codergeek42

With the recent clamour over Nautilus' default spatial-paradigm navigation mode as the default in Fedora, I decided to take a page from the book of David Nielsen and force myself to use spatial mode for a few solid days (at least). Having been a "Browser" user mostly of habit since I first started with Linux in 2003, I want to know first-hand why this decision is making so many people upset.

I'll report back soon with my findings! :)

One of the simple reasons I love F/OSS so much is that - in general- It Just F***ing Works(tm). Today, for the first time in as long as I can remember using it, this has failed me quite miserably.

Part of my gift this year to all of my friends this year is an audio CD - a custom compilation of various holiday-themed music. One thing I'd love to be able to do is add CD-Text to the tracks, so that their players (if capable) as well as their computer - should they choose to import it so - will easily have the metadata already in-place, and the tedium of having to enter that information manually from the decoratively printed track-list is substantially eliminated.

Well, this is proving to be far more difficult than I thought it would be. Rhythmbox, my favorite music player, currently just does not support this functionality, though it is under development. I've also tried Banshee, which uses Brasero for its CD-burning functionality, and that also fails quite epically. Next up in my attempts was K3b, which correctly burned the CD, did not add the CD-Text as I wanted it to. (It would not display any metadata in Rhythmbox on my Fedora desktop, and also failed on both my stand-alone CD player and my mom's Windows XP machine with both iTunes and WMP.) Lastly, I searched on Google and found a way to do it with cdrdao, but that attempt also went quite unsatisfactorily:

Writing lead-in and gap...
ERROR: Write data failed.
ERROR: Writing failed.

Oh Great Lazyweb, is there a straightforward way to accomplish this feat? Or am I doomed to copy the songs to my dad's PC and burn them with Nero (which I really don't want to need to do...)? For the record, my burner is a Pioneer DVR-110D.

Thanks!

For a long time, I had been a user of Billy Cantrell's Clearlooks_Cairo-Curve GTK+ theme, and its elder non-Cairo equivalent before then. However, as the maintainer for its packaging in Fedora (as part of the "Big Pack"), I've become rather frustrated with the apparent lack of any upstream activity: The website has disappeared and no contact information remains. Much of my packaging was working around bugs in the theme, and making it forward-compatible in slight ways.

In lieu of just being lazy and continuing to patch it like mad, I've decided to fork it and create a new theme, called CurvyLooks, whose primary goal, while similar to the original in maintaining a Bluecurve-like color scheme, is to track modern Clearlooks features (such as Cairo and the current "Gummy" style), thereby aiding in keeping the desktop aesthetically-pleasing, especially over prolonged amount of computer usage.

The first release, affectionally called "I Hope I'm Doing This Correctly," doesn't contain much of a difference from the original by Billy Cantrell, but this will surely change in due time as cool features are added and modified/enhanced in Clearlooks.

The tarball is available from my webspace for download:
curvylooks-0.1.tbz2, along with a SHA1SUM file to verify that your download is correct.

A package for Fedora is currently mostly complete. It's already past 1 AM here, so I'm probably going to get that done tomorrow (...or later today as one might see it.) Now I will answer some questions that you may have in a pre-emptive fashion.

Q: What effect will this have on Fedora's "Big Pack" packaging?
A:I have emailed Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams (ivazquez, the previous maintainer of this package in Fedora) to see if he would like to take its maintenance from now on. Should he choose not to do so, I intend to maintain the gnome-theme-clearlooks-bigpack package through the entire Fedora 8 cycle; but it will probably be mostly bugfixes and whatnot. My intent, if he does not wish to continue its maintenance, is to retire it for Fedora 9+.

Q: Your Makefile sucks.
A: That's not a question...but it's probably very true. This is my first real attempt at being the so-called "upstream" for a project. While I have attempted not to commit the various mistakes I've learned as a packager that upstreams often do, this is my first major Makefile that hasn't been a simple gcc/g++ invocation. I'm still learning this stuff. Please bear with me.

Q: How can I help?
A: Any contributions are welcomed. Packaging, testing and bug-reporting, patching and fixing various aspects of it, etc. are all greatly appreciated.

Q: Okay...so how do I report a bug? How do I contact you?
A: Until I can get a mailing list properly setup, just post a comment to my blog here and I'll do my best to resolve the issue in a timely fashion.

Q: What dependencies does this have?
A: The only necessary dependency is a recent (2.12+) version of GTK+ and the Clearlooks engine.

Q: What other theming do you suggest?
A: I prefer this with the Tango icon theme and Clearlooks Metacity decorations, as can be noted from my comment in the README contained in the tarball. :-)

Q: You're stupid.
A: No; just insane.

Any other questions/comments/fixes/whatever should be posted as a comment here. Thanks.