Linux4kix

To undecorate or not to undecorate

I have pondered and played with the idea that we should be undecorating maximized windows. On my netbook it really does help with screen real estate and makes the interface feel more integrated. Well I have been chatting with some folks on #gnome-shell and reading some of the bugs filed against this subject. Well I have finally come up with a solution I ultimately like.

I believe that maximized windows should be turned into border-only windows. This allows the metacity theme to specifically say what to and how to draw the border of the window only when it is maximized. One theme can cram the menubar right up against the Activities button, while another one can make a nice large strip the size of a normal window border, title and all. Everyone can have it their way, just like Burger King.

I will post how all this can be accomplished at a later time, after I push the code to my repos. For the short term to help you decipher my ramblings, here is a screenie.

posted on Monday, September 21, 2009
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ChromeShell for the world.

I promised I would make my gnome-shell customized theme available here for people to try and discuss. It uses the murrine engine, so make sure to install it. This is a derivative work from some other themes that I found on gnome-look.org. I believe all original copyright material is still intact and should be fine for redistribution.

Uploading the files failed so I just popped them on my web server for download.

ChromeShell-theme.tar.gz

ChromeShell-icons.tar.gz

From DropBox

From DropBox

posted on Saturday, September 19, 2009
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Collaboration Efforts

I have been working with Volker Sobek on and off as he has been experimenting with a better shadow effect for mutter. After he had all the hard work done, I took some time tonight and extended the mutter plugin so a drop shadow could be positioned a bit more dynamic. The hack is ugly and needs a lot of cleanup, but does finally get us the upper-center shadows drawn to match the gnome-shell spec.

posted on Saturday, September 19, 2009
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Behind the scenes things are moving

All the behind the scenes work I have been pulling together is finally consumable on Livecrumbs. I have pulled in the nbtk-introduction branch to livecrumbs and re-reverted the libTidy removal. My drawer.js code was then a trivial patch to NbtkGrid and things were rolling.

Now I just need to pull in my local workspaces-crumb branch and push that and things should be displaying nice and cleanly. After that the future focus will be on mouse gestures and widgets.

posted on Friday, September 18, 2009
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VirtualBox calm down!

I have been testing some respins and such on my desktop using VirtualBox. I noticed that the main process was spinning at 100% cpu utilization when my guest was sitting around doing nothing. Hmmm, strange. After some googling around I found that it was a problem with the CPU affinity of VirtualBox. Here is my fix.

sudo yum install util-linux-ng
sudo vi /usr/bin/VirtualBox

change line 72 to

exec "/bin/taskset"  "-c" "1" "/usr/lib/virtualbox/VirtualBox" "$@"
        

posted on Tuesday, September 15, 2009
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Using LiveCrumbs refresher

It seems more and more people are getting into gnome-shell testing mode. They also seem to like some of the experimental features I am implementing in my branch. I decided to add an entry here that covers the steps you need to add gnome-shell livecrumbs to your gnome-shell jhbuild environment. Some of these steps were modified from a great write up done here by my good friend Augias.

First Step is to add my mutter branch to your local git repo and do a checkout.

cd ~/gnome-shell/source/mutter
git remote add -f linux4kix git://github.com/linux4kix/mutter.git
git checkout --track -b linux4kix linux4kix/linux4kix
git fetch
jhbuild shell
make
make install
        

cd ~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell
git remote add -f linux4kix git://github.com/linux4kix/gnome-shell.git
git checkout --track -b livecrumbs linux4kix/livecrumbs
git fetch
jhbuild shell
make
make install
        

gnome-shell --replace
        

git fetch
jhbuild shell
make
make install
        

git checkout master
jhbuild shell
make
make install
        

posted on Sunday, September 13, 2009
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A Necessary Evil

I know we, we being the Open Source community, have various methods for voip services. Ekiga is responsible for me keeping in touch with my wife for over a year before she was my wife. Telepathy and it's tubes are also starting to gain some maturity. However most the non-geek world handles their internet video chat and telephony with Skype. Well since Fedora 10 and full acceptance of pulseaudio skype has really been a nightmare to use. I just did my morning perusing of the web for interesting bits and found a new beta release of Skype is available for linux, *gasp*. My download is now finished so now let me see if it actually works.

posted on Friday, September 11, 2009
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Baby Steps Forward

Tonight I pushed the bits to my mutter and gnome-shell branches to enable the new "maximized window behavior. The idea is that maximizing a window will undecorate it and move the window controls up next to the application menu, or window crumb in my branches case. On netbooks this behaviour is invaluable for giving the user a bit more screen real estate. This will be the default behavior on netbooks once I land my next set of changes.

I have thought a bit about how I want to integrate livecrumbs as a feature into gnome-shell. I am not going to cover any details right now as I want to hash out the ideas in my head a bit more.

I am always interested in ideas so feel free to add them in comments or catch me on #gnome-shell or send me an e-mail.

posted on Monday, September 07, 2009
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My hate for computers

Over the last week I have finally been able to get back to livecrumbs and gnome-shell in general. Well last night I did something very stupid and I lost half of my work on my netbook. I will not exactly say what I did because I really don't want the specifics documented anywhere.

Regardless to say I will have to redo a lot of the work I had pieced together over time. The good news is I do have some patches and such here and there that will help me remember specifics. I will hopefully have everything back together this weekend. I am using this opportunity to make most my work consumable upstream. That means getting maximized window, demands attention and countless other patches merged upstream.

For people tracking LiveCrumbs I apologize for the delay. I just pushed changes which should bring in master for mutter and gnome-shell and should work, just without major changes.

posted on Friday, September 04, 2009
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