Tag Archives: GNOME

Linux

vnc viewer presents black screen along with GNOME settings daemon errors.

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By Miguel E. Perez

File Type: txt
Hello folks,

I’m remotely connecting through VNC to two machines, each running Red Hat 5.9, from mine which is running Windows 7. Both connections were working well before. However, now one of the machines only gives me a black screen, with a pop up that says:

“There was an error starting GNOME Settings Daemon. Some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not work correctly. The last error message was: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.”

I’ve searched all over the net for a solution to no avail. One thing I tried was deleting the following files in hopes of resetting my gnome environment but this did not help either.

Files: /tmp/orbit-, .gconf, .gconfd, .gnome, .gnome2 and .metacity.

I have attached the two vncviewer log files, one from the connection that still works well and the other from the one that gives me the above errors, named bad and good respectively.

I’m new to the forum so I apologize if this is not the most adequate forum section for my problem or if I omitted any relevant files or debug information. I would greatly appreciate any help you can send my way.

Miguel.

Attached Files
good.txt (2.4 KB)
File Type: txt bad.txt (6.8 KB)

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at The UNIX and Linux Forums

Linux

Dylan McCall: GNOME Break Timer GSoC Project: Week 4

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The new settings screen (or whatever we call it now) is already feeling quite nice.

My work is coming along nicely with the new break timer application for GNOME. I started off week three working on some extra pieces for the break monitor component. I disabled its big “take a break” overlay, and I added some new functionality: the screen locks automatically during a long break, there’s a new “break interrupted” notification that appears at just the right moment (like when you unlock the screen), and there are some helpful sounds when breaks start and stop.

With that bit behaving mostly as intended, for now, I switched over to the other half to the application: its settings screen. The new settings screen is very different from the old one. Actually, the way it’s presented is that the settings application is the break timer application, and it just continues running in the background when you close it. That makes a ton of sense, of course, but it’s different from how this is implemented so I’ll probably sound nonsensical for a bit as I get used to describing it that way.

The new settings screen (or whatever we call it now) is already feeling quite nice.

It took a surprising amount of fiddling to get the break status to show up correctly in the new Break Timer application, but I learned some interesting things about Vala along the way. These two bits of the application talk to each other over dbus, so to make that easier I define my interface in a source file that is common between the two components, and then I implement it in the code that actually provides the dbus service. Here’s how that looks (in a very simplified, contrived form, of course):

// common/IMyService.vala:

public const string MY_BUS_NAME = "org.my.application";
public const string MY_OBJECT_PATH = "/org/my/service";

[DBus (name = "org.my.service")]
public interface IMyService : Object {
	public abstract string[] get_messages() throws IOError;
}

// service/main.vala:

[DBus (name = "org.my.service")]
private class MyService : Object, IMyService {
	public string[] get_messages() {
		return {"Hello", "world"};
	}
}

public int main(string[] args) {
	try {
		DBusConnection connection = Bus.get_sync(BusType.SESSION, null);
		connection.register_object(
			MY_OBJECT_PATH,
			new MyService()
		);
	} catch (IOError error) {
		GLib.error("Error registering service on the session bus: %s", error.message);
	}
	return 0;
}

// client/main.vala:

IMyService my_service = Bus.get_proxy_sync(
	BusType.SESSION,
	MY_BUS_NAME,
	MY_OBJECT_PATH
);

Vala does a great job making all of that just work, though I did run into some trouble when I tried to define a signal in my interface. Normally we just have the signal in the interface definition and it’s automatically available for any implementing class (think mixins), but something was getting muddled up somewhere and, while the signal was available to the application, it was never registered on dbus. So, my client application couldn’t use it. The obvious workaround is to just not implement the Vala interface with MyService (so it’s just private class MyService : Object {), but I hate to do that because the nice thing about using the same Vala interface on either end is you can’t change them independently. So, I’m less likely to do something dumb like change the DBus interface in a way that breaks part of the settings application. In the end I …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

What makes a “lightweight” desktop environment lightweight?

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Over the last few days I was wondering what is a “lightweight” desktop. And I must say I couldn’t come up with an answer to that question.

I was considering various things like “being memory efficient” which I discarded for obvious reasons. First of all it’s difficult to measure memory usage correctly (I haven’t seen anyone, who provides numbers, doing it correctly, this includes especially Phoronix). And then it’s comparing mostly apples to oranges. Loading a high-resolution wallpaper might make all the difference in the memory usage. Also if desktop environment Foo provides features which are not provided by Bar it’s obvious that Foo uses more memory. But still it’s apples vs oranges. It’s not a comparison on memory, it’s a comparison of features. And of course one might consider the Time-memory-tradeoff.

So is it all about features? Obviously not. If there is a feature a user needs and uses it cannot be bloat. The fact that a desktop environment has only few features cannot be the key to being lightweight. Being evil now: many people say GNOME is removing features, but nobody would say that GNOME is lightweight.

What about support for old systems? That’s not lightweight, that’s support for old hardware. And it’s something which doesn’t make any sense given Moore’s law. Which raises the first question: what is old hardware? One year, two years, ten years? Is it a moving target or is a Pentium III for all time the reference? Optimizing for old hardware means not making use of modern hardware capabilities. But does that make sense to not use modern hardware if it is available? Using the GPU for things the GPU can do better than the CPU is a good thing, isn’t it? Parallelize a computation on multi-core if possible is a good thing, isn’t it? But if you do so, you are optimizing for modern hardware and not for old hardware. So saying you are good for old hardware, implies you are bad on new hardware? Also I’m wondering how one can optimize for old hardware? Developers tend to have new hardware to not have problems like this. And how can one keep support for old hardware when the complete stack is moving towards new hardware? Who tests the kernel against old hardware? Who provides DRI drivers for obsoleted hardware which doesn’t fit into modern mainboards (who remembers AGP or PCI)? Who ensures that software is still working on 32 bit systems, who would notice such a breakage for example in the X-Server? So lightweight cannot be fit for old hardware. And remember: optimizing for old hardware is not the same as optimizing for modern low-end hardware. Even the Raspberry Pi has a stronger CPU (700 MHz) than the oldest Pentium III (450 MHz) – not to mention things like OpenGL…

What’s it then? Let’s ask Wikipedia. For Xfce it tells us, that “it aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use”. Unfortunately there’s no

From: http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/04/what-makes-a-lightweight-desktop-environment-lightweight/

Linux

Flavia Weisghizzi: Ubuntu, GNOME and OPW.

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It seems hard to believe but this last OPW months flew like the wind.

My first thought is a HUGE THANKS to all the women which work behind this project, first of all Karen and Marina.

I have been lucky, and I have had the opportunity to work with Karen, who mentored me (and Sriram too, of course!) and this has been an excellent chance to prove myself in an very international environment with people of great competency, and everybody knows competency is the first quality of an outstanding ledership.

This round of OPW is closed, but another one is approaching: another opportunity for new lady rock stars to full try out their competences, in coding, marketing, design and so on

Next round will be held in june/september 2013 and submission deadline is on May 1st: complete details of next round are available here: OutreachProgramForWomen.

This program is an unique opportunity to work with awesome women in every part of the world… why don’t you take a look and have your try?

My only regret in these three months has been that I haven’t met any women coming from Ubuntu.

Participating organizations come from very different FOSS projects, from KDE and from GNOME, from Debian, Mozilla, Wikimedia, just to remember the more famous, but it’s very sad to me to realize that Ubuntu isn’t involved at all, as project and as people.

As a Ubuntu Women co-leader I really hope that my experience will serve. I found a great effort from everybody to make me feel comfortable albeit I’m not an English native speaker and I was really much more tied to Ubuntu than Fedora or GNOME communities.

I’ll be enlightened if this could encourage the build of bridges between Ubuntu Women and OPW, and, why not, be the first step to consider GNOME people as a counterpart again.

I believe every woman in FOSS really rocks, and I really hope all women will find a way to walk together again

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Jeremy Bicha: Resigning from the Docs Team

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I first got involved with Ubuntu docs around the time the Ubuntu 11.04 Beta was released. That was a very busy time as GNOME 3.0 was being finalized and Ubuntu 11.04 was switching to Unity by default. The GNOME Docs team had undertaken a massive rewrite of their user docs using the new Mallard topic-based format. The official Ubuntu documentation then was currently a snapshot of the GNOME docs but it was a bit outdated, missing a lot of the finalization work done by the GNOME volunteers at a recent hackfest.

I had been interested in contributing to docs for a while and seeing the documentation as seriously incomplete was the motivation I needed to step in and figure out what I could do to help. We had to merge in the latest GNOME improvements and rewrite the docs to mention Unity instead of GNOME Shell. We didn’t meet the normal deadlines (which meant the translators didn’t have a chance to do much by release day) but we shipped a nice update to the user docs for Ubuntu 11.04. I provided a lot of help and I wasn’t the only one.

But after 11.04 Jim moved on to contribute to GNOME directly. (Jim bucked the stereotype by switching from XFCE to GNOME when GNOME3 was released.) I would periodically remerge the GNOME work back into the Ubuntu documentation. I ended up being by far the major force keeping the Ubuntu documentation updated. Meanwhile, I was also contributing to the community in other ways by getting involved in packaging (especially GNOME) and contributing back to Debian and to GNOME itself. I also helped get the Ubuntu GNOME project going because of the widespread demand for a GNOME flavor of Ubuntu.

I’m very sad that life and my other responsibilities are pushing me to need to give up some of my responsibilities. I am stepping down from my Docs team responsibilities now. I will still be around for the next few weeks to help pass the torch to anyone who wants to take my place on the Docs team. After that I will be withdrawing my ~ubuntu-core-doc membership as well. This is a very sad moment for me and I’ve been putting it off for a while.

I was able to help Benjamin Kerensa and Kevin Godby today with some of their work to get the 13.04 user documentation out the door. Maybe they’ll help lead the next round of keeping the docs up to date; maybe others will help too. While most of my work involved the Ubuntu user guide, the other flavors of Ubuntu can use help too. I’m happy to see Doug Smythies and Peter Matulis take charge of the Server Guide. Pasi Lallinaho did a major rewrite of the Xubuntu docs last cycle. And the other flavors can use your help too.

If you’re interested in getting involved with Ubuntu documentation, jump in and get involved. …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Stephen Michael Kellat: Changes in Ubuntu Ohio

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It appears that as of 7 April 2013 I am the Point of Contact for Ubuntu Ohio and effectively Leader. In an e-mail to the community sent Sunday I wrote:

Good afternoon.

As of today the High Council of Ubuntu Ohio is taking a breather by ceasing to operate for the time being. The e-mail address for the High Council also no longer functions. It is time to give thanks to Cheri Francis, Michael Gilbert, Jon Buckley, Jacob Peddicord, and Paul Tagliamonte for their periods of service on that body over the past three years.

At this time I am the designated Point of Contact for our Local Community Team on Launchpad. The length of term for this is open-ended at this time. Ubuntu Ohio encompasses users of all flavors of the common core whether you favor Unity, KDE, Xfce, GNOME 3, or LXDE. I must reiterate that we have a big tent here and are not solely focused on the desktop environment named Unity but rather the unity that comes from the common core in software we all utilize.

Looking ahead, our near-term goal is to prepare for participation in Ohio Linux Fest 2013. In the long term we are going to need to strengthen the core of our community by mentoring members of our community so as to increase the number of Ubuntu Members that we have located here in the Buckeye State. Slowly but surely we will be looking forward to new horizons that will require new and interesting approaches.

Many adventures lay ahead. Let us move forward boldly as we near the end of the Raring Ringtail cycle and prepare for the Virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit in May.

Stephen Michael Kellat

The podcast known as The Burning Circle continues at this time. I’ve made updates to the relevant Launchpad pages to put the High Council into hibernation as I’m the sole member of it remaining. In due time it will return but we have some work ahead of us in the Buckeye State first.

While Ohio Linux Fest 2013 is five months away, we have some disadvantages. First off is that we do not have as much presence in the state capital as we once did. Our members are widely spread across Ohio and it will take some effort to get people to converge on Columbus. Second, we almost did not have a presence there in 2012. Extra effort will be needed to coordinate to ensure that we might be able to sponsor an UbuCon this year perhaps or at least get some speakers lined up. Third, their website was unreachable this weekend so I will need to invest some time to locate correct contacts. This all results in plenty of action items to cover the next five months.

New adventures await as 2013 continues ever onward…

…read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Flavia Weisghizzi: Outreach report (part II)

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During the first part of my OPW, I spent much of my time in investigating the issues newcomers could encounter in approaching FOSS. Results of my work, are available here.
Starting form these results, I’ve spent some time in second part of my internship in studying how to apply what I’ve discovered in the GNOME environment.
I’ve tried to provide some answers to the questions I met: I share with you the result of my work.

Classification of newcomers.

I’ve try out that newcomers could be generally set in three type:

Type A: Enthusiastic

An Enthusiastic newcomer is a great passionate of GNOME, is a GNOME user and generally decides to use some of his time to give a hand.
He has not a well established idea about what he can do, but he wants to contribute.
Probably he’ll start to follow as much ML as he can, join IRC channel, proposing himself for every task.
What he really needs is a guide not only a Mentor, but someone who can address him to the right team,   supply some indication about guidelines and more important, give him some task to do, that could help him to perfectly feel himself as a part of community.

Risks and potentialities: An Enthusiastic newcomer is proud to serve the project he chose, is very participative, but his outburst risks to burn away and fall very quickly, if he doesn’t find the right way to  take part of community.

Type B: Passionate

A Passionate newcomer is a volunteer provided of some experience in GNOME world.
He could be a GNOME user, and very often he came from other FOSS projects.
He desires offer his capabilities and some amount of his time in developing some specific part of project.
What he really needs is to find well defined task to do and some people who could steer him in early days.

Risks and potentialities: A Passionate newcomer is usually a professional who has little time to spend, but can offer a significant know-how. Generally his contribute is not daily, but often very relevant and long-lasting.

Type C: Technician

A Technician newcomer approach a community bringing a great experience.
Usually he has a technical background and is a first class citizen in FOSS world.
Coder or not coder, he has a great familiarity with community tools.
What he really needs is to find well written documentation and guidelines, and some project in which he cans easily take part.

Risks and potentialities: whatever be the know-how brought by a Technichian newcomer, it will be valuable; the main risks involve only the capability of newcomer to integrate his knowledge to work-flow.

Howdy, newcomer!

A very relevant issue we should take in consideration, is how a newcomer joins GNOME.
My personal opinion is through IRC Channels.
A direct contact is always the best, IMHO, but IRC Channels can’t be enough to provide detailed info.
This should be the role of gnome.org/ gnome.org/get-involved/ pages.
I’ve been really pleased to notice that design renewal of the site occurred …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Computers

GNOME 3.8 delivers more privacy and a new 'classic' mode

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Linux fans may recall the GNOME project’s announcement late last fall that it was planning to drop its “fallback” mode aimed at systems incapable of 3D rendering and to deliver a brand-new “classic” mode instead.

Sure enough, last week saw the launch of GNOME 3.8, and there among numerous major new features and enhancements was the promised GNOME Classic traditionally flavored desktop.

Classic mode delivers a GNOME 2-like experience (Click image to enlarge.)

Specifically, GNOME Classic retains all the underlying technologies from the current GNOME 3 Linux desktop environment but adds many popular features from the well-loved GNOME 2. Also incorporated are a variety of community-created extensions.

“GNOME 3 is elegant by default and extremely configurable by design,” said Karen Sandler, executive director of the GNOME Foundation. “The release of GNOME Classic is evidence of the ability to customize GNOME through extensions and demonstrates how our developers have listened and responded to feedback from the community.”

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Linux

The Perfect Desktop – OpenSUSE 12.3 (GNOME Desktop)

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HowtoForge: This tutorial shows how you can set up an OpenSUSE 12.3 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

The software I propose as default is the one I found easiest to use and best in their functionality – this won’t necessarily be true for your needs, thus you are welcome to try out the applications listed as alternatives.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Preliminary Note

To fully replace a Windows desktop, I want the OpenSUSE 12.3 desktop to have the following software installed:

Graphics:

  • Pinta – open source drawing application modeled after Paint.NET
  • KolourPaint – paint application with elemental functions
  • The GIMP – free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop
  • Shotwell Photo Manager – full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop

Internet:

  • Firefox
  • Opera
  • Chromium – Google’s open-source browser
  • Thunderbird – email and news client
  • Evolution – combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions
  • Deluge – free cross-platform BitTorrent client
  • Transmission BitTorrent Client – Bittorrent client
  • qBittorrent – free alternative to µtorrent
  • Marble – desktop globe similar to google earth
  • GoogleEarth – Google’s desktop globe
  • Flash Player 11
  • FileZilla – multithreaded FTP client
  • Pidgin IM Client – multi-platform instant messaging client
  • Skype (only for 32 bit systems)
  • Dropbox Client – cloud storage
  • Gwibber Social Client – open-source microblogging client (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Office:

  • Adobe Reader
  • Evince – document viewer
  • Okular – document viewer
  • LibreOffice Writer – replacement for Microsoft Word
  • LibreOffice Calc – replacement for Microsoft Excel
  • GnuCash – double-entry book-keeping personal finance system, similar to Quicken
  • Scribus – open source desktop publishing (DTP) application

Sound & Video:

  • Banshee – audio player, can encode/decode various formats and synchronize music with Apple iPods
  • Amarok – audio player
  • MPlayer – media player (video/audio), supports WMA
  • Rhythmbox Music Player – audio player, similar to Apple’s iTunes, with support for iPods
  • gtkPod – software similar to Apple’s iTunes, supports iPod, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, iPod photo, and iPod mini
  • Sound Juicer CD Extractor – CD ripping tool, supports various audio codecs
  • XMMS – audio player similar to Winamp
  • Clementine – Amarok 1.4 fork
  • VLC Media Player – media player, plays all kinds of videos (video/audio)
  • Totem – media player (video/audio)
  • Xine – media player, supports various formats; can play DVDs
  • Winff – free video converter
  • SoundConverter – free audio converter
  • Soundkonverter – free audio converter
  • K3B – CD/DVD burning program
  • Brasero – CD/DVD burning program
  • Audacity – free, open source, cross platform digital audio editor
  • Kino – free digital video editor
  • dvd::rip – full featured DVD copy program
  • Multimedia Codecs

Programming:

  • Bluefish – text editor, suitable for many programming and markup languages
  • Eclipse – Extensible Tool Platform and Java IDE

Other:

  • VirtualBox – lets you run your old Windows desktop as a virtual machine under your Linux desktop, so you don’t have to entirely abandon Windows
  • TrueType fonts
  • Java
  • gedit – simple text editor

The software provided in the above list covers most of the basic tasks one might need to do on their desktop computers, sometimes there are multiple choices for same functionality. If you know which one you like best, you obviously don’t need to install and test the other applications, however if you like choice, then of course you can install more than one.

I’m using the OpenSUSE 12.3 Live-DVD in this tutorial to set up the system. You can download it from here: http://software.opensuse.org/123/en

I will use the username howtoforge in this tutorial, and I will download all necessary files to howtoforge’s desktop which is equivalent to the directory /home/howtoforge/Desktop. If you use another username, please replace howtoforge with your own username. So when I use a command such as

cd /home/howtoforge/Desktop

you must replace howtoforge.

 

2 Installing The Base System

Download the OpenSUSE 12.3 Live-DVD iso image, burn it onto a DVD, and boot your computer from it. Select Installation.

OpenSUSE

Continue reading this article at it’s original source:
http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-opensuse-12.3-gnome-desktop

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Linux Today

Linux

Flavia Weisghizzi: GNOME 3.8: Proud to be there

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GNOME 3.8 has been finally released, as everybody knows.
But what really you can’t imagine, it’s the deep sense of pride and excitation you can try out in feeling yourself part of this fantastic adventure.
I’m member of Ubuntu, but albeit I’ve always taken part of Marketing team, I’ve never felt so involved previously.
I suppose it depends from the deep differences in power relations between Canonical and Ubuntu in regard of a community driven project as GNOME.
I haven’t wrote code, or drawn interfaces, but I’ve been asked to write up a draft of Press Release, and I can swear it has been exciting.
Obviously everyone in Marketing team made of his best to improve earlier text, and I feel it was born as a awesome mix of different passions and backgrounds.
What I really get from this experience is that everyone is truly capable to add his help in this project, and that GNOME 3.8 is really a common effort.

GNOME 3.8 has been the very first release I’ve been involved to, and I’m proud to be there.

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu