Category Archives: Gnome

Dec 16 2007
99 Comments
FOSS, Fun, Gnome, My Activities, Python, ubuntu, Web Designing

Vista to Ubuntu (100%)

I had enough with eating crap with Vista. My last line of patience warned off when I happened to wait about 5 seconds when changing from one MS Doc file to another and also happened that I was running with time to finish a project report. No, I’m not running on 256 ram, it’s 1 GB and this kind of a time wastage is totally unacceptable. You may ask why I put up with Vista in the first place. That’s thanks to HP’s decision to embrace Vista so my laptop was pre-built with Vista and no chance to downgrade because there are no drivers. So where to go now ? Easy….Gutsy.

So I’m now another guy who left windows permanently because of their own defects. I was playing dumb with Vista for this long had nothing to do with Vista being better, it’s because of substitutions not being available for some applications that I was used to in Windows environment – mainly Macromedia(now Adobe) Dreamweaver and Fireworks. Now before biting my head off, yes – there are good web developer editors in Linux such as NVu or KompoZer but they will need another few developing years to get into the same line as Dreamweaver (which had a long time to develop into the state now in) and I have to have some thing until then.

But my worries were groundless as Wine now supports Macromedia 8 series like a babe. Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash all works perfectly with Wine – installation to Execution. Another great thing with Gutsy is that my Broadcom network card support is inbuilt and with some additional applications I can search networks and connect to them like a charm. Also I’m using AWN manager to manage desktop (here is a great article on desktop styling – thanks to Lakshan) and now it looks like a hybrid between Leopard and Vista. So what else I can ask for ?

Here is my application list in Ubuntu.

Web developments = Wine + DreamWeaver 8

Web images = Wine + Fireworks 8

Photo Editing = Gimp

Java editor = NetBeans for Linux

Python = Eclipse with PyDev plugin

IM client = Pidgin

Wifi manager = gtkwifi and wifi radar

Skype = Skype for Linux

Btw, My machine is AMD 64 X2, therefore had some issues and had to do some tweaks when installing some applications but nothing I can’t handle with some effort. The catch is that I can work with all comforts like in Windows with half the memory usage as in Windows.

Vista-Leopard Look

DreamWeaver in Ubuntu

GTKwifi

Jul 01 2007
7 Comments
FOSS, Fun, Gnome, GSoC, My Activities, Python

FoieGras- First look at how the text rendering

After about a months of time into the GSoC project, I was able to finish the first significant improvement in the project that happened from my side. For a long time I was wandering here and there testing one thing or the other to see what’s working best and finally got a breakthrough.

For now FoieGras (The code name of the editor we are developing) text engine is capable of these capabilities. It can render some given tags but only inline tags. It can hide and show tags, so if the user wants to see tags and work with them it’s possible. Also you can add more tags and configure the style tags, which are rendered using a configure file. I think it’ll be the main configuration file with regards to text rendering functions. After phenatic (http://phanatic.hu) releases the first UI part, we’ll be able to map the menu events to this text rendering functions and present the first release of FoieGras. 🙂

To tell you how the implementation of FoieGras is done: it’s done using python and PyGTK as the wrapper for GTK to do UI work. First I planned on implementing the text renderer using some thread system, giving a thread to take care of each tag. But soon I understood that it’s a waste of time and resources so thought of a better way. Now the text rendering is done through the XMLparser that comes with python, and so far it’s working nicely.

Also my mentor ( Dr. Don Scorgie – yeah, he is now a doctor 🙂 . Congrats Don ! ) is helping me with technical details and brilliant ideas. FoieGras now has a repository in GNOME svn and I’ve created a branch for tag rendering implementation and copied my works there, So you can check it. Another news is that I’m planning to goto GUADEC next 14th July and I hope it’ll be fun and be able to discuss more about FoieGras there with the team and also hack FoieGras there.

FoieGras-1

FoieGras-2

FoieGras-3