Project Updates

Just back to the office after a long weekend and I thought that I would create an update on the various projects.

Recreation System
The developer and business analyst are making progress on new recreation system. Now that IT got a signoff on the receipts, the final design has been implemented. A screen was designed to allow them to add coupons on the far right side of the printout. Following our internal goal of never having users obtain a file manager, this step is performed inside the GUI itself. All available coupons display and the user just has to click on it and hit the arrow which loads it into the printout page. They are beginning the process now of implementing more robust accounting principles at this time.

(shot below, sorry Steve Perry isn't coming to Largo) :)



Evolution Print Dialog
We have had some problems with libgnomeprint which will require me to change the source. We have about 60 printers, all HP using JetDirect. They are always in various states of function; paper jams, paper outages, toner shortages, waiting on paper tray, etc. Some of them are turned off, and some of them have latency from the Internet. When you hit the print button in Evolution the dialog will very frequently gray out and then block Evolution which grays out too. After a few seconds the dialog returns and everything works. Jeff Steadfast happened to be on IRC and gave me a few areas to try to improve this situation. I'm going to comment out the call for it to poll the printers. We don't really care about their statuses and users will just send the print jobs and await their completion. Sounds like a nice gconf key idea to me for future releases.



Debian Crashes
Does anyone want to backport some packages for me? This bug is really causing us some grief. It's causing our thin clients to crash for 3D/Compiz users and some people have gone back to 2D because they are annoyed by losing the Xserver. The last instruction was to upgrade Mesa, which will require an extensive upgrade of all of the X packages too which would take a lot of QA work. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to hang them on the bug report.

Halfline XDMCP Hero
XDMCP really hasn't worked for a while now in the latest OpenSuse releases and Halfline cooked a patch which I was able to get compiled and it's working! It's been submitted to Suse/Novell and Vincent already classified the bug report (thanks!). The production "Desktop" server is running Gnome 2.16 so there are many new things for me to test over remote display since that release. I also see the wallpapers now transition/animate with a .xml file and I need to check performance over the network. I built Compiz 0.9.0 and it's crashing the Xserver a good amount of the time (See Debian Crashes) above. There is a lot to review before I can get beta testers on here; but it's very encouraging.

Yup, the final login screen will be a bit more professional. When I am hunting down configuration files, I always change them so radically to leave no doubt that I found the right settings.