure it will be a success and make the delights of many! My faith points that GNOME3 will change Desktop user experience forever!

Have a lot of fun…!

Nelson Marques

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Posted in Build Service, Desktop, Distribution, Factory, GNOME | 16 Comments »

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