Older blog entries for sisob (starting at number 68)

Uni

Have now officially had 2 days of lectures in CS and it's looking pretty fun. The fact that I am recovering from surgery is a bit of a bummer because it means that I can't go out at night or anything like that for the moment, but I'll be better soon enough so it's not so bad.

Met a whole load of interesting people, who will no doubt read this blog in time when I give them the URL so I'd better be nice :) Seriously tho, was impressed that a load of people knew about Linux, even a member of *cough* d'oposite-sex. V. Impressive. I'm loading up XD2 on my laptop to show it off because, while they all know about Linux and have tried it out, they don't seem to know how sweet it can be and have generally got stuck with install and hardware issues etc..

Maybe I'll try to organise an Install fest :p

PnP and Notification in WinXP

I was using windows XP for a while over the weekend and on thing about it really impressed me: The use of the System tray (Notification area in Gnome). This can be broken down into a few areas:

* Networking: Windows used to be really poor in this area in that you would have to reboot to restart a network connection, but now it's pretty sweet. I was using my gf's laptop which had both WiFi and Ethernet. When I booted up neither were connected so there were two icons in the system area which consisted of a network icon with big red X accross it. Once I connected either of these, it would get an IP from the DHCP server and I was immediately online, then a balloon would pop up and tell me that I was connected to the network. The way these ballons work in general is IMHO less than ideal but I'm not going to go into that - all in all it is pretty nifty.

In Gnome we have the gnome-netstatus applet in Gnome cvs which is pretty nice but it must be added to the panel manually and told which connection to monitor - obviously a far cry from the ease of use of the XP version. I don't pretend to know how we could implement something similar in Gnome, but it will have to be done some day if we want to compete with the big boys ;) Maybe we could use Gnome-System-Tools to detect the avaliable connections and show them in the notification area :/

* Hardware: Plug and Play hardware (eg. USB) works really nicely. Instead of the old wizard dialog you used to get now a little notification bubble pops up to tell you that new hardware has been detected and another one then replaces it telling you whether the new hardware could be installed.

Hopefully HAL will provide this kind of functionality in the future for Linux users.

* Battery and Sound: If you are using a laptop a battery is shown in the system tray so you can see how much life is left - if you aren't it isn't. Simple as that. Same goes for sound - if you have sound hardware then a speaker is shown to let you change the volume - if you don't it isn't. Gnome should work like this. Not sure how to detect if the system has a battery - maybe HAL, but sound wont be as much of a challenge.

Another thing in Gnome, if that a system is capable of suspending then "Suspend" should be shown in the Actions menu, along with Logout/Shut Down/Reboot.

So in short - XP does a good job of customising the interface based on what hardware is avaliable. ATM Joe Gnome User must do this h[i/er]mself. This needs to change and with kickin' things like HAL I think it can.

Need laptop Advice

I can get this laptop with the following spec for €920:

ACER AMD2200,
40GB Hard Disk
512MB DDR Ra,
15" Screen
DVD/CDRW Combo Drive
56k Modem
10/100 Lan
XP Home

Another Picture: http://global.acer.com/products/notebook/as1300.htm

It looks fairly ordianary and may not include a warranty(but I can insure it) and fancy things like TV-Out, Bluetooth, etc... And I can't see it before I buy so I have to make do with info from the web.

Also - it's about 3.1Kg

So... Should I buy it? :)

Distos

Still frustrated by avaliable distros. Installed fedora over the gentoo install I did a few days ago. It's not bad except that the menus are still broken when you try to use anything except the blucurve icon theme. It's also a royal pita to get mp3 etc.. support installed - hopefully this will change when fedora gets released and people start updating their repositories.

Maybe I'll try gentoo again :/ I'm just getting to old to have to manually configure stupid things like sound.

P2P in Gnome & Hospital

Hospital
Just found out that I'm out of here tomorrow. Rock on!

College here I come.

P2P in Gnome
Another application area that needs to be improved in Gnome is P2P. I actaually started looking into this long before I ever gave any thought to Scanning in Gnome.

Most recently I mailed the gnome-network list to see if bittorrent support could be added to whatever download manager makes it into gnome-network. Bittorrent is a really cool protocal and is used for a lot of open source software so it would be great to support. It's also really simple: From the user's point of view, one just has to click on a bittorrent link in a webpage and the gnome download manager will download it. How to implement this is another story that I will leave up to someone else as usual :) I imageine it's a question of adding a mime type for .torrent files to be opened bu the download manager and making the download manager support bittorrent.

A nice little project for anyone looking for something to do ;)

As early as this may i was in contact with giFToxic developers to see if we could make it a really usable Gnome P2P program. I did loads of mockups and we did get a few things chnaged and made easier, but I don't know if the giFToxic hackers are into being as radical as I am.

What Gnome (and the world) needs is an un-tabbed, task-based interfact to the P2P networks of the world. Ths mockup was the best thing I could come up with at the time, but I've learned a lot since then and can probably improve on that a lot. I need to find out how people use P2P and do up a task analysis(I'll put a basic task analysis in the extended text of this entry so keep reading if your interested). For example, I'd assume that no-one is going to have more than 6 to 10 transfers (either up or down) in progress at the same time. If this assumption is correct we can get rid of the sepporate Uploads and Downloads tabs for Transfers and just use one tree view. Another thing that I would assume is that people are going to spend more time searching for files and browsing that they are going to spend watching their downloads complete - therefore the primary function of the interface is to allow the user to find files to download.

As for implementation, I'm not sure if giFT can really cut it. The developers have a very different view on software to the standard Gnome ideals, eg. atm you need to understand intricate details of how the giFT network works to get it running. the good thing about giFT is that it is a free network, and as such should probably be like jabber for IM: the defaut in Gnome, with the option to use propriotary networks.

Another option is to write a new Gnome UI for something like mlDonkey which has great support for all of the major networks and has a very good developer community and is both stable and quick and easy to set up. The only problem is that their UI is very strongly focused at the power user and there is no point in trying to change that. Ideally the whole thing is designed to have a sepporate UI and there are already at least 15 of them, so writing one for Gnome would mostly be UI work. Maybe I'd even be able to code it, some day :)

ps. I haven't given this post my usual sanity check so sorry for all the typos (well more than usual at least) and bad grammer :)

re: seth

Seth: I've had that before - you need to put it together bit by bit testing as you go.

Found a net connection

I'm in hospital and still alive and stuff which is good. As usual I'm recovering twice as fast as the average punter. Ah the joys of youth and a fairly healthy lifestyle. I won't be joining the rock climbing club this year, but I should be able to get to most of the leactures.

Morphine(sp?) is some pretty mental stuff - i keep falling into have awake dreams/halonucionations . Crazy. I really need to learn to spell.

Lots of fund and exciting stuff going on, look forward to seeing seth's jhbuild ui, the Ximain live CD and fedora redhat. Also OpenOffice 1.1 Ximain Edition is going to rock words - go Michael - pitty it's not avaliable for windows or I'd be giving it to all my friends :)

Oh and thanks for all the well wishes everyone :)

I also started downloading Gentoo 1.4 before I left, it was 1.2 when I used it last and I'm curious to see what it's like now - being able to get up and running with prebuild binaries for things like X, OO.o and mozilla makes it very tempting. I think for me it'll be a face-off between Gentoo and fedora.

Also, it's good to see Sun releasing c# bidings for OpenOffice.org - I know that Sun and Ximain have worked together before, and I'd love to see them working well together on OpenOffice.org and Gnome.

Away

Going into hospital in 2 hours. Wont be back for at least a week.

Happy hacking everyone.

Distros and Futures

I forgot to mention this very good Spamassiassin guide. I didn't use it to the letter, but it has loads of great info.

Distros
Tried out installing Debian from a Morphix cd but I'm back in Redhat I'm affraid. I mean, what's the point in having an apt repository with thousands of packages if they are all at least 6 months old. It seems rediculous that Xfree86 4.3 isn't even in unstable yet, but Morphix and Redhat etc.. have been using it for ages. By Default Debian comes with XFree86 4.2 and a freetype setup that makes actually gave me a headache. I can understand there being a short delay getting Gnome 2.4 into the repository, and I dont mind running Debian unstable, but the one thing I really can't live without is decent fonts and X4.3. Think I'll wait and see what happens with the Redhat Linux Project.

"Imagine this.."
You sit down and turn on your linux box. You're greated by grub with a nice Gnome/Redhat/Ximian graphic and an improved layout and look. You choose Linux and are greeted by SystemServices which loads up the basic system serivces (while showing you a nice progress bar and graphics to match grub). Then X and gdm start and the rest of the system services load in the background. The system feels integrated, consistent and polished. X is stable fast and featureful (transparency etc..).

You log into Gnome and are greeted by a network and hardware aware environment. No longer does Gnome feel like it has been hastily stuck ontop of X as an afterthought. You can browse you LAN, share files with others, plugin in USB hardware and have it work out of the box, change you screen resolution, grub config, start-up services, network connections, system date and time etc... You can search for your files with natural language searches, you can share your desktop over your desktop or log into someone else's.

[Edit]Oh and throw in The new Kernel with Alsa and the new X sound server, and a mature gstreamer, with totem and rhythmbox attached and loads of other highly usable Gnome apps, and a Lean mean Ximain OpenOffice and a mature Gnome Office suite.

I have a dream, and Gnome is going to make it come true...
(With a little help from it's friends)

[Edit] This may sound like a mental mad rambling to you - Imaging how Gnome/Linux will be in the future is how I cheer myself up when stuff in the real world is pissing me off.

Spam and stuff

Got spamassasin working nicely with fetchmail/procmail thanks to the help of the boys on gimpnet.

Also, tried out Morphix. Very nice base, and I like what I've read about how it's put together, but their Gnome desktop is pretty poor. That's partly because Gnome 2.2 and 2.4 are pretty poor out of the box, but they also customised it and made it slightly suckier. Still, a little 2.6 love and the right app selection and it could really rock.

Herzi says there will be a 2.4 version of Gnoppix as some stage which will rock. I'll probably download the 2.2 version tomorrow to play around with and see if it's any better. The package selection looks pretty nice.

Looks like my plans for a "Gnome Linux Desktop" will end up being based around Gnome2.6/Debain and 2.6 will rock so hard that it wont even need to be patched :)

Seth: spell-checking in gnome-blog would rock ;)

Spam, Distros, Nautilus

Spam
Managed to get Spamassassin down to 6 seconds per e-mail from 30 but that is still way to much. I'm going to try again with the latest version when it is released in the next few days.

Distros
I thinking about using some sort of Virtual Machine software (VMware, bochs, plex86) to try out various distros and various configs. I'm getting sick of re-installing my main system, I want to find something and stick with it. Once I get access to my Uni Network I'll burn a good 10GB of isos and try loads of stuff out.

Moving/Copying/Replacing Files in Nautilus
Dennis Cranston agreed to look at the relevant eel dialogs so I said I would do a writeup on the problems related to Moving, Copying and Replacing Files in Nautilus.

Here it is: (If you can think of any similar problems Moving/Copying/Replacing Files in Nautilus please post a comment)

Some Replies

mrcsparker: Will you post up your ssh hack somewhere so that I can give it a try? I'm dieing for ssh: to work. Also, just post the patch to desktop-devel-list@gnome.org - the worst that can happen is that no-one will reply or that it will be rejected :)

Jauco: I want to have all these tools avaliable at scan time, but maybe we could share code with a "Gnome Photo Editor" or something which would be more like iPhoto (which I've never seen or used, so no compying on my part ;) ). Gnome really does need a simple image editor in the Gnome style but that's another project entirely, and we're lucky enough to have gnome-scan on Ross's list already.

Scanning, Webcam and Distos

<img alt="gnome-scan-9-small.png" src="http://sisob.tuxfamily.org/archives/gnome-scan-9-small.png" width="190" height="150" border="0" style="float: left; padding: 10px;" />
Did a wee bit more mockuping:

* Added a color mode setting
* Added an adjustments section for brightness and contrast, I think that these are pretty commonly used.
* Removed the "Customize" buttom because I realised that we can just list all the possible resolutions there, giving each a descriptive name, and no-one should ever have to customize it.

* Started working on the menus a bit, not that you can see much of it in the mockup. The "Scan" menu has "Preview" and "Scan". The "Selection" menu lets you save,load, delete, select all, and select none. The tools menu is as yet empty but will have frequent-by-few items in there like invert colors, mirror, color adjustment etc...
* The "Scan to" item now has useful things like "Abiword as text", "Gimp as Image", "E-Mail as text", "E-Mail as Image"
* The file name box below "Scan to" will be insensitive when relevant depending on the selection in the drop down.
* Once again the icons are just to give you an idea, but there is now rotate-left and rotate-right on the toolbar.

If people want me to post glade files as well as screenshots just say. The only think I'm still unsure of is how to name files when you make multiple selections and how to handle OCR in the same situation.

Webcam
I was going to get myself a webcam, but then I realised that I just needed to hook up my digital camera's TV-Out to my TV card. Unfortunatly I have no-one to talk to online who has a web cam :) Will have to get my girlfriend one (Oh the fun we can have ;) ). Oh and my camera uses AA rechargable bateries which kind of sucks if want to use it as a webcam.

Distro stuff
I'm now running Redhat9/XD2 with rhythmbox, gnomechat, gossip, totem, epiphany and devhelp and gtk2 2.2.4 all rebuilt from NyQuists's source rpms. It's running pretty well but I do miss auto-completion in the run dialog and syntax highlighting in gedit. Oh and Nautilus and Gnome-Terminal are slow as ****. But the pretty menus, network browsing, artwork and general posh are keeping me happy. I'll probably end up replacing most of XD2 with 2.4 rpms eventually.

ps. If anyone wants any of my 125 rpms for Redhat9/XD2 I just need somewhere on the web to put them - more than 100mb.

oh yeah, and the reason I'm not using NyQuists repository instead of XD2 is that it uses a lot of redhat stuff that I don't like and he will be tracking 2.5 no doubt and i like to build unstable from source and have my rpms be stable.

Spam
Even with spamd running spamassasin was taking 30 seconds per e-mail so I've turned it off.

ADSL
Have had ADSL for almost 48 hours now and I've spent at least 24 of them at the computer. Need to get out - have been getting head-aches. Must get excercise, must get excercise ...