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How to restore GNOME 2 look to GNOME 3 desktop

If you don’t find the default GNOME 3 Shell appealing and would like to get back your GNOME 2 desktop, you can do it without any hassle.
It’s actually one checkbox – few clicks away. But a checkbox very well hidden by GNOME Shell designers.

Just click your name in the top-right corner and select “System Settings”. The system settings window will appear.

There select “System Info”. (Yes… System Info) and there select “Graphics” tab. (Yes… Graphics)

Now all you need is to switch ON the “Forced Fallback Mode” and relogin. Continued…

Posted in HowTo, Software.

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By Tomasz Sterna – 2 December 2011

Mer – What is it all about?

With the recent Mer Project announcement, there are a lot of people confused what Mer is about. Let me try to explain.

Mer picks up the idea of MeeGo Core, and provides a very stripped down, mobile devices oriented Linux distribution. But this distribution is vendor oriented. Not end-user oriented. Mer’s goal is to provide a base that vendors can build on and create end-user oriented products.

There are two kinds of vendors. Ones providing a “hardware adaptation” and ones providing “user experience”.

Hardware adaptation lies below Mer, and makes Mer run on a specific hardware. Let it be an Intel CPU based PC or Netbook or an ARM SoC based mobile device or any other esoteric hardware.

User Experience vendor provides a layer on top of Mer, interacting with a live human user. This may be the MeeGo Tablet UX, MeeGo Netbook UX, Plasma Active, Cordia HD, MeeGo IVI or any other User Interface.

This allows for many combinations and decouples the effort. Of course you can be both hardware adaptation and user experience vendor, building a complete Product.

Have fun in the spirit of openness.

Posted in Cordia, Maemo, Software.

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By Tomasz Sterna – 3 October 2011

Cordia Tab kernel tale

The Cordia Tab project has hit a major roadblock and it seems we are stuck.

I’ve spent a few months searching for a tablet device manufacturer in Shenzhen, willing to release the source of the Linux kernel used on the device. Finally the manufacturer of the Dreambook W7 tablet agreed to provide the source. So I got sample devices and started experimenting. I got MeeGo 1.1 to run successfully even using the binary kernel the Android runs on. So I decided to go public with the Cordia Tab project and get interested people around, waiting for the kernel source.

September 13th the news hit, that the manufacturer won’t release the kernel source and they are basically blackmailing us to either order a copious amount of the devices upfront or pay a few thousands USD “ransom” that will be returned after ordering even more tablets. Conditions impossible to meet for a community project with virtually no funding.

Searching for other manufacturers brought the same result as my previous attempts – every single manufacturer doesn’t care a button for GPL conditions and keeps the modified Linux kernel secret. Little wonder, as even giants like Dell fail to comply.

We cannot use the binary kernel provided for the Android build, as it lacks crucial features like devtmpfs and cgroups support. More importantly it locks us from any future upgrades – we need to be able to forward-port features to newer kernels.

Well… I will keep looking for the hardware, but for a moment I just got back to working on Cordia HD software, waiting to see what the future would come up with.

Posted in Cordia.

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By Tomasz Sterna – 26 September 2011

Ayatana AppMenu under openSUSE

A lot of Ayatana components are already packaged for openSUSE in GNOME:Ayatana OBS Project. There is one missing piece there though. Appmenu for GTK+ requires patched GTK+ and openSUSE:Update brought a newer, not patched version, so appmenu-gtk with indicator-appmenu does not work.

I branched the updated GTK+ to my OBS project and ported required changes. After updating my GTK+ with freshly built one AppMenu started working. Mandatory screenshot follows.

Continued…

Posted in openSUSE.

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By Tomasz Sterna – 4 May 2011

Home directory encryption++ under openSUSE

While setting up a new laptop I decided it’s finally time to encrypt my $HOME.

I don’t want to encrypt the whole /home partition, because I don’t like to watch the boot process of my computer waiting for the moment it wants to mount it and asks me for the disk encryption password. Then wait some more and enter the user password. I want to use just one password for both and let the login process do the magic for me.

Actually getting this setup under openSUSE is as easy as going to YaST -> User management -> Your user -> Edit -> Details and checking “Use encrypted home directory” checkbox. But I didn’t go this way for three reasons:

  • I wanted to have my encryption key on a separate device (explanation at the next paragraph)
  • I wanted to have a strong grip on what is going on under the hood in case of emergency (ie. system crash recovery)
  • The automagic GUI simply did not work in my case ;-)

My laptop has an MMC reader, so I wanted to utilize Jaervosz idea of having disk encryption keys in my pocket every time I need to leave the computer unattended. This gives a very good physical keys analogy. Also might be useful in countries you are required by law to reveal your password to certain services. It’s easily verifiable that you gave the real password by logging to the machine. But you cannot be expected to reveal key file content of the MMC that got “damaged” or lost. (Of course it’s crucial to have a backup of the MMC content in some safe place.) I use a small (256MB) and quite fast (Class 4) MicroSD card I had spare left after a mobile phone.

Let’s start with an easy bit and encrypt swap first. I’m not that paranoid to fear of data leaking through swap, but this gives a nice checkpoint before following with putting your crucial $HOME data into a box you may be unable to open later. ;-)

Continued…

Posted in HowTo, openSUSE.

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By Tomasz Sterna – 27 April 2011