desktop September 2006

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duplicate KDE desktop icons
by John Minson 02 Oct '06

02 Oct '06

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Re: Fedora tools don't give credits to translators
by Damien Durand 23 Sep '06

23 Sep '06

Maybe the fedora usability sig can take a look on this. This can be a good point for starting contributions ;-) 2006/9/23, Paul W. Frields <stickster(a)gmail.com>: > > On Sat, 2006-09-23 at 16:37 +0100, Dimitris Glezos wrote: > > Hello all, > > > > I just noticed that some of the system-config-* applications do not have > a > > "Help" -> "About" -> "Credits" -> "Translators" menu, which is there to > give > > credit to translators of the particular locale. All GNOME applications > that I > > have seen do have this menu item. I suggest we incorporate this too. > > > > In the "About Fedora" dialog, there is a link saying "visit our website > at > > http://fedora.redhat.com/About/Projects/translations/". Shouldn't that > be > > changed to link to the wiki? > > Yes. During the last cycle, Translation had not yet moved any content > to the wiki. That's all changed and so I have fixed this link. > > -- > Paul W. Frields, RHCE http://paul.frields.org/ > gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 > Fedora Project Board: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board > Fedora Docs Project: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject > > > -- > Fedora-trans-list mailing list > Fedora-trans-list(a)redhat.com > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-trans-list > > >

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Re: Pilgrim, kadischi, and stateless (was Re: [Fedora-livecd-list] pilgrim livecd work)
by David Zeuthen 21 Sep '06

21 Sep '06

Hi, On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 10:48 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: > Does pilgrim make an attempt to integrate any of stateless's work? In > my mind integrating stateless with livecd creation just makes sense. > But I don't think there's been much work done on that front since > Jeremy's proof of concept fork of kadischi which I don't think he's been > updating. Nope, I think it's much more elegant to just use dm-snapshot to provide a real rw rootfs. Not sure what Bill Nottingham (Cc'ed) or people working on stateless team thinks of this, they might have a number of good reasons that I haven't thought out. I still think stateless makes sense for non-livecd work however. Btw, If someone could talk davej into including unionfs into the Fedora kernel, we'd use that instead of dm-snapshot and we'd have persistence more easily solved [1]. David [1] : we can already do this for our livecd but it will be tied to the specific build you're using, e.g. in practice it's tied to the physical media you created it with. With unionfs things might look much better and we'd easily be able to do a harddisk install of "livecd + your changes made" instead of harddisk install becomes contents of "stock livecd", ie. without your changes. That said, I'm not sure that this really matters in real life.

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Re: [Fedora-livecd-list] pilgrim livecd work
by David Zeuthen 21 Sep '06

21 Sep '06

(adding back fedora-desktop-list as that Cc: field mysteriously vanished.) On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 03:05 -0500, Jasper Hartline wrote: > You really should use the stock Fedora Core utilities however. > If you are making an installer to system from LiveCD, why not use Anaconda? I'd rather ask; Why use anaconda? At the end of the day, installation is a pretty basic task - yum install what you want - write out some configuration files - perform other post-installation configuration. So, you know, I'd hate to replace < 100 lines of code by depending on anaconda, which, I might add, is designed to do far more than the relatively straightforward task of doing live cd's. I'm not even sure it makes sense to carry around code in anaconda to facilitate live cd installs but I'll leave that judgement call to the Anaconda developers. FWIW, yum works perfectly fine and one goal of the pilgrim effort is to make the process as robust as possible as well as being able to run on host OS'es that are not super current. For example, the image I linked to are built on an x86_64 RHEL4 box (though I had to put yum 2.9.* on it). There's also an historical angle here - pilgrim is the successor to the now defunt olpc-image tools. Anaconda simply didn't allow to be used in this way. > If OLPC is a "derived" from Redhat or Fedora Core distribution, I really > do not see how this pertains to this list. I think Rahul answered this already. I'll also note that this is not a kadishchi specific list (or at least that's my impression) and several people have asked me to specifically post my work here. > On another note, what functionality does this LiveCD stuff you mention > provide over Fedora Core's Kadischi? > If you are unfamiliar with Kadischi, you can find it here: > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Kadischi > Available via CVS. I think there are some key differences - specifically designed to be able to install the livecd payload on your hard disk. I've read through the archives of this list and seen objections from Jeremy and others about the feasibility of changing Kadischi to facilitate this. Pretty sure there are few objections to the approach I've taken with pilgrim but I'll leave Jeremy to comment. - designed specifically with downstream consumers in mind, e.g. it must be extremely simple to put together an Fedora Eclipse, Fedora Music, Fedora Livna Desktop, whatever live cd. This is what I tried to describe in my original mail. - r/w root so the OS actually works like it's supposed to (with the live cd ISO that I linked to you can easy yum install what you want or perhaps even use pirut) - Use selinux - ok, so I ran into some issues with enabling this (see the README.fedora file) so it's disabled in the ISO I linked to. However, if your build environment matches the target environment this works nicely. I'll be working on fixing this, certainly OLPC needs this feature anyway. - the codebase pilgrim is based on have been used successfully to build OLPC images for many months now. Pilgrim have now replaced this and is a critical component of the OLPC release infrastructure. As such, I and others are committed to maintaining pilgrim for at least this task. So these are the key differences I think. You probably know how it is with software development. People will use your software in unforeseen ways. As such, as software developers we tend to make our software prepared to do this. I just happened to identify a huge overlap between what we're doing in OLPC and what a nice livecd infrastructure should look like. So I spent a day or two making pilgrim doing just this. Hope this clarifies. David

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Re: [Fedora-livecd-list] pilgrim livecd work
by David Zeuthen 20 Sep '06

20 Sep '06

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 10:38 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: > > Well, I take it that you are aware that cd media is not normally > > partitioned (it is for bizarre things like Apple Mac OS X install CD's > > using Apple Partition Map; but that is totally not relevant for a Fedora > > Live CD on any architecture we want to support). > > > I was confused when I first read autopsy's comment as well. Autopsy, > are you talking about partitioning when creating the liveCD/liveX image? > Or talking about paritioning when installing from liveMedia to a hard > drive? I might add that for the latter, we want to allow the user to create LVM / swap / crypto whatever to install to. That's why we need something like gnome-diskutil that I mentioned in the README.fedora. > I like pilgrim's simplicity. I'm a little hesitant that it's written in > shell (Shell doesn't scale to larger projects nearly as well as python. > Although the original kadischi code had a lot of > reimplementation-of-the-wheel problems.) Shell was chosen as that's the natural language you want to use when defining derivatives. It's simple, lots of people know it and it's very expressive. Btw, I don't expect pilgrim to grow a lot in size and complexity, it's pretty much feature complete except for a few features. For the record, I've written quite a bit of stuff in python but always ended up disliking it - I guess I'm one of the types of programmers that pick extremes. I love writing code in C and think I'm good at it. Shell is pretty useful for stuff like pilgrim. Python always been in the middle for me, I like to call it a "cute" language, but not really useful for the stuff I wanted to do. It always ended up letting me down one way or another. Of course, YMMV, I understand and see that some people use Python in wonderful ways, more power to them. I just don't like it. > I'll have to run pilgrim to see how kadischi and pilgrim differ in real > usage. Let me know if you need help. I tend to hang out on #fedora-desktop on GimpNet and #freedesktop on freenode as davidz. I suppose this list if fine to use too. David

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Re: [Fedora-livecd-list] pilgrim livecd work
by David Zeuthen 20 Sep '06

20 Sep '06

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 10:41 -0500, Jasper Hartline wrote: > David Zeuthen wrote: > > >(adding back fedora-desktop-list as that Cc: field mysteriously > >vanished.) Doing this again. Please don't munge the To: or Cc: headers. Thanks. > >So, you know, I'd hate to replace < 100 lines of code by depending on > >anaconda, which, I might add, is designed to do far more than the > >relatively straightforward task of doing live cd's. I'm not even sure it > >makes sense to carry around code in anaconda to facilitate live cd > >installs but I'll leave that judgement call to the Anaconda developers. > > > > > Ok. Good luck partitioning a disk in any sort of way with Yum. Well, I take it that you are aware that cd media is not normally partitioned (it is for bizarre things like Apple Mac OS X install CD's using Apple Partition Map; but that is totally not relevant for a Fedora Live CD on any architecture we want to support). So I assume you are talking about creating Live USB images, e.g. an image people can dd(1) to the USB key e.g. # dd if=some-image.img of=/dev/sdb where /dev/sdb is the block device for your USB stick. First, pilgrim supports this (partitioning is not hard), it was the first installation target since that is what we use for OLPC; see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_USB_disks for details. Second, a Fedora system on a USB stick / hard disk is useful.. Heck, this can be done today with the pilgrim system by simple changes to streams.d/fedora-base.stream in the pilgrim source tree (just define a new variant, liveusb, where PILGRIM_FS_liveusb=ext3). The reason I haven't done this is just lack of time. And motivation. The lack of motivation has to do with the fact that I'm not sure how useful it is since ext3 basically is pretty wasteful and have no compression [1]. To have any kind of useful system you'd need a 2GB or bigger stick. Second, I think once we get the "install to hard disk" feature done people can just install the OS to a USB stick / hard disk from the livecd and be done with it. That will also ensure that we fix up the UUID of the file system and other stuff. We can easily add variants for "usb stick" builds until we have the "install to hard disk" feature. But I'd rather that we worked on the latter, that feature is so much more important for Fedora as gdk so eloquently points out. We could also add a new hack to use squashfs / ext3 / dm-snapshot hacks to the live USB image where the overlay lives in a file on a different partition of the USB stick. That way we'd have a semi-useful system that would fit on a 512MB stick. Again, not sure how useful live USB is, I'd rather focus on getting the "install to hard disk" feature done and just tell people to install to a USB stick / harddisk if they want a portable Fedora OS. David [1] : though I did read something about "compressed block devices" being added to Linux. Dunno where that is going.

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pilgrim livecd work
by David Zeuthen 20 Sep '06

20 Sep '06

Hey, I've spend a little bit of time adapting the OLPC build system to be able to spit out Fedora livecd's. First some background on what we do in OLPC o OLPC is an OS built on Core but also includes bits from Extras and a dedicated OLPC repository o Rather than using an installer, we deliver the OS in two ways - for USB sticks we provide an image that can be copied onto the whole disk. This image includes a partition table, boot loader and so forth. This image is also used for qemu. - For installation to the OLPC hardware, we provide a JFFS2 file system image that can be put on the flash using nandwrite from mtd-utils o The build system must be easy for downstream to use for creating a derived build of the upstream OLPC distribution. The thinking here is that OLPC customers (which are governments, countries) are able to very easily tweak the package selection, provide alternative packages and change how the system is configured. o (for more info on OLPC development, see http://dev.laptop.org ) As such, the goals are pretty similar to Live CD: Assemble an OS and put it on bootable media. So I spent a few days a few weekends ago to do exactly that; the how's, why's etc. are here http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/david/pilgrim.git;a=blob_plain;h=aa6… Specifically, I've made it a goal to make live cd's built with this infrastructure possible to install to hard disks such as to provide a nice user experience: you download the livecd and if you like it, you simply press the "Install" icon on the desktop and the OS is installed in a matter of minutes. No need to go through anaconda here. The README.fedora file linked to above contains some pretty specific information of what we need here. With some hard work perhaps we can make this happen for FC7. Another important goal is that it should be easy to create derived CD's. So if you are into the whole Java and Fedora things, maybe you want to easily create a Fedora Eclipse livecd. You know, to show off to your friends. I've included an example here, fedora-eclipse http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/david/pilgrim.git;a=blob;h=e79cc0e41… note how fedora-eclipse is derived from fedora-gnome http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/david/pilgrim.git;a=blob;h=f709bc90d… which in turn is derived from fedora-base http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/david/pilgrim.git;a=blob;h=5d9cb98f8… and also that fedora-desktop http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=users/david/pilgrim.git;a=blob;h=8eac448f7… is derived from fedora-base. Ie. we have fedora-base | fedora-gnome | +------------+------------+ | | fedora-eclipse fedora-desktop There is nothing to prevent us from having fedora-base | +---------------------------------+------------+------... | | fedora-gnome fedora-kde | | +------------+------------+----------------+---... .... | | | fedora-eclipse fedora-desktop fedora-music in the future. For example, it's not far fetched, I think, to have people from the tools group in Red Hat maintain the fedora-eclipse live cd bits (in fact, I'm not even sure if that image builds any more, it did some weeks ago. But y'all get the point, yes?) The very nice thing is that downstream, for example fedora-eclipse and fedora-eclipse-kde, would benefit from general improvements in fedora-gnome and fedora-kde. The barrier to entry is pretty low, just look at the simplicity of of the current fedora-eclipse and fedora-desktop stream definition files. Anyway, enough talk, it's getting late and I'm too old to miss sleep these days :-) - Here's a screenshot of the fedora-desktop livecd http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/fedora-desktop-livecd-20060920.png and here is an ISO, weighing 618MB, of fedora-desktop http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/fedora-desktop-davidz-stream-developme… Have fun, David

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Kadischi GUI : usability
by Chitlesh GOORAH 19 Sep '06

19 Sep '06

Hello there, I'm here to seek advice and suggestions on Kadischi's GUI. I have been directed by many of you to this list from IRC. After several GUI ideas I had, finally I chose one. When kadischi is launched from gnome/kde menu, http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=239174347&size=o When the "next" button is clicked, General tab: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=239174348&size=o Advanced Features tab: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=239174350&size=o Rebranding tab: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=239174351&size=o UserAccounts tab: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=239174352&size=o Unconfigured tab: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=239174355&size=o When the "Build image" button is clicked, Output tab: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=239175327&size=o The codes behind the different features hasn't yet been written, but soon will :). Regards, Chitlesh Goorah -- http://clunixchit.blogspot.com

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Usability: SUSE, AD, and caching authentication
by Andrew Ziem 17 Sep '06

17 Sep '06

Here's two articles about how Novell is integrating with Active Directory. From the looks of it, it's simple, quick, and intuitive to: * Authenticate against Active Directory * Create home directories on login * Cache authentication (for laptops, for example) * Get a Kerberos ticket for passwordless ssh http://www.whiprush.org/2006/09/on_active_direc.html http://reverendted.wordpress.com/2006/09/12/linux-goes-mad/ Andrew

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Themes Related: Ability to select a icon size from those provided by the theme
by Rogue 09 Sep '06

09 Sep '06

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desktop September 2006