Mailing List Archive

Gentoo theming during bootup
Hi all,

I've got some back-burner work on unified Gentoo theming for grub,
bootsplash, gdm/kdm [1]. (IOW, I spent a day doing research 2 months ago
and forgot about it until yesterday.) It's currently possible to have a
really awesome bootup, but it's quite a bit of work to configure and I
want to make it trivially easy.

I also share the opinion that we shouldn't go against upstream wishes
IRT branding, but if upstream encourages some fairly subtle branding
along with keeping their name visible, I'm for it.

This will help us update our "look" to catch up with a lot of other
distros I talk about in ideas.txt, found at [1], and make for an overall
slicker and cooler Gentoo desktop.

If anyone wants to help with design or turning stuff into working themes
for bootsplash, *dm, grub/gfxboot, etc, please email me. I don't have
time to do this by myself, and I've already talked to some people about
this but there can never be enough.

Any subsequent list discussions on this will occur on gentoo-desktop,
but I expect much of the collaboration to happen on IRC.

Thanks,
Donnie

1. http://dev.gentoo.org/~spyderous/splash/
Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
On Friday 07 April 2006 04:26, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> I also share the opinion that we shouldn't go against upstream wishes
> IRT branding, but if upstream encourages some fairly subtle branding
> along with keeping their name visible, I'm for it.

There's a thread in gentoo-core from 2004 with regards to branding and the
outcome was to refrain from it. I don't have a problem, when we do this for
live iso's, but generally I strongly dislike it. Users don't choose their
distro because of it, so it's just unnecessary bloat. And given that we tout
Gentoo a meta distribution, encouraging others to build on it, there's no
point forcing them to have to clean out the Gentoo brand, before they
actually can use it.


Carsten
Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> On Friday 07 April 2006 04:26, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>> I also share the opinion that we shouldn't go against upstream wishes
>> IRT branding, but if upstream encourages some fairly subtle branding
>> along with keeping their name visible, I'm for it.
>
> There's a thread in gentoo-core from 2004 with regards to branding and the
> outcome was to refrain from it. I don't have a problem, when we do this for
> live iso's, but generally I strongly dislike it. Users don't choose their
> distro because of it, so it's just unnecessary bloat. And given that we tout
> Gentoo a meta distribution, encouraging others to build on it, there's no
> point forcing them to have to clean out the Gentoo brand, before they
> actually can use it.

He said he wanted to make it easy, not forcing it. Or am I mistaken?

--
Kind Regards,

Simon Stelling
Gentoo/AMD64 Developer
--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
On Friday 07 April 2006 15:28, Simon Stelling wrote:
> He said he wanted to make it easy, not forcing it. Or am I mistaken?

How do you want not to enforce it? The last time¹ someone came up with
a "branding" use flag, some were in favor of, some against it.

Still, the basic question is: Why!? There's no benefit for the user, who will
choose whatever theming he wants anyways. Imho it's superfluous and therefore
wasted time. I for one favor to stick with that, what upstream provides.


Carsten


[1] http://tinyurl.com/o7dkc
Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
On Thursday 06 April 2006 22:26, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> I've got some back-burner work on unified Gentoo theming for grub,
> bootsplash, gdm/kdm [1]. (IOW, I spent a day doing research 2 months ago
> and forgot about it until yesterday.) It's currently possible to have a
> really awesome bootup, but it's quite a bit of work to configure and I
> want to make it trivially easy.

can you post the .xpm for use with grub-0.xx for me to check out ?

> I also share the opinion that we shouldn't go against upstream wishes
> IRT branding, but if upstream encourages some fairly subtle branding
> along with keeping their name visible, I'm for it.

grub-0.xx has no upstream theme ... unless you count like white text on a
black background "a theme"
-mike
--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Thursday 06 April 2006 22:26, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>> I've got some back-burner work on unified Gentoo theming for grub,
>> bootsplash, gdm/kdm [1]. (IOW, I spent a day doing research 2 months ago
>> and forgot about it until yesterday.) It's currently possible to have a
>> really awesome bootup, but it's quite a bit of work to configure and I
>> want to make it trivially easy.
>
> can you post the .xpm for use with grub-0.xx for me to check out ?

Don't have one designed yet, this is all still in the planning stages.

But gimp can trivially take any image, reduce it to 15 colors using a
smart algorithm and save as xpm so feel free to use whatever you want
till then.

>> I also share the opinion that we shouldn't go against upstream wishes
>> IRT branding, but if upstream encourages some fairly subtle branding
>> along with keeping their name visible, I'm for it.
>
> grub-0.xx has no upstream theme ... unless you count like white text on a
> black background "a theme"

Exactly, that's the point. Places without themes are great places to
provide ours, since we aren't really overriding anything.

Thanks,
Donnie
Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>> can you post the .xpm for use with grub-0.xx for me to check out ?
> Don't have one designed yet, this is all still in the planning stages.

There's one available at http://www.schultz-net.dk/grub.html (scroll
down pass the Debian/Slackware ;) ).

--
Krzysiek Pawlik <nelchael at gentoo.org> key id: 0xBC555551
desktop-misc, desktop-dock, x86, java, apache...
Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
On Friday 07 April 2006 10:31, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> Still, the basic question is: Why!? There's no benefit for the user, who
> will choose whatever theming he wants anyways. Imho it's superfluous and
> therefore wasted time.

highly suspect statements

these states are all quite common ... trying to make some kind of supposition
as to which is the most common is a waste of time

in my experience, from the many forms of Gentoo communication (real life,
mailing lists, irc, forums, etc...):
- quite common for people to be lazy and just use the default
- quite common for people to change the default to their own thing
- quite common for people to use just Gentoo themes where they can

as long as people include Gentoo themes in packages for people to select, we
should have pretty good coverage of everyone's needs
-mike
--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
On Saturday 08 April 2006 00:52, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> highly suspect statements
>
> these states are all quite common ... trying to make some kind of
> supposition as to which is the most common is a waste of time

No. It's my opinion. Respect it, please. You don't have to agree.

> in my experience, from the many forms of Gentoo communication (real life,
> mailing lists, irc, forums, etc...):
> - quite common for people to be lazy and just use the default
> - quite common for people to change the default to their own thing
> - quite common for people to use just Gentoo themes where they can
>
> as long as people include Gentoo themes in packages for people to select,
> we should have pretty good coverage of everyone's needs

Well, if we end with some stuff not themed, some stuff themed, having it
applied by default as well as non-default, maybe even different looking
theming depending on the package, the result will suck.

Is it that hard to define a few goals, instead coming up with "ha, let's do
Gentoo themes" without having a clue about the conditions, what it should
look like and what the side-effects are!?


Carsten
Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> On Saturday 08 April 2006 00:52, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>> highly suspect statements
>>
>> these states are all quite common ... trying to make some kind of
>> supposition as to which is the most common is a waste of time
>
> No. It's my opinion. Respect it, please. You don't have to agree.

My opinion is that *must* be the default theme everywhere in Gentoo:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/images/6/63/Gnome-jamapii.2006-04.jpg

If not, I'll get pretty angry, so you'd better start fixing
KDE/Gnome/boosplash/grub etc. soon! :P

--

jakub
Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Carsten Lohrke <carlo <at> gentoo.org> writes:

> How do you want not to enforce it?
Have you actually read the proposal? It's quite sensible and is entitled:

"Proposal: Integrated boot themes on LiveCDs and installations"

I suppose that the themes would be defaulted to on the LiveCDs and optional
for regular installations - typical emerge-if-you-need-it situation.

> Still, the basic question is: Why!?
Because it may lead to the creation of well thought out and integrated themes
for several programs that are able to use them? Including more robustness
and/or functionality similar to the one that the gfxboot provides?

> There's no benefit for the user, who will choose whatever theming
> he wants anyways.
I for one would be delighted if there was such new set of themes. I'd use
them right away. To be honest, I tend to match my bootsplash theme with the
one that's used on the current LiveCD. Somehow I feel I need that when people
come and ask me "What Linux distro do you use?". If it happens that they ask
when I boot my laptop they can watch the nice graphical progress (bootsplash)
and finally my gdm theme. Having a Gentoo theme here helps to associate the
theme with the distribution. Nobody forced me to do this. I just like it :)

> Imho it's superfluous
To be honest, there are not so many themes out there that are worth
installing. A good set of Gentoo themes is one of the best ideas
I've heard for a long time. (!)

> and therefore wasted time.
I understand your point. But are you sure that spreading the "negative energy"
and killing the idea is best? No progress is done without breaking rules
and working against the inertia of habits.

> I for one favor to stick with that, what upstream provides.
I guess you should be able to leave with that. No one would "force" you to
switch the splashes/background/themes unless you wanted it.


And while we are at it, is there any chance that the bug #124920
could be taken into account while creating new gdm theme?

Regards,
Wiktor

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
> Having a Gentoo theme here helps to associate the
> theme with the distribution. Nobody forced me to do this. I just like it :)

In his blog (http://www.livingwithpenguins.blogspot.com/), Steven O.
writes in the "Fresh WORKING install of Gentoo":

> One of the coolest things about the Fluxbox guide is that the guy
> that wrote it included all of the Gentoo theamed items, so after
> you get it setup you can have a *true Gentoo box*.

Guess I'm not the only one... :-)

Regards,
Wiktor

--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
On Sat, 2006-04-08 at 19:15 +0000, Wiktor Wandachowicz wrote:
> Carsten Lohrke <carlo <at> gentoo.org> writes:
>
> > How do you want not to enforce it?
> Have you actually read the proposal? It's quite sensible and is entitled:
>
> "Proposal: Integrated boot themes on LiveCDs and installations"
>
> I suppose that the themes would be defaulted to on the LiveCDs and optional
> for regular installations - typical emerge-if-you-need-it situation.

Funny enough, this was something that I heard requested *many times*
when we were at the booth at LWE. Many of our users think that upstream
defaults are ugly. I tend to agree. I would love to see the "branding"
USE flag added *and used* to give us themes. One of the main reasons
that I chose Gnome over KDE originally was that Gnome had the nice
little Gentoo splash and gdm already had Gentoo themes (even if they
were not the default). It just also happened that later when I tried to
build a KDE-only CD that I couldn't get it to fit on the CD along with
the other stuff, meaning I would have had to remove other packages and I
was planning on investing more time into determining what should go/stay
before touching it.

> > Still, the basic question is: Why!?
> Because it may lead to the creation of well thought out and integrated themes
> for several programs that are able to use them? Including more robustness
> and/or functionality similar to the one that the gfxboot provides?

How about "Why not?" as an answer? It isn't like anyone said that you
would have to do the work. As it stands now, Release Engineering has
someone who does the splash themes for the releases, and this person
could well be tapped to either create or assist in creating a unified
theme set. It really is funny that Donnie brought this up since this
was something that we were actually discussing at LWE.

> > There's no benefit for the user, who will choose whatever theming
> > he wants anyways.
> I for one would be delighted if there was such new set of themes. I'd use
> them right away. To be honest, I tend to match my bootsplash theme with the
> one that's used on the current LiveCD. Somehow I feel I need that when people
> come and ask me "What Linux distro do you use?". If it happens that they ask
> when I boot my laptop they can watch the nice graphical progress (bootsplash)
> and finally my gdm theme. Having a Gentoo theme here helps to associate the
> theme with the distribution. Nobody forced me to do this. I just like it :)

I tend to agree. My laptop also runs the same splash theme as the
release. In fact, it usually is one of the first boxes running it,
since we do testing there before we ever roll it onto a CD.

> > Imho it's superfluous
> To be honest, there are not so many themes out there that are worth
> installing. A good set of Gentoo themes is one of the best ideas
> I've heard for a long time. (!)

You think it is superfluous. I do not. I respect your opinion on this.
Basically, you don't have to work on it. Nobody is forcing you to do so
or even asking you to participate.

> > and therefore wasted time.
> I understand your point. But are you sure that spreading the "negative energy"
> and killing the idea is best? No progress is done without breaking rules
> and working against the inertia of habits.

Sure, it would be wasted time if someone were trying to force *you* to
waste *your* time as you are not interested. For those of us that are,
it isn't a waste in any sense.

> > I for one favor to stick with that, what upstream provides.
> I guess you should be able to leave with that. No one would "force" you to
> switch the splashes/background/themes unless you wanted it.

Correct.

> And while we are at it, is there any chance that the bug #124920
> could be taken into account while creating new gdm theme?

I don't see why not.

--
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-04-08 at 19:15 +0000, Wiktor Wandachowicz wrote:
>> Carsten Lohrke <carlo <at> gentoo.org> writes:
>>
>>> How do you want not to enforce it?
>> Have you actually read the proposal? It's quite sensible and is entitled:
>>
>> "Proposal: Integrated boot themes on LiveCDs and installations"
>>
>> I suppose that the themes would be defaulted to on the LiveCDs and optional
>> for regular installations - typical emerge-if-you-need-it situation.
>
> Funny enough, this was something that I heard requested *many times*
> when we were at the booth at LWE. Many of our users think that upstream
> defaults are ugly. I tend to agree. I would love to see the "branding"
> USE flag added *and used* to give us themes. One of the main reasons
> that I chose Gnome over KDE originally was that Gnome had the nice
> little Gentoo splash and gdm already had Gentoo themes (even if they
> were not the default). It just also happened that later when I tried to
> build a KDE-only CD that I couldn't get it to fit on the CD along with
> the other stuff, meaning I would have had to remove other packages and I
> was planning on investing more time into determining what should go/stay
> before touching it.
>
>>> Still, the basic question is: Why!?
>> Because it may lead to the creation of well thought out and integrated themes
>> for several programs that are able to use them? Including more robustness
>> and/or functionality similar to the one that the gfxboot provides?
>
> How about "Why not?" as an answer? It isn't like anyone said that you
> would have to do the work. As it stands now, Release Engineering has
> someone who does the splash themes for the releases, and this person
> could well be tapped to either create or assist in creating a unified
> theme set. It really is funny that Donnie brought this up since this
> was something that we were actually discussing at LWE.
>
>>> There's no benefit for the user, who will choose whatever theming
>>> he wants anyways.
>> I for one would be delighted if there was such new set of themes. I'd use
>> them right away. To be honest, I tend to match my bootsplash theme with the
>> one that's used on the current LiveCD. Somehow I feel I need that when people
>> come and ask me "What Linux distro do you use?". If it happens that they ask
>> when I boot my laptop they can watch the nice graphical progress (bootsplash)
>> and finally my gdm theme. Having a Gentoo theme here helps to associate the
>> theme with the distribution. Nobody forced me to do this. I just like it :)
>
> I tend to agree. My laptop also runs the same splash theme as the
> release. In fact, it usually is one of the first boxes running it,
> since we do testing there before we ever roll it onto a CD.
>
>>> Imho it's superfluous
>> To be honest, there are not so many themes out there that are worth
>> installing. A good set of Gentoo themes is one of the best ideas
>> I've heard for a long time. (!)
>
> You think it is superfluous. I do not. I respect your opinion on this.
> Basically, you don't have to work on it. Nobody is forcing you to do so
> or even asking you to participate.
>
>>> and therefore wasted time.
>> I understand your point. But are you sure that spreading the "negative energy"
>> and killing the idea is best? No progress is done without breaking rules
>> and working against the inertia of habits.
>
> Sure, it would be wasted time if someone were trying to force *you* to
> waste *your* time as you are not interested. For those of us that are,
> it isn't a waste in any sense.
>
>>> I for one favor to stick with that, what upstream provides.
>> I guess you should be able to leave with that. No one would "force" you to
>> switch the splashes/background/themes unless you wanted it.
>
> Correct.
>
>> And while we are at it, is there any chance that the bug #124920
>> could be taken into account while creating new gdm theme?
>
> I don't see why not.
>

You said everything I wanted to say. I'll add this:

I talked to spyderous and christel about this on irc the other day. I
think we should have a unified Gentoo Theme that cuts across all
projects. I'm willing to theme *.gentoo.org to match and I'm also
willing to help out with theming other things or actually creating the
artwork if we really need help on that front (I'm not an artist but if
we have basic artwork made I can fit it into other things, do layouts,
help patch ebuilds, etc...).

Spyderous already has a new logo started that we can build on. We can
easily take it and build an entire theme around it. We also have the
lila theme and the Gentoo Icon Set we can use as raw material. Both of
them could easily be reworked into something we can use if we need to.

The theme we create could easily be extended to all the other things we
use artwork for, business cards and posters for the live events plus all
the things in the store, etc...

Personally, I think it's time we stopped releasing with the default,
upstream, ugly and boring themes and start releasing with a unified
distro wide Gentoo Theme. Present the world with a professional face for
a change instead of this ad-hoc-made-in-my-basement look and feel it has
now.

SO, what sort of time frame is everyone looking at here, 2006.1 or 2007.0?
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Curtis Napier wrote: [Mon Apr 10 2006, 09:53:04AM CDT]
> I'm willing to theme *.gentoo.org to match [...].

Speaking of which, what is the current status of the web redesign?

Thanks,
g2boojum
--
Grant Goodyear
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
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Curtis Napier wrote:
> Spyderous already has a new logo started that we can build on. We can
> easily take it and build an entire theme around it. We also have the
> lila theme and the Gentoo Icon Set we can use as raw material. Both of
> them could easily be reworked into something we can use if we need to.

That might be pushing things a little bit. What I've got are some
general themes/ideas that need some work and creativity by a good
graphics person to make into reality.

Thanks,
Donnie
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--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Curtis Napier wrote:
> I think we should have a unified Gentoo Theme that cuts across all
> projects. I'm willing to theme *.gentoo.org to match and I'm also
> willing to help out with theming other things or actually creating the
> artwork if we really need help on that front (I'm not an artist but if
> we have basic artwork made I can fit it into other things, do layouts,
> help patch ebuilds, etc...).
>

Now that is nice indeed. Having an common integrated style both local
and through the Internet is a great idea. IMHO we're going the M$ way :)

--
Ioannis Aslanidis

Gentoo Staff
Gentoo Linux
--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Grant Goodyear wrote:
> Curtis Napier wrote: [Mon Apr 10 2006, 09:53:04AM CDT]
>> I'm willing to theme *.gentoo.org to match [...].
>
> Speaking of which, what is the current status of the web redesign?
>
> Thanks,
> g2boojum

Well, I was planning on announcing this later on but I guess now is as
good a time as any.

The redesign as it was known up until this point is no more. There were
things the winner of the contest had to do and he failed to do them
(after almost 2 years of trying to get him too). I discussed it with
klieber a little and after much thought I have decided that the
WWW-Redesign Contest is now officially dead and abandoned.

Instead, I'm now the "Web Coordinator". I proposed this new role to the
Infra Leads and met no resistance or objections so I have taken the
initiative and created the role. Also, neysx and I together were
approached and offered to be the new www node administrators as a team.
Of course we both said yes. Official Infra Monkey at last! :D

As Web Coordinator I am responsible for ensuring a consistent look and
feel and adherence to standards across all *.gentoo.org sites.

This includes standardizing on an xhtml-1.0 layout with a standard set
of css id's and classes so that a single "core" style sheet can be
shared across all *.gentoo.org sites with a minimal custom style sheet
being imported to take care of the site specific styling. This will make
it **so** easy to change the ENTIRE *.gentoo.org web presence
layout/design by simply dropping in a new style sheet.

Basically what I'll be doing is letting the individual maintainers of
the various sites focus on the back-end functionality of their sites.
Leaving the forward facing html/css for me to worry about freeing up
their valuable time.

wwwredesign.gentoo.org already has been converted and is going live on
www.gentoo.org shortly (we just have a few last minute things to do).

I'm also working on bugday.g.o (with gurliegebis), planet.g.o and
torrents.g.o and those 3 should be ready to go by the end of the month.
Hopefully upstream for planet and torrents will accept my patches where
applicable. Even if they don't these web-apps are pretty simplistic and
keeping a customized version up-to-date will be no problem.

I'll be working with tomk on forums.g.o and we already have a plan in
the works. The forum has already been so heavily modified that it is
almost not even recognizable as a phpbb anymore. tomk says we can pretty
much do what we want to it (within reason) without having to worry about
upstream accepting our modifications.

bugs.g.o will be done with jforman. bugs.g.o is a touchy one, it's one
of our most used resources so it will have to be done very slowly, very
carefully and I'll have to get all the relevant patches accepted
upstream. I doubt jforman wants to stray from the official upstream
release very much, I haven't talked to him about this yet though so I'm
not sure. bugs may end up getting a new header/footer and nothing else.
We'll see how it goes.

packages.g.o is a custom web-app written and maintained by marduk who is
currently busy in real life. I'm putting this one on the bottom of the
list until he gets more free time. I *could* just style the existing
site without him but he is working on packages-2.0 and it will add a lot
of needed functionality. I'd rather wait and do this the right way
instead of wasting time styling a site that he is going to replace anyway.

Neysx and I also have a plan to make the stylesheet user selectable so
we can offer multiple themes. He already has a semi-working prototype at
gentoo.neysx.org (it doesn't work in IE). I'll extend that concept to
all the other websites. This fits perfectly with the idea of theming the
websites to match the liveCD's. We can offer that theme as the default
but still let people choose the "classic" style or any other styles we
may offer.

Realistically speaking I can have all of this done by the 2007.0 release
(maybe not bugs - depends on how much jforman is willing to stray from
the official bugzilla release). If everyone wants to shoot for 2006.1
for this new theme I will at least have 4 sites complete and ready for
the new theme. The others can be themed as I get them upgraded.

I know the redesign was a great big PITA. I faced many obstacles in
getting it put up live (the specifics are irrelevant). Now that I am a
full fledged Infra member with some actual authority and the support of
the rest of the Infra team (teaming up with neysx is also making it MUCH
easier) I can actually get (and AM getting) things accomplished.

I should copy this to my blog too so I don't have to repeat this a
million times....
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
On Monday 10 April 2006 16:53, Curtis Napier wrote:
> We also have the
> lila theme and the Gentoo Icon Set we can use as raw material. Both of
> them could easily be reworked into something we can use if we need to.
I suggest you to not consider the gentoo icon set. As it is is a _really_ bad
copyright infringement, it has icons that are copied from Windows OS or
applications and for sure are not licensed to allow such an edit.
There are also icons took from Crystal SVG iconset (of KDE) that are licensed
under LGPL for artists that's not respected as SVG sources are not provided,
nor copyright is stated.

--
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Curtis Napier wrote:
>>> Spyderous already has a new logo started that we can build on. We can
>>> easily take it and build an entire theme around it. We also have the
>>> lila theme and the Gentoo Icon Set we can use as raw material. Both of
>>> them could easily be reworked into something we can use if we need to.
>
> That might be pushing things a little bit. What I've got are some
> general themes/ideas that need some work and creativity by a good
> graphics person to make into reality.
>
> Thanks,
> Donnie

You think it's to much? IMHO it's high time Gentoo presented a unified
professional look and feel to the world. We want to act and be treated
as a professional organization yet we have a hodge-podge of themes and
styles that makes us look amateurish. I don't care how or why it got
this way, I just want to do should something about it NOW.

I honestly think we can make it happen if we all pitch in. fox2mike
knows that artist who has already contributed artwork and says he is
willing to contribute more. I also know an artist who may be willing to
do a few things here and there.

fox2mike, can you talk to that artist guy and see what he is willing to
help out with or if he has any ideas?

Really, all we need is a set of color codes, a main logo and an icon
base set to start us out. All the rest can be built with that if we use
one of the 2 existing icon sets color coded to match.

Maybe we should start a list of things that need to be themed so we know
what sort of artwork that will take. I'll start a list right now, if you
are working on any of these things or have the skill/desire to work on
them respond:

Gentoo Logo
grubsplash
framebuffer splash
gdm
kdm
qt
gtk
gnome/kde startup splash
metacity
kwin
icons
wallpapers
PR materials (posters, handouts, business cards, etc..)
Cafepress store items
websites

other WM's/desktops can also be done if someone is willing to do it.
Like E17 or XFCE, etc... Even if they don't get full custom themes they
can still use the icons and wallpapers and the qt/gtk theme will apply
to the apps.

The lila theme[1] already has *most* of that stuff already. This project
is highly configurable as far as color scheme is concerned (it's svg).
The icons can easily be colorized to match any scheme and we even have
ebuilds for all of it (not in the tree though) that are mostly up to
date. Maybe the lila maintainer would be willing to jump in and help us
out with this.

We also have the Gentoo Icon Set[2] to work with but it's not as easy to
customize as lila and some of the icons have questionable copyright.
Lila is all original GPL'd artwork that we would be free to use.

To be honest I think lila, colorized to match whatever scheme we decide
on, is the best way to go. It already has most of what we need and it's
relatively easy to customize. Since no artistic skill would be required
to customize lila I could do a lot of this stuff. I would be willing to
do anything with gnome, updating gtk/metacity/icons etc... That sort of
stuff is all fill-in-the-blank scripting for the most part with
excellent tutorials already provided.

And this theming should extend to all of our artwork. Things like
business cards and all the stuff that PR uses at the live shows. All the
stuff in the store, etc... Once we have an agreed upon logo and color
scheme that stuff will be *relatively* easy to change.

Spyderous, what is the Desktop herds stance on this. If we can get this
all done (or as much of it as possible) is Desktop willing to make it
the default theme? What would it take for this to happen?

Wolf31o2, what about you and the other CD maintainers, are you guys
willing to use this if we can get it done?

PR, are you guys willing (or able) to remake your materials? What would
it take?

Who runs the store? I can't find any info about it. Can you/will you
change the products?

Anything else that can be themed that I'm missing?

Like I said in that other email, if we start right now we could have it
all done in time for 2007.0.

Am I being crazy thinking we can do all of this? Does anyone else even
want to try or think it's a good idea? Any other questions, comments,
suggestions, flames?


[1]http://lila-theme.berlios.de/
[2]http://www.gentoo.org/dyn/icons.xml
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 14:08 -0400, Curtis Napier wrote:
> Wolf31o2, what about you and the other CD maintainers, are you guys
> willing to use this if we can get it done?

CD creation has nothing to do with it, really. We simply make stuff
based on the defaults. If there were a "branding" USE flag on these
packages, we would use it. That's about all of the interaction Release
Engineering would have with regard to this. I do want to point out that
we have someone who has been doing our splash themes for us since 2005.0
for the releases (blackace). The best course of action currently is
simply to pool the resources together and find out what you have
available with respect to artists and pre-existing work.

Please do NOT rush into this, or we'll end up looking worse off for it.

> PR, are you guys willing (or able) to remake your materials? What would
> it take?

The only "materials" that I am aware of that we have is some flyers and
generic business cards, along with the Gentoo "G" logo on a large
poster. We shouldn't have too hard of a time changing stuff since we
don't really have much of anything, which is something I'm hoping we can
change.

> Who runs the store? I can't find any info about it. Can you/will you
> change the products?

I do. I can change them to anything, really. The main concern I have
here is that we have something that can easily be translated into either
black and white or CYMK for pressing professional-looking CDs. I am
currently working on investigating other avenues for what we can do to
provide a better service for our users and possibly generate more
revenue with our release media via our store.

> Anything else that can be themed that I'm missing?
>
> Like I said in that other email, if we start right now we could have it
> all done in time for 2007.0.

I wouldn't shoot for anything sooner than this, really, as it will take
a massive amount of coordination.

> Am I being crazy thinking we can do all of this? Does anyone else even
> want to try or think it's a good idea? Any other questions, comments,
> suggestions, flames?
>
>
> [1]http://lila-theme.berlios.de/
> [2]http://www.gentoo.org/dyn/icons.xml

--
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Curtis Napier wrote: [Mon Apr 10 2006, 11:21:14AM CDT]
> The redesign as it was known up until this point is no more. There were
> things the winner of the contest had to do and he failed to do them
> (after almost 2 years of trying to get him too). I discussed it with
> klieber a little and after much thought I have decided that the
> WWW-Redesign Contest is now officially dead and abandoned.

Thanks for the update.

One question that your thorough response didn't answer (assuming that I
didn't miss it) is if you have plans to improve the site's navigation?
My understanding during the original redesign contest was that the
majority of the complaints we received about our site from users was the
difficulty involved in finding things.

In any event, I think we need to remove the flying saucer guy. When
drobbins left and turned over the Gentoo IP to us, one thing that he
kept was the flying saucer guy. I believe that he was allowing us to
use it while we got the redesign put together, but since that's dead it
seems unfair to hold on to that flying saucer guy indefinitely.

-g2boojum-
--
Grant Goodyear
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Grant Goodyear wrote:
> Curtis Napier wrote: [Mon Apr 10 2006, 11:21:14AM CDT]
>> The redesign as it was known up until this point is no more. There were
>> things the winner of the contest had to do and he failed to do them
>> (after almost 2 years of trying to get him too). I discussed it with
>> klieber a little and after much thought I have decided that the
>> WWW-Redesign Contest is now officially dead and abandoned.
>
> Thanks for the update.
>
> One question that your thorough response didn't answer (assuming that I
> didn't miss it) is if you have plans to improve the site's navigation?
> My understanding during the original redesign contest was that the
> majority of the complaints we received about our site from users was the
> difficulty involved in finding things.
>
> In any event, I think we need to remove the flying saucer guy. When
> drobbins left and turned over the Gentoo IP to us, one thing that he
> kept was the flying saucer guy. I believe that he was allowing us to
> use it while we got the redesign put together, but since that's dead it
> seems unfair to hold on to that flying saucer guy indefinitely.
>
> -g2boojum-


That's what this whole thread is about... a new theme. Specifically for
the CD's but I am jumping on the bandwagon and going along for the ride.
Hopefully something good will come of this, if not then I'll figure
something out.

For now just suffice it to say that a new theme that takes into
consideration all the things you said above (and more) is going to
happen one way or another.
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
On Monday 10 April 2006 15:37, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> In any event, I think we need to remove the flying saucer guy. When
> drobbins left and turned over the Gentoo IP to us, one thing that he
> kept was the flying saucer guy. I believe that he was allowing us to
> use it while we got the redesign put together, but since that's dead it
> seems unfair to hold on to that flying saucer guy indefinitely.

i'll miss him :(

any way we can beg to keep him in the one place on the front page ?
-mike
--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: Re: Gentoo theming during bootup [ In reply to ]
Vapier wrote: [Mon Apr 10 2006, 05:25:23PM CDT]
> On Monday 10 April 2006 15:37, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> > In any event, I think we need to remove the flying saucer guy. When
> > drobbins left and turned over the Gentoo IP to us, one thing that he
> > kept was the flying saucer guy. I believe that he was allowing us to
> > use it while we got the redesign put together, but since that's dead it
> > seems unfair to hold on to that flying saucer guy indefinitely.
>
> i'll miss him :(
>
> any way we can beg to keep him in the one place on the front page ?

Feel free to ask him. I believe that drobbins@gentoo.org should still
work.

-g2boojum-
--
Grant Goodyear
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0 9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76

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