desktop April 2008

desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org

12 participants
8 discussions

system tools vs administration menu
by Rahul Sundaram 02 Jun '08

02 Jun '08

Hi, What's the difference actually supposed to be? Whatever it is certainly some programs are not following the idea probably because the distinction doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. gconf-editor is in system tools yumex and smart is in system tools gpk-application is in administration Rahul

2 1

few ideas how to make fedora better as a desktop
by Valent Turkovic 06 May '08

06 May '08

I have a few ideas that IMO would make Fedora more usable as a general desktop and developer platform: What? : 1. have gnome-terminal shortcut on gnome panel (as firefox and evolution) 2. have gnome clipboard manager installed by default (glipper gnome applet) 3. have /usr/sbin and /sbin in PATH for regular users Why? : 1. because gnome-terminal is the second most used [1] application on gnome desktop and this would make it more accessible for users. 2. because any desktop needs a good clipboard manager, it enhances usability enormously. 3. I personally need it only for some commands - like /sbin/ifconfig and /sbin/iwconfig are there any down sides to putting new /sbin and /usr/sbin in every users PATH variable? What do you think is this a good or bad idea? Cheers, Valent. [1] http://online.gnome.org/applications -- http://kernelreloaded.blog385.com/ linux, blog, anime, spirituality, windsurf, wireless registered as user #367004 with the Linux Counter, http://counter.li.org. ICQ: 2125241, Skype: valent.turkovic

17 37

Online Desktop run-through redux
by Owen Taylor 01 May '08

01 May '08

I spent some time today running through the same things I did 3 weeks ago with a new set of packages we've built for Fedora 9 (maybe the final set), and things in general were much stabler and more polished. Thanks for the hard work everybody! I did, of course, see some things I didn't notice on the last run through. - Owen Regressions =========== * Application pages are badly screwed up at the moment because of wrong CSS (Colin committed some fixes and is working testing) Stuff I didn't notice before ============================ * The Save/Cancel options when editing fields on http://online.gnome.org/accounts have some issues: http://bugzilla.mugshot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1397 * We are properly handling launching the Mugshot client or not on login, but it would be nice to do it dynamically if the user enables Mugshot through the web: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=529963 * The newly added "Configure IM Accounts" link doesn't work if Pidgin is already running: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=529964 * On Fedora 9 (and on all GNOME-2.22?) the dialog you get when you select "Log out or Shutdown..." only allows you to log out, not to shut down. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=529967 * In a newly created account, the contents of the application browser was all messed up: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=529972 Old stuff verified fixed ======================== * When Firefox was started, it came up with two tabs, both with the Fedora start page ** Bigboard was configured to use the default "Milky" theme rather than the Fedora theme. * Mugshot stacker was started (because it was installed on the system) and showed a stack with an initial share about "setup your account" even though I hadn't enabled Mugshot. * It seemed a little less than obvious that you should click on the "Enable Online Desktop" link to proceed, especially with the browser window sitting there. There wasn't a clear flow that enabling the online desktop was the *first* step. ** The desktop data engine didn't pick up my login until I manually restarted it. I think this was because I didn't have a Firefox profile at all (or even a .mozilla dir) when I started the desktop-data-engine, so it couldn't establish an inotify watch. ** A "GNOME Online" person appeared in the People stock. * There was no obvious way to add more people to the people stock. If there are no online.g.o contacts, a minimal thing would be to have a button to launch Pidgin. ** People stock slideouts got a bright red header in the Milky theme (theme bug causing the header not to be drawn themed.) * Sidebar Preferences should put a border around the preview images - they look funny blending into the background. * Apps stock should be labelled "Applications" not "Apps"? ** I got fooled when trying to add a stock to the sidebar by the "Add to sidebar" button next to the google gadget link entry. Unless we fix the google gadget stuff very soon, we should just remove it from the F9 packages. ** Logging into GMail in mail stock: - Should show Connecting... between the point where you apply a new password and it succeeds or fails - In the case of failure, should be button or link to get back to the point of logging in again, instead of having to navigate back through sidebar preferences. * In the Apps browser, selecting an application (which shows the profile to the left) should also highlight the selected app, since otherwise you don't feel you have good click-feedback. Same for the People browser

3 2

gio / gvfs changes
by David Zeuthen 18 Apr '08

18 Apr '08

Hey, For GNOME, as you may know, we're shipping gvfs as a new component in this release. One key feature is the fuse mount that is provided by gvfs-fuse. Meaning that any gvfs file system is available to POSIX apps from $HOME/.gvfs. Now, we haven't fully exploited this feature until the patch introduced here https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=442835 (you may need to pull the rpm's from koji for a while; I've asked Fedora rel-eng to tag them for Fedora 9 but that was just an hour or two ago) This patch enables any non-gio application (including non-GNOME apps) to Just Work(tm) when launching files from the file manager from non-kernel mounts such as sftp, cdda, gphoto2, obex-ftp, archive etc. (It's actually very cool; browsing my digital camera and ISO files Just Work(tm); I can open text files in gedit, view images using eog (or The Gimp or ImageMagick's display), watch videos using an mplayer frontend and so forth. It really goes to show how cool gvfs really is.) There is one catch, applications using gio must set this key X-GNOME-Vfs-System=gio in their desktop file. Note that the key name is subject to change pending upstream and xdg-list discussions. Either way, if this change goes upstream (which I think it will), gio-enabled applications will set this themselves. I've already did this for nautilus and gvfs and am now asking for assistance for remaining gio apps. Since gio/gvfs is brand new, I don't expect a lot of apps. AFAIK only totem openoffice.org (or maybe the gio port isn't complete?) are using gio natively and can open files from the file manager (e.g. has MimeTypes in it's desktop file). Can anyone think of other gio apps? David

4 5

Soundcards Race Condition
by Carsten Breuer 12 Apr '08

12 Apr '08

Hi all, i have three soundcards on my computer (one internal, 2 usb) running under FC8. I use this to run two mpd's (music player daemon) on the two USB-Soundcards. The soundcards in my system makes a great race during startup and you can never predict which one wins. Since the setup defines an index of the internal motherboard card in /etc/modprobe.conf, this card is not available anymore if the USB-Soundcards are detected first. In my opinion this is a bad behavior of fedora core. Users should be able to decide which id which soundcard get. Of cource, you can write udev rules for that, but IMO this is the job of fedora. Why don't we delay the start of the soundcards until all interfaces are enumerated? If this is done immediately before running rc.local, everything would be fine and there are no race conditions any more. This would also make sure that a soundcard doesn't disappear because the given index is used by another card. Best Regards, Carsten

4 6

Online Desktop run-through
by Owen Taylor 10 Apr '08

10 Apr '08

I spent some time running through initial login to the online desktop session with a clean account and the current Fedora 9 packages. Here are my notes about what went wrong or could be improved. I double starred the stuff that I think is at the top of what we should fix immediately. If you are going to work on something, follow up here. (I'll make sure that important stuff from the residual gets filed in bugzilla and post bug links here.) - Owen * When Firefox was started, it came up with two tabs, both with the Fedora start page * It seemed a little less than obvious that you should click on the "Enable Online Desktop" link to proceed, especially with the browser window sitting there. There wasn't a clear flow that enabling the online desktop was the *first* step. ** Bigboard was configured to use the default "Milky" theme rather than the Fedora theme. * When I did click on "enable the online desktop", I then had *three* browser tabs * After going to my mail, and clicking on the link, I had *four* browser tabs. * Mugshot stacker was started (because it was installed on the system) and showed a stack with an initial share about "setup your account" even though I hadn't enabled Mugshot. * When I changed my name on the account tab, the window title didn't update to match, as it would if I reloaded the page. * If I chose to enable Mugshot from my account page, I got taken to the login dialog with (at the bottom) "You can login with your _online.gnome.org_ account" The link there is actually a weird trap because it implies you can follow that link to log in, then you end up back where you are already logged in. (Need to do the discussed login-link URL's from the online.gnome.org account page.) ** The desktop data engine didn't pick up my login until I manually restarted it. I think this was because I didn't have a Firefox profile at all (or even a .mozilla dir) when I started the desktop-data-engine, so it couldn't establish an inotify watch. ** A "GNOME Online" person appeared in the People stock. * There was no obvious way to add more people to the people stock. If there are no online.g.o contacts, a minimal thing would be to have a button to launch Pidgin. ** People stock slideouts got a bright red header in the Milky theme (theme bug causing the header not to be drawn themed.) * Clicking on "Enable application tracking" opened another browser tab, with another copy of my account dialog. * None of the text in explaining what this "application tracking" thing referred to the benefits I got for the online desktop. We really need to turn on application tracking *by default* when you create an account through this path. ** /applications-learnmore was all centered, as is the top text on /applications when tracking is not enabled. * Hard to find out how to add more stocks to the bigboard * The two start page were eating 5% cpu showing their anim GIFs. * Sidebar Preferences should put a border around the preview images - they look funny blending into the background. ** I got fooled when trying to add a stock to the sidebar by the "Add to sidebar" button next to the google gadget link entry. Unless we fix the google gadget stuff very soon, we should just remove it from the F9 packages. * Apps stock should be labelled "Applications" not "Apps"? * In the Apps browser, selecting an application (which shows the profile to the left) should also highlight the selected app, since otherwise you don't feel you have good click-feedback. Same for the People browser * Very hard to switch the online desktop to a different user, since the logout link on the web doesn't actually log the d-d-m out. (Send a "Recheck" headline message over XMPP.) ** Logging into GMail in mail stock: - Should show Connecting... between the point where you apply a new password and it succeeds or fails - In the case of failure, should be button or link to get back to the point of logging in again, instead of having to navigate back through sidebar preferences.

3 9

Re: Online Desktop run-through
by Marco Pesenti Gritti 09 Apr '08

09 Apr '08

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:18 PM, Marina Zhurakhinskaya <marinaz(a)redhat.com> wrote: > Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: > Some observations about these screen shots: > -- In a addition to the sub-header which is shown in gray, there is a > longer description of the application in the application overview area. > -- There is a More Info link which links to the > http://online.gnome.org/applications page about the application. > -- There is a "Show in sidebar" check box for pinning the application in > the Applications widget. All of these seem to work inconsistently. "Nibbles" for example misses all of the details. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=526937 > -- The subcategories show only the applications you have used at some > point. The More links take you to the page with that particular category > that contains all the applications in that category that you have installed, > as well as the applications that you have used, even if you do not have them > installed. This is gone, not sure if intentionally. > -- The sub-header for the applications that you don't have installed is > used to say "(Not Installed)". An "Install" button is displayed instead of > the "Run" button in the overview area for such applications. I think I've seen it working at some point, but right now I don't have any uninstalled application in my list. > -- The area at the bottom is supposed to be used for "advertising" popular > applications that you do not have installed. (I don't remember if they'd be > show in the overview area or you'd be taken to the web page about them if > you click on one of them.) > This seem to be working here. Marco

2 3

Re: Online Desktop run-through
by Marco Pesenti Gritti 08 Apr '08

08 Apr '08

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:18 PM, Marina Zhurakhinskaya <marinaz(a)redhat.com> wrote: > Once you enable application tracking, the list should consist of your most > used applications. You can view popular applications by following "Find New > Applications" link in the Applications Browser. If you don't have the > application tracking enabled, the list will have the global list of popular > applications. I see, that make sense. It doesn't work for me though. I have tracking enabled but I still see a "Popular Actions" at the top of the widget. And launching applications doesn't seem to affect the list at all (not even on http://online.gnome.org/applications). I'll try to track it down on the client side. Marco

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desktop April 2008