Tag Archives: GNOME

Linux

Looking for a greener distribution?

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Join the thundring herd of geekos!

Last week we released openSUSE 12.3 and the responses from the community and the press were better than ever before. Lots of journalists announced we’ve moved firmly in the top spot or top-three of favorite distro’s and quite a few are running openSUSE now. Seeing the many blog posts, tweets, facebook posts and Google+ discussions, the community feels very much the same!

Now maybe you’re not 100% happy with your current distribution. Maybe it isn’t entirely stable or you sometimes would like it if things just worked. Or you worry about the decision making process and the future of your current choice. Maybe you don’t want to wait for stuff to compile anymore.

I know, the technical differences between distributions are not huge. I’d even argue they are small – differences in philosophy and how they are developed are bigger, however. And I can imagine one feels more comfortable with a project which picks collaboration and sharing over secrecy and Not Invented Here. I know what I prefer. Technically, openSUSE belongs to the top distributions as well. And while nothing is perfect we at least make it darn easy to fix stuff without administrative sillyness.

So whatever the reason for looking somewhere else – I think it is fair to say that openSUSE should be on your short list of distributions to try.

To help with the trying, I called in help from our community and created an openSUSE introduction and a cheat sheet for moving over to openSUSE from a variety of other distributions. Check it out on news.opensuse.org!

As bonus, I’ll just give you three links that’ll be helpful getting your openSUSE up and running quickly:

And of course you can download openSUSE 12.3 on software.opensuse.org and find out what is new in the announcement.

Have a lot of fun! …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

KDE joins the Outreach Program for Women

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Outreach Program For Women Logo. CC-BY-SA – artists: Máirín Duffy, Liansu Yu, Hylke Bons

KDE will – for the first time this year – participate in the “Outreach Program for Women”. This was originally started by GNOME, but has also other participating organisations like Wikimedia, Mozilla, Fedora and others.

With KDAB as our sponsor we will be offering one internship. This is in no way only limited to coding, but includes user experience design, graphic design, documentation, web development, marketing, translation and other types of tasks needed to sustain a Free Software project.

The deadline for task submission is March 27. Please all in the KDE Community, suggest suitable tasks on our wiki page and volunteer to mentor. Feel free to contact me or Lydia for more information.

Prerequisites for application: Any woman who has not previously participated in an Outreach Program for Women or Google Summer of Code internship is welcome to apply, provided she is available for a full-time internship during this time period. This program is open to anyone who identifies as a woman regardless of gender presentation or assigned sex at birth. Genderqueer and genderfluid people are welcome to apply.

The application deadline for candidates is already on May 1st, while the program runs from June 17 to September 23.

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

Zeitgeist 1.0 Beta is out

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So finally we have rolled out Zeitgeist 1.0 beta…

With Zeitgeist 1.0 we areintroducinglibzeitgeist2, a Vala port of the previouslyindependent libzeitgeist library. The new libzeitgeist2 comes with 3 bigimprovementsover libzeitgeist:

  • Maintained internally by the Zeitgeist team since it is part of the internal datamodel we used.
  • Has direct read support. This way when querying Zeitgeist for data there is no more round-trips and less serialization which improves most queries by almost 100% and sometimes even more. Writing is still done over D-Bus.
  • GObject Introspection support. So now it can be used with almost any language.

The engine itself is also faster and has seen a lots of bug fixes. Zeitgeist datahub package is now part of the Zeitgeist Framework package. This should beconvenientfor packagers.

Over the weekend some of us will be porting apps in GNOME using Zeitgeist to libzeitgeist2 and actually patch some existing apps to have better sorting.

I would like to thank the whole Zeitgeist team for getting this far, and the people who helped us get there. Also we are looking into porting libQzeitgeist to depend on libzeitgeist2 for less future maintenance efforts (please contact Trever Fischer – tdfischer on irc) if you are interested.We have a very interesting KDE application in mind at the moment that would make use of kde-telepathy, nepomuk and libqzeitgeist.

We are hanging out on #zeitgeist on freenode and for the latest Zeitgeist, just check out our fdo git repo ==>http://cgit.freedesktop.org/zeitgeist/zeitgeist

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

Have you heard of Tanglu?

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If not, read this. This sounds like it’s going to be an awesome project, and I’m going to contribute in any way I can.

To quote some highlights from the initial announcement:

Tanglu will be based on Debian Testing and follow the Debian development closely. It will have a 6-months release-cycle and it’s target audience are Linux desktop users. We will make installing and setting up the distro as easy as possible.

Tanglu will be usable for both developers of upstream software and the average Linux user and Linux newbie. This is possible because in our opinion developers and users don’t have different needs for a desktop system. Both kinds of users like a polished desktop which “just works”. We will, hwever, not apply any kind of fancy modification on upstream software, we will basically just distribute what upstream created, so users can get an almost “pure” GNOME and KDE experience.

Tanglu is designed to be able to solve the issue that Debian is frozen for a long time and Debian Developers can’t make new upstream versions available for testing easily. During a Debian freeze, DDs can upload their software to the current Tanglu development version and later start the new Debian cycle with already tested packages from Tanglu. The delta between Tanglu and Debian should be kept as minimal as possible. However, Tanglu is not meant as experimental distribution for Debian, so please upload experimental stuff to Experimental. Only packages good enough for a release should go into Tanglu.

And the best part (to me, anyway 🙂 ):

Which desktop will you use?

Everyone can add a new desktop to Tanglu, as long as the desktop-environment is present in Debian. Long term, we will have to offer Linux-newbies a default flavour, probably by setting a default download on the website. But as long as there is a community for a given desktop-environment, the desktop is considered as supported.
At the beginning, we will focus on KDE, as many people have experience with it. But adding vanilla GNOME is planned too.

Yay for another option for a Debian based, pure KDE distro. I’m running both openSUSE and Kubuntu now on different machines. I’m surely more comfortable with Debian, but Kubuntu is simply more up-to-date, and KDE is really well integrated. I’m trying openSUSE, but having used Debian based distros for going on 10 years now, I still don’t have the level of comfort, so it lives on my (less critical) Laptop.

I see this as great because it will help the overall Debian ecosystem, which feeds not only Debian, but The ‘buntu’s, Mint CrunchBang and many others.

I just think it’s awesome to have something with a pure KDE more closely aligned with Debian coming soon.

Does this all sound as exciting to you as it does to me? Because, man, I’m pumped!

If so, do like I did and sign up for the mailing list, join the Freenode …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

Martin Pitt: PyGObject 3.7.92 released

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I just released a new PyGObject for GNOME 3.7.92. This fixes a couple of crashes and marshalling errors again, but most importantly got a change to automatically mute the PyGIDeprecationWarnings for stable versions. Please run pythonX.X with the -Wd option to still be able to see them.

We got through all our bugs that were milestoned for GNOME 3.8 and don’t want to or plan to introduce any major behavioural change at this point, so barring catastrophes this is what will be in GNOME 3.8.0.

Thanks to all contributors!

  • Fix stack smasher when marshaling enums as a vfunc return value (Simon Feltman) (#637832)
  • Change base class of PyGIDeprecationWarning based on minor version (Simon Feltman) (#696011)
  • autogen.sh: Source gnome-autogen to fix out of source builddir (Alban Browaeys) (#694889)
  • pygtkcompat: Make gdk.Window.get_geometry return tuple of 5 (Simon Feltman)
  • pygtkcompat: Initialize hint to zero in set_geometry_hints (Simon Feltman)
  • Remove incorrect bounds check with property helper flags (Simon Feltman)
  • Fix crash when setting property of type object to an incorrect type (Simon Feltman) (#695420)
  • Remove skipping of object property tests (Simon Feltman) (#695420)
  • Give more informative error when setting property to incorrect type (Simon Feltman) (#695420)

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Minor German Translation Update

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Hi, long time no post. Not that I have been a very frequent writer here in earlier days, but I needed a reason to tell you that my paid job is taking quite some space in my schedule recently.

Sidenote for those interested: I am working at a company that is doing the automation and conveyor technology for Porsche in Leipzig/Germany and several other rather Volkswagen-centric companies. So it’s all Windows and crappy industrial software for me now. That brought me quite far away from KDE and Linux in general. I am still using Linux with KDE on my private laptop, but there is so little free time now that I barely see the KDE desktop anymore. And if I do, the hotel’s internet is probably down. I am planning to write a rather KDE-unrelated post about software development in the automotive industry, but that will have to wait for the automotive industry to change in a way that gives its service providers enough room to breathe. 😀

Following the development of me being rather Windows-centric these days, describing my involvement in the German translation as “sparse” would be rather generous. If it wasn’t for Burkhard Lück (he himself holder of an Akademy award), we probably would not have a German translation in 4.10. Big Thank You for that!

One thing I want to mention though is that as of this weekend the German KDE translation follows the rest of the world regarding the translation of “Trash”. For some reason we have been using “Mülleimer” since … forever. GNOME, Windows, Mac OS X and probably everyone else is using “Papierkorb”. For the non-German speakers: “Mülleimer” is more like the thing in the kitchen, while “Papierkorb” is its office equivalent. So, big “Yay” here from my side.

That I am celebrating a small (but nice) thing like that, shows that the German translation team is in a rather sad state of decline. A few years ago, there were about six to ten active translators. Now there are two (if you are positive enough to count me).

I am planning on writing a post about what it takes to be a translator hoping that we find someone who is willing to take responsibility to be a long-term contributor, but … well, as said, lacking free time. 🙂

So, I hope there are some folks out there who appreciate the new “Papierkorb” and more generally the German KDE translation and even more generally German translations and most generally translations in all languages.

Have fun. 🙂

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

ownCloud 5 released: a vision realized, a vision expanded

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Today we released ownCloud 5, a very important milestone for the ownCloud community and perhaps the most important release so far. But before going into the details I want to take a step back and look at what the original idea of ownCloud was at the beginning.
The idea of ownCloud was and is to enable everybody to host, control and sync and share their personal data without giving control away to the big data silos like Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive and iCloud. I think today we have all the features in place to say that we reached this goal. Everybody from a home user to a big enterprise can host their own personal cloud installation. I’m also super happy about the integration into KDE and GNOME because this is important to provide a really seamless experience for users.
It’s a coincidence that CERN invited me to give a talk about ownCloud and data silos that I will give here in a few hours at the exact same day ownCloud 5 is released. CERN is also the place where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web 22 years ago. It’s interesting that the Web was built as a completely decentralized system where no distinction between someone who is publishing data and someone who is consuming data exists. There is no concept of a centralized entity that everybody connects to. Everybody can be sender and receiver at the same time. Just as Berthold Brecht proposed in 1932.
Interestingly, the web looks a bit different today where a huge amount of the traffic goes through websites like Facebook, Google, Dropbox and Amazon. Where is the idea of a decentralized and federated web?
Today we are deciding how the world will look like in the future. We, the IT community, set the course of the train that is called “open society” now and we can decide into which station the train will roll into in 5-10 years. Is it the one where all the people still control their own data and information and can decide who has access to the personal files, photos, contacts, location data, chat messages and other personal information or will we live in a future where all the personal data of all the people in the world are stored on the servers of just a few big organizations and commercial interests, terms of services and secret services decide who has access to the digital life of everybody?
If you care about these questions then join the ownCloud community or other free software projects and work on decentralized and federated alternatives.
ownCloud 5 is the result of the work of our awesome developer community. More and more people join and are getting more involved. To me this is a sign that we are doing something right and that ownCloud is not just a crazy idea that no one needs but something that is very important to …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Computers

Ubuntu Linux gets a new official flavor

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Ubuntu fans may recall Ubuntu GNOME Remix, the unofficial flavor of the Linux distribution that was launched last fall for users not fond of the software’s default Unity desktop environment.

Following hard on the heels of the release of Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal,” the new GNOME Remix version was created “to bring the best of GNOME to Ubuntu users,” in the words of its developers.

Well, this week the new flavor was made an official part of the Ubuntu Linux family, giving it full access to infrastructure support, publicity, and other benefits from Canonical and the Ubuntu community.

‘There was strong demand’

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

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Linux

openSUSE 12.3 is out!

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It’s been an interesting release cycle for me. It was my first full release cycle (ok, short one, just 6 months) with the new openSUSE team. Interesting ride.

But today, it is party time. Tonight I will finally see the famous
In the last days we released three sneak previews of what’s new in openSUSE 12.3, each getting a lot of reads and comments:

  • For desktop users with a intro to GNOME (I’m new to that, still) and a series of more ‘pro’ tips for KDE apps as well as a newbie-friendly intro video to KDE Plasma Desktop by +Cameron Wiebe.

    I must admit that writing the GNOME part was a tad frustrating, used as I am to a KDE environment and all its perks and some things drove me almost mad (or wonder what @#$%@ designed $SPECIFIC_THING). But at the same time, it is completely obvious that a great many things are extremely well designed in GNOME Shell. A number of basic workflows are clearly well thought out and polished and that is very noticeably missing on the KDE side. As Alex Fiestas said: you notice that not many KDE developers ever start their favorite desktop on a ‘fresh’ user account. Application windows which require resizing is really the least of the problem there – yes, the defaults are still not very nice. But once you start configuring, you can have it any way YOU want, an unbeatable advantage if you’ve got a busy life like me. As I write in the preview, I think it’s a trade-off.

  • Will and Michal wrote a “openSUSE 12.3 for servers” article with OpenStack and some other things. Personally, I’m not exactly deep into that stuff but hey, if you run a server I bet it is awesome 😉
  • The third sneak preview was about software handling and getting new stuff on openSUSE. We’ve got our famous Open Build Service – yes, the 200K packages on it and the 35K accounts do not all point to unique packages or active packagers but there is plenty of action there. We’ve got a great search front end with software.opensuse.org and a less-nice-but-still doing-the-job one-click-install to get the goodies. When will that new one-click-install be finished, I wonder?

Now, let me include two video‘s I’m extremely happy with: the KDE intro and a demonstration of installing the new LibreOffice 4.0 from OBS.

PS I hope to go to the Owncloud 5 release party in Berlin, maybe cu there 😉

Now, go, get openSUSE 12.3! …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

Juha Siltala: When you’re done

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From the recent minor Ubuntu “crisis”, I have managed to distill some good bits too. Here’s one from Mark: “If you’ve done what you want for Ubuntu, then move on.”[1] I think this is great advice. Why loiter around making useless noise when a community and its project change in ways you’re not comfortable with?

To add balance, I myself have received from Ubuntu what I came for in 2004, and much, much more. I’m not very interested in any of the Special Ubuntu Stuff that we’ve been receiving in the last couple of years. I came for an easy Debian-like system with a reliable release cycle (and latest GNOME!), but Debian itself is much better with this stuff now, so there’s no reason really to keep using Ubuntu (and to keep stripping all the Ubuntu niceties and adding GNOME goodies).

Not sure what I should do, this is just a point that stood out. It’s even in our Code of Conduct. “Step down considerately.”[2]

In any case, there are a couple of things I’ve actually committed myself to doing this year, so that’s what I’m going to do first – with minimal whineage, I promise! Who knows what I’ll be thinking this December, we’re just getting warm for this year!

[1] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1228
[2] http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu/conduct

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu

Linux

Daniel Holbach: Ubuntu: you’ve changed

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Ubuntu 4.10 (CC BY-SA 2.0 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/silwenae/4632675/)

I can’t precisely date back when I got involved in Ubuntu, all I do know is that Michael Vogt helped me out with some Debian CDs in university and some months later told me: “you might like this, you can upgrade to it”. I tried it and was hooked immediately.

Ubuntu 4.10

When some time later the Ubuntu preview was announced and I learned more about the project goals and values, I felt totally inspired and knew I would totally love this. I had a hard time focusing on my thesis, I ignored it for a while and got involved in Ubuntu. Many folks encouraged me and I started to do some packaging. I packaged some software outside of Ubuntu first (coaster for example, it seems not to exist any more), but quickly got dragged into Ubuntu itself. (pyzor was the first upload I could find.)

Life in 2004 was exciting:

  • Plugging in a USB key and having it show up on your desktop finally worked.
  • We used GNOME 2.8, Firefox 0.9, XFree86 4.3, Evolution 2.0 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.2.
  • Some months later we had Live CDs!

This was a very special time, it inspired many to do all kinds of crazy things.

April Fool’s login

Admittedly, I looked funny too.

myself at Ubuntu Down Under (picture taken by Tollef Fog Heen)

myself at Ubuntu Down Under

Ubuntu was very different. Its focus on making things work and favouring simplicity won many hearts over. Also its friendly community with high social standards inspired many and made it a pleasure to be involved and try something new. Ubuntu introduced LoCo teams, which brought Ubuntu into many parts of the world, which helped many finding new friends and which brought many new opportunities to everyone.

Ubuntu always was full of change. We pioneered and forged ahead in many many places. We were the first to ship a 2.6 kernel, we modularised X, derooted many services, made it easier to upgrade and install packages, wrote upstart, made booting fast and very often were the first to think new, shake up the standards and improve things for everyone.

Each of these changes was hard work, sometimes brought some problems with it, had its opponents, but also inspired many others, often new folks to jump in and help.

Some of these disagreements were very loud, sometimes they were inside the Ubuntu community, sometimes included Canonical people, sometimes they were on the sidelines of the Ubuntu world. And they were almost accompanied by calls that Ubuntu/Canonical should do more, do less, do it earlier or do it later. Some of the decisions which were made were reverted as a result of testing and feedback, but many stuck around and proved themselves as wise choices.

We were quick to embrace and count on new technologies. Many casual Ubuntu …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu