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Archive for the ‘XFCE’ Category

Desktop Summit Berlin 2011 – Report

August 15th, 2011 by

Desktop Summit

Last minute team

Monday before Desktop Summit, I’ve just learned that we (as openSUSE/SUSE) will not have the SuseStudio kiosk.
Too bad, but Wednesday, I finally get confirmation from my customer, that the new hardware will not be delivered before Friday 12th. Ah ah good news. I will be able to go to Berlin. So I bought the last airplane ticket for Friday afternoon, and also the last bed at good price.

I will be a Berliner for a few days! And fill the blanks to maintain our booth up and welcoming

Somethings has to be done? sometimes has been done!

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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.

New software in build service

November 18th, 2008 by

I try testing xfce4 desktop and find some bugs. But I also find that some really interesting missing in opensuse build service, so I add two new applications to build service (gnome community repository…but now gaupol is available only in my personal repository, because in gnome pygtk wait for python 1.6) – osmo and gaupol.
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Follow The Netbook Road

November 6th, 2008 by

As many people will have noticed from my ramblings on twitter and identi.ca and also from my sporadic almost dumb sounding questions on IRC (thanks very much for your patience in IRC btw), I have been working on getting a usable installation of openSUSE on the eeePC 701 – both GNOME and KDE4. As I have a 4GB SSD model my aim is to have a feature full install taking up no more than 2.6GB. Yes I know this doesn’t help those with the 2GB model, but I’m scratching my own itch here ;). Ultimately I would like to be able to create USB and CD images of the builds in time for 11.1’s release which is in about 43 days time, problem is KIWI does not like me 🙁 but I will persevere and see what I can conjure up in time. I am a happy user of openSUSE 11.0 with XFCE on my eeePC at the moment, but I fancy a bit of a challenge and a good dose of stress and anger trying to get it to work will be a welcome distraction from the stress and chaos I have to deal with at work 🙂

So what packages am I looking at putting on there? Below are a couple of tables of applications and what I have selected for each DE including ASUS eeePC related drivers (ACPI/Events) and also bluetooth; I have tried to stick to those that come with the DE e.g. all KDE apps are KDE4 variants, and if a DE provides an app for a function I try to use that.  So the first iteration of the table is:

  KDE GNOME XFCE
Terminal Konsole GNOME-Terminal Terminal
Text Editor Kwrite Gedit Mousepad
Web Browser Konqueror Epiphany Epiphany
File Manager Dolphin Nautilus Thunar
Music Player Amarok2 Banshee xfmedia
Video Player Dragon Player Totem xfmedia
PDF Viewer Okular Evince Evince
IM client Kopete Pidgin Pidgin
IRC client irssi Pidgin Pidgin
Office Suite OOo OOo OOo
E-mail Kmail Evolution Claws-Mail
RSS Akregator Liferea Liferea
Calendar Korganiser Evolution Orage
Addressbook Kaddressbook Evolution Claws-Mail
Flashplayer Yes Yes Yes
Java Java-1.6 Java-1.6 Java-1.6
Codecs Xine Gstreamer Xine
Photo Viewer Gwenview F-spot Ristretto
FTP Client Dolphin Nautilus Gftp
Networking NetworkManager NetworkManager NetworkManager
Total Space Taken Up 2.6GB / 2676552k 2.7GB / 2752336k 2.6GB / 2718412k

 

As you can see KDE4 takes up the least amount of space followed by XFCE with GNOME dropping into third place.  This surprised me as I actually expected XFCE to be way ahead in the lead.  I then tried to minimise the number of applications and tried to use apps that could multi task, still prefering those that are included as part of the openSUSE distro:

  KDE GNOME XFCE
Terminal Konsole GNOME-Terminal Terminal
Text Editor Kwrite Gedit Mousepad
Web Browser Konqueror Epiphany Epiphany
File Manager Dolphin Nautilus Thunar
Music Player MPlayer Totem xfmedia
Video Player MPlayer Totem xfmedia
PDF Viewer Okular Evince Evince
IM client Kopete Pidgin Pidgin
IRC client irssi Pidgin Pidgin
Office Suite OOo OOo OOo
E-mail Kmail Claws-Mail Claws-Mail
RSS Akregator Claws-Mail Claws-Mail
Calendar Korganiser Claws-Mail Orage
Addressbook Kaddressbook Claws-Mail Claws-Mail
Flashplayer Yes Yes Yes
Java Java-1.6 Java-1.6 Java-1.6
Codec Framework
ffmpeg Gstreamer Xine
Photo Viewer Gwenview Eye Of GNOME Ristretto
FTP Client Dolphin Nautilus Gftp
Networking NetworkManager NetworkManager NetworkManager
Total Space Taken Up 2.6GB / 2662540k
2.6GB / 2682516k
2.6GB / 2716364k

As you can see KDE is still the leader, but GNOME has managed to close the gap significantly.

You will notice that there are some notable applications missing from both tables, both from the Mozilla family – FireFox and Thunderbird.  I chose not to use FireFox as the browser as I have been experiencing some icky lockups with it, and this is irrespective of platform.  I decided against Thunderbird because it just did not like to display correctly on the 7″ screen, even the version supplied by Xandros refused to display nicely.  As KDE4 doesn’t have a native IRC client yet I have chosen irssi, i will update the list when a native KDE4 client is available – most likely Quassel.  Also as it stands Kaffeine is not available for KDE4 yet, when that happens I would imagine I would replace MPlayer with it.

Both the GNOME and KDE4 builds were based on a minimal X install – for GNOME add gnome-panel and gnome-session; for for KDE add kdebase4-session, kdebase4-workspace and kde4-win; XFCE was based on the supplied pattern.  One thing I did notice is that 11.1 (Beta4) seems to have put on a bit of weight in comparison to 11.0, a base install appears to be ~400MB more O_o.  I am going to to do a verification shortly and file a bug so hopefully I can thin them out even further.

If people have any recommendations or suggestions as to what applications to use, then please let me know.  My next step is to create both ISO and USB images, any and all help would be much appreciated – SUSEStudio access would be even better ;)  This list is not meant to be the be all and end all, but more a matter of itch scratching.  Yes I know I could reduce the space taken up if I didnt bother with any of that non-free codec crud, and drop flash from the equation, but I’m pragmatic and ultimately want to see people use openSUSE.  Get them using our distro first, once thatis established then we can educate them on the ugly side of things.  Once I manage to create the images with the above package list i will look at creating a completely free version with no colsed codecs/apps.

Once again I’d like to thank all those on IRC for there help and advice – JP Rosevear, James Wilcox, Stephan Binner, Will Stephenson, Martin Schandler and Hubert Figuiere.

Xfce Project Status Report 06/2008

June 10th, 2008 by

As some of you might already have noticed, we are working on a better integration of Xfce in openSUSE. The aim of the Xfce Project is to establish Xfce as well-accepted desktop environment besides GNOME and KDE. We have already started building Xfce LiveCDs with KIWI but still fail in getting yast-live to work.

Besides that we had some success in the re-design process, so this is how the upcoming Xfce in openSUSE might look like:

          

Miguel Cruz has provided his great CrashBit theme and designed a few new icons to improve Xfce support.

I have also finished a SLiM Display Manager theme and work on some packages for that. There is still a lot of work to be done and things to coordinate. We are going to set up a oS Xfce Mailing List soon, that all interested people should join. In the near future I am continuing to blog about the current development process, so stay tuned.

Update: The Mailinglist is now availabl.: To subscribe send an eMail to: opensuse-xfce+subscribe@opensuse.org

I have also added an upgraded screenshot showing how it would look like using the Gilouche Window decoration.

Marcus