desktop November 2010

desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org

9 participants
7 discussions

GNOME 3 Test Days
by Adam Williamson 06 Dec '10

06 Dec '10

Hey, folks. So I've been doing some preliminary thinking about testing GNOME 3 for F15; obviously it's one of the most significant and potentially disruptive changes. My preliminary idea is that there are possibly two different areas to cover with test days: the Shell, and everything else. I think we can focus on the Shell as one topic, and then on testing other apps in the GNOME 3 environment as another; running them and making sure they work and all expected operations are possible and covering potential issues with GTK 3 and gsettings and so on. We could (and probably should) run multiple test days on each topic; maybe two or three for each. What does everyone think of this as a general plan? When do you think it would be best to start up with Test Days? My feeling with Rawhide right now is that's probably too messy to get useful feedback from Test Days yet; maybe shortly post-Alpha would be a good time to start up. But you might have better ideas of when things should be present in at least basically-working form. Thanks! -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net

10 18

Changing themes in rawhide
by Bruno Wolff III 24 Nov '10

24 Nov '10

The appearance menu item has disappeared from the menu panel. Now there are individual items for a few things that used to be in appearance. Is this intentional behavior? If so, what is the new recommended way to change themes?

4 7

GNOME appearance settings not honored after today's update
by Adam Williamson 23 Nov '10

23 Nov '10

I just updated Rawhide with 2010-11-19 packages, and after the reboot, all my GNOME appearance preferences are no longer honored. I had all fonts changed to Droid, icon theme changed to Tango, and set to display text only on buttons (not icons), and no icons in menus. After the reboot, none of these are being honored. I note they're not listed in gconf-editor any more; if I look in dconf-editor, matching settings are present and appear to be set to what I want (Tango theme, Droid fonts etc) but these settings do not seem to be taking effect. Is this a bug? Known? Note that I'm using metacity rather than gnome-shell as I can't run gnome-shell in Rawhide ATM. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net

3 4

F14: Process /usr/bin/evolution was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV)
by Donald Buchan 09 Nov '10

09 Nov '10

Hi I just installed F14 via netinstall today and evolution is being killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV) immediately upon being run, be it from the launch icon at the top of the screen, from the Applications menu, or from the command line. I have submitted a comment on bug 596916 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=596916, which was essentially the same thing for another user under F13. Of course as root did "yum remove evolution" and "yum install evolution" hoping that the initial install could have somehow become corrupted or otherwise poorly installed, but no surprise the new install gives identical results. I have not added any plugins yet. My specs: F14, desktop only install, gnome, generally unmodified (ie. only a few common desktop settings changed and one or two pieces of software added straight off the repos); 1 gig memory; P4 2.8; 40 gig HD, that I suspect may be acting up; Dell Optiplex something or other, one of the cute compact mini-towers, which has had F10-F12 on it as well as Ubuntu 8.04 before that (briefly!) and even more briefly before that CentOS 5.4; Obviously, I'm using a wired connection to my router to my DSL modem to my Internet supplier All packages are up to date -- just checked even though I did a network install just this afternoon. My home directory was transplanted from my F12 install, including the hidden directories, so I imagine that the machine conceivably could be having difficulty with something leftover from the .evolution directory, but I would have not clue what to look for. Obviously I have not been able to go through any setup information with the initial setup wizard (ie. accounts, mail servers, email addy, user, etc.) that I expect to have to go through. Has anyone experienced this or a similar problem?

2 6

URGENT F14: Un-announced change to default dual-head config: intentional or accidental?
by Adam Williamson 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

Hey, folks. Just wanted to flag up this bug before we hit the change deadline: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=623824 it seems that the default policy for multiple monitors in current F14 is not to use them at all (see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=623824#c15 ). On the face of it, this seems like an unintentional change from previous policy. Is this actually the case? If so, can someone submit a fix, quick? :) If it's an intentional change, it should be announced/documented for the release... -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net

6 9

feedback : Improving user experience in desktop
by Mohd Izhar Firdaus Ismail 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

Hi, i think this is my first post in this list after years on it XD.. anyway... I had a chat (or more like.. an argument?) with my colleague in my company about what Fedora lack in term of user experience which made Ubuntu stand out more for normal users. He's an Ubuntu user, a developer who view stuff from a non-technical, end user perspective, who everytime he try to move to Fedora, Fedora's current state always turned him off. Of course, he knows that he can modify that himself, but thats not the point here, as we are talking about user experience for a non-technical person. So i thought of sharing the stuff he raised, hopefully someone who have the resources (time/skill) to improve this read this and improve it: 1) Polish While technically, Fedora desktop have almost the same apps Ubuntu desktop have, however, Fedora desktop apps fell behind in term of polish. 'Polish' here includes: * icon set Fedora icon set, which uses Tango, is not user-friendly. Take for example the notification area, in Fedora, our notification area is a mix of colorful icons from many applications, which - doesnt look good on the panel - but more importantly - makes the notification area confusing and less useful. - the approach in Ubuntu, and in Mac, is that application icons, especially those which have system tray icons, are standardized in a particular style guideline. When a notification area icon is idle, the icon uses a faded out scheme, but when theres a notification, they switches to a brighter colored scheme Similar rule apply to applications which involves notification such as messenger, email, etc. * application defaults In Fedora, probably because of our upstream mantra, our application usually uses whatever default configuration upstream provided. While this works for technical people who knows (or bother to) change their settings, a non-technical person would want a sane, usable defaults when they first launch the application, which will allow them to do the common tasks associated with the application without the need to figure out how to configure it. 2) application feedback Ok, i think this mainly apply to Fedora's packagekit, but probably other apps too. Our packagekit UI lack of feedback, such as no download progressbar, and the current task info is too vague. It happens a lot where packagekit simply showing "downloading repository information" .. but only remain like that until everything are downloaded... if you are in a slow network, the user experience become very bad as the lack of feedback made user anxious on whether something is working, or not working. Its agreeable that user are not supposed to care about the internal details, however, some sort of feedback gives the user assurance that the application is working or not.. Application feedback for events such as a usb device is connected or unmounted, new hardware detected also makes a difference in user experience.. ===== Thats it for now i guess.. i'll post more if i end up arguing stuff with the colleague about fedora again XD .. Hope this post will be useful for someone :-) -- Mohd Izhar Firdaus Bin Ismail / KageSenshi Inigo Consulting (FOSS/Plone Development, Training & Services) http://www.inigo-tech.com Fedora Malaysia Contributor & Ambassador http://blog.kagesenshi.org 92C2 B295 B40B B3DC 6866 5011 5BD2 584A 8A5D 7331

1 1

Improving user experience in desktop
by Mohd Izhar Firdaus Ismail 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

Hi, i think this is my first post in this list after years on it XD.. anyway... I had a chat (or more like.. an argument?) with my colleague in my company about what Fedora lack in term of user experience which made Ubuntu stand out more for normal users. He's an Ubuntu user, a developer who view stuff from a non-technical, end user perspective, who everytime he try to move to Fedora, Fedora's current state keep always turn him off everytime he tried. Of course, he knows that he can modify that himself, but thats not the point here, as we are talking about user experience for a non-technical person. So i thought of sharing the stuff he raised, hopefully someone who have the resources (time) to improve this read this and improve it: 1) Polish While technically, Fedora desktop have almost the same apps Ubuntu desktop have, however, Fedora desktop apps fell behind in term of polish. 'Polish' here includes: * icon set Fedora icon set, which uses Tango, is not user-friendly. Take for example the notification area, in Fedora, our notification area is a mix of colorful icons from many applications, which - doesnt look good on the panel - but more importantly - makes the notification area confusing and less useful. - the approach in Ubuntu, and in Mac, is that application icons, especially those which have system tray icons, are standardized in a particular style guideline. When a notification area icon is idle, the icon uses a faded out scheme, but when theres a notification, they switches to a brighter colored scheme Similar rule apply to applications which involves notification such as messenger, email, etc. * application defaults In Fedora, probably because of our upstream mantra, our application usually uses whatever default configuration upstream provided. While this works for technical people who knows (or bother to) change their settings, a non-technical person would want a sane, usable defaults when they first launch the application, which will allow them to do the common tasks associated with the application without the need to figure out how to configure it. 2) application feedback Ok, i think this mainly apply to Fedora's packagekit, but probably other apps too. Our packagekit UI lack of feedback, such as no download progressbar, and the current task info is too vague. It happens a lot where packagekit simply showing "downloading repository information" .. but only remain like that until everything are downloaded... if you are in a slow network, the user experience become very bad as the lack of feedback made user anxious on whether something is working, or not working. Its agreeable that user are not supposed to care about the internal details, however, some sort of feedback gives the user assurance that the application is working or not.. Application feedback for events such as a usb device is connected or unmounted, new hardware detected also makes a difference in user experience.. ===== Thats it for now i guess.. i'll post more if i end up arguing stuff with the colleague about fedora again XD .. Hope this post will be useful for someone :-) -- Mohd Izhar Firdaus Bin Ismail / KageSenshi Inigo Consulting (FOSS/Plone Development, Training & Services) http://www.inigo-tech.com Fedora Malaysia Contributor & Ambassador http://blog.kagesenshi.org 92C2 B295 B40B B3DC 6866 5011 5BD2 584A 8A5D 7331

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desktop November 2010