This address is defunct

I’ve decided to move the content here to a shorter, more memorable address. This new address is http://linuxlemoner.wordpress.com/. I will soon be deleting the page here, so update your bookmarks!

Note: It used to be BrightLemon, but it turned out that was the name of a company in the UK doing web design on Drupal. Now there are a lot of similarities between web design and icon design. So I had to change it. Again.

Flat Icon Theme preview

The first preview of my (quite flat) icon theme (named Flat) is here. Only one icon for now – accessories-calculator. I hope you like it:

If you’re counting the buttons, there is supposed to be a pi button, and the red rectangle at the top is a solar panel, for those who use battery powered calculators..
In this icon, I tried to capture the roundness of everything on a typical calculator – no sharp edges. The highlight on the buttons was the hardest part – until I remembered the stroke options. This was just done on an Inkscape 0.47 pre-release.

KDE 4.3 pushed to Fedora 11

I noticed Fedora 11 has pushed KDE 4.3 to the stable repository. This is great news from a functionality perspective, but not so great from a disk space perspective. Fortunately, I have plenty of disk space. It requires kdm and its settings though, and another helping called xdm (something which I haven’t heard in a long time). I’m wondering if that will ever get used though (I have gdm). Hopefully it should be a smooth ride! Another interesting dependency is eet, from the Enlightenment project. They are apparently going to release their E17 WM soon, with plenty of eye candy – are bets on to be better than KDE?

UPDATE: Actually, it also pulled in the KDE workspace. How nice! I’m running it now with Air, but I will still reinstall for Fedora 12 (my system is a mess! Currently the problem has been temporarily fixed by compiling applications myself and storing them in my home directory. I have modified various programs to do this correctly.) On a great note, I noticed that the Nodoka theme goes well with Oxygen! It’s not perfect, but it will do.

PulseAudio

It seems that PulseAudio still breaks your audio. After a few weeks of using JACK as a workaround, I finally decided to remove it, because there aren’t enough applications supporting it. You’ll need to get rid of gnome-bluetooth to remove it though, I don’t know why. Strangely, bluez (Bluetooth drivers) depends on it. But seriously, who actually uses Bluetooth? (I may be a little biased, since I have never used a mobile beyond using it properly, that is, making phone calls and texting.)

MurrineDark 2

This is an improved version of the original MurrineDark theme, based on the default theme of Ubuntu Studio. This improved version includes an Openbox theme (GlossyEvil) and three color variations (red, green and blue). Enjoy!

You can get it from MediaFire here.

Just to be safe, I’m tri-licensing this under GPLv3, CC-By-Sa 3 and my personal license in the About Page.

For those who don’t know, MurrineDark is my first GTK theme. This is an improved version.

For those using KDE, there is an almost equivalent colorsheme called “Silver and Grey”. It is available on KDE-Look.org here. I believe there is a different colored scroll bar though (black as opposed to gray).

On Recent and Soon KDE Releases

I’ve been experimenting with more KDE software recently. Looking at the website I can see a small advert for KDE 4.3. That encouraged me to take a look at the screenshots. My first response was “God, they’ve improved and learned how to make a good theme (unlike Plastik)!” Taking a further look, I saw that they had integrated a compositing manager. Now I’m not the compositing sort of person, but I did make note they did better than KDE 3.5 and 3.4. Also, KDE4 apps are more fully featured (look at ksudoku) than their GNOME counterparts (and there are more apps available). Now, given that GNOME has the Mono obstacle in its way to freedom, I wonder what will happen next. Perhaps it will be dropped from the GNU project (and they either make GNUstep or perhaps Xfce their DE). Perhaps the Mono evil will stop. But I don’t know, making KDE a very attractive choice to me. But once GNOME is conquered, they might go for KDE next. (That may be less likely, since that KDE explicitly notes in the About KDE dialog boxes that it isn’t controlled by one single entity, and Qt has no Mono binding.) I don’t know. Still, at the moment I have plans involving KDE 4.3, Fedora 12 and a CD.
By the way, Mono sucks and is very dangerous – have you seen what they do? I’m glad Fedora is cleaning it up in F12.

Oops…

Oops, I apologize for the recent lack of posts. To make it up, here’s a historic icon set I did once (somewhat inspired by Silk):
SilkInspired
The image is a matrix of 16×16 icons. It compresses better that way. Just use GIMP to copy the icons you want into another image file.

I may also be updating MurrinaDark (perhaps with an Openbox theme!) soon.
What do you mean, Openbox sucks? It’s a good, almost vector (look at the theme files) WM. I know Enlightenment is the one for artists, though.

Fedora 11 upgrade

Hurray, I upgraded! Here follows a listing of the upgrade. This isn’t a tutorial.

The first step was to start PreUpgrade. That was done from the terminal. Following the wizard, I downloaded the packages and then rebooted.
Hitting a key to bypass the GRUB automatic boot, I selected the “Upgrade to Fedora 11″ option, at the top of the menu.
The rest was very simple. I don’t know why that just because I have FluidSynth to listen to MIDI files that I have to get the 350MB Fluid soundfont. What an “out-of-box” experience. I’ve always used a 4MB soundfont, which sounds very good.
The installations took 2 hours, and configuration (?) took 50 minutes. As I went down to watch some television, the installer silently rebooted into the updated system. Too bad I didn’t see the boot screen, but never mind.
Then I realised something. There were two copies of everything in PackageKit! I must have forgotten to clean up the repository. But with yum being similar to apt-get, I quickly guessed this was a cache problem and cleared the cache.
Finally I removed a few packages I didn’t want (the Solar packages).

The worst package system ever

Yes, this is a complaint. But it isn’t about RPM or APT, if you like those tools. I like apt-get and yum.

I hate Python’s distutils. What sort of package system doesn’t let you remove packages? I had to manually rm -rf the packages I installed, thanks to a helpful post I found listing the areas that they were stored (/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/, /usr/bin/ and /usr/share/). What a waste of time. Some people recommended I make an RPM and use the rpm tool to remove it, but I’m not keen on touching the very deep parts of package managers.

Fedora 11

Are you waiting for the new release? I certainly am looking forward to GNOME 2.26 and all the other extras included. At the time of writing, there are only 12 days left – just over a week! I am looking to upgrade to the release without making a CD, but PreUpgrade isn’t stabilized yet, much like Hardy Heron’s upgrader, which broke my entire system.