GNOME 3 Test Day

On Wednesday evening, Fedora Desktop hackers were frantically building GNOME 2.91.6 into rawhide, including a number of rebuilds against newer versions of GTK+, and beta testing Live CD images to make sure they were usable.

On Thursday morning (European time), ISO images were being uploaded by the our favourite QA insomniac. Quite a few people came to test the Live CD, and many bugs were filed.

There were plenty of questions about GNOME Shell itself, and some about the design decisions. So if you did try out one of the many GNOME 3 live CDs, and asked yourself the following questions, we'll try and provide some answers.

Q: The dash is broken, I can't add more than 13 favourites to it!?

A: It's known problem, which also fits into the dash resizing when you drag'n'drop new items to it.

Q: I can't read the full name of certain applications when searching for them in overview mode. Can I haz tooltips?

A: Tooltips, maybe not, but a solution is being worked on. Follow the discussion in this bug.

Q: I can't change my font size, really?

A: You can change it for the applications, in the Universal Access settings. For the shell, it's currently not possible, but it will get fixed.

Q: I don't like how hard it is to create workspaces. Is this the final design?

A: It's not. Owen has been working on implementing Jakub's video mockups. See this bug for all the links.

Q: I use 2 monitors, and GNOME Shell is very difficult to use. Is it going to get fixed in time?

A: Hopefully yes. There are two bugs you can monitor. One is about a bug when using two monitors (or at least, more prominent when using two monitors), the other about the plans for even better multi-screen support.

Q: How do I restart my computer?

A: Type "reboot" in a terminal? Unfortunate, but how to present it needs a bit of design work. Just adding another menu item in the system menu just muddles it.

Q: This is way slick. But the NetworkManager applet looks really out-of-place. Can you make it look cool?

A: Yes! System status legend Giovanni is on the case.

Q: My machine can't run GNOME Shell. What about the fallback mode?

A: It looks pretty sad at the moment. There's plenty of room for improvements here. Feel free to jump in if you want to help those not fortunate enough to be able to run GNOME Shell.

Also notable is the fact that plenty of bugs were filed, and quite a few fixed, that we are exercising the graphics drivers and finding bugs, and that despite some complaints (some of them constructive, but not always), GNOME 3 is looking better and even more usable than GNOME 2 by the day.

PS: We even had KDE make GNOME crash. Or close enough.

Region panel

Yesterday, I finished working on a UI cleanup for the “Region and Language” panel in the control-center. You can see the results below. I'm pretty happy with this, though quite a bit of work could still be done, like allowing users to install “language packs” (fonts, translations, dictionaries) from the language tab, or integrating input sources in the layouts tab.

The layout before the separator are used by other users on the system

My favourite layouts, with the new contextual items

(and sans keyboard model selection)

infra-red remotes in GNOME 3

gnome-lirc-properties has served its purpose. It will probably carry on working on GNOME 3 desktops, but you won't be happy when it drags in GTK+ 2.x Python bindings, HAL or doesn't integrate into the new control-center.

But things have changed since gnome-lirc-properties was first written, and the way to handle IR remotes has changed as well:

• A large majority of receivers are now supported in the kernel using rc-core (né ir-core).
• Some receivers aren't supported (iguanaIR amongst others), and some need porting from pure input drivers to rc-core. Some functionality for the ATI Remote Wonder remotes is also not supported by the new drivers. If you're interested in working on this, drop a mail to the LIRC list.
• Mauro Chehab is making progress at propagating the key events from the kernel up to the stack to X11 applications. There's some patches in that direction on the Red Hat Bugzilla.

This means that:

• Event delivery would still need a broker in the session, to get to unfocused applications. gnome-settings-daemon can step in that role (and step out of the way when the application is focused, so the app can bring context dependent behaviour). gnome-settings-daemon already handle some of the more common multimedia keys in its media-keys plugin.
• The only configuration one would need to do is selecting the type of remote for the receiver, eventually tweaking the keymap for that remote.

So to write a replacement for gnome-lirc-properties that would fit into GNOME 3, one would need:

• A way to enumerate receivers on the machine
• A way to change the remote configuration (changing the keymap) for that receiver
• Eventually a way to tweak the keymap

This could all be handled through a D-Bus version of ir-keytable. If Mauro's patches reach X.org mainstream, then a kernel/GNOME summer of code project could be had for this work. Best to start writing some kernel patches, or laying some code if you want to get a headstart.

PS: For completeness' sake, there are also "pure" input devices that are remotes that wouldn't be handled through this. Those would need to be blacklisted in the input layer, and handled through rc-core instead.

YouTube playback will suck again

If you've seen the comments on this PiTiVi bug, you're probably already aware that YouTube/Google strongly disapprove of any breach to their terms of service.

We thought that Totem was living in a soft, gray, area by using YouTube GData API to do video searches, and then accessing direct streams that were of the quality expected by users, and in formats that meant out-of-the-box support for most Linux distributions (eg. using Web-M).

Turns out not. I won't make a whole scene about the way that this problem was brought up to me, but let's say that it wasn't the way I would have expected a corporation like Google dealing with things.

After a multitude of e-mails back and forth, I'm afraid that YouTube stuck to its guns, and I was repeatedly told about the "supported" solutions (embedding Flash was even proposed as a solution!).

So Totem will soon be playing your YouTube videos in crappy quality. Some of you with faster computers and better connections will be switching from full-HD streams to 176x144 videos.

If you want decent desktop integration with high-quality streams, feel free to "star" this GData bug report.

And for something different now

Because it looks better in fullscreen, with acceleration, and you can save it if you want to keep it. Totem now with a "Save Copy..." menu item, and a playlist parser that knows about video websites.

The ever present Xan is demo man.

You'll need quvi (for its library) and the master of totem-pl-parser (that should even work with older versions of Totem) for the video website support. The "Save" menu item lives in Totem master, scheduled for GNOME 3.

New gnome-phone-manager maintainer

Seeing as I haven't given gnome-phone-manager enough love lately, Daniele Forsi, of gnokii fame, is stepping up as the new maintainer for it. Bug fixes coming your way very soon!

I'll still be handling the packaging of gnome-phone-manager in Fedora.

House arrest, or just document sharing

Yesterday and today, I wrote a chunky patch for gvfs to allow it to use the "house arrest" protocol for iOS devices. This is the protocol is rather more well-known as "iTunes documents sharing".

You can see a tedious example of how you can use it in this Apple KB.

For GNOME, we did it slightly differently, and you don't need to use your music manager as a file manager for your non-music device. Plug the device in, and all the apps that support file sharing will be showing up in a "Applications on Foo" device, on your desktop.

Managing files with a file manager, what a brilliant idea.