Debugging the 'something has gone wrong' screen
by Adam Williamson
The 'Oh no! Something has gone wrong' screen is rather un-helpful from
the point of view of debugging. I'm working on a live image for the Test
Day on Thursday; the one I'm currently testing is very unstable on my
laptop, and hit that screen three times within two minutes of testing
(immediately on first attempted login, then shortly after the session
started the next two logins, while I was trying to get the wireless
connected). I don't know how I can provide a useful bug report, though,
because I've no idea what the screen really means (_what_ went wrong?
Why is it so unrecoverable that all you can do is pop up a BSOD and kick
me to gdm?) or how to debug it. A guide would help :) thanks!
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net
13 years, 1 month
GNOME 3 Test Day coming
by Vitezslav Humpa
Hey guys,
Final of the three Fedora GNOME 3 test days is to be held this Thursday. We think that the current set of test cases covers most of the important functionality. However, should any of you guys think that something might still be missing (perhaps due to new functionalities added recently), or if you have any other ideas for something else you'd like to have tested, please, let me know and I will write them down as test cases and add them to the event.
You can see the current list of tests here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2011-04-21_GNOME3_Final
Thanks!
--
Vita Humpa
Fedora QA
13 years, 1 month
Sound theme selection GUI
by Elad Alfassa
Hello desktop team.
We, at the Fedora sound SIG [1] are creating sound themes [2] for fedora.
As we were investigating how to create a sound theme, Lennart pointed
out that GNOME's sound configuration UI does not allow switching
themes, only switching alert sounds.
Now that's a crappy UX! Users will search sound themes with
gnome-packagekit, and install them. But how would they know how to
enable it? Most users doesn't know what gsettings is, and we can't put
it in the README file because most users are not aware of
/usr/share/docs.
I would expect GNOME's sound configuration UI to allow selecting a
sound theme, and:
* The UI should have a button for searching for sound themes
automatically in pacakgekit.
* The UI should allow changing the gdm user sound theme (so that
sounds like system-ready will be used from the user installed theme
and not the freedesktop theme).
It should be rather easy to implement, and will improve UX in
installing and using a sound theme.
I guess it's too late to add it to Fedora 15 (I hope I'm wrong, and
there is still time), and if it is, a secondary temporary UI should be
created for switching sound themes, and packaged for Fedora 14 and
Fedora 15. This is a really ugly workaround, so it should be only
temporary, until the required change is done in upstream GNOME.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Sound
[2] http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/music/2011-April/000791.html
--
-Elad.
13 years, 1 month
customization of themes and colors in gnome 3 desktop in Fedora 15
by Aleksandra Bookwar
Hello everyone,
I would like to raise up the question of possibilities user have to
customize the look and feel of his desktop. And let us limit our
consideration to Fedora 15 release only. I don't have enough
information to speak about future plans and their realization yet.
1) Why this is important:
After one week of testing gnome-shell and Gnome3 by community i've
made a list of things people complain most in Gnome3 (Fortunately this
list contains only cosmetic issues. Many thanks to gnome developers
for that.)
The list is:
- window titlebar size
Window titles of the same color as a window background, without much
meaning since they have only one button, make almost everyone think
about wasting vertical space. This very expensive vertical space which
is already taken by "top bar".
- icon size in Applications menu
The bug is here https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636655.
And discussion is still open.
- color scheme
Dark black-blue default color scheme with deep shadows seems to be
too dark and grim for many users. Once I published the light grey
version of default gnome-shell, at least 10 users changed their mind
about Gnome3 and decided to try it.
- fonts
Default fonts are bad for non-english speaking users, who work with
non-Latin characters.
Bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=695405 still open.
( After three days of using gnome-shell i fixed all four and made this
picture to promote Gnome 3 http://www.linux.org.ru/gallery/6144374.jpg
And people do like it. )
I don't want to open discussion with designers team here. Artwork is
always controversial, so let default setting be as they are now,
except may be fedora logo improvement suggested here:
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2011-April/004215.html
. Please, consider it.
I want to emphasize that changing default settings is not an
exceptional use-case for F15 Gnome users. It is a normal thing which
will be used very often.
2) The gnome-developers point of view
I have found these opinions on theming the gnome desktop:
Bastien Nocera said at
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-March/msg00059.html
===============================================================
Changing either theme or font would detract from our visual identity.
And we also cannot offer users to switch to different themes and expect
all those themes to be of the high quality one would expect from the one
shipped in GNOME 3. My guess is that if you're willing to possibly break
the appearance of a number of applications, we want to make it clear
that you shouldn't start filing bugs against whichever product offered
you that ability.
There are however some missing parts to the customisation that we might
want to revisit, such allowing users to tweak colours, but this would
need to be designed, and thought out.
================================================================
Owen Taylor said at
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647686
================================================================
>From the perspective of the GNOME Shell team, GNOME Shell themes are
both not interesting and not supportable
================================================================
If I understood correctly, this means that till at least Gnome 3.2,
may be later, user is not supposed to do all the things I mentioned in
1). Although this may be reasonable from developers point of view
(they have a lot of more important things to do), I think from the
point of Fedora 15 it is wrong. Things that i listed above have much
more impact on the end-user experience then integration of empathy
into desktop environment, for example. Desktop settings are urgent for
user-oriented distro release.
3) What I think Fedora Desktop and Fedora QA Team could and should do
in this case.
Fortunately, current gnome-shell does have tools to solve almost all
the problems. But what is needed to be done is to change their
priority from "strange things no one cares about" to the "must(or at
least nice) to have in current release".
I suggest
a) state that theming _is_ a feature of Gnome 3 Desktop in F15
b) add gnome-tweaks-tool to the default @gnome-desktop group of
packages, put it on Live images and so on
Probably add gnome-shell user-theme extension package by default also.
c) raise the priority and help with the bugs
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647599 user-theme
extension: support globally installed extension
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=644271 [PATCH] Add
extension that prefers local theme to system theme
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647386 [PATCH] The
user-theme extension doesn't revert to the original theme immediately
and others in gnome-tweak-tools component.
d) consider to add gnome-tweak-tool's bugs as a blocker or
nice-to-have or any other good status in Red Hat Bugzilla.
--
Best regards,
Aleksandra Bookwar
13 years, 1 month
resume from suspend doesn't present a locked screen
by Chuck Anderson
In F15 Beta, suspending doesn't lock the screen, so resuming from
suspend-to-ram doesn't ask you to enter your password--I think this is
a security risk (or at least an inconvenience) because anyone could
come along later and access your session if you forget to manually
lock the screen.
Would the desktop team consider implementing auto-screen-lock on
suspend please?
Thanks.
13 years, 1 month
fallback and safe modes
by Rahul Sundaram
Hi
If for some reason, fallback mode doesn' get activated or the default
interface is not working properly, would it be useful to have a option
to choose fallback mode in GDM itself? I recently ran into a issue
where GNOME Shell would launch but all the windows were black and hence
couldn't go to system settings and force fallback mode on. I traced
this problem due a upgrade issue eventually but in such situations,
ability to choose the mode right in the login screen is useful
Another option I think is needed is a safe mode which basically ignores
all the installed extensions. The reason is that, these GNOME Shell
extensions are essentially arbitrary javascript and if I install a bunch
of extensions and one of them has a bug, GNOME Shell basically gives up
and you can't login. Similar to Firefox, a safe mode might be handy to have
Rahul
13 years, 1 month
Request for packaging: grilo and grilo-plugins
by Bastien Nocera
Heya,
In GNOME 3.2, we hope to have Totem use Grilo to implement the various
"source" sidebars, and there's also interest from Rhythmbox, and other
applications to start using it as a way to avoid duplicating various
amounts of code adding new sources to each of those applications.
Anybody interested in packaging grilo and grilo-plugins?
The upstream code is at:
https://live.gnome.org/Grilo
Cheers
13 years, 1 month
