Gnome15

Packages for Linux Mint 17 are now available on the Gnome15 repositories. For instructions on how to install Gnome15 on Linux Mint 17 , please refer to the Linux Mint download instructions. Tags:  Gnome15

Packages for the Ubuntu 14.04 are now available on the Gnome15 repositories. For instructions on how to install Gnome15 on Ubuntu 14.04, please refer to the Ubuntu download instructions. Tags:  Gnome15

Brett Smith, the original developer of Gnome15 has shut down the old gnome15.org website. People going to www.gnome15.org are now redirected to the Gnome15 page on this site. We are now in the process of transferring the gnome15.org domain name so ... [More] that it does not get hijacked. This process should be completed soon. Tags:  Gnome15 [Less]

Gnome15 next release estimated date is postponed to March 2nd 2014. While initially focus on next release was simply migration to GTK3, it now also includes switching from GConf to GSettings. More information about the reasons of this decision can be read on this blog post. Tags:  Gnome15

First of all, my best wishes for the 2014 year to all the Gnome15 users! Current work on Gnome15 is focused on migrating the application to GTK3. The migration is going well, and most of the core of Gnome15 was migrated as well as some plugins. ... [More] Updating from GTK2 to GTK3 involves going from the PyGTK libraries to GObject-Introspection. PyGTK was essentially a carefully maintained wrapper around the C libgtk2 library with a lot of nice handcrafted features and syntactic shortcuts for Python coders; GObject-Introspection on the other hand is a more direct presentation of the underlying C-and-GObject model, and it tends to be much fussier about the code it will accept. You can't mix and match PyGTK code and PyGI/GTK3, which means that this migration needs to be a all-or-nothing change with some risks of regressions and instability. Those risks could be mitigated by making usage of pygtkcompat[1] instead of directly migrating directly to PyGI/GTK3, however I have decided not to. I also choose to replace all the deprecated widgets. Gtk.HBox and Gtk.VBox widgets were directly migrated to Gtk.Grid instead of Gtk.Box as recommended in their upstream documentation. When upgrading the ui files, Glade, the user interface designer crashed several times. Some of Gnome15 ui files used to have several windows into each of them, and many projects seem rather to use a single ui file per window. I took this approach and have split the ui files. This had a good effect and I do not remember of having any Glade crashes since. At first, GConf was to remain used for storing Gnome15 configuration. Switching to GSettings was to be made at a later release. Unfortunately, the GConf PyGI bindings are far from complete and access to many native GConf features (such as read and store string lists) was impossible. Instead of adding hacks to workaround these issues, next release will also include the switch to GSettings. Although GSettings and GConf share many similarities, one of them increased the amount of work to be done: GSettings, unlike GConf, does not allow to have schema-less entries. Gnome15 made an heavy usage of this possibility, since it did not declared a schema at all for its configuration. GSettings schemas were created for Gnome15 settings as well as for each of the plugins. Usually, GSettings schema files are installed in /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas and are compiled at install time with the glib-compile-schemas tool. This folder being a "system" folder, a user needs superuser permissions to access it. The fact that Gnome15 allows the usage of external plugins stored in the users $HOME folder raises another issue. To keep it's current flexibility, we need to allow GSettings to load compiled schemas from other folders. GSettings does allow us to do it by specifying schema sources to use when looking for the settings to manipulate. This is still work to do, but will be done before publishing next release. The last thing related to the switch to GSettings is about importing GConf settings and store them in GSettings. GSettings does provide a way of doing this kind of migration, but it only works in simple cases (one to one matching of settings). This is not applicable in Gnome15's case and a migration code (executed automatically if needed) will be created. Switching to GSettings is the major reason for changing the estimated date for the next Gnome15 release from February 2nd to March 2nd 2014. In summary, here is the minimal list of tasks before being able to publish Gnome15 next release: Finish migrating (mostly plugins now) to PyGI/GTK3/GSettings; Allowing the usage of several schema sources for the settings; Importing the settings from GConf when Gnome15 is run; Update the plugin tutorial to integrate these changes; Packaging; Test, test and finally test Currently, I still have not pushed these changes to Gnome15 git repository, since I try to keep the code buildable and runnable at each commit. As soon as I have finished point 1 above, I will make a push. If you had the courage to read all of the above, congratulations! As you see, a lot of work remains to be done, but things are on track. One can argue the decision to postpone this release could have been avoided by making usage of pygtkcompat and/or keep using GConf even if with some hacks. Although I agree, I prefer the approach I took. This release won't bring any new features to the users compared to version 0.9.8 and as such there's no true loss on having a new date. My coding efforts for the next releases of Gnome15 will mostly target "modernizing" the code by making usage of recent libraries instead of bringing new features. I'm aware that this will bring a lot of API breakage that will impact plugin developers, but it will reduce the technical debt accumulated all these months and I hope reduce the time needed to reach a 1.0 milestone, which will bring commitment on API stability [1] pygtkcompat is a compatibility layer that provides a PyGTK compatible API on top of gobject-introspection, which makes it possible to run an application on top of both PyGTK and gobject-introspection at the same time. If you are interested, you can find more information about migrating a Python application to GTK3 here. Tags:  Gnome15 [Less]

Fedora 20 is out and Gnome15 0.9.8 has been packaged for it. You can now enjoy Gnome15 on the latest and greatest Fedora. For instructions on how to install Gnome15 on Fedora 20, please refer to the Fedora download instructions. End of Support ... [More] Gnome15 0.9.8 will be the latest release packaged for Fedora 19. If you are using this distribution, please consider upgrading if you wish to have access to new versions of Gnome15. Tags:  Gnome15 [Less]

openSUSE 13.1 is out and Gnome15 0.9.8 has been packaged for it. You can now enjoy Gnome15 on the latest and greatest openSUSE. For instructions on how to install Gnome15 on openSUSE 13.1, please refer to the openSUSE download instructions. End of ... [More] Support Gnome15 0.9.8 will be the latest release packaged for openSUSE 12.3. If you are using this distribution, please consider upgrading if you wish to have access to new versions of Gnome15. Tags:  Gnome15 [Less]

Gnome15 0.9.8, also know as The release that got delayed twice, is mainly a bug fix release with some enhancements and a new plugin. A new "Pommodoro Timer" plugin is now available. The Gnome shell extension now supports Gnome 3.10 Ubuntu 13.10 ... [More] (saucy) and Linux Mint 16 (Petra) are now supported. Arch Linux users using LTS kernels can now use the kernel-driver EXPERIMENTAL End of support As announced previously, packages are no longer built for Fedora 18. Gnome15 may however still work on these distributions. If you wish to, you may still try to build it from source. Depending on the release date of Linux Mint 16 (Petra), this is probably the last release packaged for Ubuntu 13.04 (raring) and Linux Mint 15 (Olivia). If you are using these distributions, please consider upgrading if you wish to have access to new versions of Gnome15. Changes since 0.9.7 The Gnome Shell extension now displayed the plugin list in alphabetical order. (Issue 172) A new Pommodoro Timer plugin is now available. (Issue 240) The Gnome Shell extension now supports Gnome 3.10. (Issue 290) Packages are now provided for Ubuntu 13.10 and Linux Mint 16. (Issue 294) ArchLinux users of the LTS kernels can now use the kernel driver.Note:This is an experimental feature. Feedback apreciated(Issue 297) Bugs fixed in this release The build now displays an error if neither PIL or pillow python libraries are available. (Issue 286) The stop key (multimedia) now sends the correct keycode when Gnome15 is running. (Issue 291) The weather plugin keeps refreshing its data event if it is not the active plugin. (Issue 298) The screensaver plugin now correctly displayed the user message on G19 keyboards. (Issue 299) The g15top module now provides a uptime method. This module is used as a fallback replacement for python-gtop on systems that don't provide it. (Issue 301) Fonts on openSUSE should now be displayed correctly on devices with a mono screen. (Issue 300) Fix a packaging error where the trafficstats plugin didn't depend on python-gtop. (Issue 303) Fix a packaging error on Debian systems where some font configuration files were delete. (Issue 310) Under the hood changes for this release Exceptions are now logged in a consistent way always giving the backtrace. (Issue 269) XDG directories are now used instead of hard coded paths. (Issue 278) Mono icons are no longer installed by default. These icons are only used on Ubuntu systems. (Issue 285) The python interpreter for Gnome15 scripts was changed from python to python2. (Issue 289) User custom plugins should now be installed in $XDG_DATA_HOME/gnome15/plugins instead of $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gnome15/plugins. Support for $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gnome15/plugins will be removed in a future release. (Issue 292) Have contributed patches for this release Bram Faas Known issues On Ubuntu 13.10 the indicator doesn't show the list of running plugins. This behavior is due to a bug in Ubuntu itself for which a fix will probably be published soon. More details here. Next release Next release of Gnome15 will be focused on migrating Gnome15 to GTK3 and should be available on February 2nd 2014. However, if major bugs are found on this release, there may be a bugfix release published either on December 1st or January 5th 2014. Tags:  Gnome15 [Less]

Packaging is taken longer than estimated and as such, the next release of Gnome15 will only be available on November 17th. Users waiting for support of Ubuntu 13.10 will have to wait some more days. Tags:  Gnome15

Contrary to what was announced previously, next release of Gnome15 will be delayed for a week and will only be available on November 9th. Some last minute events prevented me to prepare a release for the date initially announced. Tags:  Gnome15