desktop June 2015

desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org

37 participants
25 discussions

F23 changes and the workstation
by Matthias Clasen 13 Jun '15

13 Jun '15

I haven't been following the F23 change proposals very closely, so I was a little surprised when I found that the 'default local dns resolver' feature as currently implemented will affect the workstation quite a bit, despite what the Change page claims ("It is not something a user would notice"). I think we should take a look at other changes that are in the queue for F23 with an eye towards unexpected surprises like that.

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concern over fedora's meeting videos
by kendell clark 12 Jun '15

12 Jun '15

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 hi all The subject is kind of vague, so I'll try to clarify. In order to participate in video meetings with fedora's council or anyone else that uses it, you currently have to use google hangouts. I'm not averse to this even though it's closed source software, but there's still a rather concerning issue. Currently, I believe, I don't know for sure, but I think the only way to do this is by installing either google chrome or chromium. This wouldn't be a problem, except that chrome and chromium provide no accessibility support. That is, orca, the main linux screen reader, cannot get at the contents of web pages to read them. This can be fixed by installing an addon to chrome/chromium called chromevox, which is a screen reader specifically designed for chrome. This isn't a major problem, except that until this is done, a blind person cannot use chrome. The procedure for doing this isn't at all intuitive. You have to go to the chrome app store, type in chromevox, and install it. After this, chrome will be accessible. This isn't easy to do in fedora, largely because fedora doesn't feature chromium, and I object to chrome's license. I'm not writing in to complain, but just to ask if there are any plans in place to migrate away from something that requires a specific web browser to participate in? If this were doable in firefox or any derivitives, this would not be an issue, because firefox and it's spinoffs are accessible to orca. Thanks Kendell clark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJVeM1DAAoJEGYgJ5/kqBTdCsgQAJ3DwNNEHMO6FiSxGWejwZTV sfR1JoqGfPPoH/sWhMiQHfkSdCsvDpn4M0t5/5v2iZnYbThU1drqVra6PF5PvMde LyPt++RMnvW1KH6eybV0lYaEPRs9PCG8bp0ugwmeXgE+oh4W7bvgGxuUR2cjFirY EkzCSHUIZBjX9QTPCU9ACf8156CLxfhcvTAt9cumjJTeJBrygHrEusCCx6cFfJ7z jqPJ2WLx/4B6viiadewRlAzH1+3oG664QaGG5YjZQA49PBpZzHSKO0SKDDNXF+eV MR8kPcWPnsGbzmUzubXfhCHgc/lr7tsMWcJKnHgTYtE5PfRmKlP9OB/6lWaXYYHH 4kL7lTIZIcjLOIgH41H5mpx3Z90LBgBVqOPJOFE7HY2UfWwnp8DGbqB5IVfIpoll dVaUE6Z2aqw1jNNDQfCRYuuilQzavvG9XNFN1A8lTQfJGihIxXypk+Ye+ybFug6E LTpvtcU06eG41NOEbr4xlFfprXf/r67gCsRYZinmGbm3uuq+ad1iI7zx2GwDbpX5 HUDdyq6oeVrORy4Yq3LqU61AVMhzNVVuccLHhf0ndTSxgUIBp6hvhwogN3EMh4kt 1KwzKZPMCJgt4JoY6kfBMPSa51iSijPFjGSvzo0Ldil8qb/Ea0YVjYoZACMfcf6W 3R/okAoJqu/2us+xkYQh =YgLi -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Council report
by Paul W. Frields 11 Jun '15

11 Jun '15

I produced the following supplementary wiki page to go with the small PRD refresh. Because the PRD is not changing drastically, and was written with a fairly long horizon in mind, some work has been done, other work still remains. The Council report here adds a bit of detail, hopefully without going to the point of duplicating too much of our release points: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/2015_report_to_Council -- Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ The open source story continues to grow: http://opensource.com

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Patent-free software where it makes sense
by Alex Puchades 11 Jun '15

11 Jun '15

Hi, my name is Alex and I've been a Fedora user for a long time. Also, I'm quite new to this list. I know a lot of people (myself included) that agree with Fedora not integrating propietary software into the system, as Ubuntu does in many different ways, especially in the installer. To put things clear, I'd never advocate for that. However, there's one issue I think deserves a little more consideration. There is another kind of software that is perfectly fine free software but is also excluded from a default Fedora install. That is, patent encumbered software. As you know, there are some patents that are not valid outside USA (ie: subpixel rendering, MP3). That software is provided in third-party repositories like RPMFusion in the form of "-freetype" packages. The lack-by-default of these packages presents a clear usability issue for non-quite-that-technical users and it greatly hurts the user experience for everyone. So, is there any way that Fedora could enforce this patent-free position where it makes sense (the USA), but includes it (or at least gives the user the option at installation time) if allowed by local laws? -- Álex Puchades

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LAS F22 review - summary
by Ankur Sinha 10 Jun '15

10 Jun '15

Hi, The LAS reviewed F22 recently (the F22 review starts at about 1:07:00)[1]. They had quite a few good things to say and some suggestions on the issue that they ran into. Just forwarding them here FYI :) Positives: - Ease of setting up on-line accounts etc - Notifications that tell you what you need but don't disturb you - Network captive portal that comes up automatically - Gnome software and the work done to make apps available in it - Focus that the rings approach brings - DNF works well - Improvements to anaconda - FedUp redesign works well (although I've read that fedup will be dropped from F23) - Server product defaults to XFS Issues: - After login on the captive portal, no indication that you've been connected (he said his wife would've gotten stuck there, for example, since she'd assume the captive portal is the browser itself). Suggestion was that the captive portal closes once the user has logged in and connection to the internet established. - GDM Wayland on some Nvidia cards didn't work - documented on the common bugs page, though, with a workaround. - Global dark themes seem incomplete - text and text boxes are both black, so text can't be read easily - needs the user to tweak to fix. [1] http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/83032/fedora-22-review-las-367/ -- Thanks, Regards, Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD" http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha

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Font rendering, 2015
by Matthew Miller 10 Jun '15

10 Jun '15

Okay, so, here we go again with this... well, actually, hoping *not* to, but one specific thing keeps coming up. As far as I know, the patents affecting freetype expired, and the "freetype-freeworld" package from third party repositories no longer has any special sauce. Yet, I still see people swearing up and down that this makes a big difference, it's included in "making fonts in Fedora look good" guides everywhere — even though that patent expiration was now long ago. And I see that in RPMFusion, the "freetype-freeworld" package still exists and is regularly updated. So, what's going on with this? My uneducated guess is that the "freeworld" package simply enables autohinting that we have off by default and does not contain any magic sauce. Is this correct? (On the other hand "Infinality" is a set of patches to Freetype, and appears specifically tuned for various sets of non-free fonts.) -- Matthew Miller <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org> Fedora Project Leader

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Fedora.next PRD refresh
by Stephen Gallagher 09 Jun '15

09 Jun '15

== Overview == Back at the beginning of the Fedora.next initiative when we created the working groups, we tasked them with creating "Product Requirement Documents" (PRDs) to guide the development of each of these core groups. * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Workstation_PRD * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Env_and_Stacks/Product_Requirements_Doc ument * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud/Cloud_PRD?rd=Cloud_PRD * https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Server/Product_Requirements_Document More than a year has passed and the Fedora Council feels that it's a good time to give another pass at these documents and re-align them, both with the current reality and the next phase of this process. Additionally, the Council feels that it would be good to perform such a re-alignment and update each year. This year, we have set an admittedly short deadline: the PRDs need to be updated and ready for review on June 12th (11 days from now). In the future, this will be scheduled further in advance and with more time to address it (see below). == What do we have to do? == There are two things that should be done during a PRD refresh exercise (though their implementation is left as an exercise to the Working Groups). 1) Review the PRD for plans that are outdated. Some examples: * Support for CPU architectures that no longer make sense * Features that have been de-prioritized or indefinitely deferred * References to technology that has been replaced or obsoleted 2) Add new plans and requirements for the evolving technology. Some possible examples: * Fedora Cloud commits to producing an implementation of the Nulecule Container Specification * Fedora Server commits to producing Server Roles that can be migrated to a Fedora Atomic deployment * Fedora Workstation integrates seamlessly with a self- or publicly -hosted ownCloud deployment. (Optional): The PRD review period may be an excellent time for those WGs with persistent membership to evaluate whether it is time to refresh the WG membership as well. == Future PRD Refreshes == Starting at Flock 2016 (yes, *next* calendar year), each working group will have a workshop scheduled at Flock to go over its PRD and plan for the following year. Note: because Flock generally falls between Alpha and Beta of a Fedora release, all PRD planning is presumed to be a directive for Fedora N+1 and N+2 at that time, not retroactively applied to the current release. The workshops are expected to cover the majority of the update, and then they will be brought back to the respective mailing lists for further review before being due to the Council one month after Flock concludes.

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Workstation WG Recap 2015-Jun-08
by Paul W. Frields 08 Jun '15

08 Jun '15

Minutes: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-06-08/workstation.2015… Minutes (text): http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-06-08/workstation.2015… Log: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-06-08/workstation.2015… * * * =============================== #fedora-meeting: Workstation WG =============================== Meeting started by stickster at 13:00:01 UTC. The full logs are available at http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2015-06-08/workstation.2015… . Meeting summary --------------- * Roll call! (stickster, 13:00:09) * PRD refresh (stickster, 13:04:02) * LINK: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2015-June/012419.html (juhp_, 13:09:47) * IDEA: Future discussion: How to make developer software/tools/docs more discoverable at first login (stickster, 13:20:11) * IDEA: Add to PRD: A set of important third party apps are installable -- (tested/verified before Beta) (stickster, 13:23:45) * LINK: http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/intellij-idea.git/ -- retired. (stickster, 13:24:40) * IDEA: work xdg-app into technical specification or relevant roadmap document (stickster, 13:46:07) * LINK: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/2015_report_to_Council (stickster, 13:49:28) * Contributions to that page will be gratefully accepted (stickster, 13:50:53) * ACTION: stickster Make changes to Workstation PRD page based on mcatanzaro contributions (stickster, 13:51:32) * ACTION: stickster Start assembling Council report at above link, and note to list for WG member contributions (stickster, 13:57:11) Meeting ended at 13:57:51 UTC. Action Items ------------ * stickster Make changes to Workstation PRD page based on mcatanzaro contributions * stickster Start assembling Council report at above link, and note to list for WG member contributions Action Items, by person ----------------------- * mcatanzaro * stickster Make changes to Workstation PRD page based on mcatanzaro contributions * stickster * stickster Make changes to Workstation PRD page based on mcatanzaro contributions * stickster Start assembling Council report at above link, and note to list for WG member contributions * **UNASSIGNED** * (none) People Present (lines said) --------------------------- * stickster (68) * mclasen_ (23) * mcatanzaro (18) * kalev (15) * cschalle (11) * juhp_ (6) * zodbot (5) * rdieter (4) Generated by `MeetBot`_ 0.1.4 .. _`MeetBot`: http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot -- Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ The open source story continues to grow: http://opensource.com

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alsa-firmware missing from major desktop spins
by Enrico Tagliavini 07 Jun '15

07 Jun '15

Hi there, I've just done a fresh install of Fedora 22 KDE spin on a Dell Alienware 15 and stumbled upon a very weird issue: audio works, but volume control is broken. This is due to alsa-firmware being missing from the default installation group. Had a quick chat with Rex Dieter (rdieter) in #fedora-kde and he told me: <rdieter_work> commit 320e6ccc3b524a5146daafe7717cdc18598d97e6 Author: Peter Robinson <pbrobinson(a)gmail.com> Date: Sat May 31 21:02:43 2014 +0100 <rdieter_work> make alsa-firmware optional. It supports a tiny collection of specialist devices and adds reasonable size to minimal images but I wonder if this is still the case. Currently it seems there are root@alientux ~ # rpm -ql alsa-firmware | grep '^/lib/firmware' | awk -F / '{print $4}' | uniq | wc -l 19 drivers and about root@alientux ~ # rpm -ql alsa-firmware | grep '^/lib/firmware' | grep '\..\+$' | wc -l 100 firmware files. I can agree that most of them might not be very common, but it doesn't sound very good not to give people with such hardware a sub-optimal out of the box experience. My specific case: root@alientux ~ # lspci | grep Audio 00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor HD Audio Controller (rev 06) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05) which means snd_hda_intel with creative chip. The driver requires firmware file ctefx.bin to work correctly. The minimal image size argument is still very valid in my opinion. People using this kind of minimal images are unlikely to have this hardware. However people installing Workstation or KDE spins are 1. interested in having a good out of the box hardware support 2. possibly are not expert enough to know about dmesg or firmware packages (not I'm a professional SysAdmin, and still this turned out not to be trivial mostly due to cluttered dmesg because of the wireless driver ath10k having massive problems with firmware) 3. size matter less for these images. They are over 1 GB already and the entire alsa-firmware package is 11 MB on disk. I would like to ask for your opinion and possibly bring alsa-firmware back by default for the proper use cases (mainly desktop spins). Best regards. Enrico Tagliavini

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proposal: provide more complete freedesktop sound theme support compatibility in gnome
by kendell clark 06 Jun '15

06 Jun '15

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 hi all I've been thinking on this for a while, and I think this is something gnome should do well. Gnome's support for the freedesktop sound theme standard is a little incomplete. The sounds that currently play are, desktop-login, hardware-added, hardware-removed, power-plug, power-unplug, terminal-bell for when you've reached the end of a line or end of a list. It's possible that the chat sounds play, but in my experience they only work if the application you're using supports sounds, and then it uses it's own. Incoming and outgoing call might also work, I've never gotten a call that triggered any sounds. New mail sounds also work. I've verified this by installing a different sound theme, known as fresh and clean, which has lots more sounds than the basic freedesktop one does. Incidentally, I really hope that gnome can add back the ability to choose a different sound theme in the sound control panel. Taking it out was a bad idea. I'd be happy to help anyone who is interested in improving this, I know a little bit about the freedesktop sound theme spec. These are just suggestions, But I can start working on it if anyone is interested. I'm not exactly sure what component needs changing, perhapse the libgsound library? I think this fits into gnome's goal of being a user friendly desktop, especially since sounds are useful for the visually impaired. Thoughts, suggestions? Thanks Kendell clark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJVcjrdAAoJEGYgJ5/kqBTdpbsQAII7L0nban0FuIf0liWZYiqX Wok+U1nD3nMZpA32dE5u+lWoOxJMia+BmZSmt9isvcmlGQHGpCIZmPiAITgjC8oY +kJPgchzTGiMhA01rB0lU5XyYFWBp5mOYa6tyQp+MgIoN9A1Ho4LWYCQBujJVl6s kno1Ph4lN3WW9HL/dyk0Vo4S0uDGW4FCgOPO6rwNON65rsXEZCxz9ToHnEG7PMai G38MNUHJhG5zyNgMCz3q0m0T/t0fT/YJlEZwO0qXv0PmwlpwCl+JZu1q4cMq6ct2 eUCYSJz4CyYAP9eanxdXyQt/rePxH0Y1HHfWWeQpyBrJHRbWutV+dRvmIiALzgUw B6PLCxedhiA803U5frt8gR9xS9Wr6z2+4gjGj/ykA0y2GEuo25P7BVyKJopBm5MH O8A7RXwl5b2UQnIDuPJTKQOqA9nv+uHwyeKisJYI2QNL7XBmUQNgecmlRLctrrfz jDyG+fyg46KJp9Y0zvAaMw3wwOJf0KluyswZfkvfZ85W1R3WRsgPSQYxgYj4VtGm PZ3Z1LYajI2WiG/+E5/icrfKBE99RYoycpaXGLz/zO2CPkZR9NuFRHRud47WqYli o4LEXh6G9JdN/kfqrGOPVTQRUJvOnLyIPjdi05plmjXfgzxKXBzV3dMS/vU9fZSx KT9z6GxuqdyddFhrsne3 =1f+s -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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desktop June 2015