Nothing for intrepid?

The reason unr packages are slightly older in Intrepid is that they had to have a cut-off point somewhere, to have stable packages to upload.

We are approaching a stable release of all the packages very soon, at which point we will fix the naming (no ubuntu*) and switch to making regular releases. At this point I hope to start building intrepid packages as well as hardy packages so people using intrepid can keep up-to-date.

The issue with the launcher is that Intrepid uses a newer version of the Clutter libraries and therefore the launcher needs a massive amount of work to get it to the same level as the hardy one. netbook-launcher is an updated version which works with clutter-0.8, however it does have issues which we are trying to get fixed for Intrepid.

Currently, we hope to move to clutter-0.8 (in development) for unr 2.0. Until then, I will try and maintain updated netbook-launcher packages (with fixes forward-ported (?) from ume-launcher). It's not the greatest of situations, but there's just too much of a change from clutter-0.6->0.8 to switch now.

I think we have a big issue in intrepid with closing down the machine as that differs in hardy and intrepid.

In Intrepid the only way to turn off the machine from the desktop is to use the MENU not the icon. Of course we don't have a menu so you need to logoff using the icon and then shut down from gdm's options menu.

It would me MUCH more helpful if netbook-remix was on the same development cycle as the rest of the distro. This is in danger of becoming unusable like this. We're at beta now with no packages! How are we supposed to test it??

hm, having just *found* the unr intrepid packages was about to start reporting a pile of issues, but it looks like most of them are covered here anyway - in particular the really serious display issues in netbook-launcher and missing human-netbook-theme.

It does seem a little snail-like, given the last word on the matter seems to be two weeks ago...

As Neil pointed out in comment 1, the main focus of development for UNR has been on Hardy to date, as it is a LTS release and many customers are shipping with it. As we wind down the critical bug fixes for UNR/Hardy our development will be ramping up on Intrepid. Because of the major differences in Clutter 0.8, it is a substantial effort and we are aware of many issues and bug fixes that have not yet been ported, although the UNR packages are included in Intreprid and minimally work. We will be working on improving Intrepid support in the near future, but can't give any exact dates at the moment when the work will be completed. Thanks for your understanding and patience. We all look forward to an improved UNR for Intrepid.

In case it wasn't clear, can I at least assure you that any signs of impatience is meant lightheartedly. UNR works great for me in Hardy so I got bored and decided to play with Intrepid. :-) I'm commensurate in how upset I get with the problems I find. :-) If it bothers me too much I can always boot back to the hardy install...

Bug reports seem to be the only real route of communication either way though, so I can see how it can seem more critical than it's meant. I just wanted to know what was going on. :-) (ie: blog? forum? Sorry if they exist, I haven't found them.)

As for specific wants: go-home-applet, window-picker-applet and maximus all seem to be working OK (netbook-launcher is even usable if you don't mind only having icons!); so in the limited screen real-estate of a netbook, I'm already finding it worthwhile having what there is of UNR. So....

Could we have the human-netbook-theme pretty-please? Is that also broken at the moment or was it just overlooked?

How about, for the short term, giving us a netbook-launcher build that's *statically* linked against libclutter 0.6, so we have a launcher that works until the 0.8 issues are sorted out? Maybe if only in the (currently empty) intrepid netbook remix ppa if policy prevents doing that sort of thing in the proper intrepid repos. I don't think anything else many of us are using is linking to libclutter as well as netbook-launcher so hopefully that wouldn't be too awfully wasteful of resources? :-)

desktop switcher is still a bit new (and still too broken on hardy to be really useful) so I'm not bothered about that. :-)

Re: font problem, it's already fixed in the intrepid branch of the launcher since last week, and is currently waiting for the maintainer of the intrepid package to roll a new releadesktop switcher is still a bit new (and still too broken on hardy to be really useful) so I'm not bothered about that. :-)

THe other issues with the intrepid launcher will be fix as soon as I have some spare time and hopefully I will be able to host these up-to-date packages in our PPA, next to the hardy ones.

I'm not sure about the status of human-netbook-theme, but will find out. As it's mostly text file and images, you can just download the latest from the ppa (hardy version) and install it on your system (as a stop gap) :-). If it will not be available for intrepid, I'll add a build to our PPA.

(pulling human-netbook-theme from archive and installing manually)

doh. Yes, that's much nicer.

Extracted from the tarball and dropped into ~/.themes, it doesn't show up in the main Themes list like it did in Hardy; only as a controls theme Human Murrine Netbook. But that does work fine.

... currently running without maximus though as I suspect it of causing Thunderbird to crash (specifically go unresponsive). If thunderbird continues to not crash while maximus is not running, I'll post a new bug report about that tomorrow. (Certainly didn't have this problem in Hardy.)

I see that Intrepid has a fix for the inability to logoff but naturally it doesn't work for us Netbook Remix users.

I'm finding the netbook remix lag from the normal distro cycle really difficult. I need to be using the development version on my netbook because of my work in the distro.

The plan for intrepid as announced was very mobile so it's a shame that netbook remix is like this. I don't think I could recommend that people use it on the new version, and I think I'll have to bite the bullet and uninstall.

You may end up with it perfect for hardy but hardy will be ancient by the time you've done that.

I've gone back to hardy fulltime too. I don't mind (even quite enjoy)
the flakiness of a new distro version as long as there are signs of
forward progress. It's kinda fun to try out the new builds and report
bugs on them... But no, there aren't many such signs. No new versions of
any netbook remix component since I installed intrepid; netbook theme
still isn't even in the repos; netbook-launcher remains unusable in any
released intrepid build, too unusable for me to even care about the
minor issues with things like what the quit button does, when it can't
even show the "Quit" next to it. Frustrating. :-(

2008/10/11 Rachel Greenham <email address hidden>:
> I've gone back to hardy fulltime too. I don't mind (even quite enjoy)
> the flakiness of a new distro version as long as there are signs of
> forward progress. It's kinda fun to try out the new builds and report
> bugs on them... But no, there aren't many such signs. No new versions of
> any netbook remix component since I installed intrepid; netbook theme
> still isn't even in the repos; netbook-launcher remains unusable in any
> released intrepid build, too unusable for me to even care about the
> minor issues with things like what the quit button does, when it can't
> even show the "Quit" next to it. Frustrating. :-(

All the netbook remix components are at the same beginning stage. They
were synced once at the beginning and that's been it.

They are concentrating 100% on the OEM market rather than thinking
about users installing this stuff on their netbooks themselves.OEMs
will probably ship with the last LTS (ie Hardy).

The way Ubuntu stuff is supposed to work is that we work up to a
release, and then everything done post release is essential bug
fixing. The netbook remix team seem to be waiting until after release
to actually start work.

The quit button issue was a bug across the board with intrepid. It's
now been fixed but we don't get the fix, *and* the netbook remix devs
probably don't know about either the fix nor the problem.

The real problem is that there doesn't seem to be much way of the
community getting involved as it is being done in closed PPAs by
Canonical staff. To get a working netbook friendly install in
Intrepid we'd have to either fork their work or start again from
scratch.

I'm guessing something like eeeUbuntu is a better solution.

I want *this* solution. :-) I like it. I just want to be reporting
current bugs on it.

At the moment the clear message is "Stop testing. Any bugs you might
report have probably already been fixed in our source code, but we're
not releasing it yet."

That is frustrating. There are bugs I could be reporting, including a
couple of maximus issues I'm experiencing in intrepid; but there's no
point reporting those bugs. They've probably been fixed already.
Probably. Maybe not...

> That is frustrating. There are bugs I could be reporting, including a
> couple of maximus issues I'm experiencing in intrepid; but there's no
> point reporting those bugs. They've probably been fixed already.
> Probably. Maybe not...

I wonder if it's worth rebuilding the hardy packages in intrepid and
sticking them in my PPA? I'd have to have the old clutter too.

I've made https://edge.launchpad.net/~netbook-community-repo

It's an open group on launchpad with a PPA. Nothing in there yet but
I'll add some stuff to it later.

All welcome to join in!

Useful to note here that bug #269150 at https://bugs.launchpad.net/netbook-remix-launcher/+bug/269150 gives some basic instructions on installing netbook-launcher from bzr sources. once the source dependencies are satisfied (silly me i should have done apt-get build-dep netbook-launcher, didn't think of it :-) ) it does work, and the font bug that's been bugging me is fixed, which makes it usable to me now. :-)

I think there's a bit of a problem of project bug reporting organisation. I regularly look at the netbook remix bug list (not that that's changing much) and completely missed the above bug until today.

Your right, UNR is targetted at the current stable release of Ubuntu. As it deals with window-management, desktop management, sessions etc, this is a good idea. However, we also want to see it in Intrepid, but this is not a simple task of recompiling the packages.

Launcher needed to be moved from clutter-0.6 to clutter-0.8, which was a huge change and eventually I did this in my own time. This also means that the codebases differ massively between the Hardy and Intrepid versions and bugfixes not only need to be ported to compile, but they often throw up issues of their own.

Maximus/window-picker-applet/go-home-applet all needed to be modified to compile on Intrepid (some new gcc directives were causing errors). These were fixed thanks to contributors from within and outside Canonical, working in their free time.

Saying that UNR is not community orientated because, while still in development, we find it hard to keep two codebases in sync is harsh. You are welcome to provide patches (as so many have already done),report bugs (please always report bugs) and, of course, create branches of any of the code.

Finally, the process to get packages into Intrepid is it's own can of worms. I am not responsible for getting UNR into Intrepid (I don't know nearly enough about packaging or the process), so the best I can do is fix bugs and host packages in the PPA, until someone has time to review and move them into Intrepid. Even then, we can't just add them in, all packages have to follow the same process once the freeze is made. It doesn't matter whether they are Canonical's or not.

Anyway, all the intrepid packages have been brought up-to-date in the PPA. It would have been done last week, but I was attending the GNOME UI Hackfest in Boston. Here are the changes:

* netbook-launcher
   - Synced with ume-launcher (all the bug fixes from the past few weeks are integrated)
   - Fix issues with RTL languages
   - Fix shortcuts with spaces/special chars in names
   - Add support for portrait mode
   - Use ConsoleKit to decide when to restart instead of sleep.d script
   - Fix font issue with Clutter and mipmapping

* Maximus
  - Synced with latest
  - Better support for Resource/class names
  - Better handling of XWindow errors
  - Autorestart session support (not working on Intrepid yet)

* window-picker-applet
  - Synced with latest
  - Some fixes for updating text/icons consistently
  - Less padding to allow for more space for the icons to show

* go-home-applet
  - Synced with latest
  - Support for changing the icon through gconf

* human-netbook-theme
  - Created intrepid version

All the packages have updated translations too.

What's left?

* Quit dialog
   - This is a Intrepid issue and is effecting other packages too. The new session management in GNOME allows for either a quit dialog or logout dialog, but not both. Adding another option to show both won't work either as the dialog doesn't fit on a 600px vertical area (we can't win :-), so I'm going to add support directly in the launcher instead (which means it won't be translated straight away, but we can't help it).

* Metacity
   - the cur...

Neil J. Patel wrote:
> Anyway, all the intrepid packages have been brought up-to-date in the
> PPA.

That's all I wanted. :-) I'm happy now; progress is more tangible. It's
all about that "release often" part of the open source mantra. :-)

> As always, testing appreciated and please file bugs for any issues you
> see. Tagging bugs related to intrepid with "intrepid" is really helpful
> for me to figure out what needs to be fixed quickly. Thanks!
>

I intend to. The problem before certainly was with the fact that only
old builds were available that exhibited bugs we knew had been fixed.
That made reporting bugs pointless. Yesterday I discovered another bug
which included enough information for me to build from bzr sources, and
then later in the day the ppa version got updated anyway. My intrepid
install has already jumped ahead to the default install. I just need to
keep using it now to see what drops out. :-)

--
Rachel

This looks really good - thanks for doing it :)

Caroline

This bug has been moved to Ubuntu distribution. It seems somewhat old though, can this be closed?