#sh Blog - Entries tagged as GNOME

I recently signed up for a sipgate base account. If you choose the basic tarif you can get a free landline number without paying anything, as long you don't use it to call out. This handy for people with have a phone flat to call landline phones.

Sipgate uses standard SIP technology to forward calls to VoIP clients. Hence you can actually use it with any client soft- and hardware supporting SIP (s.th. which wouldn't be possible with Skype). Sipgate has a own windows client you can use if you use windows, which is already pre-configured for the use with sipgate. If you use other plattforms you have to set it up yourself.
For Linux there are two major SIP apps. One is Ekiga* and one is Empathy (relying on the telepathy framework). If you want to use Empathy for SIP, you should first install the telepathy-sofiasip package from the repository. Otherwise nothing happens when you add a new SIP account.

In debian based Distros just use: apt-get install telepathy-sofiasip

After that you can just add a new SIP account with Empathy, using your details from the login area of sipgate.

If you are a GNOME-Do user, you may have noticed that the Mozilla Thunderbird® icon doesn't look nice when appearing in GNOME-Do. That's because the logo is upscaled to fit the size of the Do bar. That scaling is made necessary, because the icon-size of the icon that Thunderbird puts into /usr/share/pixmaps/ by default is too small. To get a crisp logo in Do the logo should be about 128x128px (like the firefox.png you might find in pixmaps). To replace the thunderbird.png with a larger icon you can take the 256x256px icon from /usr/lib/thunderbird-3.0.6/chrome/icons/default/default256.png. Copy that file into your home-directory (or somwhere where you have write permissions). Then use GIMP to scale it down to 128px. After saving and renaming the file to thunderbird.png you can then copy it as root to /user/share/pixmaps/ replacing the old icon.

Copy-command:
sudo cp thunderbird.png /usr/share/pixmaps/

After restarting GNOME-Do, you should see a nice crisp Thunderbird icon. Like that:

Color management has finally arrived at the GNOME Desktop. The new piece of software is called gnome color manager and is still pretty young. I heard about it while ago, so after installing Ubuntu 10.04 I found it in the repos and gave it a shot. It looks quite simple and promising. Still a bit unstable (crashes on some clicks) though. Unfortunately I couldn't calibrate my screen, because the color profile (ICC) I had for my screen was not suitable for full color calibration and I don't have any equipment to mesure my screen. But it's a good thing GNOME is getting a color manager, which it opens up to the professional Designers and DTP uses.

I made some screenshot for those interested.

Ubuntu Jaunty (9.10) has the nice new dark look for the status icons. But this is only working if you use the "Humanity-Dark" icon theme.

I wanted to have another icon theme, but keep the nice dark status icons. So I had a look at the Humanity-Dark icon folder in /usr/share/icons/ and discovered, that this is only an overlay of the normal Humanity icon theme. So this overlay could be used for my favourite icon theme as well. So I just made a copy of the Humanity-Dark folder (if you want to make a new folder in /usr/share/icons you have to be root of course) and changed the name of the new folder to Colors-Dark (because I want to inherit from the gnome colors theme). In the Colors-Dark folder you have to modify the index.theme file, to use another theme than the Humanity one. First you should change the name to avoid confusion. For example Name=Colors-Dark. After that the important part comes: change the inherit value to your prefered icon theme. For example Inherits=gnome-wise if you want to use gnome wise. That's already everything you have to do. If there is any icon-cache file you better remove and recreate it. You can use gtk-update-icon-cache to create a new cache. Now you have your nice new icons being used, when you choose the Colors-Dark theme, but the dark ubuntu-icons stay.

A new version of GNOME-Do was just released a few days ago. I already tried it and the new Docky is quite a nice idea. Docky is the new big feature in Do, which offers a panel with starters on it. It's already quite nice to use, and almost ready for productive use. If you already like Do you should give it a try! There are already packages for most Linux-Distros, even a repository for Ubuntu. Have fun!

Note: You have to resart the Do-Deamon before the new features are available.

I also made a Screenshot.

Banshee 1.0 was finally released a few days ago. Yesterday I got it installed on my Ubuntu machine. Ubuntu Debs are already there too available in the Banshee Ubuntu repository.
If you have tried Banshee and didn't like it in the earlier versions, you should give it another shot it's really worth trying. Except of the brilliant last.fm integration we heard about already, it has many other improvements too and finally we have an Artist/Album browser as well!

[Screenhots]

The new GNOME clock/weather-applet somtimes has different opinions when it comes to temperature. Like in this case:


I think the temperature in the Tooltip is the right one. The 1°C in the panel itself didn't change over the past few hours...