Richard A. Johnson

Thanks to Silke “If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, then it’s a duck” McCance for taking pictures during the entire weekend and uploading them.

The Official Pictures of the 2010 Desktop Help Summit.

What an amazing weekend! First off, I really want to thank the following people:

• Shaun “Is it Help? Hjelp? Yelp?” McCance – This entire event was his idea, his baby, and he pulled off one hell of an event. Thanks for showing off Mallard and Yelp.
• Kevin “Is my iPad here yet?” Harriss – The venue was hosted by Kevin at the always awesome IIT Institute of Design in downtown Chicago, IL. Also thanks for allowing me to crash on the futon.
• Jim “There are spy camera’s in my mansion” Campbell – Xfce and Xubuntu should be proud to have you on their teams, thanks for hosting that silly Brit Phil Bull and thanks for the coffee, donuts, and bagels.
• Milo “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie” Casagrande – always good to see you again, and thank you for admitting that Italy could learn to make pizza from Chicago.
• John “Fedora has a bat cave” McDonough – Google thanks you for realizing you shouldn’t listen to me for directions, and it was great to get to hang out with some (somewhat) local Fedora peeps.
• Brian “GNOME is in the hizzy” Cameron – Thanks for spilling GNOME’s secrets so I can take them back to KDE Thanks for being a whicked cross-collab dude. Don’t think I didn’t hear you over there in the corner while I was writing American Idol’s next great hit!
• Phil “The Intern” Bull – Thanks for the surprise! It was awesome to finally meet you after working along side you for the past 5 years on the Ubuntu Documentation Project. I had no idea you were coming and then hearing some British voice yell my name in Chicago scared the hell out of me, I swore I paid those tickets, really I do!
• Silke “I’m with the Mallard” McCance – It was great to meet you, and great to see who it is that keeps Shaun in line Thanks for the spy videos of my computer voice song, and thanks for running across the street and picking up the utensils and drinks when there was free food, and thanks for getting Milo to admit that Chicago knows Pizza! Thanks for the coffee and bagels this morning too!

I would also like to thank Paul Cutler for trying to make it. I hope your family is feeling better, and I am sure this summer we can all get together for some documentation love!

So, the Desktop Help Summit 2010, the main reason for this post. We, members of GNOME, KDE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Oracle/Sun/OpenSolaris, gathered in Chicago this weekend to hold the first, but hopefully not the last, Desktop Help Summit. It was all about collaborating on bringing help to our users and doing it better than everyone else. We collaborated, we learned, and we quacked! Heck, Shaun even gave the dancing Mallard some background music provided by Severed Fifth. Some of you who have followed me in the past know that for 3 years I chuckled at Project Mallard and called it nothing more than vapor-ware. Maybe I said it enough that Shaun, deciding to shut me up, has provided an amazing markup language specialized for topic-based help. If you doubt it for even a second, you should really see it in action. It is definitely something I would like to see make its way into the KDE SC one of these days. He showed off what he has been doing on Yelp 3.0, I think that is the version, that made be a bit envious and made me want something like it in the KDE SC.

To learn more about the event and what went on, check out the links to the people above, as I am sure they will post more information as well. I know John and Milo already have started blogging about it. There are pictures somewhere, as Silke was showin’ off her mad super camera skills. I really want a nice camera like that. I think Milo took some pictures and John has as well. Phil didn’t take any pictures because he was to busy looking up in the air at the tall buildings. We had to take him over to the zoo because he was missing the view of sheep on a daily basis, so to curb his home sickness, we looked out for him.

I also had some tweets (by @nixternal) and dents (by @nixternal) about the event as well. Thanks to those of you as well who participated on IRC. Notes are also available via Ether pad at http://etherpad.com/tUI4jbLm01 and http://etherpad.com/bnDi2pxN42.

Well, I lost a bet this week and the result was I had to use GNOME for 1 month. I could easily cheat, but I wanted to go through with it and see what I have “supposedly been missing.” Well after day 1, I have to admit that after listening to Jorge talk about the Dust theme, I have a somewhat pretty lookin’ desktop.

So, I went ahead and installed Empathy to chat with my buds, Gnome-Do because everyone ooh’s and ahh’s over it, and Gwibber, so I can tweet in style. I tried using the Gnome-Do Twitter plugin, but it didn’t work at all for me. Well it worked a little, as in I could see others tweets, but it didn’t like mine at all. Always said it had some sort of authorization error.

I am impressed with the quality of GNOME these days and I have to take my hat off to all of those involved. GNOME still is not for me, and probably never will be, but it is fun from time-to-time to check out the competition. I have GNOME on my home desktop, but the rest of my machines are either KDE 4 (4.1.3 Kubuntu and Trunk with Debian), and WMII (umph!).

Let me explain this briefly and why I am giving Kubuntu 1 and Ubuntu a 0 in this one aspect, which to me is very important, I mean very important!

I have a xorg.conf configuration that is very simple, all I do is add a virtual config to it that states I want my desktop to be 3360×1050, as I have 2 monitors that are 1680×1050.

Now with this same exact xorg.conf, Kubuntu Intrepid works like a champ with utilizing the dual monitors in a non-mirroring mode. Ubuntu Intrepid on the other hand, well it is utter garbage with or without Compiz. With Compiz you get nastiness on the 2nd display, and without Compiz you get short changed 3/4 of the 2nd display.

My video card is:
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0c)

Other than this, I do enjoy the way Ubuntu Intrepid has shaped up, and the new wallpaper, oooh I like it! Unless someone can give me the groovyness I need with my dual monitor setup, it is back to my home in Kubuntu land (I told you Harald I wouldn’t be gone long).

EDIT: I have changed the title from Kubuntu 1 – Ubuntu 0 to what it is now. Why? They are both failing right now. In Kubuntu my external screen sits here and blinks, but it is usable. I fixed this issue last week and cannot remember how I did it. I get the following error in Xorg.log:
(EE) intel(0): Unable to write to SDVOCTRL_E for SDVOB Slave 0x70.

As a member of both the Ubuntu Documentation Project and the KDE Documentation Project, one thing is clear, our current state of system help isn’t the greatest. An initiative that the GNOME project has looked at taking on (for the greater part of the past 3 years) is called Project Mallard. There are some things in this project that I like and dislike, however one thing is clear, they understand the inefficiency of their current system and know it needs to be fixed. KDE is realizing this same exact thing and know we need to fix it, but figuring out how to do so correctly, isn’t the easiest thing.

One thing that GNOME, KDE, and others have worked hard to do is collaborate with Freedesktop.org specifications on many levels. Maybe it is time we look at continuing this excellence, but this time add documentation to the menu. How many of you GNOME users love using Amarok or another KDE application, but hate the fact that KHelpCenter is installed just so you can view the help documentation? Granted a lot of this has been fixed by just recommending KHelpCenter in the packages, but this doesn’t fix the issue, because now you have a .docbook file to read, and guess what, Yelp isn’t going to open it cleanly for you, or at least the last time I looked at Yelp it didn’t. Or you have KDE and want to open up the .xml file with KHelpCenter, but it just doesn’t work correctly. I think if we were to unify documentation we could move toward the goal of world domination

Would working closely together help fix our issues, would this be a good thing? What would be the “best” way to move forward?

No, not a masquerade party, but a Tasque’rade party! After hanging out with Jorge Castro and Joe Brockmeier last weekend at Penguicon, I was beat up with Gnome quite a bit. Being the groovy KDE dude that I am, I hung around and listened to their Gnome speak, and even sat in on Joe’s openSUSE talk. During Joe’s talk he introduced a great application called Tasque for the Gnome desktop. After showing some interest in this application, Jorge asked me to package Tasque for all of you. Well since Jorge fed me a lot of beer last weekend, I went ahead and did just that. As of right now, I built 2 packages, one for Hardy of course and the other for Gutsy.

If you are using Hardy and want to give Tasque a look over, then add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tasque-packagers/ubuntu hardy main

If you are using Gutsy, then add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tasque-packagers/ubuntu gutsy main

EDIT: I have had 2 people now tell me that Tasque gives an error that has something to do with evolution-sharp missing. I don’t have that issue, so if you can narrow it down, I would appreciate it. I am the furthest thing from a Gnome dev imaginable. Thanks!