www.lewiz.org

I know I didn’t blog about this when I first read about the proposed update, but now that it is real and I can use it, it’s definitely worth a mention.

Sun ship a modified version of the panel calendar that supports multiple timezones, very handy when you work in a global organisation and regularly collaborate with people in different timezones.

Admittedly, this doesn’t apply too strongly to me in my current role at Sun, but at home, it’s very handy to glance quickly and know what time it is in China.

Hopefully Sun will quickly abandon their (in my opinion) third-party changes now that a far superior implementation is available upstream.  I present you, the Gnome calendar:

While catching up on my daily dose of Planet GNOME, I spotted a rather interesting blog post requesting info from people with specific Gateway laptops.

Why?

Well, it turns out that the author is compiling a list of known-faulty batteries to be used with hal-info/hald.

Such a list would be able to provide a very neat message to the user, something like:

“The battery you have in your Dell laptop could potentially explode.  Please visit dell.com/explodingbattery for details on ordering a replacement.”

While browsing through the roadmap for the next GNOME release (2.20) I continued on and spotted that there is a plan to add an encryption plugin for Pidgin in GNOME 2.22.

This is great news for anybody that values the security and privacy of their instant messaging passwords.

One of the common arguments made by the Gaim/Pidgin developers that by its very nature, an IM password was a throw-away commodity.  This may be true, but in Sun (and countless other companies) we have a unified username and password for all services, including IM.  Suddenly the plain-text password in your home directory looks less satisfactory.

Anyway, you can read more about the roadmap at live.gnome.org/RoadMap

In Solaris Nevada/Express build 64 a patch has finally been applied to Gaim (hopefully soon-to-be Pidgin) that implements working gnome-keyring support for storing and retrieving passwords.

This now means that my primary LDAP password for logging on to all of the machines on the SWAN network is no longer sat in a plain-text XML file in my home directory.  Same thing for my MSN password and so on.

This is a big move for the Sun Ray desktop environment where the arguments made by the Gaim/Pidgin developers do not hold true.

Hopefully in the future we can see this change being pushed upstream in a more refined form, one that implements an authentication hook that can be used by plugins… this way we don’t need to link the main Gaim/Pidgin library against gnome-keyring or the Windows/KDE/Mac equivalent.

I borrowed an openSuSE 10.2 DVD from Anton and finally got around to giving it a whirl. Here are my thoughts about it:

• GRUB bootsplash and boot-up is very nice and swish; better than Ubuntu
• installer is way behind the Ubuntu equivalent; there is too much choice and potential to go wrong
• partition editor is a recipe for disaster; different disks aren’t clearly defined: it would be very easy for a newbie to nuke their disk by accident
• the install went smoothly and the overall presentation of the OS is good
• GNOME support is much improved over previous releases; it feels like less of an afterthought
• I ended up with a CD-only application repository thanks to not having an uplink at install time. YaST2 sucks monkey balls; this is a real shame considering how great it used to be. The options are ambiguous and it took me a good amount of time to find out how to add a new YUM repository
• What is YUM? What is ZEN? What is going on with the consistency in this operating system? There are two available tools to add/update repositories and whatnot. One of them crashed half-way through, and the other wanted me to insert a disc!
• YUM is very slow, apt/deb is far superior
• Installing nvidia drivers was more complicated than Ubuntu (I gave up)
• The GNOME slab is very nice, not because it is better, but because it is good that people are thinking about things
• Beagle (with the Firefox plugin) by default is good news for all
• I didn’t get the 3D desktop stuff working
• Nice to have some proprietary stuff included by default: Flash, etc.
• My webcam wasn’t recognised (Ubuntu manages it)

• Much improved integration between KDE and GNOME

  Overall I wasn’t impressed. Some things are definitely ahead of Ubuntu: the GRUB menu is one big thing that I think the Ubuntu guys need to concentrate on. It seems the Novell guys are spending more time with whiz-bang than they are on the fundamentals.

  Ubuntu, on the other hand, now have a very solid foundation and the next release (which won’t install on my machine right now (but it is an alpha)) should definitely help level things out.

  If you want desktop Linux: use Ubuntu.

GNOME 2.18 (due in a little over six months) is hoping to shake up the bundled games (the gnome-games package) by removing one game, and adding one new one. I took my part by voting for Mahjonng, Mines and Same GNOME. It’s clear to me, that Mahjongg is the one true GNOME game.

A nice little discovery for the day was apt-build. I’ve never had cause to use it before but due to some incompatibilities with the GPL (under which mail-notification is licensed) and OpenSSL encryption support has been intentionally disabled in the package for mail-notification.

I need SSL support for checking my email and after doing some very quick reading somebody suggested apt-build. This did the job very quickly. I used apt-build build mail-notification and then edited debian/rules to comment out the --disable-ssl line before finally running apt-build install mail-notification to compile and install mail-notification with SSL support. For some reason the actualy install didn’t work but a quick dpkg -i on the resulting package did the trick.

Not as customisable as FreeBSD’s ports or Gentoo’s ebuilds, but a very neat feature that shows the designers of apt really thought things through.

Now I receive great notifications when I receive new email:

All the cool kids are doing it… why aren’t you?

I’m seriously impressed… I’ve got Xgl and Compiz running on my laptop (an i810 graphics chipset) and it all runs fairly speedily. The battery hit seems to be negligible (surprisingly) and as a result I get all sorts of cool goodies.

The coolest is Expose—hit F12 and see all of the open windows tiled on your desktop. This has been available for MacOS X for some time now. ALT+TAB has a fancy new dialogue, which is good eyecandy but also handy for finding the window you’re looking for. Windows now “burst” onto the screen and wibble-wobble when you move them about.

There are a whole bunch more plugins that I haven’t got working yet—one of the coolest is the rotating cube desktop… but this still seems fairly elusive for most people.

Great work Dave Reveman!

Well, so much for my big plans. I managed to get Xgl running on my laptop, which has an Intel 855GM chipset (uses the i810 driver). Unfortunately there is a bug with the i810 driver that causes it to be horrendously slow. I understand this will be fixed some time, but for now Xgl is not usable on my laptop.

No such luck with my desktop machine, which has an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 280, which is basically a GeForce 4MX. Known issues with the GeForce 2 and 4 chipsets mean that I get a black screen. No amount of attempting to compile the “fixed” CVS code has worked. I guess I’ll just have to wait a bit. It’s no big deal, anyway, as currently things don’t seem to work with TwinView (two displays) anyway. Maybe for this I just have to wait until NVIDIA release updated drivers that support the new extensions, instead of the Mesa libGL.

As for the photoblog… well, didn’t do that either. Or go to Kro bar. Or go take some crappy photos in the evening. Hehe, so, I didn’t do a great deal. Anyway, time to head out for some food and then I’ll have a play with some PHP or Ruby on Rails for this photoblog.

Finally! GNOME has a decent power management applet… the defaults are a little un-sane (somehow insane doesn’t seem right) as it decided that running on AC power my display should not be at full brightness.

This is a turn for the better… it even has buttons, sliders and options to configure it, which is a lot more than can be said for the latest reincarnation of the GNOME screensaver.

I wonder how long before the GNOME interface Nazis get their hands on this great little application… time will tell.