On the GNOME side, people accuse Canonical of not working together with the GNOME project. Most of the controversy seems to evolve around the decision to use the desktop that started as an in-house Canonical project called Unity instead of the new GNOME Shell in the upcoming release of Ubuntu. Supporters of GNOME seem to see that as an open attack on their project, or something like that. Much of the argument is also fueled by past and present Canonical “mistakes” like moving the window buttons, their policy of copyright assignment and most recently the change of the Banshee Amazon affiliate ID.

On the Canonical side, it seems people are sick and tired of receiving a ton of hate mail for every little change they make. I could imagine that having to justify that they’re working on a Free Software project and giving it away for free can be quite frustrating for Canonical employees and Ubuntu community members. After all everything they do (at least on the desktop) is completely Free Software.

Now, when I see both sides putting so much effort into the discussion, I am asking myself:
What do they try to achieve?

The thing is, that’s not that easy to answer. Of course everyone speaking/writing on this subject may try to achieve something else, but the general tone I seem to hear is:
GNOME: Use GNOME Shell in your next release and abandon your non-upstream stuff like Unity, Application Indicators, Messaging Menu etc or at least integrate it into GNOME Shell.
Canonical: We would really like to keep using that stuff, leave us alone already.

Let’s broaden the perspective a bit. Let’s move away from the current discussion and look at what the projects, GNOME and Ubuntu, try to achieve. Because I think they have a common goal, and actually a very similar vision of how that goal should look like. A Free Software desktop, easy to use, elegant, with a unified user experience and a unified developer experience. In short, a Free Software desktop operating system and platform that is able to compete with the proprietary alternatives. This also includes an App Store/Software Center. Let me show you two screenshots.

GNOME 3 in the Fedora 15 Alpha

Unity in Ubuntu 10.10

Does this look like a different vision to you? Does this look so different to you that it’s worth having a heated argument about it? To me it seems that GNOME and Ubuntu still share the same vision, and also have very similar understandings of the concrete manifestation of a Free Software desktop. This is what the Ubuntu community means when they say they are still a GNOME distro. Canonical tweaked the desktop over several releases with the introduction of App Indicators, the MeMenu etc etc and presented Unity as an end result of this, while the GNOME people got their Shell ready and ported most of the core applications to GTK3.

Now the final release of Unity for standard desktops and the final release of GNOME 3 (which will first be included in a major distro in Fedora 15) are soon to happen. It’s not a new phenomena in Free Software communities that when two projects are equally good and it doesn’t look like one is going to cease development anytime soon (it is my point of view that Unity and GNOME Shell are currently equally good desktops, I’m trying to be as objective as possible here), a huge flame war starts. These are almost never based on “technical” arguments, only sometimes based on project politics, and all of the times pure personal preference. The latter also applies in this case. You might argue about Canonical’s decision finding process, or the way they develop software, but they release working software that obviously pleases its users. This is Free Software. Even if you don’t like the company developing it, in the end only the code matters, and whether the users like it. The freedom is not going away.

What I’m trying to say is: Are the points brought up against Canonical really that grave? Grave enough to justify a major split of the Free Software Desktop? Can’t two projects with such similar goals, such similar visions and such a shared history as GNOME and Ubuntu stop the turf war and try to get things done together? And if that’s not possible for reasons I fail to see right now, at least accept and respect the existence of each other? If Google launches Chrome OS soon, I’m sure they’ll put all their force behind it, and I don’t think there will be enough space left for a fourth major player on the desktop market after that. This might be the last chance for the Free Software Desktop. Can we unite, or will we go down fighting each other?

Hello Mr. Ballmer,
my name is Julian Aloofi, I'm a 17 years old pupil, currently living in
Germany, and interested in PCs and especially programming. I'm a very
satisfied user of Windows Vista (I'll upgrade to 7 with my next computer
soon, I promise!) and generally tinkering with the .NET framework.

Well, why am I writing to you?
I heard rumors on the internet that you threw a chair at one of your
employees. Maybe you heard about this as well yet. I don't even want to
talk about whether this was right or not, it's your chair after all.
However, my chair recently broke, and while I was looking for a new
chair, I thought that the best chair I could think of possibly is this
very chair. If someone owns a good office chair, who but not the CEO of
Microsoft?
Would I ask too much if I'd ask you to send this chair to me? I know it
probably doesn't mean much to you, but just imagine how happy you'd make
a small german boy. If you're interested, write me back so I can tell
you the postal address. My eternal gratefulness is of course guaranteed.

Best regards and a happy and successful New Year,
Julian Aloofi

PS: Yes, I'm serious!

I just hope he doesn’t find out about the operating system I actually use…

By the way, I made some new packages for eViacam. They should contain no errors, regarding the application itself and packaging guidelines compliance. You can find 32-bit packages on my fedorapeople space. 64-bit users will have to rebuild the latest SRPM for now. If you try them and something breaks, please let me know!

in a couple of weeks, the OpenRheinRuhr 2010 will take place in Oberhausen in Germany. It’s a fairly young and promising Free Software conference and of course Fedora will be present as well! Apart from that, although the presence of Fedora alone makes the whole thing awesome enough, there will be various different projects from all corners of the Free Software world and a broad range of talks. If you happen to own an Android phone, you can install the OpenRheinRuhr Android app from the market and start planning

If that sounds interesting to you, come join us and have some fun embracing Free Software and just generally chitchatting at the Fedora Booth on 13th and 14th November.

By the way, I think the OpenRheinRuhr could still use some helpers, so if you’d like to lend a hand check out the helpers page.

PS: Don’t you forget to vote for the Fedora 15 release name. Together, we can make Asturias happen!

So, let’s jump right into it:

1.) Install Wine, obviously
1.1) If you have it enabled, temporarely disable SELinux with setenforce 0 as root

2.) Start winecfg
2.1) Don’t choose to install Gecko, you don’t need it for the game

3.) Set the Windows version to Windows 98
3.1) Open the “Audio” tab and select your preferred driver. The default one should generally work
3.2) In “Drives”, select “Add”, choose the “Path” to your mounted Grim Fandango Disc 1 (or a folder on your hard drive containing all files from the Disc 1), open advanced settings and select “Type” CD-ROM

4.) Go to ~/.wine/dosdevices/d: (or whatever letter you gave to the CD drive) and run wine SETUP.EXE
4.1) Follow the instructions on the screen to install
4.2) If it asks you to setup your joystick, don’t do that. It crashes the installer over here. I didn’t try using a joystick, so if you want to use one you’ll have to figure that out yourself
4.3) If it asks you, install DirectX 6.0

5.) Go to ~/.wine/dosdevices/d: again, enter the folder PATCH and run wine start /unix GFUPD101.EXE
5.1) If you don’t have that folder, download and apply the patch from ftp://ftp.lucasarts.com/patches/pc/Gfupd101.exe

6.) Download the Grim Fandango Launcher from http://quick.mixnmojo.com/grim-fandango-launcher (or if that’s down, the older version from http://www.grimfandango.net/?page=launcher)
6.1) Unzip the launcher and launch the .exe with wine
6.2) If you want to, you can go to “Options” and select “Run Grim from Hard Drive”. If it asks you to override files, always select no to save time, or select “Yes to all” if you’re lazy. It won’t make a difference.
When it asks you for Disc B, just open winecfg and point the CD drive to the mounted disc B (or a folder on your hard drive containing the files from disc B)
Note that it may look like the program froze or crashed, but it’s just copying files so give it a bit of time
6.3) Select “Run Windowed”. When the game started, press F1. If you can see the menu, you’re done! Go directly to step 8

7.) If you can’t see the menu when pressing F1, press F1 and do: Arrow Down, Enter, Arrow left, Enter
This will exit the game. Don’t just kill the process or hit Ctrl+C
7.1) Go to ~/.wine/drive_c/ and navigate to the install folder, usually Program Files/LucasArts/Grim/
7.2) Run wine GRIMFANDANGO.EXE -h. That should fix it

8.) Never ever change the ingame graphics options

9.) Make a nice shortcut somewhere to launch the “Grim Fandango Launcher.exe”, and always play in windowed mode. Maybe Fullscreen works for you as well, but it definitely doesn’t over here

PS: If you think this was too hard, support the Residual project!

It’s in Beta right now, but it’s the idea that counts. To get an idea of it, visit the homepage and watch the introduction video.

It basically is about adding a little button (like Tweet this!) to every website that offers content, and users will be able to click it and automatically donate a share of their monthly donation budget. This way you always know what you’re going to pay at the end of the month and can support authors, photographers or even developers you like.

I’m asking myself how many “normal” people will use it in the end though, if they can get the stuff for free anyway… It could make donating to creative people sharing their content on the internet much easier though, as opposed to visiting some website, searching the donate button and entering all kinds of payment information.

I like the idea!

After I wrote my last post I did some research on what is possible. The people commenting also pointed me to already existing solutions and projects. So I thought about how to integrate all these solutions into one, to get a usable desktop that does what I’d like to do it.

So I created a diagram consisting of four different components.

Real file storage: The most low-level part. This is where the real files are stored. This can be a local file system, or a server “in the cloud” to have files and settings available on every device.

Revision Management Layer: This will be a virtual file system or something like that, which can track file changes and version saved files. Thanks to davidnielsen for pointing me to Wizbit, which is working on something like that. I think it should only track changes in /home/username, because it will be pointless for other files (like things in /etc or /var).

Metadata Management: This will keep track of metadata, tags and related information. There seem to be many projects working on this, and the progress is very far, if not finished.

Applications: Applications are very important, because they make all this usable. They should support revision rollback and share their tags with the Metadata Management. Tomboy in this video is a very good example.

I thought I’d just share this, hoping this post will be useful or inspiring. I’m releasing this post and the embedded diagram under Creative Commons BY-SA.

<borschty> it would be nice to see the whole concept of having to save files go away

This started a little discussion, and we were thinking about a way how to get rid of that concept. As Zeitgeist tries to get away from handling with the filesystem anyway, it would be quite fitting to hide the technical details of files as well. The idea we had was to hide the details of saving files from users by simply “having” the files “on their computer” (or maybe in the cloud as well). This would mean that files automatically get saved when they are closed, and users can just continue their work when they access them again. No need to “Save”, no “Do you really want to quit?” boxes. No grandmas asking me “What do I have to do now, I already entered the text but there is this message popping up” (this is how it really happened, sorry if you feel offended when I use “grandma” for “user who got no clue about computers”). This would make handling with documents easier and more intuitive, just like you don’t need to “Apply” your settings when you select them, just close the configuration dialog.

If you think “this is a drastic change!”, then think about it twice. It isn’t very much of that. New users will find it very easy to use their desktop without even having to know what local files are (maybe some files even are in the cloud, they wouldn’t have to make a distinction), while users who know how to save files simply get rid of clicking “Save” every time. Let’s conceive a desktop using this:

User John wants to write a recipe for delicious cake. He opens his word processor and starts writing. Now he has to stop writing and just closes his word processor. He goes away and comes back three days later. In Zeitgeist he sees that he edited a document three days ago which is tagged with baking, recipe and cake. He just clicks on it, finishes writing it and closes his word processor again.

You may have noticed a little problem:
Where did he specify the file name?
The filename could be the “title” of the document. This would make it necessary to give each document a title though (e.g. the headline “How to bake a cake”, which would be used as document title). If the user gives no title, a default title could be used (like in Tomboy) or it could be generated from file meta data like tags and commonly used words, and the current date. This brings me to the next (more amazing) level:

A versioned computer! Let’s assume our user John replaces some ingredients of his cake because they are more delicious. He opens his file again, changes the recipe and closes his application again. Two weeks later his local supermarket burns down and he can’t use the new ingredients anymore (it’s hard to find good examples if you just quickly want to explain your concept ). As a normal user he would have to change parts of his recipe again. But not our John! He simply selects the recipe he created before he changed the ingredients, and it will be the version he closed at this day! Alternatively, he could select his latest document and just press “Restore previous version” two times. Here is a screenshot of the general idea.

Now let’s further imagine he goes to vacation to Switzerland. The supermarket near his house has the ingredients he needs for the more delicious version of the cake. Unfortunately he only printed his older version and took it with him. Oh no! Fortunately he somehow gains access to a computer running GNOME, logs into his cloud service’s account (Ubuntu One or Click’n Backup for example) which is integrated into GDM as if he was just using a normal user name and got an exact copy of his home desktop. Now he only needs to open the newer version of his recipe and can enjoy delicious cake in Switzerland!

I think you’re getting the idea. Be assured I have no clue how to implement something like this, just the vague idea that openSolaris does something roughly similar with their ZFS restore slider.

Some problems and notes:

What will happen if the computer runs out of power/crashes? – Users will still be able to use File->Save to manually create “revisions” of their file. Apart from that, we could have an autosave feature. If the user closes the program, the autosaves will automatically get inherited in their latest file “revision”. If it crashes the latest working autosave will appear as filename_date_BACKUP.fileextension or something like that (some name that makes the user aware of the file and think “Ah thank god, my file is not lost”).

This will take much space. – Yes, I suppose so as well. But hard drives are getting bigger all the time, and files can be stored online as well.

File names. – I’m not entirely happy with the filename solution. I’m thinking about something like this, where the filename is the heading: Picture

How to call versions of files? – How to call the different versions of files? Revisions? Versions? Snapshots?

Benefits: Users won’t have to make a distinction between local and remote files, they don’t even need to bother about files at all. The process of saving files can easily be integrated into a RCS-like file history. This will make rollbacks easier. I think btrfs might even bring some features to do that.

Migration: How will users integrate their existing data

Final notes: This is a draft of things I’d like to see. Many of the ideas did come from people in the ##gnome channel on Freenode, I am just summarizing my own thoughts on this. Some things are described in detail, while others are barely planned (e.g. the technical implementation). Please tell me what you think, why it will certainly fail, why it will be a great success, your ideas, solutions and whether it is technically possible! I don’t think this will get implemented, but maybe it will deliver some interesting thoughts for the future of the GNU/Linux and PC desktop in general. Now that I read the whole article I also noticed that I’m talking about different ideas and concepts. I hope this won’t make reading any harder

First let me say, Free Software has many advantages. In most cases it’s free (as in beer), which means you can save a lot of money. And you always have a choice, if you like it or not. You’re not tied to one specific vendor. Yadada, I suppose you know this or you wouldn’t read my blog.

Now let me explain the big problem that often is not noticed by anyone, and I think nobody adressed this yet. So let me raise attention to a fact so simple that almost everyone just forgets about it and doesn’t even miss it:

It’s impossible to hide easter eggs. Yes, you can write them, but other project members will immediatly find them and shout them out to the world. Why am I writing this? Because I just found this, and must admit that these developers really got a sense of humour: Link

I wrote about eViacam earlier. If you want to try it on Fedora, just check out the packages over here

Edit: The source RPMS are here

We have several guidelines too, and ours are definitely funnier, but something like the Ubuntu Code of Conduct is missing.
I don’t want to say we need one, because I have never seen anyone (at least not from the Fedora community) being rude or offending on #fedora or the mailing lists.

PS: I got some Spam comments on my blog. I mean, real Spam. Spammers decided someone would actually read my blog and placed ads on it. Wow, i’m amazed!