Color Scheme Designer vs Adobe Kuler

One of my designer friend shows me Color Scheme Designer, similar to Adobe Kuler. The best part about that scheme is it only uses HTML and Javascripts instead of Flash, can export as Gimp palette. What are missing are HSV, CMYK, and LAB.

Regression on Fedora 12 Beta for TabletPC

Since this summer, most of my tasks are now done on Tablet PC. I took opportunity to try Fedora 12 on my LT-20. Unfortunately, major regression occurred because the stylus is no longer recognized. It appears linuxwacom package is old and not up to date compared to upstream.

I tried to use the old method to create xorg.conf. Alas, the set-up for TabletPC crashed X and I restored by removing xorg.conf.

Bug report has been submitted and hopefully that will resolved for final release because TabletPC users get a bad surprise

gnome-shell and plasma

Following my comment about gnome-shell useless with nouveau driver, I installed KDE for testing Plasma about 3D as suggested by Kevin. As expected, effects will not work with OpenGL enabled for composing. What I did not know before is the presence of XRender option for Plasma that give those effects in glory. That test brings a question about gnome-shell: why Gnome development did not use XRender as fallback option or even providing that option?
Enlightenment can least produce some similar effects without requiring hardware acceleration.

gnome-shell useless with nouveau driver

Running rawhide 20090924 from desktop system, I test gnome-shell to explore its features (seems Activities name is inspired from Sugar interface. Very disappointing because the shell needs hardware acceleration i.e 3D support. Even Sugar interface did a much better job despite its simple look. Picture speaks itself.

[inkscape]: do not upgrade to libxml2-2.7.4-1

libxml2-2.7.4-1 which is available on test-update and rawhide seems to be broken preventing Inkscape to run. Should you attempt to dowgrade that package, make sure to downgrade packagekit, setroubleshoot and system-config-printer first, otherwise temporally remove them. Bug report has been submitted and hopefully should be fixed.

Testing nouveau driver with Armacycle

Armacycle is basically a renamed Armagetron Advanced for Fedora due to trademark concert. That game is perhaps overlooked by many users because it provides an excellent benchmark for free and open source drivers (nouveau in this case) with a lot of parameter to adjust. It might work on other system like XO-1 with lower resolution considering the RAM limit but that is another story.

The system is a Nvidia Geforce 7800GS powered by AMD Athlon X2 4200 2.2GHZ running on nforce 3 based motherboard. The operating system is Fedora Rawhide.

In fullscreen mode, the game only runs in average on 7-10 fps but four times faster in desktop mode using default setting (640x480 with 16bit colours). An idea comes to list benchmark in order to improve those FOSS driver with the following list:

- Desktop, laptop?
- CPU:
- GPU:
- Smolt information
- Average frame per second with following setting
- default:
- Screen Mode setting: Windows size, resolution, z-buffer, fullscreeen, color
- Preferences: effects like explosion, sparks, rims
- Display: fonts, object textures, wall textures, shading etc.


Another idea for designer is to create textures for this game. Comments and suggestion welcome

Comment about icon removal on Gnome 2.8

Reading The Tales of Menu, it appears to be a step backward. Using a very outdated stock widget to justify the removal of icons is the worst excuse ever written. Real issue is the API itseft.