Home Home > Desktop
Sign up | Login

Deprecation notice: openSUSE Lizards user blog platform is deprecated, and will remain read only for the time being. Learn more...

Archive for the ‘Desktop’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

LXDE and gtk3

July 19th, 2011 by

GTK3 will slowly replace the “old” gtk2, and of course, if we don’t want to be left behind we have to move to gtk3 eventually.

Even if slowly (we need horse power! –> yes we need you too!!) LXDE is being ported too. Nothing has been released yet, but a good deal of work is actually into git repositories.

X11:lxde:gtk3 project

Thanks to openSUSE Build Service (public instance of the Open Build Service) we are currently able to get git code and build it auto-magically (thanks god you created obs _services 😀 )

Right now, only five packages don’t want to build with gtk3 and they are: gpicview, libfm, lxmusic, lxpanel, pcmanfm. Everything else builds fine. As a side note, lxdm gtk greeter build but seems to crasch.

Please test those packages and report in our mailing list or even better upstream your issues.

To conclude, right now i don’t feel comfortable to push into factory gtk3 packages, so 12.1 most probably will stuck with the well know stable gtk2 packages.

Also, i’m actually working to use obs, to provide gtk3 enabled git nightly build not only to openSUSE (actually only >= 11.4) but also to Fedora 15 (already building with many successful packages) and Ubuntu/Debian. So if you are .deb packagers, please let me know, i need your help. Contact me and the lxde team using our mailing list opensue-lxde@opensuse.org

Have a great day,

Andrea

Tags: , ,
Posted in Build Service, Desktop, Distribution, Packaging, Programming | 1 Comment »

Steampunk beautiful theme for KDM and ksplash

July 17th, 2011 by

I created packages for the nice KDM and ksplash theme Steampunk. For this theme a matching color scheme, wallpaper and mouse theme exist and those are packed in the same rpm. Youtube shows the theme in action for Kubuntu, the version in the rpm is distribution neutral. The rpm can be obtained from the home:rbos repository, I hope you enjoy the theme.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Artwork, KDE | Comments Off on Steampunk beautiful theme for KDM and ksplash

Zippl again – now in the package

July 12th, 2011 by
Zippl

lightweight presentations

some might remember my hackweek project Zippl. I blogged about it more than a year ago. Zippl is a lightweigt presentation tool, a bit like prezi, a hipp tool for that purpose, where all ‘slides’ sit on one large canvas and during the presentation a kind of camera moves over the canvas.

I liked the idea and did Zippl as I wanted to play with Qt’s QGraphicsView. It takes a simple xml file as input which describes the presentation and animates it as shown in the video in my older blog.

First I thought it doesn’t make sense to continue that project. But recently, somebody asked if I have built in the feature back to the previous spot as I promised almost a year ago, as he wanted to do a presentation with Zippl. I couldn’t believe, and so I spent an evening in the weekend to polish Zippl a bit. And because its easy with OBS, I quickly built an rpm package for various openSUSEs.

Now that I worked on it a bit again I found it could also make sense on tablet devices, for example to run cool Hello New User animations or small presentations for ant Tilly to get some sponsorship for the new bike. Could be fun.

If you want to check it, please install from my home repository.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Boosters, Desktop, KDE | 9 Comments »

Presentation resolution on netbooks

July 11th, 2011 by

I recently got ASUS Eee Netbook R051PX, nice little machine, however small annoyance it has when plugged to projectors for presentation is that the default mirrored resolution is just 800×600, the gnome-display-properties does not allow the selection of 1024×768, xrandr comes to the rescue:

Run the following as normal user in terminal to get the required resolution.

xrandr --output LVDS1 --panning 1024x768
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1024x768

Note: just in case wordpress eats up – character, there are 2 – before output, panning and mode.

Posted in GNOME, Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Presentation resolution on netbooks

Facebook bans KDE’s photo uploader; all uploaded content inaccessible.

June 27th, 2011 by

So in my head there’s a little Walter Sobchak beating on my conscience and shouting “This is what you get when you trust Facebook with your data, Will”.
The reason is that I upload photos to Facebook using KDE’s shared uploader and this has fallen victim to the whims of FB’s purge of its app biosphere. Unless the original developer can convince them that the app is not spammy, offering a bad experience or having the wrong attitude, the app, my photos (all archived elsewhere of course), but most importantly, all the kind comments from my friends and contacts that represent FB’s only value, get sent to the farm.
This is what you get when you trust one company with stuff you care about. Will.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in KDE, Miscellaneous | 14 Comments »

LibreOffice 3.3.3 bugfix release available for openSUSE

June 21st, 2011 by

I’m happy to announce LibreOffice 3.3.3 bugfix release for openSUSE. The packages are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Stable project. They fix various crashers, usability and translation problems, see the libreoffice-3.3.3.1 release news for more details. See also some notes about openSUSE LibreOffice build.

The openSUSE LO team hopes that you will be happy with this release. Though, any software contains bugs and we kindly ask you to report bugs. It will help us to fix them in the future releases.

Other information and plans:

The bugfix release 3.3.4 is planed two months from now. Though, I would rather provide LO-3.4.2 packages instead.

I am already working on the LO-3.4 packages. They are more complicated because there were significant changes in the build stuff. You might expect something within the next few weeks in the LibreOffice:Unstable project.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 3 Comments »

ATI/AMD fglrx 8.861 Catalyst 11.6 available for openSUSE 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, Factory

June 17th, 2011 by

New version of catalyst 11.6 / fglrx 8.861 available

fglrx-8.861

Please refer to my previous article where all the installation procedure is explained.

  • Quick résumé :
  • There’s no full changelog about them, but Catalyst 11.6 installer (pdf)
  • Get the cheat-sheet 11.6 version
  • Kernel supported up to 3.0x version
  • Should be the latest version supporting 11.2
  • Wrong (to my point of view) create an xorg.conf file which is unneeded if you work with /etc/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf and have driver "fglrx&quot inside

Warning

Some instabilities could happen. In case of crash like no keyboard, mouse, and blackscreen on reboot. Try to shutdown properly your computer with the shutdown poweroff button (or remote ssh). On reboot, just add 3 at the end of grub line to restart in console mode.
Then with yast or zypper you can always remove the actual version and try the previous version available in the repos.

All credits to Sebastian Siebert (freespacer) : 11.6 article (German)

What about tumbleweed, factory?

Users have reported that version 8.861 of catalyst 11.6 compile correctly under Tumbleweed with 2.6.39 kernel and the driver is ready for kernel 3.0x, so until xorg change too much and then AMD support for the new version, installing the 11.4 version should work

For factory, I’ve build a repository (see previous article) that can be used, and fglrx build.
The new package are called SUSE121 & no more SUSEFACTORY.

Stats Numbers ?

Month Unique IP Number of visits Pages Hits Bandwidth
Jan 2011 2355 6411 19688 35263 16.63 GB
Feb 2011 2906 7719 26383 41142 22.37 GB
Mar 2011 8055 21157 228494 258613 59.13 GB
Apr 2011 10592 29129 418281 437416 76.87 GB
May 2011 12511 36816 608350 626901 104.91 GB

All proudly served by openSUSE powered server! zypper dup from 11.2 to 11.4 in 45minutes last month

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Base System, Distribution, Factory, Kernel, lizards.openSUSE.org, openSUSE 11.2, X.org | 10 Comments »

Some updates on the Banshee repositories…

May 31st, 2011 by

Sometime ago Gabriel asked me if I could give him help with the Banshee repositories for openSUSE; This repositories have many users hanging around and some packages are enabled on other projects, which makes them somehow sensible to deep changes.

Today I’ve pushed to openSUSE:Factory Banshee 2.0.1 (latest stable release) and a few packages which live in the Banshee repository. I’ve also submitted a deletion request to ipod-sharp which is no longer maintained and was replaced in the past for libgpod.

I’ve fixed the pending issues I’ve seen on the Banshee repository and Banshee 2.0.1 and disabled SLE 11 builds (not requiring all the dependencies). The repository serves now the following platforms (banshee and banshee-community-extensions):
* SLE 11 SP1;
* openSUSE 11.3;
* openSUSE 11.4;
* openSUSE Factory;
* openSUSE Tumbleweed (new).

On Banshee:Unstable (which should hold the unstable releases, currently 2.1.0) I’ll be introducing some changes during the next days which will feature:
* Package being renamed to ‘banshee’, thus dropping the current banshee-1;
* Migration to pkgconfig() calls for >= 1130;
* Packages banshee and banshee-core get merged into banshee (currently banshee had only 4 documentation files);
*  New sub-package banshee-common to hold all the architecture independent files (ex: text files, icons, etc);
* A few cleanups on the spec file for unsupported platforms (SLE11 and SLE11SP1 do not meet the requirements for this version and superior).

Once this is implemented and tested I will look into Banshee:Alpha and see the best way to start building daily/weekly snapshots using the OBS magic available and some magic tricks hidden in Dimstar’s sleeve which kindly accepted my request to give me a hand on such evil task.

In the future, on the next stable release (2.2.0), I’ll move the changes from Banshee:Unstable to Banshee and hopefully change the development repository to Banshee (as if Factory has the latest stable release it makes no sense in having Banshee’s development repository in Banshee:Unstable) and synch all at once.

Users subscribed to Banshee:Unstable repository might see some turbulence during the next days, while users subscribing now through the 1-Click installer will already be installing Banshee with the changes described above.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Desktop, Distribution, Factory, GNOME, Mono, Packaging, Sound | 4 Comments »

Unity 2D to enter GNOME:Ayatana soon…

May 19th, 2011 by

In the past days I’ve been packaging and fixing some issues on Unity 2D for inclusion on the GNOME:Ayatana repository in the openSUSE Build Service.

This gave me an excellent opportunity to test a few components share by both, Unity and Unity 2D, which is the case of ‘unity-place-applications’ and ‘unity-place-files’, both using Zeitgeist which is already in Factory for the upcoming openSUSE 12.1. We thank the integration of this packages to Federico Quintero. Thanks Fred.

A few more additional packages need some care and once they get updated and tested they will be uploaded to GNOME:Ayatana, at which time I will provide an installer (1-Click) for those willing to test Unity-2D. Unity 2D will be the first application to use the indicators I have prepared in the past which all all found working, except 1, the AppMenu (strangely it works on GNOME2 panel without issues).

This is how Unity 2D looks like. There are transparencies because I enabled ‘composite’ on metacity, which works very nicely. As far as I could understand, the developers of Unity 2D are also looking into implementing Compiz with Unity 2D, which would be sweet.

Unity introduces the ‘dash’ which is pretty much the following screen. Transparencies are enabled (though metacity composite) and the notification bubble belongs to NotifyOSD (already present in openSUSE 11.4 as optional). This is one of the three issues I have to fix, the icons displayed on the dash should have text underneath, it’s not showing. The top icons are quick links to Program Categories and the ones bellow are the default applications which are setup in GNOME.

The launcher panel on the side auto-hides, and seems to be working. The three icons displayed in last are respectively: Workspace selector, applications menu and files. Everything seems to be working with them, and the 2 last are components shared with Unity, and they both rely on Zeitgeist. Here’s a few captures of what they do…

There’s also a feature from Unity which is cute… The title artifact of the decorator window (metacity, which required a few patches) is removed and implemented on the top bar when the window is maximized. Sadly for me the AppMenu (menu proxy) isn’t working properly, this is another thing that needs fixing…

This should cover pretty much the functionality that is available currently. There’s a few issues still remaining before I can push this to GNOME:Ayatana:

– I tried not to have the need to patch gnome-session, but since Unity relies on the Session Indicator to have this functionality, gnome-session will need to be patched (should be ok, because it also requires the backport patch for  defining –sessions for openSUSE 11.4).

– Unity 2D itself relies on a few gconf hacks that should be on a schema file. I’ve talked to upstream and this is planned already, so once it’s release, that’s when it will be published.

– There’s one issue also with backgrounds and workspace switcher… unfortunatly the workspace switcher only renders wallpapers if they are in image format (no .xml stuff), so this can turn some wallpapers not to render, which eventually ends up in the background of the switcher being the one defined in GNOME as solid color.

So the order of TODO’s for GNOME:Ayatana is pretty much this one:

1. Implement dependencies and then Unity 2D;
2. Make sure Compiz is well implemented, because Unity will require Compiz at it’s best shape;
3. Make sure nux and other twisted dependencies are properly implemented;
4. Implement Unity itself;

This are the latest news for GNOME:Ayatana…

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Build Service, Desktop, Distribution, GNOME, Usability | 3 Comments »

A few improvements…

May 18th, 2011 by

A lot more to fix...

Posted in GNOME | Comments Off on A few improvements…

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »