Como tuve un tiempo disponible, pude navegar un poco en el contenido de GNOME-Look para buscar un tema que se visualizara bien en LXDE y GNOME3.

Aunque muchos temas se derivan de Adwaita, me sorprendió ver que reNIX mantenía la estética de fondos negros y claros.

Para descargarlo, tendremos que ir a su página en GNOME-Look y descargar en archivo ZIP que contiene el tema. Después bastará con extraerlo en el directorio .themes del home de su usuario.

Ahora abriremos el gestor de apariencia de LXDE mediante el Menú del lxpanel (Menú -> Preferencias -> Personalizar apariencia).

En la sección de «controles» tendremos que buscar «renix-gtk-master» y aplicar los cambios.

Con esto tendremos activados los cambios y nuestro LXDE debería lucir así (o parecido):

 

More than a year (12+ months) since my last entry... obviously lots have happened... BUT

Its a new year (2013), a new job, a new Laptop and a new openSUSE 12.2!  I'll stop right there before I go off on a tangent, seeing & proclaiming trends where none existed previously.

Details:

• openSUSE 12.2 x86_64 (64-bit) - KDE desktop (default)
• Toshiba Tecra R840 (Intel i5, 4Gb RAM, 320Gb Hdd, Intel HD integrated graphics)
• Dual-boot with Windows 7 (/dev/sda1) and openSUSE (/dev/sda2)

Installation:
Smooth as silk is all I can say and something that has come to be expected.

Given the dual-boot setup, I created my own disk partitioning scheme.  So this step deviated from the otherwise straight-forward install (ie click next till the end).

Disk partition scheme:

• /dev/sda1 - 100Gb - original factory installed Windows 7 (size shrunk to 100Gb)
• /dev/sda2 - 100Gb - root partition of openSUSE 12.2 ('/') formatted to ext4
• /dev/sda3 - 98Gb - extended partition
• /dev/sda5 - 6Gb - SWAP partition
• /dev/sda6 - 92Gb - common data partition formatted to NTFS (read/write for both Win7 & openSUSE 12.2)

At install time, I did not format the common data partition.  Instead, I left it blank (unformatted) and used Windows 7 to format it much later.  Once formatted, this common data partition will be known as D:\ drive on Windows 7.

Reboot into openSUSE 12.2 and use YaST Partitioner to set a mount point.  I usually mount this under /mnt/common.  Now, openSUSE 12.2 will automatically mount the common data partition in /mnt/common on boot.

The only outstanding part is that /mnt/common is accessible by root (super-user) but normal users access is troublesome.  To make /mnt/common read-writeable by normal user, I edit the mount options of /mnt/common in the /etc/fstab file.  Example, changed the options in bold from original (first line below) to the second:

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-xxxxxx-part6 /mnt/common          ntfs-3g    user,users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-xxxxxx-part6 /mnt/common          ntfs-3g    uid=han,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

where han in uid=han is my normal user account on openSUSE 12.2.

There might be a more user-friendly way to do this but I did not explore since I'm comfortable editing the /etc/fstab. Readers who knows how this can be done, please feel free to leave a comment.  Thanks.


Grub vs Grub2:
I chose to stick with Grub instead of the newer Grub2 boot loader.  The reason is simple, I could easily edit the boot options via /boot/grub/menu.lst because its a text file.  In Grub2, this is non-trivial and until they have an easier editing interface, I'll stick with Grub.


Additional Software

Read more »

Following up on my previous post, a different type of image has been made by the openSUSE KDE community members. In particular, alin has created images sporting the same software from KDE (4.10 RC2) but using the upcoming openSUSE 12.3 as base.

Download links:

• 32 bit version
• 64 bit version
• Release directory (in case the above links go 404; the files are named KDE4-.4.10.RC2-Live)

These images are provided not only to test 4.10 in openSUSE, but also to test part of the distribution itself, without touching existing systems. Should you encounter a bug, please report it as follows:

• Bugs in KDE software will need to be reported to bugs.kde.org
• Bugs in openSUSE will need to be reported to bugzilla.novell.com

Don’t forget that those images are not persistent, i.e. the settings will not be saved between sessions.

With that said, let the testing commence (or continue)!

For some time now, the KDE:Unstable:SC repository for openSUSE did not offer any new snapshot due to the work that was going into getting KDE 4.10 into the upcoming openSUSE 12.3 release. Now that the latest KDE 4.10 Release Candidate (RC2) was placed into the correct repositories, I found some time again to update the KDE:Unstable:SC to a new snapshot from KDE git-master (KDE 4.11). Of course at this moment not many changes are happening in git-master due to the polishing of the KDE 4.10 release (beginning of February). 

Como ando usando entornos de escritorio diferentes a KDE, le he delegado la gestión de sesiones a  LXDM. Desafortunadamente el tema con el que viene por defecto es algo «simple».

Afortunadamente en AUR hay dos opciones interesantes y muy presentables para ponerle a LXDM.

• Archlinux Top.
• Archlinux Theme.

En lo personal me agradó más el segundo por su simpleza. De hecho, me parece que ese es su nombre: «Simple».

Para instalarlo recurrimos a Yaourt mediante el uso de la terminal:

yaourt archlinux-lxdm-theme-full

Ingresamos el número que tenga la opción del tema que instalaremos (1) y procedemos a descargar el PKGBUILD.

Como nota, el paquete es muy estable y no hay necesidad de modificar el PKGBUILD. Así que le decimos que no (opción n) y simplemente nos pedirá la confirmación y el password para instalar el paquete.

Tras terminar la instalación, verificaremos que se encuentre en la carpeta /usr/share/lxdm/themes.

Ahora editaremos el archivo /etc/lxdm/lxdm.conf y buscaremos la línea con la cadena «theme«. La cuál nos aparecerá de la siguiente forma:

theme=Industrial

Cambiaremos «Industrial» por «Archlinux» para cambiar el tema. Si es otro el que descargaste, escribe el nombre del directorio que aparece en /usr/share/lxdm/themes. Guardamos los cambios y reiniciamos el servicio LXDM. Como en mi caso uso systemd, escribo:

sudo systemctl restart lxdm

Con esto, ya estará disponible el nuevo tema.

The 4.10 release for the KDE Development Platform, Workspaces and Applications is drawing nigh… as you may have read, there is now an additional release candidate in order to test some last-minute changes.

Of course, the KDE developers can only do so much: it’s impossible to test all possible combinations. That is, unless the community at large helps by finding and reporting issues the developers can fix. But doing so requires a 4.10 install. You can of course use packages from distributions, but you may not feel comfortable installing a prerelease on your system (and no one would blame you for that). Of course, if you had something to test without touching your own system…

And that’s exactly what you can do now. Alin and shumski from the openSUSE KDE team have generated live images (based on openSUSE 12.2) for USB and DVD offering a standard 4.10 install, which should provide enough to try the new release and be able to report bugs to the developers.

Some screenshots for the impatient:

[]({{ site.url }}/images/2013/01/snapshot11.png) []({{ site.url }}/images/2013/01/snapshot2.png) []({{ site.url }}/images/2013/01/snapshot31.png) []({{ site.url }}/images/2013/01/snapshot41.png)

And of course, the  download links (EDIT: now fixed for good!):

• x86 (32bit) image

• x86_64 (64 bit) image

It’s more than 650 Mb, so it won’t fit on a CD, but it will on an USB stick. Follow these instructions to install them to USB media. You can also burn these images to DVD.

If you decide to use it, don’t forget to test (see here what’s needed) and submit detailed bug reports to the developers.

Let’s make 4.10 rock solid!

At the very last minute, my patches to support Firefox Personas in LibreOffice were accepted as a late feature for 4.0, hooray! :-) What does it mean?

Personas are easy-to-use themes that let you personalize the look of your Firefox says the Personas page. In fact, it is a great collection of many nice pictures you can apply in your Firefox with one click.

Olivier had the great idea to reuse them in LibreOffice too. I provided him with few code pointers to implement the feature, but then I decided this is actually so fun project that I wanted to do it myself (sorry, Olivier!) - and started that at the Munich HackFest. Long story short, here is the result:

Unfortunately we cannot choose Personas in LibreOffice with just one click as in Firefox, but it is as easy as it can be - just download LibreOffice 4.0 RC1 (or later) when available, choose Tools -> Options... -> Personalization -> Select Persona, and the rest is trivial, the dialog will lead you through the necessary steps. Enjoy!

If you have an OBS package containing multiple spec files, you may have discovered that OBS only builds the spec file matching the OBS package name. If you want to have the other(s) spec file(s) built, you should use a link, don't use copypac! For example, devel:languages:python / python-nose is a OBS package containing four … Continue reading OBS 101: How to treat packages with multiple spec files

The KDE:Distro:Factory repo aka KDF now serves KDE SC 4.10 RC2 packages for openSUSE 12.2 (ARM) and openSUSE Factory. KR410 will be created next week.

The KDE release team has decided to ship a third RC for 4.10. Even though this makes the schedule for 12.3 a bit tight the openSUSE KDE team holds on to the plan to ship KDE SC 4.10 with openSUSE 12.3.

Big thanks to everybody who made this happen!