Tag Archives: BlueBubble

Why Gnome 3′s Fallback mode sucks

Posted by on July 3, 2011 26 comments

This is waaaaaaaaaaay different from Why I’m sick and tired of Gnome Shell.

Ask every Gnome user. Every Gnome release, developers take away features, while giving us a proverbial carrot, but Gnome 3? They decided to just give us a stick.

For starters, the GDM, The screen where you log in? There used to be a way to select your keyboard language and other settings. That’s gone in 3.0. (Psst, some people use áccénts on their passwords but I guess Gnome isn’t designed for people)

I think the most frustrating thing missing from Gnome 3.0′s “Fallback” mode is the fact that the panels *try* to look like the old panels, but fail miserably.

All actions have been moved to ‘Alt’, so if you want to add, move or remove a shortcut, you need to use ‘Alt’+'Right Click’. Also gone is the ability to resize the bar to the former 24 pixel glory (It’s now set to 29 and haven’t found a way to make it smaller).

If that wasn’t enough, painting the bar to a different color is now impossible, thanks to the removal of the slider that lets you set Transparency under the Panel Properties.

And if you haven’t noticed, all Applets are gone from 3.0. Read somewhere about having your cake and eating it, but this isn’t cake, this is rotten eggs. Artificially obsoleted rotten eggs. Trying to install applets like lock-keys or the cpu frequency scaler is impossible, because they’ve been artificially obsoleted.

Also gone are icons on your desktop, the ability to change themes or fonts and minimize and maximize buttons. These are easily fixed with gnome-tweak-tools, but they’re still gone by default and its one more thing we need to tweak to get a usable desktop.

Since I’m not a fan of the dark theme, I really appreciate Marcus Möller’s Newlooks theme and thought I’d mention it here.

I’d like to end this note with an official announcement: I’m working on an alternative repository that will bring Gnome’s Missing Features back to Gnome 3, without any conflicts at all. I’m concentrating on bringing applets back at first, but also want to fix most of gnome-panel’s newest quirks. I was thinking on calling this “Plus”, but now that Google beat me to it… I’ll see what funky name I come up with.

I’m not abandoning the BlueBubble repository, but I’m working on something that should help out more abandoned Gnome users.

Edit: Also on my Gnome Hate List: The ugly black icons on top (Bluetooth, Audio and Battery). I’ve managed to replace the Bluetooth one but have had little success replacing the horrible volume and battery icons.

BlueBubble: What I learned

Posted by on June 30, 2011 5 comments

I had a lot of fun recompiling Gnome 2.32 for Fedora 15, and a lot of help too. Here’s a list of things I learned, in no particular order:

  • fedpkg is the best thing ever. It grabs the specs, it builds the rpms, it cooks bacon. (More on that later)
  • The Fedora Project Weightless Packager Cube is better than I thought. (It’s the one on the right, with no preview image)
  • You can’t install 32 bit and 64bit -devel packages of every library, therefore needing a Virtual Machine or a secondary computer
  • If you’re on 64bit Fedora, installing 32bit -devel packages will let you bypass the BuildRequires, but will fail because the 64bit package isn’t actually installed.
  • If you’re on 32bit Fedora, installing the 64bit -devel packages will let you bypass the BuildRequires but will fail because the 32bit package isn’t actually installed… (See what I did there? Yeah, took me a while to catch on too)
  • Building on a Virtual Machine is slooooooooooooooooooow.
  • I spent a couple of hours chowning and chmodding an RPM trying to get rpm –resign to work. (See below)
  • This bug needs love.This bug needs love.This bug needs love. (It’s worth saying three times just to get you to click it)
  • Building as root is a terrible, terrible idea.
  • There’s a huge difference between rm -rf %{_libdir}/* and rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{_libdir}/* (See above)
  • There are build orders for a reason. (And I wrote a song about that)
  • createrepo makes creating a repository an extremely easy task.
  • The comps.xml file isn’t built by fairies, but is powered by Dark Elf magic.
  • Fighting against artificial obsolescence is kinda hard.
  • If you Provide: %{title}, and you Conflicts: %{title}, yum will throw a warning. Use Conflicts: %{title} >= {your-version} instead.
  • The best way to avoid artificial obsolescence is to rename your package and skip the Provides clause.
  • Google returns about 2,190 results for “artificial obsolescence”.
  • If you listen to your heart, it goes “lub-dub” “lub-dub” “lub-dub”
  • rsync is like my bff now.
  • Adding alias ding=”play /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/complete.oga” to your .bashrc is an absolute must.
  • Adding alias bake-on=”fedpkg local && ding” to your .bashrc makes building tastier.

As a closing note, I’ve got both 32bit and 64bit packages uploaded to the BlueBubble repository. If you’re having issues, clean your cache.

BlueBubble + Applets

Posted by on June 28, 2011 2 comments

(If you’re reading this, I finished building and uploading the 32bit packages and the 64bit packages. I suggest you clean your yum cache (yum clean all)

I spent the better part of the yesterday rpmbuilding a better future by rebuilding the past for the present, and the result is quite visible: On the screen, you can see the lock-keys-appket, as well as gnote, gnome-music-applet and the cpu-frequency-monitor applet. Also visible are the trashcan and the show desktop applets, the ‘fast user switch’ applet (Called gdm-classic-user-switch-applet in the repo) and the gnome-volume-control applet which was sadly missing from the initial BlueBubble launch. I’d like to throw a huge ‘thank you’ to Thomas Scheunemann for helping me out with the gnome-volume-control applet. To prevent some conflicts between old-gnome-media and new-gnome-media packages, I decided to package gnome-volume-control as an independent applet. Caveats: Sadly, the gnome-music-applet does not work with Rhythmbox, use Banshee instead (Banshee is actually pretty, unlike Rhythmbox, so I recommend it despite the fact that it’s written in mono). Gnote artificially removed the gnote applet, and I can’t find an easy way to provide ‘just the applet’, so instead, I’m providing gnote-classic, which includes the applet (As well as gnote). You can use Fedora’s gnote, and once launched i’tll display an icon on the notification area, so you don’t actually *need* my package. Some applets don’t show up after you install them. Log out and log back in, and they’ll show up. Magic. There’s this tiny graphical issue with gnome’s network manager. A picture speaks a thousand words, and I decided to take a snapshot of it: If it wasn’t clear, all applets have a light blue background (In my setup, anyway), except for gnome-NetworkManager, which was built on gtk3, where themes are made from css instead of magical rc files.

BlueBubble Errata

Posted by on June 24, 2011 2 comments

The repository was published yesterday, as well as “The Fine Manual“. I’ve updated TFM and the FAQ a few times throughout these days to clear things up and fix some typos I had, just thought I’d let you know.

I’m trying to build the ISOs I promised,and Valent Turkovic from Fusion Linux suggested that it would be better if I added “Obsoletes: {new-package}” instead of “Conflicts: {new-package}”.

What this means is that while  I originally advertised the repository as being compatible with both old and new packages, if I upload these RPMs, the next time you yum-update, it’ll replace nautilus, gedit and gnome-terminal with the ‘classic’ versions, if you have the repository enabled. The ‘classic’ versions are functional, but perhaps you wanted the classic panel look & feel, while staying with “new” versions of gedit and gnome-terminal.

I’m going to push these RPMs sometime during the weekend, as I’m still rebuilding both 32bit and 64bit packages, and include a couple of Applets I finally got working. Just thought I’d give everyone a heads-up in case this isn’t desired, to please let me know so I can figure something out.

Thanks for your interest!

BlueBubble: The Fine Manual

Posted by on June 22, 2011 28 comments

Because we’re often told to RTFM, I decided to write one for the project.
This guide requires common sense and perhaps technical knowledge of what you’re doing.

Upgrading from Fedora 14 – Gnome

If you’re using Fedora 14 and want to switch to BlueBubble, there’s currently no easy way to do this. I recommend you proceed with the regular upgrade, try Gnome 3 for a few days and if you’re not convinced, follow the guide below.

Installing BlueBubble from Fedora 15.

For starters, Read The FAQ. You can set up the BlueBubble repository by using gedit (or vi, or your favorite editor) /etc/yum.repos.d/bluebubble.repo

[BlueBubble]
name=BlueBubble Project Packages
baseurl=http://bluebubble.k3rnel.net/repo
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-bluebubble

You’ll also want to import the rpm key.

rpmkeys –import http://bluebubble.k3rnel.net/repo/RPM-GPG-KEY-bluebubble

This repository contains a lot of conflicting packages. This is natural, you can’t have gedit-2.32 and gedit-3 installed at the same time, and yum will complain from time to time, but you’re free to choose which packages to stick in most cases.

There are at least two ways to do this. If you’re uncomfortable with staying under a command-line-interface for too long, Install KDE and load it, otherwise booting into “Run Level 3” does the job without the KDE requirement. Once it’s safe to remove Gnome, then go ahead and

yum remove gnome-panel nautilus gnome-terminal gedit control-center control-center-filesystem evolution-data-server file-roller gnome-bluetooth gnome-power-manager libgdata libgweather libgnomekbd

Once you’re Shell-Free, you can yum groupinstall gnome-desktop-classic. I added gdm as part of the group, but gdm looks ugly because of mismatching themes. If you prefer, you can replace gdm with kdm, though that will drag KDE packages. Here’s how to switch to kdm.

Reboot your computer once you’re done and enjoy Gnome 2.32 on Fedora 15. I’m aware that certain programs can’t be installed due to incompatible requirements (Such as gLabels, which requires evolution-data-server-3 while we’re sticking with evolution-data-server-2.32). The only thing I can do is provide alternative packages (glabels-classic, in this case) which would be the same version you were running on Fedora 14.

I created a Bug Tracker page where you can report missing packages (Such as the Fast-User-Switcher applet), or broken compatibility (Such as the gLabels example) and don’t forget to Read The FAQ.

Switching back to Gnome 3.

If for whatever reason you decide that Gnome ‘Classic’ on Fedora 15 just isn’t for you…. No hard feelings. Switching back to Gnome 3 is pretty simple. Just yum groupremove gnome-desktop-classic (or just remove the -classic packages) from either KDE or Run Level 3 (Same as above), and then yum groupinstall gnome-desktop to install Gnome 3.

Thank Yous

Last, but not least, I’d like to give a shout out to the many people who helped me out on this mad quest to bring old Gnome onto new Fedora. In no particular order, thanks to Kevin Fonzi (nirik), Tom Callaway (spot), Guillermo Gomez (gomix), Rex Dieter (rdieter) (And whoever else I forgot to name) for helping me out with technical aspects. Paulo Cereda who helped me out with the logo, video and other things, and finally, the entire Gnome Development Team and Fedora’s Packagers for making Gnome 2.32 as awesome as it is. They’re the ones that did all the hard work. Thanks!

Final Notes

In some cases, you can install ‘new’ packages (like gnome-terminal, gedit and nautilus) on Gnome 2.32. You can also use this repository’s ‘old’ packages on Gnome 3. Either way, you might want to modify your /root/.bashrc file and add alias yum=”yum –skip-broken”, because yum will always try to update your ‘classic’ packages, give up on it, and forget to update the rest.

The Future

I learned a thing or two based on recompiling Gnome and I think the time and effort put into BlueBubble could be better used in making Gnome 3 suck less, so my next project will be providing a Fedora-compatible repository (Separate from BlueBubble) which will help bring Gnome 2′s goodies into Gnome 3′s fallback mode without having to stick with old libraries and packages. Exact details and all will be provided in a separate blogpost. Stay tuned.

I’ve already done the impossible. This should be a piece of cake.

BlueBubble FAQ

Posted by on June 15, 2011 16 comments

It’s Q&A Time!

Q: What exactly is BlueBubble?
A: It’s an effort to bring back the Gnome 2.32 desktop in Fedora 15, or as Hannah would put it.. “The best of both worlds”.

Q: What does the logo represent?
A: It’s a parody on Fedora’s kick-ass logo. Instead of representing Infinity, Freedom and Voice, it represents equality, as in “We want things to stay the same“. Have you seen the video?

Q: Why did you do this?
A: Gnome 3 just isn’t *there* yet. The fallback mode is horrible, and the Shell itself needs a metric ton of extensions to become usable. In my humble opinion.

Q: Haven’t you heard about XFCE, LXDE or KDE?
A: Yes, I have.

Q: But?
A: Gnome is where the heart is.

Q: What is the target audience?
A: The same people who miss the Coke “Classic”, are afraid of change and/or suffer from Freemanic Paracusia.

Q: What architectures are supported?
A:i686 / x86_64. No ARM / PPC packages are planned.

Q: How’d you do it?
A: I actually wrote a song about it. Packagers might complain that the build order is wrong, but I had to sacrifice reality to make the lyrics sorta match.

Q: Where does Fedora stand in all of this?
A: I don’t know. I haven’t asked the board. This project is not endorsed or sponsored by Fedora or Red Hat in any way, shape or form.
Yes, I’m a Fedora ambassador, contributor and user, but this does not represent Fedora’s goals and ideals. The packages are not hosted on any Fedora domains.

Q: Alright, you’re convincing me…. What’s the catch?
A: You’ll have yum-conflicts for life! (Or for however long you decide to stay on BlueBubble)
A2: To clarify, you’ll only have yum-conflicts on the files you installed. You can’t have Nautilus and Nautilus-Classic at once. Duh.

Q: Did you know that Gnome 2.32 will no longer be supported?

A: Lies! Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 comes with Gnome 2.30, I think, (And I’m later versions will update it to 2.32, but not to 3.0. It’s not their style) This means that it will be supported until the Mayans destroy the Earth or I grow sick and tired of Gnome 2.32, whichever happens first, which means there’ll be no new features, but there will be bugfixes.

Q: Alright, how do I get it?
A: It’s finally available, however this isn’t your average REPO, I suggest you RTFM.

Q: Can I mix and match Gnome 3 apps with Gnome 2 apps?
A: Yes. Your milage may vary, but I managed to run the 3.0 versions of Evince, Cheese and Brasero on Gnome 2.32 without any problems.

Q: Will you make a LiveCD or DVD?
A: Yes, I’m still working on some minor details (Wallpaper and Plymouth, for starters), but they’ll be available *after* the repo.

Q: Surely everything’s unstable?
A: No. I’ve been “Eating my own dog food” for these past few weeks, running nothing but my RPMs. Other than the few things I’ll mention below, everything’s been buttery-smooth. And my name is not Shirley.

Q: Okay, Bugs and Issues you’ve found so far?
A: Here’s the list:

  • gnome-display-properties thing is completely broken. You can’t use an external screen for now, unless you use xrandr.
  • GDM looks ugly, so use KDM instead. (This is due to GTK Themes / GTK 3 themes not matching)
  • A lot of applets are missing. PyGTK2 obsoleted them.Applets are back! Installing them is as easy as yum install gnome-applets.
  • Obviously, trying to install certain gnome-centric gtk3 apps will fail and come up with all sorts of conflicts. I’ll provide “classic” version of conflicting packages. Yeah, using old versions instead of newer ones is kinda lame, but c’est la vie.
  • Rhythmbox’s notification status icon is gone. Bummer.
  • Some apps have a blue scrollbar, some apps have a white scrollbar. It depends if you’re running gtk2 or gtk3 apps.
  • Sometimes you get a black screen when you turn on the computer. Just press Ctrl-Alt-F2 then Ctrl-Alt-F1. Suggestions on how to debug are welcome. This isn’t a BlueBubble issue afaik, it could be Fedora 15 or Intel’s fault somehow, as I’m using KDM.
  • Sometimes you look at the screen and just have a strange sense of nostalgia. Then you realize its artificial. You can’t miss Gnome 2.32 if it isn’t gone.

Q: Did you know Evolution is missing?
A: You say ‘missing’. I say ugly. Use Thunderbird instead.

Q: How do I stop GTK 3 apps from looking ugly?
A: Contact whoever made the old GTK 2 themes and ask them to port it to GTK3. Adwaita is just horrible.
In all seriousness, go to System-> Preferences -> Apperance. Click on Customize, and under the ‘Controls’ tab, click on Adwaita. You can choose any window border, but until there are other themes that provide both gtk2 *and* gtk3 files, we’re stuck with ugly.

Q: You’re insane, you know that?
A: Indeed.

Q: I have a package request and/or something’s broken!
A: Well you’re in luck, I just added a Bug Report page to my blog.  (WordPress as a Bug Tracker? Did I mention I’m insane?)

Q: I have a question, where can I ask?
A: Drop me a comment below, tweet in my general direction or just mail to bluebubble at k3rnel.net

Calling in the favor

Posted by on June 6, 2011 10 comments

That pic above? That’s BlueBubble. Gnome 2.32 built and running on Fedora 15. You might notice by the rounded tabs that it’s not running GTK2, but GTK3.

Almost everything seems to be working so far. If you pay close attention to the picture above, you’ll notice that several key applets are missing, particularly the gnome-volume-control one and gnome-music-applet (Which I happen to like). In particular, I’m having issues building gnome-python2-desktop (And gnome-applets requires gnome-python2-desktop), so any and all that said “I’d like to help”, here’s your chance.

The error I’m having is getting libtoolize to recognize the newer libraries and build with them. The libraries I can’t get to recognize are these.
The actual build error is this one. (But if I stick to brasero-old and evince-old, I get this instead. )

Despite having several dozen gtksoureview packages installed, including 32 and 64bit libraries, it still won’t recognize it. I know Brasero and Evince might be a different problem, I’d love to be able to build gnome-python2-desktop with the newer Brasero and Evince, but already built the “old” variants in case that’s not plausible without heavy rewriting. If we can’t get new Brasero to work with this, then Rhythmbox will also have to be downgraded to 0.13 instead of 2.90.

At this point, I can safely say that Gnome 2.32 on Fedora is totally possible, and I’ve been using it these past few days with just one major hiccup: Despite gnome-display-properties displaying everything all nice and dandy, It wouldn’t output to an external monitor. I didn’t have time to debug at the moment, but definitely have to solve this before Sunday.

I should have usable packages for everyone in the next few days, I really want to solve the applets issue before releasing them to the public, and figure out a way to do mass keysigns of the RPMs, as well as set up *somewhere* to upload the RPMs, SRPMs and patches I’ve had to use to make this happen.

Last but not least, I’d like to give a shoutout to nirik and gomix who have helped me out along the way. Without them, I probably wouldn’t be typing this from a Gnome 2.32 Fedora 15 machine.

Edit: Spot helped me out, apparently I installed gtksourceview-devel.i686 but forgot to set up gtksourceview-devel.x86_64. Live and learn. I still have issues compiling gnome-python2-applets, which is part of gnome-python2-desktop though. A copy of the build log is here.

There was a stubborn guy

Posted by on May 31, 2011 6 comments

There was a stubborn guy who recompiled gnome-desktop,
I don’t know why he recompiled gnome-desktop,
Perhaps he’ll fail.

There was a stubborn guy who recompiled gnome-panel,
How absurd! to recompile gnome-panel,
He rebuilt gnome-panel to recompile gnome-desktop
I don’t know why he recompiled gnome-desktop,
Perhaps he’ll fail.

There was a stubborn guy who recompiled gnome-common,
Imagine that! to recompile gnome-common,
He rebuilt gnome-common to recompile gnome-panel,
He rebuilt gnome-panel to recompile gnome-desktop,
I don’t know why he recompiled gnome-desktop,
Perhaps he’ll fail.

There was a stubborn guy who recompiled gnome-bluetooth,
How stupid! to recompile gnome-bluetooth,
He rebuilt gnome-bluetooth to recompile gnome-common,
He rebuilt gnome-common to recompile gnome-panel,
He rebuilt gnome-panel to recompile gnome-desktop,
I don’t know why he recompiled gnome-desktop,
Perhaps he’ll fail.

There was a stubborn guy who rebuilt gnome-control-center,
I don’t know how he rebuilt gnome-control-center!
He rebuilt gnome-control center to rebuild gnome-bluetooth,
He rebuilt gnome-bluetooth to recompile gnome-common,
He rebuilt gnome-common to recompile gnome-panel,
He rebuilt gnome-panel to recompile gnome-desktop,
I don’t know why he recompiled gnome-desktop,
Perhaps he’ll fail.

There was a stubborn guy who rebuilt gnome,
He’s almost done—of course!

BlueBubble Teaser Video

Posted by on May 28, 2011 2 comments

So, Paulo Cereda made this awesome “Teaser Video” for Project BlueBubble I thought it was too fun to pass. Enjoy!

Project BlueBubble’s Logo

Posted by on May 27, 2011 1 comment

I’m fairly certain Red Hat Legal has my contact data.

In case you missed it, I’m working on this little project I call “bluebubble“, which will bring Gnome 2.32 to Fedora 15 (And perhaps, Fedora 16 too).

In case it wasn’t obvious, the Logo is some sort of a parody of the awesome Fedora Logo. I decided that the logo should represent not Infinity, Freedom and Voice, but just Equals, as in “We DON’T want things to change” (At least not for a while). It was made by the awesome Paulo Cereda.

In case you’re wondering, I can’t call this “Remix” Fedora, because I’d have to go through Fedora’s packaging process which is time consuming and I don’t believe it would match Fedora’s image of staying on the “Bleeding Edge”.

I only intend to package as little as possible, too. I found out that packages like Cheese 3.0 and Gedit 3.0 work perfectly well on a Gnome 2.32, but I’m still going to provide “gedit-classic” (and more) for those who want to stick to old, dusty packages.

I’ve received a lot of feedback already, I’m glad I’m not the only one interested in this. Like I said before, I intend to maintain this for at least Fedora 15 and if Gnome 3.2 isn’t the promised land, Fedora 16 too. If Gnome 3.4 isn’t what you’re looking for, you best start looking elsewhere. I won’t keep this up eternally.

Finally, a request. If you really like what I’m doing, please Support Gnome. They’re the ones that have been doing all the hard work, not me.

I will embrace the future, once it reaches feature parity with the past.

 

Update: For an alternative logo, click here. Also made by Paulo Cereda.