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More AWN Eye Candy

Neil Patel upated his blog with news that Avant Window Navigator, everyone’s favorite dock-like menu bar for GNOME, now had reflections enabled (and some bug fixes) in the latest subversion thanks to some contributors.

Pscott was kind enough to package it within minutes of being pinged in IRC, a simple conary update avant-window-navigator and voila, new AWN. (See, don’t you wish you were running Foresight right now?)

Here is a picture of my dock taken just minutes ago with the new AWN from subversion:

awn-dock-715-3

Changing AWN to use reflections and have the icons sit on top of the bar does require two changes in Gconf, it’s not in the AWN preferences yet. This Youtube click shows you how, or just do this:

  1. Open Gconf (Applicatons > System Tools > Configuration Editor)

  2. Click on Apps > Avant-Window-Navigator > Bar

  3. Change the Bar_angle value to 30

  4. Change the Icon_offset value to 10

  5. Close Gconf

  6. Restart Avant-Window-Navigator (Right click on it (not on an icon!) and click Close. Hit ALT-F2 to run it, and type avant-window-naviagor to start it. Voila!

Thanks again to the fine developers, and to Pscott for packaging it so quickly. It’s the little things that keep me happy, like eye candy.

_Update: Thanks to Cornelius in the comments, these settings make the reflection much more apparent:

_

bar_angle: 45

icon_offset: 18

Banshee plugin for X-Chat-GNOME

Will Farrington has created a wonderful plugin that controls Banshee from within X-Chat-GNOME. And thanks to Ken for packaging it so quickly.

It looks and sounds so simple, but it’s fun to play with. I absolutely love Banshee (and am so excited about all the Banshee news this week), and I spen a lot of time in IRC. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate, they just go together.

If you’re running Foresight, just do the following:

sudo conary update xchat-gnome=@fl:1-devel banshee-xchat=@fl:1-devel

I’m running a normal version of Foresight Linux (not the development version), but installing X-Chat GNOME out of 1-Devel hasn’t led to any issues.

Screenshot (Click through to see full size on Flickr):

xchat-banshee

ChicagoBarcamp Day 2 Recap

After a handful of hours sleep, we made it back to BarcampChicago on Sunday.

The crowd had definitely thinned out compared to Sunday, but there were still quite a number of folks there.

Ken’s first talk on installing a MythTV appliance was great. There is so much buzz and interest in the community around virtualization and appliances, and Ken’s talk and the live demo of installing the appliance went over well.

After a brief juggling of the schedule, and a little swearing at the projectors, Ken kicked off the Foresight presentation. We had put the presentation together on Saturday, and I’ll get a copy posted to the website this week. I was mostly watching the crowd’s reaction and listening to questions. I want to take a snapshot of the current presentation, and then work on version 2. There were lots of questions about Conary, and later, rPath, that would be good to address in the next version. The presentation provides an overview of why Foresight was created and it’s purpose, an overview of the innovative applications included, and where Foresight is headed in the future.

A brief while later, we had a small get together on kicking off the first US based GNOME Usergroup in Chicago. Kevin Hariss did a great job in sharing his passion for GNOME, and shared some ideas on what a GNOME Usergroup could hope to accomplish, and next steps for the group. I’ll throw up a post in the next day or too with some additional details and the meeting notes.

Shortly after that, I took off, grabbed a Chicago style hot dog at a local restaurant, and took the train to O’Hare where I promptly took a nap on the flight home.

A big shout out to the Chicago BarCamp organizers, the event was a blast. I’ve finished uploading the photos I took from Saturday and Sunday, here’s the set on Flickr. A big thanks to Kevin for hosting Ken and I, and thanks to Ken and Kevin for all the great Foresight discussion. I was excited about Foresight before, and now I can’t even put it into words.

GNOME Journal

The latest GNOME Journal was published today. Articles include:

  • Fun with Gstreamer Audio Effects
  • Exercising Your Application With Accerciser
  • GNOME.conf.au 2007 Wrap-up

And most importantly, my first contribution GNOME Journal,

Creating the GNOME 2.18 Live Media: An interview with Ken VanDine. Hopefully, this will be the first of many articles I hope to write in the future.

I don’t know if I’ve ever told this story, but I first met Ken last February when I was trying to figure out how to build a new GNOME LiveCD. Dave Neary pointed me at Ken at one point, who was already working on this as well. After talking to Ken, he was lightyears ahead of my struggles as he was using the rPath toolset, which enabled him to quickly publish a GNOME 2.18 LiveCD. I helped out with the easy stuff, editing the LGO pages for Live Media, and the PGO page which was later committed.

Ken was so welcoming to the help, I gave Foresight Linux a try as he is the founder and lead developer. I had just installed it when I started the interview, and by the time the interview was done a month later, I was helping out Foresight with docs and website updates and other little stuff.

Three or four months later here we are, and I’m still going strong helping out, and I enjoy the Foresight community as much today as the first time I asked a question in IRC. I hope you enjoy the article as much as I enjoyed working with Ken writing it.

Barcamp Chicago Day 2

We’re back at Barcamp as of just after noon after 4 hours of sleep. We’re surprisingly awake and ready to go. We had a small hicuup trying to download the images needed for today’s Conary talk, but SpecialKevin bailed us out.

Ken is on in 10 minutes – the first talk is on Conary, and he will be demonstrating a MythTV appliance. (I’m so excited – I’m on vacation as of Thursday, and one of my projects over vacation is to get my MythTV box up and running finally. The timing of this talk couldn’t be better!)

Ken then continues on for another hour at 2:00 CST with the Foresight presentation. The day’s a little in flux, so we might push it back as people are still trickling in (we were up late….). And then at 3, the first US based GNOME usergroup meeting, a brainstorming session with SpecialKevin.

More to come soon!

Writing Foresight Docs: Part 5

No, your eyes aren’t fooling you, the Getting Started with Foresight Linux User Guide is complete, and ported to Docbook. (Click through to see a larger picture at flickr.com):

foresight-userguide1

I was traveling for most of the week for my day job, but I did a little writing after last weeks post, then a flurry of activity Friday and Saturday. Last week, I was mostly content complete, with tons of formatting left to complete in almost every document, including:

  • Linking all URLs
  • Fixing all bullet points
  • Adding arrows to directions for clicking in the menu
  • Fixing the indentation errors
  • Resizing all screenshots to 510 pixels wide

The above items were almost all completed Friday, but I still hadn’t started the biggest challenge, which was writing a Table of Contents. Looking through the source code of various other Yelp / Docbook files, I had seen a number of pages calling other Docbook pages, such as the GNOME Documentation Project Handbook, for inclusion using this tag:

[include href="filename.xml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"/]

In the end, I ended up using the ENTITY tag, as found in the GNOME Documentation Style Guide, which consists of listing all the files in alphabetical order at the top, and then calling each one in the order you want within the [book] tag:

[!ENTITY APPLICATIONS SYSTEM "applications.xml"]

&APPLICATIONS;

I borrowed heavily from the GNOME Documentation Style Guide’s structure and code, in writing the default page (foresight-user-guide.xml) and create a Preface chapter. This chapter is new as of yesterday, and includes an “About” section, “What’s in this Guide” with links to each Chapter and it’s summary, and a “Who Should Read this Guide” which breaks out by chapter for new or experienced Linux users the chapters they might find the most relevant.

This required me to rewrite the first 75 lines of each of the 9 Docbook files that currently make up the userguide, and change them from using sect1 tags, to using chapter tags. This actually makes it much more simpler for future contributors to add to the book, as they write their chapter and don’t have to worry about filling out all the revision history in each file, it’s updated in the foresight-user-guide.xml file instead of each individual one. I got in the zone and knocked all the files out last night, and submitted them to the Mercurial repo.

There is one bug I have yet to solve:

foresight-userguide-helpbug

In two different sections of the Userguide, the “Help” section is called, both in the Preface chapter, and it references the IRC help sub-topic instead. A bug-hunting we will go.

I am sure that I haven’t done everything in the right order or by the book – for example, I’ve found references that GNOME developers use make to write documentation files, I can guess to why, but I’m not sure, nor can I figure out how they’re set up. I’m also not sure on the translation process, other than editing the files by hand but I’ve never created a program either that has had to use a po file.

I’m also darned if I can find where Yelp, when you start the GNOME Help from System > Help, is calling the files on the right side under “Welcome to the GNOME Help Browser”. That’s where I want to put the userguide, but when you open /usr/share/yelp/toc.xml it only appears to be calling the links under “Desktop” on the left.

This has been a great experience so far, and isn’t even close to over. After I track down the bug and find a place for the userguide to live in the default documentation, it’s time to take Foresight documentation to the next level. The content written so far is not set in stone. In some cases, it only skims the top of what should be included in a given chapter, there are huge holes of information not even presented in the current guide, such as a better installation overview or printing, and more screenshots could be sprinkled throughout. Other sub-chapters could be written on specialized topics, such as installing on a Macbook or running OpenBox.

A process still needs to be developed to cull documentation on the wiki to live offline in the userguide. Documentation should be a living, breathing thing that grows with the operating system, not something that grows stale. (Quick sidenote – the fact that GNOME still ships with the GNOME 2.14 Desktop Accessibility Guide and the GNOME 2.14 Desktop System Administration Guide in the default help page ticks me off to no end. Now that I have some limited experience with Docbook, it’s time to give back). Taking user contribution submissions to the wiki and putting them in the userguide should be a high priority. Hopefully, the work done on the userguide so far can serve as a base for future contributors to continue to add content to, and people will find it useful as they use Foresight Linux.

Writing Foresight Docs: Part 4

Progress on the Userguide has been swift this week. Ken’s comments about having Foresight Linux 2.0 in testing in a “couple of weeks” spurred me to action. In no particular order are the things I’ve learned and accomplished this week:

  • URLs. Again, it’s just a matter of re-wiring my brain from HTML to Docbook’s format. For example: [ulink url="http://www.openoffice.org/product/math.html" type="http">Math here[/ulink] (replace brackets with < or >) links to the Math page on OpenOffice.org. Similar, but different. And god knows I’m no HTML expert to start with.
  • Bullets have been driving me crazy. It was just one little thing, adding the mark=”bullet” to the tag, i.e. [itemizedlist mark="bullet"]
  • 3 of the 5 last pages created were created with zero syntax errors. Yes, pride cometh before the fall. All it means is I’m starting to get the hang of this. And I haven’t started doing any of the advanced formatting yet.
  • All pages have been committed. There’s some editing to be done (more on this below), but the directory structure is complete, all screenshots are uploaded,and the copy is complete in all XML files.
  • I’ve learned more Mercurial commands, such as hg pull and hg update, as I’ve worked on this on my laptop and desktop now. And I experienced a moment of panic after editing a file and not having done a pull. But I figured it out, thankfully.
  • I added a TODO file in the repository, but it probably needs to be updated more often.

Things left to do:

  • The first few pages need major formatting updates, especially on removing the indentation.
  • All pages need to be reviewed and edited for the correct URL tags.
  • Bullet points need to be fixed in almost all the pages.
  • Screenshots need to be resized to 510 pixels wide (so they print correctly, per the GNOME Documentation Handbook guidelines).
  • I still need to research, learn and build a Table of Contents.
  • I need to add some advanced formatting, specifically the arrow labels when showing how to access menus to run applications. (The tag I believe).
  • I still need to research on how to add this to the default Yelp page in GNOME, and how that will work from a packaging perspective.

Paul Scott-Wilson asked a great question in IRC last night, regarding whether Docbook repository or the Wiki will be the master copy of the userguide moving forward. My recommendation would be that Docbook would be the master copy, put together from the text on the wiki. This way it gives users a chance to contribute to the userguide on the wiki, adding new copy, having it proofed, and then moved to Docbook. The Printing section is a great example of this, it’s 80% complete on the wiki, but it needs to be 100% to be included in Docbook. (Jonathan Brickman, where are you? Please finish the Printing page!) Additionally, the Docbook repository has source control, which would make it easier to manage over the long term. Opinions or thoughts? Leave a comment below on the blog, or email me at pcutler at foresightlinux dot org.

Progress will be small to non-existent as I have to travel for my day job. This probably means no blog updates either. More to come soon.

Writing Docs: Part 2

Last week, I kicked off the first blog post in my ongoing adventures to learn how to write GNOME documentation, posted as a long rant about my frustrations in the tools and information available. This week in part two, I’ll cover the start of porting the Userguide to Docbook, the tools I’m using, how I’m learning, and my unanswered questions.

After downloading the source for gedit, banshee and seahorse, I started browsing through the XML files to learn the structure and tags. I was using Gedit, but then on Tuesday Og posted about Geany and I decided to give that a try. (And of course it’s in the Foresight repos!) I mentioned it in IRC Thursday night as my new favorite tool for writing Docbook, and Ken recommended I use Mercurial for revision control.

geany-gedit

Ken set up a Mercurial repo for the userguide with the other Foresight repos, and answered my questions on using Mercurial as I quickly scanned the Mercurial documentation. Over the next couple of days I tweaked my Mercurial setup, fixing the author link with a tip from Ken, and getting Nano to be my default text editor as set in my .bashrc file.

One of the weird things I learned with Docbook, is that the section tags, and as you can see in the Gedit screenshot, having nothing to with creating sections in the documentation, rather they are the sublevels within a given chapter. I still don’t understand a number of the tags used by default, such as guilabel, which appears to be a bold tag. I fired off an email to the GNOME-docs mailing list this morning, and Leonardo Fontenelle posted links to the Subversion repositories with the handbook and styleguide, which I’m slowly going through today.

For the Userguide itself, we are creating a folder for each chapter, rather than creating one big XML file for Yelp in Mercurial. I’m hopeful a script can be written to tie the XML files together, but I haven’t even started looking at how you take these files and get them to display in Yelp. I’ve only finished chapter one, and chapter 2 is just over halfway done. There’s a lot of copy / paste going on, as I build the docbook structure for the chapter, then copy from the wiki to a text file, and copy chunks from that to the XML file. It’s slow going as I have to review the tags, and I’m just re-using the structure and tags I see used in other GNOME help files. But I learn best by doing, and repetition. At this point I have no idea if it’s working or not, or how many errors each file may have, which I won’t know until they’re displayed in Yelp. My goal is after I finish chapter 3 to ask for help in tackling that piece, in getting the files to display in Yelp, I’m assuming in a FL-1.

I’ve also mentioned this in IRC, but it’s really interesting for me on a personal level to be putting in to practice all the development practices I’ve read about over the years. From creating the source XML file to pushing the files in to a revision control system, it’s an interesting feeling building something from scratch. And this is just the beginning – once I have a few chapters I’ll need to learn how to package them for inclusion in Foresight, and then update the userguide with each release.

The only downside? With the Mercurial repository being public, you’ll be able to see if I’m working on the userguide or slacking off! No pressure there at all….

Release Day! Foresight 1.3

It’s release day for Foresight Linux 1.3. Nothing gets your adrenaline flowing like release day as you try and get all your tasks done to help out. Not only did we release the latest and greatest version of Foresight Linux, including GNOME 2.18.2 also released today, Issue #3 of the Newsletter is out. Here are some links to keep you busy:

  • Foresight Linux 1.3 release notes
  • Go download Foresight! We have installable CD & DVD images, and lots of Live Media, including VMware images, Parallels / QEMU images, and a LiveCD will be out in the next day or two. Why aren’t you using Foresight Linux yet?
  • Issue #3 of the Newsletter. Including a first look at the next generation version of Foresight Linux, 2.0.
  • The Release Day HOWTO. All the different tasks that go into release day. (Feel free to add whatever we’ve missed!)

Use it, love it, and help us make Foresight even better. Stop by #foresight on FreeNode in IRC – we won’t bite, I promise.