Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day 2011: Thank you!

Its the first Community Appreciation Day in the history of mankind Ubuntu, and I just want to say to the Ubuntu community:

THANK YOU!

I usually don’t like singling out people, but I’d like to thank Jorge Castro in particular, for his hard work with the community on various fronts, be it AskUbuntu (especially this), gathering Unity contributors, maintaining good upstream relations, AskJorge.info, and anything else, I haven’t ever seen a person more active and hardworking in the community than Jorge themselves.

And, of course, thank you to everyone in the community. From IRC operators to core developers and Community Council members, everyone has a common goal: to make the most user-friendly FOSS operating system ever. I appreciate the community, and you should too!

Eureka! Chuck!

That’s kinda an unfortunate place to be, isn’t it?

One year, many new things learnt

Its 3rd of May, 2010. Bilal is in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where its raining heavily, an unusual phenomenon. By the evening, flash floods strike parts of the city. Schools declared closed for the next day. I had a lot of free time that evening, and decided to try getting the package gnome-media-player into Ubuntu.

I hopped onto #ubuntu-motu and asked for someone to review my package. Chow Loong Jin (aka hyperair) stepped up to help, and began reviewing my package. He caught several mistakes in the packaging, and dedicated over 2 hours of his precious post-exams time to help me in packaging. He suggested a ton of changes, and after lots of building/suggesting/fixing, he advocated the package on REVU. That was my entry into Ubuntu Development. (You can read the logs of those IRC discussions at this link. I was kiddy and childish at that time, but Ubuntu Development has made me mature )

At that time I was 13 years old. I had a debate competition in my school 2 days later, which I lost. But I wasn’t grieved. I was so interested in helping in the development of Ubuntu, and then began merging/syncing packages from Ubuntu. I would have stepped up and tried getting more packages into Ubuntu, but as suggested by others on the channels, it’d be better if I did merging/syncing in the Ubuntu world and tried getting my new packages into Debian. I followed their advice after gnome-media-player upload, and till date, gnome-media-player is the only new package which I got uploaded to Ubuntu and not Debian (there were many reasons why I wasn’t able to put the package in Debian, in short I’d say there were some objections by Debian developers on the name of the package).

Now I’m 14. One year and 2 days have passed since that day. I’m now MOTU, Ubuntu Member, and I’ve also been contracted by Canonical to work on Unity . Lots has changed in 1 year.

I’d like to thank these people who helped me a lot in the last 1 year:

1. Chow Loong Jin
2. Benjamin Drung
3. Stefano Rivera
4. Ahmed El-Mahmoudy
5. Vishnoo Charan Reddy
6. Ken VanDine
7. Didier Roche
8. Sebastien Bacher
9. Michael Vogt
10. Daniel Holbach
11. Jorge Castro

A big THANK YOU to everyone up there in that list for helping me, it wouldn’t have been without your help that I’m here. Also many others helped me on my way whom I just can’t count or remember, and a big thanks to them as well

So just a message for everyone ,

Join the Ubuntu Community right now. Things will move faster than you’d expect them to, and in no time you’d be making significant and sustained contributions to the project, be it in terms of coding, bug reporting/triaging, testing, translating, community support, etc.

Together, we as a community could gather enough momentum to fix bug #1. Always remember: nothing is impossible.

GNOME3 on Ubuntu using the PPA

First of all, a hearty congratulations to everyone involved in the GNOME project for having released GNOME3, a really awesome desktop environment. My previous post about GNOME3 was about my partial experience with it, and as pointed out by comments on that post, I had made a false image of GNOME3 from a partial as experience as that. So I installed Fedora 15 on a spare partition, and I must say that it was a rockin’ experience. Thanks to Unity, I am used to Alt+Tabbing, etc, so I was getting around with Shell just as well.

Now back in the Ubuntu world. The Ubuntu GNOME3 PPA has been in active development since the beginning of this cycle, and thanks to the work by the Ubuntu GNOME3 team, the PPA now provides a 97% GNOME3 experience. On my Natty install I added the PPA again, upgraded all packages, installed some others (which others? I’ll point that out later on) and then rebooted.

Software Center and Ayatana Scrollbars on Ubuntu with GNOME3

In its current state the PPA is far from perfect, as it is known to break Unity as well as it can also break your entire system at times. So I STRONGLY discourage you from trying it out on a production system. Here are a few tips for those using (or planning to use) the PPA:

1) Make sure to *upgrade* *all* *packages*. Partial upgrades of packages often leads to some problems like a borked wallpaper, desktop icons when they shouldn’t be, bad theming, etc.

2) Ensure these packages are installed: gnome-icon-theme gnome-icon-theme-symbolic gnome-themes-standard (NOT gnome-themes, remove gnome-themes if its installed).

3) Once you’ve upgraded all packages, make sure to *remove* gnome-accessibility-themes as it conflicts with gnome-themes-standard and if you have both installed, GDM won’t theme well.

4) For proper configuration, install gnome-tweak-tool (also in the PPA).

Known issues with the PPA (After 4 days of heavy usage I found only 2, err, 3 of them):

1) gnome-system-log shows logs empty.

2) Network Manager Applet at the top right of the desktop pops up a menu unlike other icons which pop up fancy menus with animations.

3) Unlike in Fedora, you’ll have to use apt-get to install stuff in Ubuntu

In all the other fields I found the PPA to be matching the experience of Fedora 100%. From GDM to Shutdown, everything else was flawless (atleast in my case). Unlike my previous experience, keyboard shortcuts, animations, just everything was working as it should.

GNOME3 on Ubuntu (yes, on Ubuntu!)

Now, for the most important part of the post. Why did I write this up? No, not because I wanted to tell everyone about the PPA, but to tell everyone that regardless of Unity being default in Ubuntu 11.04, users will still have a choice to install their favourite DE as they wish (GNOME with Shell, KDE, XFCE, LXDE). Just a small DE change doesn’t always mean changing distros for an end-user. FOSS is all about choice. Use what you like, on top of what you like.

Also most people who had tried out the PPA in the last week didn’t upgrade all packages, and arrived at stupid conclusions saying: “The PPA breaks my system, GDM doesn’t even open up, it crashes with an error” . On further investigation I found out that that guy was using the 2.32 version of GDM with the new gnome-session, not a healthy combination even though GDM 3.0 is in the PPA. On asking why he didn’t update all packages, he replied that he was too eager to get to GNOME Shell and just updated a select of packages. And instead of blaming himself, that guy was blaming the PPA folks. *ahem*

Let us take up another such scenario. Take a look at this comment on Rodrigo’s blog. Let us consider each point one by one:

it is not possible to a) login without many errors b) change your theme which suddenly is broken c) access many options in systems settings which were previously available before instalation… and so on.

That user had tried out the PPA a few days ago, before GDM 3 got uploaded. And even before GDM3 got it, it was possible to log in to the GNOME-Shell session, the only problem was that GDM came up with a really bad theme and no wallpaper. All that’s fixed now, and GDM is now pleasant to use, with its new theme, new design and new background wallpaper (the same blue wallpaper which is the GNOME3 default as well).

Now for point b. His theme is broken because he didn’t install gnome-themes-standard (I also had this problem earlier). Now gnome-shell depends on gnome-themes-standard, and so all that’s fixed now. For changing themes, you can use gnome-tweak-tool.

Point C now. That difference in system settings is actually a GNOME3 feature. The GNOME3 team have simplified many options and have made them available in the new gnome-control-center, also in the PPA. The new control-center is awesome, by no way I could believe that its just a new version of the same old gnome-control-center. Gnome-tweak-tool is used to change themes, etc.

If you encounter any problems with the PPA, feel free to contact the GNOME3 team at this address: gnome3-team@lists.launchpad.net . You can also file bugs on the respective Ubuntu packages and tag them with gnome3 and subscribe the gnome3-team to the bug. We’ll be happy to help. Enjoy GNOME3 on Ubuntu!

(BTW, ever since I installed GNOME3 on Ubuntu, I didn’t boot up Fedora )

Dynamic Quicklists in Unity

It has been quite some time since the Unity launcher API was opened; and though dynamic quicklists didn’t work until the release of Unity 3.6.4 (fix courtesy the awesome Michael Terry), many applications in Natty now have support for quicklists, both static and dynamic. Examples of applications using quicklists: Gwibber, Deja-Dup, GNOME-Screenshot, etc.

Last month I worked on adding Unity launcher quicklist support to Firefox , and now I’m working on adding it to update-manager. Provided that I don’t get stopped by major hurdles (UI freeze is in effect, I need to get an exception for each such change), my next stop would be *burp* Banshee!

You too can easily add quicklist support to your own applications. The guide here is highly helpful. As an example, below is the patch I wrote to enable quicklist support in Update Manager:

=== modified file 'UpdateManager/UpdateManager.py'
--- UpdateManager/UpdateManager.py    2011-04-06 07:43:01 +0000
+++ UpdateManager/UpdateManager.py    2011-04-12 09:33:28 +0000
@@ -297,6 +297,34 @@
     self.alert_watcher.connect("battery-alert", self._on_battery_alert)
     self.alert_watcher.connect("network-3g-alert", self._on_network_3g_alert)

+    # Create Unity launcher quicklist
+    try:
+        from gi.repository import Unity, Dbusmenu
+       
+        um_launcher_entry = Unity.LauncherEntry.get_for_desktop_id ("update-manager.desktop")
+        quicklist = Dbusmenu.Menuitem.new()
+
+        update_menu_item = Dbusmenu.Menuitem.new()
+        update_menu_item.property_set (Dbusmenu.MENUITEM_PROP_LABEL, _("Check for Updates"))
+        update_menu_item.property_set_bool (Dbusmenu.MENUITEM_PROP_VISIBLE, True)
+        update_menu_item.connect ("item-activated", self.on_button_reload_clicked, None)
+        quicklist.child_append(update_menu_item)
+
+        install_all_updates_menu_item = Dbusmenu.Menuitem.new()
+        install_all_updates_menu_item.property_set (Dbusmenu.MENUITEM_PROP_LABEL,
+                                                     _("Install All Available Updates"))
+        install_all_updates_menu_item.property_set_bool (Dbusmenu.MENUITEM_PROP_VISIBLE, True)
+        install_all_updates_menu_item.connect ("item-activated", self.install_all_updates, None)
+        quicklist.child_append (install_all_updates_menu_item)
+
+        um_launcher_entry.set_property ("quicklist", quicklist)
+    except ImportError:
+        pass
+
+  def install_all_updates (self, widget, data = None):
+    self.select_all_updgrades (None)
+    self.on_button_install_clicked (None)
+
   def on_initial_focus_in(self, widget, event):
     """callback run on initial focus-in (if started unmapped)"""
     widget.unstick()

Thanks to GObject-Introspection the Unity and dbusmenu libraries are available for all languages out there which support GObject-Introspection (Vala, Python, etc do it already).

Quicklists aren’t anything too big, but they speed up your workflow a lot (atleast it did so in my case ). Add support for these in your application to make your application rock in Ubuntu 11.04!

A neutral approach at GNOME Shell and a comparison with Unity

Today’s the 27th of March. Just 10 days to go for the release of the next version of the most popular X Desktop environment: GNOME 3. I decided to give its beta a try, and downloaded and installed the latest versions of GNOME Shell, and other GNOME programs (empathy, nautilus, gnome-control-center, gnome-themes-standard including Adwaita, etc) from the GNOME3 Ubuntu Natty PPA.

A couple of things entered my system, due to some conflicts some other not-so-important things were removed, but the system didn’t break. To get a nice experience, I even changed my wallpaper to the blue lines one which is default in GNOME 3. Then I ran gnome-shell –replace.

The first experience

My first experience: WOW!. I decided at that moment that I’ll never come back to Unity. The GTK theme, the activities view, everything seemed to blend so well, that I thought that this was the end of the GNOME vs KDE war and GNOME vs Unity war. I launched up applications, played around with its workspaces, etc. I liked the new ‘sheet’ way of representing modal dialogs. For one whole hour, I was using GNOME Shell and liking it.

But it all ended there, atleast for me.

Getting productive

Well. GNOME Shell became a bit slow for me. I thought it may be because I had been running the 2GB RAM computer for a long time. I restarted the system and the I opened up my mail account, and got down to my work. I use Thunderbird for my mail work. Apart from TB, I opened up gnome-terminal for some bug-fixing and other stuff. Now this is where the advantages of GNOME Shell ended for me.

Whenever I needed to switch a window, I had to open up the Activities view. This was time-consuming and cumbersome. To prevent windows clutter, I moved my windows on to 2 separate workspaces, one containing Firefox and the other containing terminal and TB.

I found myself pressing Ctrl+Alt+<arrow keys> to move around the workspaces, which used to work for me when I had been using Unity. But it didn’t work here anymore. I opened up the Activities view to switch between workspaces. Now here I noticed one major bug in the design: long mouse movements. Just to change workspaces, I had to first move mouse on the top left corner, then move mouse to the right till the end of the screen where the workspaces were. Then I had to click the required workspace and then select the window to which I had to move to, in the middle. Compare this to the keyboard navigation system and the workspace switcher in Unity (I’ll be comparing GNOME Shell and Unity later on in detail).

Whenever I open up the Activities view and then click on ‘Applications’, it takes around 3-4 seconds for the applications list to come up. Irritating.

Another thing which I found irritating was that system indicators are rendered nicely at the top right, but app systray icons are at the bottom right. Not a big problem, but this is going to be frustrating for newcomers.

For two more hours, I was hacking around on Ubuntu packages, fixing bugs, browsing through bug lists, mails, etc. All I wanted was to get my job done. Quickly. So it has now been 3 hours since I installed GNOME shell. By the third hour, my system began to get slow. This was kinda weird for me, as my system didn’t slow down when using Unity continuously and multitasking more heavily for 5-6 hours at a stretch. So the third hour of me using GNOME Shell ended slowly.

The fourth hour

I continued with my work. Now Mutter began to show its darker side on me. What is mutter? Mutter = Metacity + Clutter. It’s a new windows manager made exclusively for GNOME Shell. It has a couple of features, but its still not at par with the other composting window managers out there, such as Compiz.

So, back to the darker side of Mutter. What were the problems I faced? Many. I have already mentioned about my system getting slow. It now became so slow that the mutter animations were no longer ‘animations’ but were jagged images moving around bumpily (sorry, I don’t know the exact English word for that). Switching to the Activities view became a slow experience. There were some other issues that I faced: top-left corners of windows became invisible, text on the top panel wasn’t rendered properly, etc.

Things became worse. My computer slowed down to a snail’s pace even when I had closed all windows and also closed background services of empathy, gwibber,etc. I started up gnome-system-monitor to find out that gnome-shell was taking up a massive 400MB of memory.

How it all ended

I must say: I had had enough. I was getting frustrated with stuff. I turned off my computer (There is no ‘power off’ option in the session menu in shell, and I was stuck until someone on Twitter helped me by asking me to press <Alt> while on the menu), and went out for a walk. After coming back, I started up my computer again, and my computer slowed down in less than an hour. And I was fed up with moving my mouse madly around the screen just to switch workspaces/open applications/switch windows.

Now, the final solution for me was:

sudo ppa-purge ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3

Yes. I was fed up. All I wanted was a nice desktop which allows me to do what I want, without any bounds.

Comparison with Unity

Unity is the name of the desktop shell which will be default in Ubuntu 11.04. Unlike Shell, Unity runs on top of Compiz.

So these are the advantages of Unity over GNOME Shell:

1) A clean launcher which does what it says on the tin and much more. By default the launcher is set to intellihide, which is a nice feature. The launcher makes switching between windows easy.

2) A clean dash which is swift and fast in opening, swift in launching apps and opening folders.

3) AppIndicators are clean, easy-to-use and fast.

4) Workspaces are easy to use, and moving apps between them is easy and fast. Switching between workspaces is also very easy thanks to Compiz.

5) Compiz is fast, doesn’t hog up memory, has nice visual effects.

Now for the advantages of GNOME Shell over Unity:

1) More customizable thanks to themes written in CSS.

2) Nice looks, suites casual users.

Conclusions

People moving from GNOME 2 will find Unity much better, mainly because it behaves in a way more similar to GNOME Panel.

GNOME 3 is more properly targeted at casual users who don’t do multitasking very much. GNOME 3 looks better on screenshots and screencasts, but the story of usage is quite different. Its mainly suitable for those who don’t have many windows open at any time, don’t work much on a computer, and are fans of eye-candy and customization.

Unity is undoubtedly the ‘One size fits all’ desktop shell out there. It suites everyone. It won’t disappoint anyone out there. It does what it is expected to do plus many more things (such as quicklists, launcher emblems, etc) which make the desktop experience intuitive, fun and swift.

One month is still remaining for the release of Ubuntu 11.04, and Unity will get even better in this month. Bugs will be fixed, the UI experience will be polished, etc.

Disclaimer: The views presented in this article are my own views. These are not biased towards either Canonical or GNOME. Though I am an Ubuntu Member, my views are not a representation of Canonical’s views on GNOME.

New blog location

Just some quick news, I just moved my blog from my old website to this blog on wordpress.com, as I am going to soon close expatsinksa.com .

Subscribers to my old blog (if there are any ) are requested to update the feed links accordingly.