Older blog entries for nyo (starting at number 23)

Today, I found a really nice toy - Splashy. It's a completely user-space frame buffer boot splash system. Though it is in development right now, it's already very nice. It does not require any kernel patches and has few dependencies. So I installed it (there's a deb on the web site) and rebooted my machine. It was so cool. I got a simple image with a progress bar below during all the boot process until GDM start up. I hope that splashy will develop quickly so it could be included in Debian Sarge release. There's also a #splashy IRC channel on the Freenode, where Splashy's developers chat.

The one thing I hate and don't understand is that really few programs use power of GnomeVFS. Even GNOME Desktop parts don't use GnomeVFS for some reason, that reason is really secret for me. Of my currently installed programs, only Nautilus, Totem, Rhythmbox and Goobox use gnomevfs (I guess that's because GStreamer provides support for it). Also Text Editor (gedit) can Open files using GnomeVFS, but not save. Why? That's really annoying that I can't open a file from samba share not by copying it to local filesystem. Or save a nice web page to my friend's machine.

GnomeVFS is really nice library with clean and easy API. Why not using it?

Too late to sleep, to sleepy to do anything... :)

By the way. I'm of course not using old P200MMX machine anymore. I got shiny new Athlon 64 systen with 512M of RAM and 200G SATA hard disk. Even gnomes flies. :) I tried Debian-AMD64 and Ubuntu Hoary AMD64 (all Pure64), but I decided to go back to 32bit environment (Debian Sid) until there will be normal multiarch support implemented.

I just prepared a patch for rus-ispell to generate aspell-ru package from its source. This will make happy many russian users. I hope that the maintainer will apply it ASAP (ie before Sarge). :) If you're interested, it's on #237745 (see the last message).

Oh, I forgot to blog. Today I also started coding a little download manager for GNOME. It's much inspired by D4X, but uses more GNOME platform features (GConf, GnomeVFS, also freedesktop's D-BUS) and tries to follow the HIG. For file transferring, I'm planning to use libCurl. It's written in Python, which I don't know much, but already like it. Currently, only some UI work are done, you can see the first screenshot here.

By the way, I'm using GNOME 2.10 that is not available in Debian Unstable (only Evolution 2.2 is there), but is packaged for Experimental. It works and looks nice here, but it needs some skill to upgrade, because metapackages aren't available yet. If you feel ready, then add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian ../project/experimental main

deb http://pkg-gnome.alioth.debian.org/debian experimental main

... and then do apt-get -t experimental install nautilus gnome-panel gnome-applets gnome-control-center epiphany-browser gedit gnome-utils gnome-media system-tools-backends

... and other packages (see output of, but DO NOT ANSWER YES: apt-get -t experimental dist-upgrade). You can use Synaptic to do it in GUI way, though you'll need to set Experimental as default distribution in its preferences.

Note that some packages are depend on newer libc6 2.3.5 which can fuck up your system.

Shit, why I always forgot to blog about interesting things? Well, i'll try to do it more often. I even installed gnome-blog and it's poster applet to the panel.

Today, I did many things in the net. I finally finished my Procedures answers for Debian New Maintainer Process and sent them to my application manager. Then I updated a Russian translation for GTK+ 2.6 and HEAD. Then I mailed Gossip developers about their improper use of notification area (the one program left is Rhythmbox). Then I updated my GNOME theme for D4X (screenshot) and sent it to the upstream author with new freedesktop-compilant .desktop file and some UI suggestions. Maybe I even did something else, I can't remember now.

BTW, Some days ago I packaged a nice program - Gnome Art - the "front-end" for http://art.gnome.org/ website. Amaya find my package sponsored it for Debian very quickly. Thanks Amaya! Also thanks to FTP Masters for that NEW queue process is fast and the queue is short again!

That was a nice hacking day...

Wow, check out the new Google Map Service!

Really need to start blogging again...

Today, with vorlon's (Steve Langasek) help I finally found a problem why my package rhythmbox-applet doesn't build on 64-bit archetictures. It's because of kinda stupid mistakes in glib-gettextize.m4. Ppl, dgettext and ngettext return a pointer to a string or NULL, not integer with return value. And those checks in GLIB_WITH_NLS fails because of -Weror, because of type size mismatch. I did a quick patch and also packaged a new upstream version. Should be in unstable today or tommorow. Let's see if it builds on ia64, alpha and amd64 now.

I'm also talked about that problem on #gnome-debian and I'm going to ping glib upstream about it.

My Debian AM (application manager) finally checked my Philosophy answers and now I'm answering on Procedures questions. So, I'll become a DD sooner! :)

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