Translating Fedora into Romanian with Narro

You may remember when I talked is some older posts about how awesome Alexandru Szasz is, now here is the latest cool thing he is up to and which I think deserve recognition: he just added Fedora in his web-based translation tool, Narro, for translation into Romanian:

Just for kicks, I translated about 100 Fedora strings and it was a snap (well, I have already used the tool, translating for Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org). There is an initiative to get the Romanian community involved in this and maybe (just maybe, it is early to say) get something ass-kicking for F10 (not that hard, the translation is currently at 39% from about 15000 stings).

In a somewhat related matter, I dis a "fedora translation" search on Google and got amused by the sponsored link shown at the top of the page (the one on yellow background). I guess that's so-called "friendly competition"...


And jumping to an unrelated matter (is it really unrelated?) that's today's counter:

Just a few more hours...

I am not a fan of their music, but when when I learned about the second album released by NIN under a CreativeCommons license, I fired up by BitTorrent client to download and see what's about it.
But starting the client activated the seeding for my previous uploads, with an interesting surprise:

Guys, stop downloading the pre-release ISOs, those are ooold... the real deal is going to get live in a few hours, just wait a bit. Or, if you can't stand the heat, use a leaked torrent, they are all over the place, but make sure to verify the SHA1SUM before installing... (me taunts my buddy who refuses to use a leaked torrent and tries to find an unprotected FTP and continues seeding the previews, they will get yum update'd tot he final version).

---

Oh, and I didn't forgot (yet):

Tuca

There is and on-going meme on the Romaian "blogosphere" and I am going with it: Marius Tuca is an onanist. That is very clear from his recent article.

For my English readers: the guy is a well known Romanian journalist (written press and TV) who recently published a piece where he calls the Romanian bloggers "onanists", here is my translation of a quote from the above-mentioned article: "...Romanian bloggers are nothing else than worms who got to the surface without having something to say, ready to flood the space with banalities and originalities known and told by everyone, in a common masturbation..."

---

In unrelated news, I keep counting down:

Photos of people

Is not hard to imagine cool stuff we can do with photos of people, see gregdek's idea about hackergotchi stickers, the old call for photos by Mo to promote spins, or a couple of ideas from me (Anaconda slides or fp.o front page banners), you know, things which could "emphasize the human nature of Fedora and the people behind the project" (he, he).

But we have a big blocker: lack of such photos... photos of Fedora contributors and enthusiasts which we allow us to use their photos (the approval part is very important).

So here is an idea: next week Fedora 9 release parties will gather all around the world a lot of right people in the right mood, so get your cameras, get approval from the subjects and let the photos flood. I am sure we can find crafty way to put them to good use.

---

Even if you are feed-up with my countdown, I still continue:

I find amusing how people think I may be going to marry, shave my beard or get a better job... not gonna happen, keep trying :p

Weekly Fedora Webcomic: Robots

Powering robots since 2005. 'Nuff said. Now bow to your robotic overlords.

If you noticed the date for this comic, yes, it was made in April and the next issue is also made in April (that one was made for the release week and I had to delay it) but, I promise, after that there is a surprise waiting...

Last week experimented with translations for the webcomic, without success which drives me to one of those two conclusions: either is to complicated to use PO files and translating directly from Inkscape is simple enough, or I have to grow the webcomic and improve its quality to become translation worthy, so back to simple SVG this week.

---

I didn't forgot about the mysterious countdown, here is the current count:

F10 Gears: Using some feedback

Before going to the meat of this post, here is a new instance of my mysterious countdown (the bets are still open):

---

After my last piece about colouring the Gears in an old paper style I got some interesting feedback (not sure if that was because what I did was good and stimulated people or because it was bad and prompted for corrections). Anyway, let's play a bit with the feedback:

Jude reminds me of the sculpting tool, one of the awesome features introduced in Inkscape 0.46, which I could have used instead of node simplification. It should be used in roughenmode:

To get something like this:


Greg is not happy with the amount of blur I used to soften the contours, and recommend either a different color for to just blur the edges:

For something like this:


Ryan points me to an alternate way to greate the paper-like texture, using the feTurbulence filter.
So I duplicated the background and got the the Filters dialog:

Here I applied a Turbulence effect:

Then color Matrix in Saturate mode to make it black and white:

And some Gaussian Blur to blend it into the image:


And here is the result, take the steps (original or alternate) you find useful for your own case:

Countdown to what?

I was so carried away with the idea of the Fedora 9 release countdown that I couldn't stop myself from creating a counter for a "personal" project (the counter is plain and boring: static images, without any scripting or autoupdate):

Now, obviously, the bets are open for what I am counting down to...

Why should I "fight" for desktop linux? or Has Red Hat betrayed me?

Sorry for the delay, this happens when the feedback is happening elsewhere , clashing with May Day and a weekend. (note: I expected a bit of controversy after the Desktop piece in my webcomic and was wondering about the silence).
As usual, Radu is strong and direct, he says "let's be honest: this is what a fanboy does when he doesn't want to admit the betrayal" (linking to the already famous official position from the Red Hat Desktop Team) but he also ask a question which I think deserves an answer:

"By the way, can you explain why should you fight for "Linux on the desktop", when Red Hat Inc. has stopped doing it?"

And the answer is simple as that: Because *I want* to run Linux on *my* desktop.

And, from what I know, there is a large number of other Fedora contributors who think the same, they want to run Fedora on their desktops and they want a first class experience doing so.
Of course, there is also a large number of Fedora contributors who are content (some are even happy) with running Windows, OS X or that other Linux distro on their desktop (even I know some) and that is their option.

Here is a short Q&A session expanding on the short answer above:

I am disappointed by the Red Hat's position about the desktop?
Sure. I use so-called "traditional desktop". I see the pluses and the minuses of Fedora in this role and understand the need of a large amount of work needed to improve it. And the need of a strong player (and $$$) behind this work.

I feel betrayed by Red Hat in this matter?
The (probably unexpected) answer is: No. You feel betrayed when you have expectations from some entity and see those expectations vanishing in the air. Well, at least in the last 5 years, Red Hat never talked about a frontal assault on the traditional desktop and all the official declarations were against it.

Do I think Red Hat is wrong with that position?
Yes. I think it is short sighted and in a few years will come back and bite them in the ass. But I also think I understand their reasons and can't provide a better solution (and isn't my business of finding one).

Should I care what happens with Red Hat?
To some degree: Yes. I am a Fedora user and a Fedora contributor, Fedora and RHEL are different distros, with different goals and audience. But Red Hat and Fedora are in a symbiotic relation, they will fail or succeed together. And I invested work, time, resources and emotions into Fedora.

I may be completely wrong in my analysis, but I think it is all about bang for the buck, spending your money in an efficient manner. And currently the best return of your investments in the Linux world seems to be on the server side.

Years ago when Red Hat choose to focus on RHEL and changed the old RHL into the Fedora "community", it was a huge outcry, betrayal accusations and flamewars on the entire Linux world. But so far it proved as the correct decision: it created a healthy company growth with a viable business model, which allowed them to expand and hire a lot of great hackers (and not only hackers) to work on various areas, including the desktop.

Desktop is hard, it is a money pit: Corel tried and failed, Linspire tried and failed, Xandros tried and failed, Novell is trying and does not look like succeeding, Ubuntu is still working as a charity and does not appear (so far, but it will come) to try and sustain itself.

Now Red Hat looks like is using the same strategy and focus on JBoss. Money invested there are expected to produce a healthy revenue stream which would allow them to hire even more hackers to work on wonderful things, including the desktop. And we have to take that and be happy with it, even if we wished to see Lunix commercials on TV or so.

Now to the "short sighted" part. While the move to the RHEL/Fedora combo may have proved as a success in terms of revenue, at the same time it acted as one of the primary factors contributing at the creation and success of its primary competition in the Linux world (despite all the collaboration in development, nice talks and Kumbaya singing, the distros are in competition).

And these days, not pushing the desktop is strengthening the competition. Desktop Linux is happening and it is happening elsewhere. And it is important for the server world because it builds mindshare. The desktop users of today are the decision makers of tomorrow - they will decide what to deploy in their corporations, and that most likely will be the server version of the distro they know from their desktop.

From my external point of view (which I acknowledged may be completely wrong) I can see an additional reason: corporate culture. Red Hat, as a corporation, seems to understand the server world well (as shown by the feedback from their customers) but not understand so well the consumer desktop (looking at some RH desktop initiatives: OLPC is a failure, going to Windows, RHGD has silently died, GNOME Online Desktop is a few RPMs in F9, but nothing in the Feature List, Mugshot is in the same boat as GOD). Usually is a god thing to stay with what you know and do it as best as you can, and Red Hat may be doing just that.

Weekly Fedora Webcomics: the Desktop

Do you remember the Fedora stickers kit I talked a about a few days ago? Here is an usage suggestion:

And in related news, my webcomic goes international! With baby steps, of course.

The first attempt was made by myself, I translated by hand the SVG (this is the advantage of having access to the source) and created a webcomic section on the Romanian Fedora community website.

On a strange coincidence, about at the same time lkundrak asked me for PO files, for proper translation, which make me to think of a proper solution. Then all I had to do was to remember I read a while ago about a piece by Andy about translating SVG, search for it and:

Create the English PO from the source SVG:

xml2po -a -o the_desktop.en-US.po the_desktop.svg

Create the Romanian PO from the source SVG:

xml2po -a -o the_desktop.ro-RO.po the_desktop.svg

Edit the translation (with gtranslator), save, create the Romanian SVG, export as PNG (with Inkscape) and publish it:

xml2po -a -p the_desktop.ro-RO.po the_desktop.svg > the_desktop.ro.svg

Now to get an infrastructure, to publish the source and the PO a few days in advance, to coordinate with translators, that is an effort. And I am not sure there is demand for it (and I lack the experience and time to set it up).

Note: making the SVG play nice with POs and translation required me to use some flowed text, a SVG feature not supported by Firefox 3 or EOG, so there are downsides.

F10 Gears: Colouring the Gears - Gears on Old Paper

After last week I took the initial gears and made them from solid gold, not is time to talk about the completely different approach, old writing on old paper, where we will work on the strokes.

So, back to the black and white gears:

If we set the stroke color and unset the fill color will get something like this, with overlapping contours, he will have to get rid of:


So select the gear (gears if we have more) suffering due to this unwanted overlap and convert the stroke to path:


The go to another gear which covers it, duplicate, select the duplicate and the former stroke and do a difference operation:


Repeat with all the gearc covering it until we get to something like this:

Then convert all the remaining strokes to paths.

Now we want the drawing to look rough. But it has a large number of nodes, it will take quite a while to edit them manually for the desired rough look, so, as usual, I will cheat and use an automatic simplify operation (shown at an increased zoom level):


Repeat for all your gears and get something like:


Now define a multistop gradient for the paper - light grown/yellow for old paper or dark blues if we want to go with blueprint (I have not decided yet about the way to go).


A multistop gradient is needed for ink too (not shown), and it has to have fitting colors but good contrast with the paper (like browns for old paper and light blue for blueprints). Apply the gradients:


Then add some texture to the paper: draw a random blob with the freehand tool, will it in a color similar with the background (but slightly darker or lighter), unset the stroke, simplify if needed and blur a lot:


Add some more until you are happy with the texture:


The images is still too sharp for an old drawing on old paper, so we will have to soften the focus. Select all the gears, duplicate, make the duplicate darker (black), apply some blur and decrease the opacity:


And this is all for now:


I still want to tweak this design further, I am researching for an additional effect which I am not sure how to achieve (yet): I want to make the paper look like it was folded (probably a combination of random shapes and blur).

Seven

After the latest issue of my webcomic, where I touched the Ubuntu release subject, I received a healthy amount of feed-back (I said you then, a bit of controversy is good) and the piece I thins stands out the best is this blog reply from Cypress:

Well, Cypress, I give you a 7 (seven) for the effort and for finding a good looking stock photo.

At a second thought, the "rpm hell" joke is so ooooold and the "old tractor" metaphor is wrong (a much better metaphor/joke on Fedora would be as a to new, unproven technology) that it make me think I was too generous with a 7, but I already said "seven" and "seven" is.

Fedora stickers kit

As for the Werewolf Romanian release party we produced locally a bunch of stickers I toyed with the idea to produce something similar but still different for Sulphur (most likely we will hold an event on 18 May).

My solution was to come with a "kit", an A6 adhesive paper with as many as possible Fedora graphics crammed on it (stickers suited for various things from USB sticks to laptops or buttons):

[PNG] [SVG]

The big advantage, as I see it, is that an ambassador (or any other Fedora enthusiast) can print them cheaply on A4 adhesive paper, cut it in 4 quarters and give them away in a "do yourself" style, where the receiver is supposed to cut itself the individual pieces:

[PNG] [SVG]

We have not printed anything yet, used the slippage of the release date as the perfect excuse to delay the work :p - so tings may change until 13/18 May.

Weekly Fedora Webcomics: 8.04

I was labelled as having a grudge, probably I will be called flamebaiter or troll, but I think a little controversy is healthy from time to time, so I won't censor myself and leave this cartoon online.
If my intention was to do cheap trolling, I would have used the word hardon somewhere in the dialogs, but I assumed the IQ of my readers is high enough so I don't have to go for obvious jokes.

PS: considering the feedback about unreadable text received after the previous issues, I kept the handfont font (for freedom) but I moved to ALL CAPS, hope it is readable enough (and updated the old webcomics too).

PPS: source is available in SVG, as always (open source webcomics).

KDE 4

I tried KDE 4 back at the Fedora 9 Beta, I tried it again at the F9 preview release and will try it again at the final release (I plan to have it on a bootable USB pen drive, along with a GNOME one at the event we will hold locally for the release). But every time I end my test run quickly, after a few minutes.

I understand that KDE fans and users should be happy with it, the KDE SIG guys did a wonderful job, it looks polished and close to the default KDE look and feel (long gone are the controversial, good or bad, days of Bluecurve, RHL 8 and unified look and feel).

But longer I try KDE, the more displeased I get and more committed to GNOME. It looks alien to me, it feels alien to me. Yes, the desktop looks shiny, but all my shortcuts, reflexes and habits are useless here. I could train myself (probably in at least a few weeks of pain) and heavily customize to get something familiar but is much easier to stay with my current choices. Which does not means KDE 4 is a bad desktop, it just isn't the best desktop for me.

F10 Gears: Colouring the Gears - Golden Gears

Last week I talked about drawing gears with Inkscape (for a Fedora 10 theme proposal, but not only), now it's the time for a promised follow-up: let' put some color on the gears.

I want to make the gears golden (or bronze, there is not much difference in the process) to express the value and at the same time match the intended steampunk style. The start is exactly where I left the image, black outlines on a transparent background:

The first step is to define the color, and metallic is not a color, the metallic look of a surface is given by light reflection, so we will use a multistop gradient (a gradient with more than two colors). For gold it should contain a succession of lighter and darker shades of yellow, maybe also a bit of orange, for bronze also yellows with a shade of green (copper oxidation is green), for steel it should contains greys, the chrome is also greys but more reflective (more contrast, from almost black to almost white), silver is less reflective grey and so on.
Here is my gold:


Then take one wheel and apply the gradient to it:


For a 3D look add a drop shadow (duplicate, make it black, move a few pixels down and right, move it under the wheel, add a bit of blur and maybe decrease the opacity):


The gear does not say on air, we'll put on a background, and I used the same golden gradient for the sake of simplicity, you can use a different one, maybe darker:


Add some more gears (all your golden gears). Note the usefulness of the drop shadow, without it it would be hard to set apart the gear from the background, now they are distinct objects:


To make the image more vivid (and because so looks the pocket watch I'm using as a reference, I add some steel gears. Start this by defining the gradient (multistop, greys, with a shade of blue):


And apply the gradient to some wheels:


Here is one trick to get some of the wheels richer, not that plain and boring: add a groove - two smaller circles, aligned to the center of the gear, filled with the same grey gradient, the larger in an opposite direction, the smaller in the same direction as the rest of the wheel:


Put the steel gears in the device (just take care to not couple steel gears with gold gears: steel with steel and gold with gold):


Now for some axles: small circles, made from gold, steel, ruby or sapphire (if you remember my attempt to cheat and put more blue). Do not forget the drop shadow and consider a white highlight:


Place the axles in the center of the gears and we are set:


But I often have a tendency to go overboard and will do now the same: add some screws holding the device. They are easy to do: create a steel circle, substract a rectangle to create the groove, add a darker steel rectangle, the bottom of the groove, rotate the screw to a random angle (we don't want all the screws to have parallel grooves, that would be repeating and boring), fix the gradient and add a drop shadow. Maybe a hole: a larger circle colored with the same gradient as the background but with an opposed orientation. (I increased the zoom level in this step for a clearer illustration)


Distribute the screws evenly (or randomly it you feel like too) and it's done:


Now wait for another follow-up, probably next week, when I will try to color is an old drawing on old paper or blueprint style.

Was she there, or wasn't she? Removing objects from photos with GIMP and Resynthesizer

Resynthesizer is a very cool GIMP plugin I have been playing with for a few days. It can be used for some "magic" effects: create seamless backgrounds, transfer textures from one image to another and remove objects from images.

The plugin is not installed by default, but is available on the website, with binaries for various OSes. In Fedora we have it already packaged, only a yum away: yum install gimp-resynthesizer.

I like its "remove objects" feature, which of course is far from perfect and works best on selected images, but is the kind of effect you see on movies: a few clicks and poof! instant coolness (in the same league with SIOX).

So open your photo with GIMP and draw a free selection (with the Lasso tool) around it:

Then apply the plugin: Script-Fu -> Enhance -> Smart remove selection...


If the case change the radius (just try some values) and leave it to work for a few seconds:


And admire the "magic":


Then you have only one thing left to do, wonder: Was she there, or wasn't she?:


If you want to get close to perfection, use the clone tool or the healing tool and remove the remaining artefacts, just don't try to use the photo as an evidence in a court of law or pass it as true photojournalism.

In reply to "Fedora + Creative Arts"

Jon talk about encouraging "creative" people to use Fedora and his ideas about achieving this.

Well, the answer is really simple: creative people are just normal people, they work in the same way as the other and the others, the main motivation is to see their work (on which may have wasted several hours) get used by people.

Look at desktop wallpapers as a perfect example: every graphics guy love to create wallpapers and to share them, a lot of people get into graphics by creating wallpapers. At the same time, of course we can have only one default wallpaper in a certain Fedora release, so the motivational factor for creating wallpapers is low.

The answer here is to provide a place where people can submit their unofficial wallpapers and have them exposed to a large number of users and at the same time a place where users can get a lot of wallpapers (in various styles, colors, formats) and find something fitting their own taste.

This can work either as a gallery hosted by the Fedora Project or as an aggregation of resources posted elsewhere by various authors. Either way, the graphics have to be discoverable and easily searchable.

Here is a cherry we could add on top, to increase even more the motivation from contributors: have as part of Fedora Weekly News a "wallpaper of the week" category.

Note: we have content hosted elsewhere and tagged, some examples: Flickr, deviantART, Fedora Forum, but they are not known enough, not easily discoverable and not tied to a central point, from where the users can learn about them (and all use proprietary services/hosting).

And I have not finished yet, there is another answer: the tools, which are not available or just not emphasised enough.

Here is one example about the tools: Inkscape is currently the star of FOSS graphic applications (and definitely the tools we use and love the most at the Art Team). However, the application is not included by default in any Fedora spin (not in Core, not in Desktop).

The answer I get when I ask about promoting the application to a spin? Usually none. Sometime I may get "create your own Art spin". Which, IMO, is just not good enough. It does not work for promotion, it does not work for attracting new people, it does not work as a selling point for us, it differentiate us from other distros in a negative way.

More webcomics

My plan was to try to produce webcomics on a weekly basis, but something happened and changed my plans: I was stuck almost all day long today without internet access (power failure, then hardware failure, ugly stuff) and as a consequence I got a lot of unplanned free time.

On top of that I received some news (which I somewhat expected) - over SMS, of course, as my net connection was down, from ajoian (we are planning an event) so I couldn't resist:

Now I promise, the next one will be next week (and I already have an idea for it).

PS: do you know all those comics come with sources? I leave to you the little quest of finding the sources, you may get even more goodies there :D

A lame webcomic

Jef talks about Fedora branded webcomics... well, this is something which I can resonate with, as I was thinking about about the same thing for quite some time. But I lacked the much needed impulse.

So here is a lame webcomic, made very quickly in a naive style and with a dull idea, feel free to hate it, but look at the concept and the format:

F10 Gears: Drawing the Gears

While I am still thinking about putting back some blue on the Gears theme proposal for Fedora 10 (and, of course, while counting down the few days remaining until the upcoming Fedora 9 release) here is a short howto about drawing gears, so anyone can learn to make them.

In fact drawing gears is not hard at all, I cheat and use an effect included in the recently released Inkscape 0.46 (available both in F8 and F9) Effects > Render > Gears:

A few parameters to adjust (with Live Preview enabled to see their effect in real time) and we get a toothed wheel:


Now add a circle:


And use the Align and Distribute dialog to align it to the center (I used here "e;Relative to: Biggest Item"):


Then substract the circle from the wheel (you may need to upgroup once, as the Gear effect greated the wheel as a group):


Now to create spokes. Add a rectangle and align it to the center:


Duplicate the rectangle and rotate it 90°:


Select both rectangles and rotate them freely:


Select everything and do an union:


For the middle of the gear create a small circle, align it to the center and do another union:


The hole for the axis is another circle aligned to the center and substracted from the wheel:


And the first gear is done!

Another gears coupled with it must have similar teeth, so use the Gear plugin and change only the number of teeth:


And do a complex mechanism:


You may want to increase the complexity further by adding some parallel gears, which may have their own parameters (as long as they are not coupled with the initial gears):


And that was all for today! Expect a follow-up (maybe next week) about coloring those gears.

Keyboard languages, language communities and national communities

I hate the the Keyboard Indicator applet on my Fedora/GNOME desktop.

My (physical) keyboard, as virtually all keyboards sold in my country (Romania), has an US layout. And I, as a large majority of people around, write without diacritics (ă, â, î, ş, ţ). Except in the cased when I really need diacritics or the euro symbol (€). So I have to change the keyboard configuration, and for my own use the "programmers" version of the Romanian layout (the default Romanian layout in Fedora) is the best: it is identical with the US layout, so the print on my keys remains usable and I get diacritics with AltGr+a for ă, AltGr+s for ş, AltGr+e for € and so on. Which is nice. But I still hate the applet.

As shown in the screenshot above, the applet display a text, "Rou" in my case, instead of flag icons. While I know the argument why the flags were replaced with text a long time ago and it make sense (flags are symbols for countries, which represent political entities, not languages and their use may get you into nasty nationalistic conflicts), I sincerely don't care. I want pretty pictures, my desktop to look nice, with icons on the panel, not with boring text. So the best option for me is to stay with one single layout and not use the applet at all.

I used to argue for the flags, as I believe we should grow up and get past those artificial issues, here is an example: using a Hungarian flag at a public event in Romania in 1990 was absolutely inflammatory, today we grew up as a community and people do not react seeing those flags displayed. But some happenings in the Fedora land made me see the issue from the other perspective and have a first hand understanding of why country-based communities are not such a good idea, so I have now something to put in balance.

I worked recently on a small graphic for the Fedora community of Moldova and I tried to find some way of collaboration with our Fedora Romanian community. I ended by not finding any solid bridge, as they have almost all the valuable content in Russian, but it was an invaluable opportunity for me to contemplate this strange animal: a tri-lingual website, with a short English introduction, a lot of Russian content and some Romanian content.

I wonder what is the purpose of such a website? People searching the web for Fedora content in Russian will land in a Russian website, people searching for Romanian content will land on a Romanian site. If they will open a forum, what's the point for an user to join that forum instead of going to a larger Russian or Romanian forum? This is, IMO, the best example for the futility of a country-based community.

But I still hate the keyboard applet and would prefer it to have flags

PS: And here is a pretty picture for the knowledgeable ones:

Sulphur, boldness, naked people

When talking about SULPHUR, the codename for the upcoming Fedora 9, and desktop themes, I may have give the wrong impression: that I consider the name so dull that is not possible to get some graphics related to it.
This isn't exactly true, I am not so unimaginative that I can't come with a cool (my own idea of cool) image. By the contrary: the first image in my head is about sulphur being the fuel of hell. I can see an image with rivers of molten, red, sulphur, something in the style of the Act IV (Hell) from Diablo II. You know, something that will make you to smell the hell.
But I fully know there are two problems with such an image: 1) it would be very hard to make it in an usable wallpaper and 2) it would be impossible to get a wallpaper acceptable as a default. And to make it fit the Fedora style...

A second idea about Sulphur themes come from the Book of Genesis: "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven." Imagine Fedora as the holy fire from Heavens, punishing the non-believers. A powerful (over-the-top) image but also not usable for the same reasons listed above.

I am a strong supporter of having a bold message sent by our graphics but at the same time I understand such imagery would be beyond bold and just not good. Naked people (of course, no full-frontal nudity) is bold but acceptable, while the molten sulphur from hell is too much.

Since I talked about naked people, I should expand more on that. Of course I don't argue about using naked people in Fedora themes, that would me just lame: it was done, repeating it is unimaginative. I am talking about this level of boldness: can you imagine we can come with something that bold in a release?
I have my doubts: we have a process based on consensus, trying to please everybody, which is pretty much a guarantee crazy ideas (either good or bad) will be filtered out. And even if the Art Team get on crack and go for a bold idea, ignoring all the inevitable negative feed-back, I suspect we would have to get on the same crack the Desktop Team and maybe even Red Hat's legal department.

I may sound obsessive about the naked people in Ubuntu themes, it was long ago, not in an official release and short lived, but I still find it a textbook example for an effective desktop theme as it delivered on at least 3 levels:

• notoriety: it was the early days, the distro was less known. It made people talk about Ubuntu and some even try it and discover that this Linux thingy is not that scary as they expected. Notoriety is essential: no use if you have the best product but nobody knows about it.
• image: it helped build the slogan "Linux for human beings" and the way it is perceived. Perception is just as essential as notoriety. (side questions: then other distros for what what are? for robots?)
• niche: it filled a niche. Yup, Linux is a niche operating system, it fill some niches (even it those niches are numbered in millions of users, they are niches). And one of the primary niches of Ubuntu is rebellious people - those that don't want to go with the crowd and stick it to the man. And how you can show how rebellious and anti-establishment you are than using images of naked people?

Now, can we learn something from that? Can we be bold enough? Think about it while counting down:

F10 themes: Gear - bringing back some blue

Here is one think I do quite often lately: I cornered myself in a situation from where I can't see a clear way out. I learned that in the end you have to find the solution on your own, but this time, being a problem of relatively public interest, graphics for Fedora, I hope somebody will care, I really need a view from the outside of my box.

The problem is: the Gears theme proposal for Fedora 10 as I see it is not blue and this is, in my opinion, a bad thing: a Fedora theme must contain blue (if not as the primary colour, at least as a secondary one) because blue is part of our identity (just as brown is part of Ubuntu's identity or green uis part of SUSE's identity).

What I don't want is a glossy and modern look, like the KDE look, not only because I want to avoid confusion with KDE but also because I search for a steampunk look and feel.

Now here are my ideas, for both current gears representation (golden and paper), please tell me where I am right, where I am wrong, maybe what different vision do you have:

Golden Gears

Here I got a simple idea: cheat (shamelessly).

• The quality of a watch (and probably any clockwork device) can be measured in the number of rubies it contains (ruby bearings), so add some rubies. Which are not that useful for me, as rubies are red/pink.
• Now to the real cheat: replace the rubies with blue sapphires, hopping people will not notice. But this does not look enough to me.
• Add some steel gears, the pocket watch I am using as a visual reference contains both bronze and steel gears.
• Instead of a grey gradient for steel, replace it with a blueish grey gradient
• Now, I feel it is still not enough and went over the top, with something is not a good wallpaper image: add a big blob of blue in the form of a vial (it may be also a blue stone) integrated in the device.
• Another over the top (and bad) idea is to add a blue electric discharge

See below:


Old drawing on old paper

I have a big problem with its current form, is brown ink on [very light] brown paper. Something reminding of Ubuntu. So far I have only a couple of ideas:

• Make the ink blue, keep the paper light brown. I am not sure the colours fit or that the iamge is blue enough
• An "inverted" graphic: make the paper blue (dark blue) with light ink. While it may be close to a blueprint definition, I feel it as a departure from the intial steampunk concept

See below:


And I am not yet talking yet about the next corner: the animated backgrounds (the change depending on the time of the day we have in F8 and F9).

Wile replying me on this topic, stay also focused on Fedora 9, which is around the corner:

Of themes, gears and pocket watches...

There are times when every bit of logic in your brain, every bit of past experience and every bit of common sense tells you to not do something and you still do it. In your personal life, in your professional life, whatever. Such is the case with me proposing the Gears theme for Fedora 10 and here are some reasons why:

• A release name should be first proposed, then cleared by legal and in the end voted by the community, slim chance to know the name so early. And a theme not related to the release name has a weak chance.
• As I see currently, Gears is not blue and this is a big problem, as I believe a theme for Fedora should be blue (I am working on that)
• Starting so early, is a good chance I will get out of steam until the important stages (Round 2-3). Effort dosage is important for motivation and work power.


• Talking about F10 themes now may damage F9, which should draw all the attention and also may be damaged by F9, which draw attention from it.
• Definitely I bore people and will bore them in the coming months repeating the same stuff all over again.
• If this isn't enough, I can add more: people stuff, politics, etc.

But even if your brain warns you against, ju just can't stop yourself, it looks like a match made in heaven and the only way is to go forward.

---

But now to less pathetic things: one of my main sources of inspiration and my most important visual reference is an old (at least pre-WW II) Swiss Omega pocket watch - it is broken currently (I should probably take it to a repair shop) but is complete and is a good shape to be used as a visual reference.

without handy access to a good camera
with good lenses, something
able to do quality macro photos,
why bother? crappy photos made with
may phone are just as good for a lame blog post

Of course this watch has a long history (it belonged to my grandfather) but I only know the recent part of it (like me, as a kid having a grudge against it and trying to break it: with magnets, rewounding the spring the wrong way, etc.)

Count with me: 22, ... 3, 2, 1, Fedora !!!

Now that the "official" release counter for Fedora 9 is live we can all make use of it:

To add it to your own website or blog just copy/paste the following code:

<script id="fedora-banner" type="text/javascript" src="http://fedoraproject.org/static/js/release-counter-ext.js"></script>

Translations in a lot of other languages are also on their way...
Spread the love, build expectation, show the count-down graphic.