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Default Wallpaper for GNOME:Ayatana

February 21st, 2011 by

Not that I know a lot about Artwork or Wallpapers… For those, I am mainly a ‘customer’ most of the times, and things get easy for… either I like it, or I don’t. There’s a lot of stuff available out there, and initially I loved the snake (I still do), but since I couldn’t distribute it due to licensing, I’ve spent a couple of hours looking for Artwork with a compatible license and contacted a few artists about licensing and the possibility of using/distributing their work.

To distribute for GNOME:Ayatana on the 11.4 cycle, I’m going to use ‘Spaceman Goldrush Edition’ from ‘mydarktime’, a German artist. I’m happy that mydarktime has been so kind in allowing openSUSE to distribute this package under CC-BY-SA. I will also take the opportunity to quote him:

“(…)  I would be very pleased to see mine in it” (wallpaper pack on GNOME:Ayatana).

I find this wallpaper very attractive and it doesn’t really tire me up from looking at it, which is really, really nice! I hope everyone else likes it also!

Spaceman Goldrush Edition @ Deviant ART

Posted in Artwork, Contrib, Desktop, Distribution, GNOME | 3 Comments »

GNOME:Ayatana project page in English and Portuguese…

February 20th, 2011 by

Dear all,

While I’ve worked on the GNOME:Ayatana project page in English, Raul, a dedicated contributor from Brazil has provided the Portuguese version of this page. I would like to express my gratitude to Raul for a well done job, and I’m happy that someone from Brazil stepped up for this task, as I assume that this project will have far more visibility in Brazil than in Portugal itself.

If anyone wants to translate the page and keep it update for any other languages, that would be awesome! Please let me know, so that I can add your name into the contributors for this Project, or eventually you can do it yourself, this is a community project, so, you don’t actually need my permission to improve contents, I encourage such behavior!

Thanks Raul.

GNOME:Ayatana on openSUSE [English]
GNOME:Ayatana on openSUSE [Portuguese]

Posted in Desktop, GNOME | Comments Off on GNOME:Ayatana project page in English and Portuguese…

ATI/AMD fglrx 8.821 Catalyst 11.2 available for openSUSE 11.2, 11.3, 11.4

February 19th, 2011 by

Updated : April 4th 2011

Preambule : free software

Warning

I would notice everybody which will install these software : you will install proprietary softwares on your computer. Nobody will be able to debug them, nor help you to resolve what can be happen. That must be said !

The free future

The real future is already in place : it’s called radeon (or free-radeon), it’s fully integrated in kernel & xorg. Actually ( for openSUSE 11.4, or openSUSE 11.3 with kernel-stable + X11 obs repo ). Support for many chipset is in real progress even for the 6xxx series.
Give it a try before using the proprietary software, report any bugs you find with it. Only your contributions can help and will make a real differences. Thanks for doing that !

Unofficial but working repository

I offer for those of you that for any reasons can’t use successfully the free-radeon drivers a repository where you will find the latest fglrx/catalyst drivers following the packaging policy made avalaible by AMD.
Thanks to Sebastian Siebert ( check his blog ) to work in coordination with ati/amd and follow the catalyst packaging. His work allow us to have that driver available for openSUSE.

The quick how-to

Adding the repository

For openSUSE Factory
zypper ar -c -f -n "ATI/AMD fglrx non-official" http://linux.ioda.net/mirror/ati/openSUSE_Factory/ "ATI/AMD FGLRX"
For openSUSE 11.4
zypper ar -c -f -n "ATI/AMD fglrx non-official" http://linux.ioda.net/mirror/ati/openSUSE_11.4/ "ATI/AMD FGLRX"
For openSUSE 11.3
zypper ar -c -f -n "ATI/AMD fglrx non-official" http://linux.ioda.net/mirror/ati/openSUSE_11.3/ "ATI/AMD FGLRX"
For openSUSE 11.2
zypper ar -c -f -n "ATI/AMD fglrx non-official" http://linux.ioda.net/mirror/ati/openSUSE_11.2/ "ATI/AMD FGLRX"

Installing the driver

Nota previous version

Due to change in ati/amd way of life, it’s recommanded to completely remove any version of fglrx previously installed with a zypper rm

I can only recommand to also (as root) 

# Remove old conf & stuff
rm -fr /etc/ati
# Remove any old fglrx inside kernel modules
find /lib/modules -type f -iname "fglrx.ko" -exec rm -fv {} \;
New installation

Once the repo has been added, you will certainly have to reboot to get ride off free radeon module. At boot on the grub line add
nomodeset blacklist=radeon 3
Don’t panic you will be land to a console, open it with root account to install fglrx.
Search the software you want for example under openSUSE 11.4 

zypper se -s fglrx
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...

S | Name                  | Type    | Version | Arch   | Repository
--+-----------------------+---------+---------+--------+-----------
i | fglrx64_xpic_SUSE114  | package | 8.831-1 | x86_64 | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official  
  | fglrx64_xpic_SUSE114  | package | 8.821-1 | x86_64 | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official  
  | fglrx_xpic_SUSE114    | package | 8.831-1 | i586   | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official
  | fglrx_xpic_SUSE114    | package | 8.821-1 | i586   | ATI/AMD fglrx non-official

Starting with 8.821 (Catalyst 11.2) ATI use now xpic (full explanation)
So use that one. I’ve removed all non xpic drivers the 2 April 2011.

For a 64bits version
zypper in fglrx64_xpic_SUSE114
For a 32bits version
zypper in fglrx_xpic_SUSE114

During the installation process, all the dependencies will be added, which mostly are needed to build the kernel modules. Expect around 200MB to dowload.

Then the installer will build the module for your installed kernel.
And if there’s a kernel update, the script will automagically detect that, and will rebuild the module for the new kernel installed. (So if you find that your workstation is slow on reboot just press the esc key to see the details … )

Preparing xorg to use fglrx

Once the module is build and installed, you should have a file fglrx.conf or 50-fglrx.conf in /etc/modprobe.d 

cat /etc/modprobe.d/50-fglrx.conf
blacklist radeon

Next ati recommend to use ati –initial-config but that break the auto-detect stack of xorg. So I recommend changing one line in file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf
just change driver line to driver “fglrx”
All the rest of the setup (double screen etc) will be made lately with the ati catalyst control center (command is amdcccle).
For those of you which want to have an xorg.conf file just have a look at aticonfig –help command.

Start X

If you are inside the console we start to use before just run “init 5” to start xorg, and normally you will find your normal xorg login screen (kdm, gdm, ldm, xdm).
Hit ctrl+alt+f1 to return to the console and type exit or logout or ctrl+d to close it.
then ctrl+alt+f7 to return to the xorg session.

Updates

ati/amd catalyst are release on a month basis, but this vary from 3 weeks to 8 weeks.

  • Catalyst 11.2 – fglx 8.821 : 14 February 2011

References

Sebastian Siebert blog ( German ) with nice howto and problem resolution.
My previous post on the subject

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Posted in Base System, Desktop, Distribution, Factory, Kernel, openSUSE 11.2, X.org | 15 Comments »

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 »

LibreOffice 3.3.0 final available for openSUSE

February 9th, 2011 by

I’m happy to announce LibreOffice 3.3.0 final packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Stable project. They are based on the libreoffice-3.3.0.4 release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice build on the wiki page.

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.

False error during update

You might see some installation errors about missing extensions when updating from OpenOffice.org, for example:

ERROR: There is no such extension deployed: com.sun.reportdesigner

Please, ignore them. They are caused by a bug in the OOo packages and can’t be avoided easily. They does not affect the LibreOffice installation!

More known bugs

Other information and plans:

LO switched to a time based schedule and more frequent bug fix releases. The purpose is to keep quality and avoid infinite RC phase at the same time. The idea is that all serious blocker bugs can be found and fixed within few weeks. Then the application is ready for masses who want to enjoy new features and more complicated fixes. The history says that bugs in less typical scenarios are found weeks after the release. Such bugs will be fixed in pure bug fix releases and released few weeks after each other. It means that more conservative people should rather wait for the 3.x.1, 3.x.2, 3.x.3 releases. We hope that it will help all people to get faster what they want.

We are already working on LO-3.3.1 bugfix release. I have just published 3.3.1-rc1. The final 3.3.1 release should be available within 2 weeks.

Posted in Desktop, OpenOffice.org | 3 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

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