Linux4kix

The sounds of silence

The past week I have been full of all sorts of busy getting ready to pack up from Denmark and make my way over to Vancouver. Well I have landed and found a free wireless access point, so here is another post.

Bit by bit I have been working on livecrumbs and my other gnome-shell modifications to provide a better user experience. Of course the guys at the official gnome-shell project are doing the same. Sometimes our divergence of work causes me to go back and revisit some of the changes. This is going to continue to be the case until gnome-shell gets a proper plugin system.

I have recently done some updates that bring my changes back into gnome-shell proper. What is interesting is that with the addition of the "application" panel item gnome-shell is starting to look more and more like breadcrumbs. I have also heard that they are planning on implementing functionality that I already have landed in crumbs. Small world.

On the plane ride over to Vancouver I have finished out some smalls bits for gnome-shell netbook edition and will start to land those as time permits over the next few days.

Time for breakfast!

posted on Saturday, August 15, 2009
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Demands-Attention!!!

It is finally here, well mostly finally here :-).

I hashed out the final bits and have a working version of demands-attention window notifications. It isn't perfect but works quite nicely within a single workspace at a time. Yes I know that is something still on the todo list. I need to figure out how to get window notifications from all workspaces.

Besides that I have landed the core bits I needed to start adding a lot more window action features in crumbs. The next bit I will nail down is undecorating maximized windows and managing them from the window crumb. All the hard work is already in git for gnome-shell now I just need to work out th emutter bits. Currently mutter throws a fit when I try to undecorate a window while it is being maximized...but I digress.

First the screenshot.

The differences are subtle but there. Next to the window crumb you see the ! icon that does a dual purpose job. It subtly notifies the user that a window has asked for attention. It does this by slowly pulsing 3 times and then staying on. It's second duty is a quick way to bring the windows-demanding attention to the foreground. If you click on the ! it will bring each window to the front in the order that they asked for attention.

If you prefer a more methodical approach to window selection you will find windows that have demanded attention highlighted in a soft rose color. Hey it fits the color scheme and grabs your attention.

Try it out, give me feedback. I am sure there are little bugs here and there so please tell me about them. Overall enjoy.

posted on Saturday, August 01, 2009
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Repos brought up to date

Morning crumb users!

The update of clutter to 1.0.0 is great news. Unfortunately it happend when I didn't have time to push changes to LiveCrumbs right away. Now all the changes are pushed and they build and work. The caveat to this is that you have to make sure your git repo for clutter is up to date. It is well worth it, there is a fix that makes notification icons redraw smoothly. Yes I know small things do make me happy.

posted on Friday, July 31, 2009
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OLPC fixups

I spent some time working on fixing up the openchrome driver for the OLPC guys. They are very overworked but still very nice to work with. Most everything I did today was maintenance specific to their device, but fulfilling none the less. I like the idea that my Open Source hacking is going towards benefiting children around the world.

posted on Tuesday, July 28, 2009
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Attention LiveCrumb users!!!

I finally decided that getting patches committed to mutter is slower than I would like and forked mutter to github for future development. This is good for me because I can more quickly and easily work on new features for livecrumbs. It is not the best because people wanting to use my livecrumbs work will need my special mutter.

I will continue to push patches upstream to mutter, let's hope they continue to get accepted. I have my fingers crossed.

People that want to continue to use my livecrumbs branch of gnome-shell will also now need to add my linux4kix branch of mutter. Within your local mutter git repository please run the following commands.

git remote add -f linux4kix git://github.com/linux4kix/mutter.git
git checkout -b linux4kix
git pull linux4kix linux4kix

This may not be the most efficient way to do this, as I am not very git literate. Please comment if there is a better way to do this.

What does this get you. Right now it gets you property notifications, so I can update window titles when they change. It also has the bits needed to get demands-attention code working. This branch of mutter will also allow me to publish my code to undecorate maximized windows.

posted on Sunday, July 26, 2009
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XO 1.5

Last night I received my XO 1.5a to hack on. As an openchrome.org developer my primary responsibility will be to get the new VX855 chipset up and running.

posted on Saturday, July 25, 2009
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Gnome-shell for Netbooks?

As a proud owner of a 7" eeePC I have continued to search for an interface that really works well for me. Use cases involve the lower default resolution of 800x480, as well as something that scales larger when I have an external monitor plugged into it. Livecrumbs to the rescue!!!

From Linux4kix

posted on Thursday, July 23, 2009
1 comments