Xfce News
The little mouse told me...

Yesterday I caved in and bought myself one of those cute little laptop devices: an Acer Aspire One.

Note that the giant machine on the left is my previously considered smallish 14.1″ laptop from Dell.

It comes with a Taiwanese distribution, Linpus Linux, based on Fedora 8. More specifically, it comes with the ‘Lite’ variant of the distribution which features Xfce as its desktop environment. Well, actually, it is part modified Xfce, part Easy(tm) interface created by Acer for this device (they call it xfdesktop2, a bit strange if you ask me).

Wow. A commercial offering available from a store for regular people, with software that I helped create. Awesome. Maybe I should have asked for a discount ;-)

I’ve just started playing with it and I think they did a pretty good job. The interface is really easy, but can only access a few predefined applications. I have wanted to write such a full screen launcher/control center interface for a long time, but never got around to actually doing anything about it. It would be perfect for my parents, who have a very hard time working with their Windows XP.

They use a modified Thunar (My Disk://, Removable://, indication of disk usage in the side bar) that seems to work fairly well.

They don’t provide easy access to changing the configuration, since they disabled the right mouse menu on the panel. However Alt-F2 brings up xfrun as in a regular Xfce installation and Terminal is installed.

There’s xfce-setting-show to bring up our own settings dialog. It doesn’t fit on the screen (1024×600), but this is partly due to the very big icon they added for screen settings, making all buttons in the dialog much bigger than they need to be. I got rid of the XP window decorations and used the Xfce theme instead of RedHat’s Nodoko. Now that looks better!

xfce4-panel -a gives you the add item menu, where you can add for instance the xfdesktop menu. Also in edit mode some right-click menus do become available (not all). I’ve added a menu and a pager to get a bit more functionality.

Since it’s based on fedora you can use yum to install more software. I’ve just installed gimp to be able to create a decently sized picture for this post.

It has an 8GB SSD for storage and two card reader slots for possible extensions. The one thing where the SSD really shows its advantage is boot time. It boots in about 15 seconds, maybe a bit less (although some daemons are still being started in the background), very nice indeed.

Oh, and it weighs slightly less than 1 kg.

So, now I’ll go back to playing with this thing ;-)

update:
Screenshot

Ogra wasn’t lying when he said Xubuntu is “*seeecret*”. Here are leaked (no, not really) screenshots of features that may or may not make it into the next release of Xubuntu Intrepid. Enjoy! ;]

It’s been a while since I last wrote anything, mostly due to a few new changes that happened these last 3 weeks or so. Here’s a small list of some of the things that I can remember right now:

• My pet project BillReminder is now hosted in the GNOME SVN repository! It took me a while to get the right resources and free time to migrate everything, but I believe that it is now completed. The source code can be checked out from here and issues can be filed in Bugzilla. There’s also a new web site theme to go along with the changes, courtesy of my good friend Elyézer Mendes Rezende.
• With the move to GNOME SVN I was (obviously) granted commit access… and due to some schedule changes for the two current committers for the Brazilian translation team, I have now been performing translations reviews and commits. It is great to finally be able to do this as I already have been doing this type of work for the XFCE team.
• Speaking of the XFCE team, I have been on top of the Brazilian Portuguese translations and the next release (coming soon I’m told) will be 100% translated!
• I started attending one single class at the University of North Carolina (here in Chapel Hill) and this Tuesday was my first day. The class, “Database Design”, is listed as a graduate level class but so far it’s been fairly easy to follow. As I already have a bacchelors in BioChemistry, I’m looking forward to taking some bioinformatics classes in the near future.
• I’ve done some travelling these last 2 weeks. Two weekends ago we went to the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher. It was the first time I went to the Carolina beaches since I moved here and it was a great experience! We took lots of pictures and spent 2 great days soaking up in the sun!

• Last weekend we went do Ocean City in Delaware to celebrate my youngest’s sister wedding. My whole family got together and rented a nice house in a fancy complex with lots of activities. There was a lot of swimming and drinking beer with my dad and older sister. Every night we would go to where my younger sister was holding the reception, a nice house by the lake with its own private pier! There was a lot of drinking, eating, and the occasional fishing off the pier! The evenings were amazing with a full moon and even some fireworks (we don’t know who was doing it, but it looked really great from where we were). Needsless to say my kids loved it all! Unfortunately we forgot our camera there and now I have to wait for my sister to mail it back.

Well, I actually have more stuff but that will have to wait for an upcoming post.

Been busy busy as always :-). As of last Monday, I’m now an employee of Canonical as a Release Engineer for the OEM Services Custom Engineering Group.

Xubuntu is doing really well. We had our strategy document officially recognized by the CC at the last CC meeting (I’ll begin implementing the details September 1st). Furthermore, upstream relationships with Xfce4 are better than ever which I personally find very exciting. Finally, Xubuntu has finally reached a “critical mass” where as we have enough contributors that things get done without there having to be someone such as myself doing a bunch of hand holding. Go Xubuntu Team, Go!

Last but not least, I bought a kitten. Pictures will be available soon.

A while back I was asked by a member of a Ubuntu translation team (who shall remain anonymous) about how the Brazilian team’s workflow worked and how we managed to maintain our position among the top translated teams in Rosetta. What follows was my reply to this person. I hope it will prove to be useful to any other team out there who may be struggling with the same issues. I’m also interested to learn how other teams managed to keep their members involved and/or how others can benefit from their experience.

|> Now, the LOCALE translators have some organisation problems and some
|> problems to find good guys for translating ubuntu. When I saw, how
|> complete is the brasilian translation i get an idea. Maybe you or some
|> of the other translators may help us.

Hi there Anonymous! The translation process of free software has been the reason why I joined the masses of the free software world. It is a very rewarding experience when you see people being able to take advantage of open source software in their native tongue.

The Brazilian team has proved to be an interesting experience for me. I was the second person to take on the lidership of the team, and I’d like to offer your my opinion and insight as for why we have managed to grow and maintain a pretty decent track of quantity and quality.

I think that anyone who participates in open source communities likes to have a sense of direction and ownership. By that I mean that people like to know what is going on, what they can do (but not in generic terms; they need specifics) and what the roadmap is. When people see an organized team and specific goals set out, it makes them want to participate too.

How can you do this? Simple. Start simple… Schedule IRC meetings on a regular basis so people can “update” their status as well as discuss priorities and give feedback on what is working and what is not.  Speaking of priority, create a list with the software packages the translators should focus on during the period (a weekly sprint?  monthly?) so that once you reach that mark people will have a feeling of accomplishment! They will like that feeling, I can guarantee you… and they’ll comeback for more!

Also, set up a wiki where people can put their names next to the packages they’re currently working on, so that new collaboratores don’t work on the same packages as other people. Set up a program where current team members would have to “adopt” a new translator and show him/her how everything works, as well as be responsible for reviewing and providing feedback. The current member will feel that he he/she has ownership of the process and team as a whole, and that is very rewarding. The new translator will have a feeling of direction… and that is very rewarding as well! It is a very good cycle that can strengthen the entire team, no matter if they’re “veterans” or “newbies”.

Lastly, let everyone know that their word counts! Assign a current member as your right hand and share the responsibility of the administration of the team (ownership, remember?) It is the job of the administrator to make decisions on behalf of the team, but it is just as important to heed to the team’s members interests and ideas. Having someone who you trust to bounce off ideas is a sure way to make sure you stay on track as well.

As far as how we keep the quality of our translations? Many of our members, myself included, work with the upstream teams for GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc and try to stick to their translation standards. I suggest you take a look at the following web site: www.open-tran.eu. It is a great service that allows you to see what terms the upstream teams are using in their translations and allows you to also follow the same pattern.

Well, these were the things I did back when I was the leader for the team. I’m sure the other guys will be able to provide you with some more tips.