Dearadh Oscailte Abú! (Open Design Forever!)

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Software Freedom Day Boston / Ninja Recruitment

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IMG_6753
Deb Nicholson, Asheesh Laroia, and the OpenHatch project organized this year’s Software Freedom Day Boston.
I gave a keynote presentation on how design bounties have worked for the Fedora Design team, and the steps to create your own bounty. You may have noticed our newest bounty was posted the morning of Software Freedom Day, and we’ve already got a ninja recruit working on it!
bounty presentation thumbnail

  • Download LibreOffice ODP (14 M)
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  • The presentation is provided here under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license. Please share and enjoy.

    • IMG_6746
    There were a lot of great talks by Boston-area community leaders. I was surprised to learn, for example, that the local python meetup in Boston is 1200+ members strong. I’m hoping to be able to make some time to get involved in the Boston python community in particular soon.

Fedora Design Bounty: Installer Ransom Notes

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Fedora Design Team Bounty
The Fedora Design Team Bounty is a type of blog post where we’ll outline a quick-and-easy design project that needs doing for the Fedora Community, outlining all the tools, files, and other resources you’ll need to complete the project. If you’re a designer and are interested in getting involved in the free and open source community, this is a good opportunity to get your feet wet!

Fedora Installer Ransom Notes

Today, when you install Fedora, you have to wait between 5-45 minutes (depending if you’re using live media or the full installer, and how many apps you select) for the install process to finish. While you wait, this is what the installer screen looks like:
Install Progress Screen in Fedora 15

Fedora package social networking

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So we’ve been talking about a reincarnation of Fedora Community (the app). Stuff to take note of: Yes, it looks like Facebook. (As my coworker Partha likes to remind me, Fedora had the white lowercase f on blue first. 🙂 ) The main navbar for the package is directly under its name & summary. Additional …

Fedora Community (the app) Update

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The story up ’till recently So you may have heard about Fedora Community, a web application we developed and launched in 2009. Or, maybe not. From the wiki planning page for the project: Fedora Community is a web portal designed to make it easier for package maintainers to do their job. The goal is to …

Newly-expanded Fedora Logo Guidelines

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Due in major part to Ian Weller’s extensive work on expanding Fedora’s logo usage guidelines, we now have updated logo usage guidelines that cover the usage of the Fedora logo in more detail, including: Coverage of the Fedora application and group sublogos. Coverage of the Fedora Remix logos. Coverage of the Fedora Foundations logos. Downloadable …

How to create graphics for a Fedora spin

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I’ve been spending some time lately putting together some how-to documentation for various tasks the Fedora design team does on a regular basis.
This is a how-to on how to create graphics for a Fedora spin. During a recent design ticket review we noticed a few requests for spin graphics, and there seemed to be some confusion on how to create them. Hopefully this guide helps.

Overview

There’s three main graphics you’ll need to create a page for your spin at spins.fedoraproject.org. What you’ll need before you start creating these graphics:

Things you need to get from the spin maintainer

  • The abbreviated version of the spin’s name. This should be used in the name of the graphics files for your spin. For example, the ‘Fedora Electronic Lab’ has an abbreviated name of ‘Electronic-lab’, so:
    • It is listed as ‘Electronic-Lab’ in the spins directory on the front page of http://spins.fedoraproject.org
    • Its mini graphic is named: electronic-lab-mini.png
    • Its feature graphic is named: electronic-lab-feature.png
    • Its tagline graphic is named: electronic-lab-tagline.png
  • A tagline for the spin. Here’s some examples from current spins (shorter is better!):
    • KDE: “Be free.”
    • LXDE: “Your desktop, light as air.”
    • ‘FCE: “Speed up your desktop.”
    • Electronic Lab: “An advanced electronic design and simulation platform for micro-nano electronics engineering.”
    • Design Suite: “Open creativity.”
Anaconda Language Selection, F14

Anaconda Language & Keyboard Layout Selection

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…If we went with this design, then, the language selection flow in Anaconda might look something like this:

A probably non-exhaustive list of how this would change Anaconda is as follows:

  • Folks who don’t speak English would be able to more easily pick out their language in the initial set of ~60 or so languages Anaconda supports since they’d be available in their native name.
  • You’d be able to install the OS in a language beyond the limited set that the Anaconda UI itself is available in.
  • You’d be able to choose between a preferred language with limited coverage or a less-preferred language with fuller coverage since limited coverage languages would be flagged.
  • You’d be able to use more than one keyboard layout, which was not possible before. Multi-lingual users would not have this extra step post-install.
  • The keyboard command for switching between keyboard layouts would be more visible, and you’d be able to switch between them in the installer itself (useful for an American with accent marks in her name. *cough*)
  • You’d be able to modify the keyboard command for switching between keyboard layouts, and not need to configure it post-install.
  • You’d be able to filter in both the keyboard layout and language lists.
  • You’d be able to take a selected keyboard layout for a test drive before committing to it.
Anaconda Language Selection, F14

Anaconda Language & Keyboard Layout Selection

on

…If we went with this design, then, the language selection flow in Anaconda might look something like this:

A probably non-exhaustive list of how this would change Anaconda is as follows:

  • Folks who don’t speak English would be able to more easily pick out their language in the initial set of ~60 or so languages Anaconda supports since they’d be available in their native name.
  • You’d be able to install the OS in a language beyond the limited set that the Anaconda UI itself is available in.
  • You’d be able to choose between a preferred language with limited coverage or a less-preferred language with fuller coverage since limited coverage languages would be flagged.
  • You’d be able to use more than one keyboard layout, which was not possible before. Multi-lingual users would not have this extra step post-install.
  • The keyboard command for switching between keyboard layouts would be more visible, and you’d be able to switch between them in the installer itself (useful for an American with accent marks in her name. *cough*)
  • You’d be able to modify the keyboard command for switching between keyboard layouts, and not need to configure it post-install.
  • You’d be able to filter in both the keyboard layout and language lists.
  • You’d be able to take a selected keyboard layout for a test drive before committing to it.