I'll give a talk about EDE at Linux Kongress in Dresden, October 30th at 11:00am, so feel free to come if you are near by :)
See you there!
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Some new things...
After beta release I haven't be much lazy, so I completed and merged the two new features: keyboard layout applet and shutdown/restart support via HAL daemon.
Keyboard layout manager we had built in panel in EDE 1.x parsed X key rules and directly called setxkbmap. Changed preferences were stored in EDE known configuration file read at panel startup.
Of course, with this approach the panel was pretty agnostic to outside changes, e.g., you change the layout via setxkbmap tool, the panel will not get it and will happily display the layout used when panel was up. Don't have to say how this could be pretty confusing for the viewer.
New keyboard layout applet resolves this, thanks to XKb extension. Unfortunately this extension (as most of X code) is pretty badly documented, so I had to dig around to figure out how the things work. Now, every keyboard layout changes during X session will be correctly caught no matter what tool was used, while the layout is stored in X server.
Also I added some nifty flags found at kde-look.org link that will match the named layout, completing the final visual appeal.
Unrelated to this, shutdown and restart actions are from now, by default, HAL powered. Just make sure you have enough permissions to do this; for example, on Slackware is pretty easy: just add yourself in power group and you will get them.
If this is not suitable for you, just set desired group for org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement interface in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf file.
On systems where HAL is not present, fallback will be done on standard shutdown command.
Keyboard layout manager we had built in panel in EDE 1.x parsed X key rules and directly called setxkbmap. Changed preferences were stored in EDE known configuration file read at panel startup.
Of course, with this approach the panel was pretty agnostic to outside changes, e.g., you change the layout via setxkbmap tool, the panel will not get it and will happily display the layout used when panel was up. Don't have to say how this could be pretty confusing for the viewer.
New keyboard layout applet resolves this, thanks to XKb extension. Unfortunately this extension (as most of X code) is pretty badly documented, so I had to dig around to figure out how the things work. Now, every keyboard layout changes during X session will be correctly caught no matter what tool was used, while the layout is stored in X server.
Also I added some nifty flags found at kde-look.org link that will match the named layout, completing the final visual appeal.
Unrelated to this, shutdown and restart actions are from now, by default, HAL powered. Just make sure you have enough permissions to do this; for example, on Slackware is pretty easy: just add yourself in power group and you will get them.
If this is not suitable for you, just set desired group for org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement interface in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf file.
On systems where HAL is not present, fallback will be done on standard shutdown command.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
New panel merged
New ede-panel is now merged in the trunk. Actually this was done two days ago, but additional management (fixing build paths, install/uninstall scripts and such) had to be done, so everything could work nicely.
What to say about it? ede-panel is written from the scratch and is using FLTK, meaning: one program less using eFLTK. Everything is placed in applets, so only things that will be used will be loaded. This will reduce memory usage and provide the base for future extensions or replacements (e.g. if you do not like current quick-launch applet, write a better one ;)).
Also, noticeable feature is support for fd.o menu specification. Now, all your installed applications will be correctly recognized and populated in desired menu section. Of course, if they are fd.o menu aware and this is the case for almost all modern GUI applications.
Here is the shot of default EDE menu layout:
Initial menu layout was taken from Xfce mostly because it is simple, concise and manageable ...and because I had no inspiration to write another XML file. Of course, the layout will be changed even more depending on requirements in upcoming period.
What to say about it? ede-panel is written from the scratch and is using FLTK, meaning: one program less using eFLTK. Everything is placed in applets, so only things that will be used will be loaded. This will reduce memory usage and provide the base for future extensions or replacements (e.g. if you do not like current quick-launch applet, write a better one ;)).
Also, noticeable feature is support for fd.o menu specification. Now, all your installed applications will be correctly recognized and populated in desired menu section. Of course, if they are fd.o menu aware and this is the case for almost all modern GUI applications.
Here is the shot of default EDE menu layout:
Initial menu layout was taken from Xfce mostly because it is simple, concise and manageable ...and because I had no inspiration to write another XML file. Of course, the layout will be changed even more depending on requirements in upcoming period.
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