desktop August 2009

desktop@lists.stg.fedoraproject.org

38 participants
27 discussions

XCF Pixbuf Loader
by Debarshi Ray 29 Oct '09

29 Oct '09

http://blog.reblochon.org/2009/03/gift-to-competition.html Is it a good idea to package it? Or has it been intentionally been kept out due to other plans? Cheers, Debarshi -- One reason that life is complex is that it has a real part and an imaginary part. -- Andrew Koenig

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GDM Login Screen
by Frank Murphy 23 Sep '09

23 Sep '09

Apologies for noise. Google hasn't helped. or main list How can I get rid of "Other" user Will future ugrades\updates remove this by default? -- Regards, Frank jabber | msn | skype: frankly3d http://www.frankly3d.com

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A less cluttered desktop
by Matthias Clasen 21 Sep '09

21 Sep '09

In anticipation of the corresponding upstream change, I have just built a change to the GConf schemas in libgnome to not show icons in menus and buttons by default anymore. This change may take a little while to get used to, but I hope that most people will come around and appreciate the less cluttered desktop. Feedback appreciated. Matthias

8 19

GNOME Shell support in desktop-effects
by Owen Taylor 02 Sep '09

02 Sep '09

I just pushed a set of changes to the desktop-effects repository on fedorahosted to add support for GNOME Shell. The basic idea can be seen in the screenshot attached - instead of a single "Enable Desktop Effects" button, the user is now presented with a three-way choice of "Standard" "Compiz" and "GNOME Shell", with short explanations for each. As before the choice is instant-apply and when the user is switching to a compositor, they are presented with a count-down dialog that they have to click on to confirm their choice. UI suggestions, small and large, appreciated. The dialog will be split out of the compiz-gnome package into a separate package required by both compiz-gnome and gnome-shell. If compiz-gnome or gnome-shell is not installed the option is simply not shown. It would be neat to instead have a "Not installed. _Install Now_" message with a package-kit enabled link, but: A) I'd have to implement it B) I'm not completely sure that we want to make it quite that easy to try out GNOME Shell with out any context. If people have to read about it somewhere and install gnome-shell as a separate step, then they'll have the opportunity to get some context. C) I'd have to implement it Longer-term, maybe even in Fedora 13, the idea is that desktop-effects goes away. Switching between gnome-panel/metacity and gnome-shell will be done through standard GNOME dialogs, for as long as gnome-panel is still supported. gnome-shell won't have the inter-distribution differences that made a unified switcher to Compiz impossible. For Compiz, Fedora should stop using the GConf plugin and ship a Compiz that is more natively "Compiz" and uses the standard Compiz configuration tools. Presumably those tools already provide the opportunity to switch your session to use Compiz, if it is not currently running, or will do so in the future. - Owen

7 13

PackageKit command line plugin
by Rahul Sundaram 01 Sep '09

01 Sep '09

Hi, First time I run a command for a package I don't have to install, I have to wait for a really long time for the whole file list to be downloaded. This is not really going to be a good first impression. Since this plugin is now by default in Rawhide, I was wondering if there was any plans to fix or workaround the problem. Rahul

2 3

No MTA on the desktop
by Rahul Sundaram 31 Aug '09

31 Aug '09

Hi Short proposal: Sendmail is a daemon enabled by default forever and ever but it doesn't make much sense for the desktop and we should remove it for Fedora 12. This will save disk space and reduce startup time. Longer Story: For context, https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2009-August/msg00660.html A proposal has been made at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NoMTA That is going to go through FESCo and since it is past feature freeze, I think it makes sense for now to use ssmtp in the desktop kickstart file and drop sendmail. Will Woods confirmed that it wouldn't really break anything. Note that ssmtp doesn't queue mails but I don't think any mails send by cron is going to be either visible or useful for the desktop user. When I was maintaining the Xfce spin, we did replace sendmail with ssmtp http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=spin-kickstarts.git;a=blob_plain;f=fedor… It's been a few releases since. LXDE spin is doing the same thing as well http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=spin-kickstarts.git;a=blob_plain;f=fedor… Can the desktop team consider this? Rahul

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RE: The MTA on Desktop
by Hristo Petkov 31 Aug '09

31 Aug '09

Hi all, It is none of my business to comment this MTA, but in my view the space on the Live CD is the least problem. It is a matter of security. This MTA has nothing to do on the Desktop. Everything which is intended to ease the user sooner or later becomes a drawback... at least the experience shows this. Regrads

1 0

Printing test day coming up...
by Matthias Clasen 18 Aug '09

18 Aug '09

Another week, another Fit and Finish test day. This time around, we want to look at printing. See http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-08-18_Fit_and_Finish:Printi… Both Marek Kasik and Tim Waugh have kindly agreed to be around, so we'll have sufficient expertise for all of the printing stack. Drop in #fedora-fit-and-finish on Freenode on Tuesday, Aug 14, to join in the fun. Matthias

2 4

Roles and Policy
by David Zeuthen 17 Aug '09

17 Aug '09

Hey, I've just added a new subpackage in the polkit SRPM called polkit-desktop-policy. This package will add two new system groups (the trailing _r signifies these are really roles, not ordinary groups) - desktop_admin_r - desktop_user_r The patch is here http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/devel/polkit/polkit.spec?r1=1.8&r2=1.9 It works like this 1. If the desktop_admin_r group is non-empty, then users in the group are used for administrator authentication - see the polkit(8) man page for details: http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/polkit/polkit.8.html If the desktop_admin_r group is empty, we just ask for the root password instead. For example, the following is a screenshot where the users davidz and bateman are in the desktop_admin_r group: http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/pkexec-with-desktop-admin-r.png 2. Second, if you are member of the desktop_admin_r group, then you should be allowed to do a lot of things without being interrupted by authentication dialogs. This part isn't complete, for now, it includes org.gnome.clockapplet.mechanism.* - set timezone and system time org.freedesktop.devicekit.disks.* - all storage related things org.freedesktop.RealtimeKit1.* - run real-time processes but we probably want to allow installing trusted packages, install trusted updates and remove packages. Without asking for a password. Probably more - Richard? 3. Third, if you are a member of the desktop_user_r group then you should be allowed to do a number of things - not as much as the desktop_admin_r role, but things like setting the time zone. For now, we only include org.gnome.clockapplet.mechanism.settimezone A couple of notes - As we add/remove mechanisms (e.g. privileged apps using polkit), we need to update this package. That's fine. - For this to be really useful, we need the User Account Editor that Matthias wrote about here https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2008-May/msg00006.html Sadly no work has been done on this yet. Anyway, the main point is that we can add something like this Account Type (*) Standard User ( ) Administrative User to this tool. We can also add more roles, e.g. "Restricted User" and also tailor policy for the mythical guest account. - This is opt-in. If you don't want to use this, just don't add any users to the desktop_admin_r or desktop_user_r groups. Heck, just uninstall the package. Second, other third-party packages can easily override this thanks to how the polkit local authority works (see the pklocalauthority(8) man page for details). - This should put an end to the (IMO misguided) request "please add first user to the 'wheel' group". The new 'wheel' is 'desktop_admin_r' and the new sudo(1) is pkexec(1). (Of course sudo(1) will still continue to work but it is not what we officially want to support. PolicyKit is, however) - With support in the OS installer for automatically adding the first user to desktop_admin_r, we should be close to actually doing installs without the concept of a root password... Of course this is not 100% useful until a) the OS installer knows about this; and b) we have an User Account Editor. But it is 90% there. Finally, Matthias, can someone please add polkit-desktop-policy to the default desktop install? Thanks. David

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Re: Re: Roles and Policy (Action Required)
by postmaster＠boxbe.com 13 Aug '09

13 Aug '09

Hello Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop, This message serves as notification that you will not receive any more courtesy notices from our members for two days. Messages you have sent will remain in a lower priority queue for our member to review at their leisure. Future messages will be more likely to be viewed if you are on our member's priority Guest List. Thank you, wieseltux23(a)gmail.com About Boxbe This courtesy notice is part of a free service to make email more reliable and useful. Boxbe (http://www.boxbe.com) uses your existing social network and that of your friends to keep your inbox clean and make sure you receive email from people who matter to you. Boxbe: Say Goodbye to Email Overload Visit http://www.boxbe.com/how-it-works?tc=312975431_1094066229

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desktop August 2009