Johns Blog

Matlab and Simulink on Dapper

Note to self: If you need to unstall simulink on ubuntu dapper then make sure you install libxft1

GNOME on the horizon

My responses to this well composed post of GNOME constructive criticism.

Interesting and well written post. I am also not a gnome expert, only a user and part time developer. Here are some suggestions regarding each of the points you made;

Firstly a few general comments. Personally on Ubuntu Dapper Beta, Gnome is considerably faster than KDE in my experience, but this may just be a variation of the placebo effect!. Either way all the recent GNOME performance work has sped it up considerably since the version in Breezy!

Secondly I think a number of your points make the assumption that GNOME = Nautilus, or GNOME = Nautilus + Metacity. This is a common belief (or if indeed this is what you though) and incorrect. HOWEVER, this is why we must admit that proportionally a lot of polish must go into these two applications. I dont think that throwing features at Nautilus is the answer, it will also never be the GNOME answer, and I am thankful for it. But you do raise some good points, and ignoring any GNOME user is the wrong thing to do.

Now, point by point responses

Instant Messaging: Check out the galago desktop presence framework. While still on the horizon I forsee some form of integration between the entire desktop, gaim, and this as the glue

Voice Over IP: Check out ekiga. Maybe at some stage this may make it into core GNOME. Either way there is possiblity for integration with above.

File Sharing: I could not agree more. Apparently nautilus (gnome-vfs) supports rendevous discovery of shares and the like but I dont think this is fully taken advantage of (or I havent seen it in GNOME 2.14). Perhaps something could be done with cherokee web server + WebDAV + automatic nautilus discovery + gnome-vfs WebDAV + places sidebar. Edit- This was done here, but i think the project died.

Secure Shell GUI: This is already there. Check out Places -> Connect To Server -> SSH. I presume you can also enter sftp://user@server/path

More Command Line Tools: While I understand the problem you want to solve; easier access to command line. I dont think shoving everything into the file browser is the right way to go about it. If GNOME can think of a better way to interact with the command line in a modern GUI environment then this is a step in the right direct. Putting the terminal into nautilus I dont think so much.

Menu Editing: Ubuntu Dapper ships the alacarte menu editor. It has also been proposed for inclusion into GNOME 2.16. Its a step in the right direction.

Eye Candy: Do NOT open this can of worms. Personally I think the GNOME has KDE beat when it comes to eye candy. The eyecandy discussion will never be resolved. Its all a matter of preference, I like toyota, you like mazda etc. At the framework GNOME can draw nice graphics using Cairo, and fun things are happening FOR EVERYONE IN THE LINUX COMMUNITY, GNOME AND KDE using compiz and XGL or AIGLX. You do have some points, there are features coming into GTK to be able to detect if a compositing manager is running, but if I want GNOME to keep looking prettier than KDE (joke) then stuff needs to go into GTK to make this easier!

Conclusion I think that this is a very interesting time for GNOME. There is all this cool framework level stuff sitting there, simmering away, ready to be cooked into GNOME in some amazing ways. leaftag, galago, deskbar (and the buzz its generating), desktop search, performance improvements, compiz and XGL, and MUCH MORE.

Comments welcome

Motivation....

"Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll get involved in the project. "

Linus Torvalds

Nuclear Energy

It is good to see that some environmentalists are not as dogmatic in their anti-nuclear views as others. I think it is high time that New Zealand had a mature and open nuclear energy debate.

Epiphany is AWESOME!

After reading this post I have now switched from firefox to epiphany. I would have done so earlier if this was hyped during the (or Davyd's) 2.14 release notes!

My favorite features (so far) are

• Extensions (especially integration with liferea)

• When a page cannot epiphany offers the GCace or Archive.org version

• Starts faster

• Taggable style bookmarks!

• Deskbar integration

• Download manager (with notification area icon)

I would recommend any gnomie out there to switch to epiphany today!

Ubuntu Dapper Flight5

Just upgraded to flight 5 and feeling quite positive about the state of ubuntu. Suspend is working agin on my laptop, and so is the SD card slot. I have included a screenshot below.

Also I plan to do a review of my laptop at some stage in the near future (Panasonic CF-R4).

Updated XGL and Compiz

With the great help of those on the Ubuntu forums XGL/Compiz is looking greater than ever. The Updated Compiz adds the opacity plugin and darkens the background for the expose effects. But better than that, the Updated XGL removes all the flicker that I was seeing.

Kororaa XGL Live CD

Well I have just tried the Kororaa live cd on my P4 2.4Ghz with Nvidia FX5200 and it works flawlessly. Xgl and Compiz are amazing!

I only hope that the recent news that Compiz will soon run on Xgl AND aiglx doesn't spell the end (or slow painful death) or metacity as the gnome window manager. If this business has shown me anything its that David (xgl and compiz author) is a man machine and can accomplish anything!

XGL on i915

Well, all the cool kids are doing it so I thought that I better have a go. XGL and compiz run on my integrated i915 video without problems and I am amazed at the speed and quality for pre-alpha software.

After all of the hassle of building Compiz and friends (excluding XGL) from CVS I found this and this (includes new opacity plugin).

Gnome Documentation System

Just started hacking on my attempt to implement some sort of more modern documentation system for the gnome user guide.

So far this involves a few components; a modified version of moinmoin 1.5, a hacked version of yelp with xml-rpc support, and some python scripts.

Basically the idea is that moinmoin now supports docbook generation and has a nice xml-rpc interface. So the idea is that periodically the wiki version of the gnome-user-guide is crawled and docbook is generated. Also, yelp can fetch the latest version of the documentation from the wiki and display it.

A bit of work to go but a nice project covering lots of disiplines