I’ve been having intermittent problems with sound not working. Usually restarting (ie, killing) PulseAudio has done the trick but today it was even worse; the sound hardware mysteriously vanished from the Sound Settings capplet. Bog knows what’s up with that, but buried in “Sound Troubleshooting” I found “Getting ALSA to work after suspend / hibernate” which contains this nugget:

The alsa “force-reload” command will kill all running programs using the sound driver so the driver itself is able to be restarted.

Huh. Didn’t know about that one. But seems reasonable, and sure enough,

$ /sbin/alsa force-reload

did the trick.

That wiki page goes on to detail adding a script to /etc/pm/sleep.d to carry this out after every resume. That seems excessive; I know that sometimes drivers don’t work or hardware doesn’t reset after the computer has been suspended or hibernated, but in my case the behaviour is only intermittent, and seems related to having docked (or not), having used an external USB headphone (or not), and having played something with Flash (which seems to circumvent PulseAudio. Bad). Anyway, one certainly doesn’t want to kill all one’s audio-using programs just because you suspended! But as a workaround for whatever it is that’s wrong today, nice.

AfC

I’ve been using GNOME 3 full time for over 9 months, and I find it quite usable. I’ve had to learn some new usage patterns, but I don’t see that as a negative. It’s a new piece of software, so I’m doing my best to use it the way it’s designed to be used.

Sure, it’s different than GNOME 2. It’s vastly different. But it is a new UI paradigm. The GNOME 2 experience was over 9 years old, and largely based on the experience inherited from the old Windows 95 muxed with a bit of CDE. There were so many things that the GNOME hackers wanted to do — and lots of things all the UI studies said needed changing — that the old pattern simply couldn’t support.

Still, a lot of people are upset. Surprise. Most recently it’s been people running Debian Testing who just recently found that their distro has migrated its packages from GNOME 2.32 to GNOME 3.x. Distros like Ubuntu have been shipping GNOME 2.32 for ages; but it has been well over 2 years since anyone actually worked on that code. It’s wonderful that nothing has changed for you in all that time [a true Debian Stable experience!] but I think it’s a bit odd not to expect that something that was widely advertised as being such a different user experience is … different.

What I find annoying about these conversations is that if they had gone and bought an Apple laptop with Mac OS X on it they would be perfectly reasonably working through learning how to use a new Desktop and not complaining about it at all. But here we are admonishing the GNOME hackers had the temerity to do something new and different.

Installing

I went to some trouble to run GNOME 3 on Ubuntu Linux during the Natty cycle; that was a bit of work but I needed to be current; now with Oneiric things are mostly up to date. GNOME 3.0 was indeed a bit of a mess, but then so was GNOME 2.0. The recently released 3.2 is a big improvement. And it looks like the list of things that seem targeted to 3.4 will further improve things.

I’m now running GNOME 3 on a freshly built Ubuntu Oneiric system; I just did a “command line” install of Ubuntu and then installed gdm, gnome-shell, xserver-xorg and friends. Working great, and not having installed gnome-desktop saved me a huge amount of baggage. Of course a normal Oneiric desktop install and then similarly installing and switching to gnome-shell would work fine too; either way you probably want to enable the ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 PPA.

Launchers

One thing I do recommend is mapping (say) CapsLock as an additional “Hyper” and then Caps + F1 .. Caps + F12 as launchers. I have epiphany browser on F1, evolution on F2, my IRC client on F3 and so on. Setting up Caps + A as to do gnome-terminal --window means you can pop a term easily from anywhere. You do the mapping in:

    System Settings → Keyboard Layout → Layout tab → Options...

and can set up launchers via:

    System Settings → Keyboard → Shortcuts tab → "Custom Shortcuts" → `[+]` button

(you’d think that’d all just be in one capplet, but anyway)

Not that my choices matter, per se, but to gives you an idea:

That means I only use the Overview’s lookup mechanism (ie typing Win, T, R, A… in this case looking for the Project Hamster time tracker) for outlying applications. The rest of the time it’s Caps + F12 and bang, I’ve got GEdit in front of me.

Of course you can also set up the things you use the most on the “Dash” (I think that’s what they call it) as favourites. I’ve actually stopped doing that (I gather the original design didn’t have favourites at all); I prefer to have it as an alternative view of things that are actually running.

Extensions

People love plugin architectures, but they’re quite the anti-pattern; over and above the software maintenance headache (evolving upstream constantly breaks APIs used by plugins, for one example; the nightmare of packaging plugins safely being another) before long you get people installing things with contradictory behaviour and which completely trash the whole experience that your program was designed to have in the first place.

Case in point is that it didn’t take long after people discovered how to use the extension mechanism built into gnome-shell for people to start using it to implement … GNOME 2. Gawd.

Seeking that certainly is not my recommendation; as I wrote above the point of GNOME 3 and it’s new shell is to enable a new mode of interaction. Still, everyone has got their itches and annoyances, and so for my friends who can’t live without their GNOME 2 features, I thought I’d point out a few things.

There are a collections of GNOME Shell Extensions some of which appear to be packaged, i.e. gnome-shell-extensions-drive-menu for an plugin which gives you some kind of menu when removable devices are inserted. I’m not quite sure what the point of that is; the shell already puts something in the tray when you’ve got removable media. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. Out in the wild are a bunch more. The charmingly named GNOME Shell Frippery extensions by Ron Yorston has a bunch of plugins to recreate GNOME 2 features. Most are things I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole (a bottom panel? Who needs it? Yo, hit the Win key to activate the Overview and you see everything!).

My personal itch was wanting to have 4 fixed workspaces. The “Auto Move Workspaces” plugin from gnome-shell-extensions was close (and would be interesting if its experience and UI were properly integrated into the primary shell experience), but the “Static Workspaces” plugin from gnome-shell-frippery did exactly the trick. Now I have four fixed workspaces and I can get to them with Caps + 1 .. Caps + 4. Hurrah.

You install the plugin by dropping the Static_Workspaces@rmy.pobox.com/ directory into ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/, then restarting the Shell via Alt + F2, R, and then firing up gnome-tweak-tool and activating the extension:

    Advanced Settings → Shell Extension tab → switch "Static Workspaces Extension" to "On"

Hopefully someone will Debian package gnome-shell-frippery soon.

Not quite properly integrated

Having to create custom launchers and fiddle around with plugins just to get things working? “Properly integrated” this ain’t, and that’s my fault. I respect the team hacking on GNOME 3, and I know they’re working hard to create a solid experience. I feel dirty having to poke and tear their work apart. Hopefully over the next few release cycles things like this will be pulled into the core and given the polish and refined experience that have always been what we’ve tried to achieve in GNOME. What would be really brilliant, though, would be a way to capture and export these customizations. Especially launchers; setting that up on new machines is a pain and it’d be lovely to be able to make it happen via a package. Hm.

AfC

Updating today, suddenly a whole bunch of icons are broken; GNOME shell was presenting everything with a generic application diamond as its icon. Bah.

I noticed gnome-icon-theme was one of the packages that bumped. It turns out that package is now only a limited subset of the GNOME icon set and that you have to install gnome-icon-theme-full to get the icons you actually need. Bah², but now everything is back the way it should be.

AfC

The Network Mananger 0.9 series has made some changes which break current Pidgin. After I installed network-manager 0.8.999 Pidgin won’t connect, stalling with “waiting for network connection”.

Turns out there is a workaround in Pidgin: you can force it to ignore what it thinks network availability by running it as:

$ pidgin -f

There’s no GUI way in gnome-shell to edit a launcher at the moment, fine; The old “edit menus” trick didn’t seem to work either. So to do that manually:

$ cp /usr/share/applications/pidgin.desktop .local/share/applications/
$ vi .local/share/applications/pidgin.desktop

And change the Exec line to:

Exec=pidgin -f

It won’t take effect until the desktop recaches things. Reload gnome-shell by typing “r” in the Alt+F2 run dialog and you’ll be on your way.

I’m sure upstream will catch up with the Network Manager changes in due course but I can live without network availability detection for now and this gets me back online.

I’ve been using Empathy for instant messaging for a long time, but I still love Pidgin for IRC. Go figure. So two clients it is.

AfC

Federico writes that he’s recently discovered Raph Levien’s Inconsolata font and really liking it.

I likewise discovered Inconsolata not too long ago (it was packaged in Gentoo and I was really pleased to discover it also available in Debian), and have been using it as the constant-width font in Quill and Parchment for program listings in technical writing.

We all tend to get obsessive about things we like, and so of course I tried it as a terminal console font. Interestingly, after a brief consideration, I decided not to use it for terminals and gedit and such. Deja Vu Sans Mono is still the king for that, especially if you’re using Deja Vu Sans and Deja Vu Serif for the rest of your UI; it means that the visual consistency across your desktop is really awesome.

Inconsolata doesn’t have anything even remotely close to the kind of Unicode coverage you need in your full-time constant-width font, and when fontconfig does a fallback it looks awful because Inconsolata’s metrics are so different from others. That’s all ok; Inconsolata is meant for program listings, and looks incredible on paper.

Anyway, Federico noted that bold didn’t work when specified as a FontDescription, it doesn’t come up bold me either when I tried to do so via a bold PangoAttribute. But if you use Wouter’s Specimen, it shows up fine (on an Ubuntu box, anyway):

So there’s a bug in our stack somewhere.

AfC

Update

Or not. I just reread the JavaDoc for the FontDescription constructor, and lo and behold relearned what I wrote there in the first place. To get bold Inconsolata you just need to use a ',' in the right place:

    desc = new FontDescription("Inconsolata, Bold 8.0");
    ...

and my Cairo drawing code on screen in a XlibSurface shows bold. Great.

But nothing is ever simple. I ran the same drawing code out through to a PdfSurface, and no bold. What the hell? There’s a bug in our stack somewhere. {sigh}

In my original post, I misattributed Specimen… it’s written by our very excellent Wouter Bolsterlee, uws on IRC. Sorry!

We recently upgraded a number of systems, and after a few days the (previously happy GNOME users) started to notice the dialog buttons were all lacking their icons. How did that break? At first I assumed it was a bug in Canonical’s then pending Linux release, “Karmic”. But the problem didn’t go away, and suddenly I noticed a fair bit of email and bug traffic about the issue.

It turns out that someone removed the icons on purpose!

It didn’t attract that much attention at the time, but this setting was changed by the small group who maintain GNOME Control Center. They claimed that text-only interfaces were better. Hm. That doesn’t seem right, but interesting choice on their part. Fine. So you start hunting around in System -> Preferences to find the place where you can return your GNOME desktop to normal.

There isn’t one.

The usability of icons

In the GNOME community, we’ve gone to immense effort over the years to get people to use the proper stock GTK icons in menus and buttons so that the user experience is consistent across applications. They’re a significant cue that aids navigation. Meanwhile non-GNOME applications poorly ported from other platforms often violate this consistency (Eclipse {cough}). So suddenly lacking icons the entire desktop looked ghetto.

The whole debate about what the user experience should be was an interesting one, but it seems a user experience change of this magnitude qualifies as just the sort of thing we don’t do to the huge communities of people using our Desktop during a stable release series. We have GTK 3.0 and “GNOME 3.0″ coming up, and surely those would have been the appropriate contexts to propose such change, and the right place to trial landing it.

The part that really puzzles me, though, is that after the people who made this change were (politely) asked if they could point to the usability research that makes them think that text only menus are better, they (politely) replied with reference to a respected source in HMI design, Jared Spool. Reading that page it indeed says that text only is better than icon only. But right before that, however, he indicates that the combination of icons-and-text is more usable than text-only, with the further emphasis being that consistent positioning (ordering in menus) of those illustrative aides being what really what matters. Which seems to make it strange that text-only was just rammed down users’ throats.

Find out what’s broken and fix it

That they changed something is NOT the issue; at the end of the day it’s the people who do the work and write the software who set the agenda. But something this widespread seems like it ought to have been discussed on the usability and accessibility lists. And that’s the problem; there’s no mechanism requiring that.

It’s not the GNOME Control Center hacker’s fault that this became such a sore point for the rest of us; they were in a position to change something they wanted to change and so they did so. That’s just another day in Open Source land. But in GNOME there’s nothing that enforces the GNOME Human Interface Guidelnes. If a change like this had been proposed as a change to the HIG and if following the HIG was mandatory then clearly people would have had a good focused discussion about user experience, we could have come to a consensus (or “Usability Team” could have made a decision), the HIG documents would have been patched as a part of that, and then we could all get with the program.

The GNOME “Release Team” puts new module proposals through hell to be accepted as a part of GNOME, with endless discussions about what the user experience will be. Libraries underneath the desktop work incredibly hard to maintain API and ABI compatibility across releases. We try to remember that corporate IT departments just want gentle improvement between their upgrade decisions, rather than having to deal with a wrecking ball every six months. So we all know the importance of not screwing the user around.

But unless we find a way to apply the same rigour to maintaining UI standards like we do to managing the internal technical aspects of our platform, it seems we’re doomed to keep breaking the consistency of our users’ experience (and more to the point, jerking the chain of all the people who work hard to install and support the systems that our users run). How to do that while still enabling people to innovate is the hard part, but surely requiring people to follow the HIG and making that document the heart of user experience debate would be a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile, lets fix your desktop:

Workaround: users

The Control Center hackers removed the “Interface” tab from gnome-appearance-properties which is a shame since it would have been a lovely place for the user to say whether or not they wish icons in their menus and buttons.

It was pointed out that this is all still controllable by the user… by changing GConf settings. I think most of us would agree that is the very definition of what normal users aren’t expected to be doing.

The GConf keys are:

/desktop/gnome/interface/buttons_have_icons

and

/desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons

So to fix your desktop to be consistent with previous GNOME releases, you need to run:

$ gconftool-2 --type bool --set /desktop/gnome/interface/buttons_have_icons true
$ gconftool-2 --type bool --set /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons true

You’ll definitely need to repair your system like this if you’re working in applications such as Inkscape that have huge numbers of items in their menus; they become really difficult to tell apart if you don’t have the pictorial aides to help you identify the action you’re looking for.

Workaround: code

It turns out GtkImageMenuItem has a new property "always-show-image" for really important icons, ie where “the menu item would be useless or hard to use without it”. The idea is that application programmers using GTK manually need to call this for all the menu items where the icons is really important and you actually want the icon shown in the menu item (Given that you have to go some trouble to construct a GtkImageMenuItem rather than just a normal GtkMenuItem, I would have thought that that emphasis would have been a given. Alas). I just added a setter to java-gnome:

    quit = new ImageMenuItem(Stock.QUIT);
    quit.setAlwaysShowImage(true);

There are also GtkSettings "gtk-menu-images" and "gtk-button-images" which can be used to set the property globally in an application programatically or via .gtkrc:

    settings.setMenuImages(true);
    settings.setButtonImages(true);

Judging by the howls of protest, not too many people had noticed the importance of these properties, and so no one was setting it in their code. Assuming that the new default is likely to stand in the GNOME >= 2.28 era, then indeed we’ll all have to be doing this a lot.

Setting defaults

Thinking about this from the perspective of a bindings hacker and sometimes application developer, it all makes me realize the importance of exposing setters for properties, and calling setters even when the value you are setting is the default. It’s tempting to think “oh, I don’t need to call that method, it’s set by default”, but as episodes like this demonstrate, relying on defaults isn’t very reliable.

AfC

I had to get a mobile broadband gizmo this week. It’s something I’ve been avoiding (not having internet access while sitting at a cafe by the beach is a feature, not a bug), but I need it for a current client. After advice from one of my colleagues that “3” (one of the carriers here and the first that did 3G digital phones in Australia) was reliable and, more importantly, that their device worked with Linux, I went and picked one up along with a prepay SIM.

3′s offering has two devices at the same price right now; the Huawei E160G and the ZTE MF627. I thought my friend had the latter and so bought that one. Big mistake.

E160G Bit older works great	MF627 Brand new doesn’t work

Do not get the ZTE MF627 device if running Linux. Stay away from it. Even after trying the usb_modeswitch hassles, it still does not present as the device as a GSM modem like it is supposed to. Tried it on two separate laptops; one running Gentoo, the other with Ubuntu’s “J” version on it. Spent the better part of a day researching and debugging the issue, but no joy on either. One person in London claims to have a similar device working, but comparing their lsusb and dmesg output, I’m not convinced the electronics in the one available here were the same; after doing a mode switch the miniSD adapter presents, but not the modem. Anyway, sure, maybe someday someone will figure out how to make it work here, but that’s not right now.

Even worse, people writing in places like Whirlpool cite chronic quality problems with ZTE devices. Clearly this is something to avoid.

I took the thing back to the store the next day and finally managed to get a refund which I promptly used to buy their other device (why they couldn’t just do an exchange was as puzzling to the poor guy in the store as it was to me. Whatever; they kept him on the phone for almost an hour while the corporate drones he had to call for permission made up their minds that it was ok to give me my money back).

So home I went with a Huawei E160G (which is what Peter had) and it worked perfectly, right out of the box, literally. Plugged it in, device properly recognized by USB subsystem and, after adding a “mobile broadband” connection with NetworkManager 0.7, it immediately started working. Pretty amazing.

You need to have the PPP stack built into your kernel and pppd installed (once upon a time we all had that, but most of us haven’t needed to do point-to-point over a dialup modem for years, so if you’re running a modern system with a custom Linux kernel you might not have it). The relevant kernel modules are “ppp_async“, “usbserial“, and “option“.

So a big hooray to the NetworkManager team and all the people working on the drivers that made this magic work. That NetworkManager seamlessly handles all the PPP configuration and dialing is brilliant.

Neat connection active icon.

And as for the lovely staff in the store, don’t let them tell you that their service doesn’t work on Linux — but do get a device that does.

AfC

While at linux.conf.au a few weeks ago, my laptop decided to blow. It had been twitchy with suspend and resume for about a day, and then Tuesday, not 48 hours until I was scheduled to give the GTK & GNOME tutorial, the thing quite petulantly decided to stop booting. No POST. Nothing. Zap.

Eeek!

Now, laptops breaking are nothing special, and I do keep fairly regular backups. So I wasn’t that concerned about data loss. But in so far as the live-action style tutorials I give are less about formal presentation slides (though I do have lots of those as backdrop) and instead more “everyone gather around and watch Andrew play in his happy place”, suddenly losing my development meant that actually coding live in front of people was looking to be a bit of a problem.

My current laptop is from ASUS, and I’ve been very happy with it. That it fried, ok, fine whatever. But as we were now in Hobart, Tasmania I had a real problem. I needed a mainboard replacement. Fast. ASUS has service centres in Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne. But not Hobart.

Several people offered to lend me a laptop “for the presentation” which was lovely of them, but given that it wasn’t just me playing a slide deck but rather me needing my full development stack on board such a machine — and more to the point, me needing my system so I could get back to real work during and after the conference — my option space was very limited. Indeed, it took me all of about 3 seconds to realize that I was going to be on a flight (to Melbourne, probably) in about 90 minutes. Sure I could have couriered it and had it back in a “few days” but I patently did not have that kind of time.

Steve to the rescue

I was in the process of booking my flight out when Steve Walsh suggested that he might have a system I could use. At first it was borrowing one of the desktop machines they had around (yup, would have worked), but then he realized he might be able to lend me “the conference laptop”, which was a computer that Hewlett-Packard had donated to linux.conf.au a year or so ago. Josh wasn’t using it anymore, and Ben agreed I could use it. You guys are awesome.

As I was thinking about what I’d have to do to bootstrap and restore off of my closest available backup (on an SD card, but that’s a story for another day), I saw one of these lying on the table

and we suddenly had a very bright idea. Why not pop the hard drive out of my laptop and put it in that thing?

I had already considered putting my hard drive into the new laptop, but only for a brief moment. Even assuming it fit, I happen to have a very tightly tuned kernel and I knew was unlikely to have enough drivers to get booted on foreign hardware. Besides, the Linux installation on the new laptop was already running great.

But why not try putting my drive into Steve’s external USB enclosure? Would that even be possible?

Steve cracked his enclosure open and carefully extracted his drive. Then we started removing endless screws from my system and found our way down to the harddisk compartment and pulled my drive out:

To be honest, I would never have attempted such a thing, but Steve knew what he was doing (and more importantly, had all his tools handy). So, having taken the cradle off of my drive, we even more delecately then attached the enclosure’s logic board to my drive.

• Miracle #1: the connector from my drive fit the one in the enclosure.

(I gather that these things are “standardized” but still. The hardware you find in your average laptop is always wacky and weird. So I was pretty excited) With that done, we plugged it into the new system:

and to my supreme happiness,

• Miracle #2: the drive’s filesystems mounted to /media/disk

Hooray for the Linux kernel, HAL, the GNOME automounter, Nautilus, and everything else that made that work.

And then, even better,

• Miracle #3: whatever it was that took out my laptop’s mainboard did not zorch my hard drive.

Hooray! My data was all ok!

A little fiddling about to make sure there was now a user andrew with a matching UID on the Ubuntu system, and then, very simply:

$ rsync -av... /media/disk /home/andrew

Outstanding.

So thanks to the help of Steve and the others, I had my /home on this new system. And one of the magic things about the GNOME Desktop for the last few years has been them safely writing down everything you need to run, so pretty much instantly I had my happy place back.

The data, at least.

Comparing distros; comparing laptops

The one problem I still faced was that the system in hand was not configured as a development machine. I had to work out what the appropriate packages were for all the different bits and pieces I was accustomed to having.

One thing I really like about Gentoo is that they clued in long ago that disk space is cheap and that things like .h files don’t take up that much room. So when you install a package on Gentoo you get development tools, header files, debug symbols [if so configured], compilers, documentation, the works. I had forgotten that Debian and Debian derived systems like Ubuntu do not install all the development libraries and tools. So I proceeded to tear my hair out for over a day wading through endless package lists trying to find what I would need to get development headers and the various tools necessary to build software (the morning of the tutorial I discovered the laptop didn’t have any man pages. What the hell?)

Granted, such things are essentially trivialities, and I accept that they were the sort of thing that one runs into when working on a new system. No big deal. Sure I could easily have built a Gentoo system in less time, but it’s not my machine and in any case I was enjoying the learning experience.

Far more interesting was living on a new distro for a few weeks. It was nice to experience all this “polish” that I’ve heard people going on about, and I was indeed duly impressed. After a while, though, I started to notice all kinds of little changes that Canonical has made to the Desktop that are really cool, but which have not been contributed back upstream to GNOME. That bothers me a little bit, but I’m hopeful that in time this sort of practise will fade in favour of them working more closely with the upstream projects they are using.

Meanwhile I also got to trial a new laptop brand. I gotta say I was really impressed with the build quality, robustness, and power efficiency of the HP corporate laptop line. This one is a couple model-years old, but I was able to have a few good chats with Bdale Garbee about it and he walked me through their current line up. After this experience I can definitely say that we will be getting HP laptops in the future.

Drove me nuts having a different keyboard layout to deal with for a few weeks. And having just about spent enough time on it to get it in my fingers, now my laptop is repaired and I’m once again mistyping everything… :)

Again, thanks to Steve who totally saved the day. And thanks to everyone anywhere who ever contributed to all the wonderful software that made the transfer from one system to another miraculous — and easy.

What about next time?

So what I have I learned?

I travel a huge amount, and having my laptop blow up is clearly something I need to be more prepared for. Remote backups are still necessary, of course, and the SD card I carry around with more or less continues snapshots of my critical files is also clearly going to continue.

But it’s kinda obvious to me now that it would be a good idea to carry around an external USB enclosure with a hard drive big enough to back up my entire system — nice encrypted partition and all set, just rsync the whole damn thing. Disk space is cheap. Along with a boot partition holding a nice generic runs-everywhere kernel, that would be enough to not only recover from, but also boot from live the next time my computer fries.

AfC

Huge kudos are due to Cody Russell for having fixed one of the longest-standing bugs in GTK. 11 June 2001!

Cody only got involved in this issue recently, but he took the time to really dig into it, examine different hypothesises, and test like crazy. This was remarkable: it’s not every day you see someone wade into a bug that’s been open for over half a decade and with over a hundred comments, and then persist for over a year to get it solved.

Way to go!

AfC

I’m glad to hear that the release-team has decided to push ahead and approve Glib 2.14 and GTK+ 2.12 for the next GNOME release. Awesome!

One of the diseases that arises in group psychology is that sometimes it is hard to say “yes”. It looked for a while like people on one side or the other (or both) were going to flinch. I’m glad that didn’t happen. I know there was some proactive negotiation and give-and-take on the part of both the GTK hackers and of the release-team. Well done everyone.

AfC