I screwed up with the proportions and the font is way to strong, but I’m liking the process. You can check out the progress in opensuse-art SVN.

Here is an idea, build OLPC XO’s Sugar interface for openSUSE this hackweek.

What is Sugar?

• Sugar graphical user interface, written in Python, on top of the X Window System and the Matchbox Window Manager.
  • Designed specifically for collaboration of users through network sharing of user activities (method calls and signals);
  • ?Zooming? interface to network connectivity ?spheres? (local, collaborators, neighborhood);
  • Journal interface to storage of events, activities, objects (files)

Why Sugar?

As sugar is designed specifically for children, getting that interface

• Almost finish list of powerpoint-impress keybindings.
• Test and apply Kohei's fix for erroneously reopened n#417840 with new bug report.
• Call with Michael. Quickly revert thinko of needing and using ResId to construct aSearchFormats and aReplaceFormats; instead provide layout::Context in the place of layout::Window. Michael has a grand plan to avoid adding code for setting the title and help-id in the ENABLE_LAYOUT case, *also* keeping plain ::SfxModelessDialog alive. Fail to wrap my brain around this yet as it appears too complex to save adding two lines of code. Usually Michael does have a clue, must have a go with this later.

• Predefined desktop items for Nautilus

  Back in the Summer of Code 2007, Sayamindu Dasgupta worked on adding support for predefined desktop items to Nautilus. This is so that system administrators can set up desktop links that will appear on users' desktops. A university could set up an icon to take people to the university's intranet, for example.

  Basically, I'm reviving Sayamindu's patch and bringing it up to date for the current Nautilus. The idea is that you set up a GConf key, /apps/nautilus/desktop/predefined_items_dir, and point it to a directory which holds .desktop files. This kind of indirection through a GConf key is what makes the scheme work nicely for deployments with Sabayon: sysadmins can have predefined items for various groups of users, and select among those by simply changing a mandatory GConf key for each user. This wouldn't be so easy if there were a hardcoded directory like /var/nautilus/global-desktop-items.

  Sysadmins should be able to define mandatory items, which users cannot change or delete, and also "normal" items, which users can tweak or remove. Mandatory ones would be ones like "Company Intranet" or "Link to Helpdesk". Distros could use normal items for their marketing materials; the perenially hacky "Welcome to FooLinux" icons that currently are hard to do properly.

  The problem I'm having is how to make non-mandatory items work. You want this behavior:

  1. The sysadmin defines a non-mandatory item.
  2. The user sees the item in his desktop. He doesn't want it anymore, so he deletes it. Where do we mark this deletion?
  3. The user decides that he wants the item back after all. How does he restore it?
  4. The sysadmin updates the non-mandatory item and he wants it to show up again in people's desktops. How can this override what the user had done?

  I'm leaning toward having two extra boolean values in .desktop files: an X-GNOME-Mandatory and X-GNOME-Deleted. If the "mandatory" value is false, then the user may change or delete the item. For changes, the item is copied from the predefined_items_dir to the user's ~/Desktop and that version is modified. For deletions, the item is copied there as well, but then the "deleted" flag gets turned on.

  If the user wants an item back, he turns on "show hidden files" and those files get shown again. (Or we could hack the Trash to restore the item by turning off the "deleted" flag...)

  If the sysadmin updates an item in the predefined_items_dir, this item will override items of the same name in users' desktops, based on the item's timestamp.

  Does this make sense? Am I overlooking something?

I'm at the Novell offices in Provo, UT for hackweek. The YOW -> DTW -> SLC flight was uneventful. There will be attendance at the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 as well.

What are my plans for hackweek? Some libopenraw work in order to have a version releasable with more and more features. If that release can be usable to actually render RAW files, then it will be great. So far I have committed some changes to the test suite and and fixed the detection by content.

GroupLink is excited to announce its upcoming release of everything HelpDesk 8.2 with asset tracking. Attend this webinar on 11 September 2008 and find out more.

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This week is hackweek at SUSE and people are frantically hacking on all kind of stuff. Fun.

My project is the Social Desktop, which is the buzzwordy title for an implementation of the Open Collaboration Services API (see specification on freedesktop.org). Frank Karlitschek has joined the fun and is at the SUSE offices for hackweek, so server and client implementations go hand in hand. The idea is to bring the community to the desktop and take benefit of the fact that free software projects are not only about software but also about community. This can provide a lot of extra value for our users, especially as the desktop is the place where all the social web data from different sites comes together and the user is in full control of what happens to the data and how it is combined. For some more background have a look at Frank's Akademy keynote.

As a first result I have now implemented a client which accesses opendesktop.org through the Open Collaboraton Services API and makes its users available on the desktop. Next steps are searching for people and enabling communication.

For more info and progress updates have a look at my hackweek blog or the occasional tweet.

After my disasterous attempt to travel out to Nurenberg on Sunday - I managed to get my passport stolen at security of all places (I thought I had lost it, but nothing found yet).