Studio with Cinnamon

[Kaj Ailomaa]

On Mon, May 27, 2013, at 10:12 PM, lukefromdc at hushmail.com wrote:
> Assuming I get all the bugs out of this, there is one other 
> issue that could make being the mantainer of a metapackage
> difficult: the "real names" issue. I looked through the Wiki page
> on development concerning PGP keys, etc, and it reminds
> people to use their real names. That is something I never do 
> online for security reasons, due to my involvement in dissident 
> politics and the need to prevent one posting of mine under my 
> "legal" name from being used by Google or by law enforcement
> to validate another post under the name everyone knows me by.
> 
> To maintain the meta I will have to be able to have it credited to 
> "Luke" or "Luke from DC," I can't use my "legal" name online for
> any purpose. That issue is also one of many reasons I don't have
> or want Google or Facebook accounts. 
> 

Initially, other people will do the uploading, so that's fine
(ultimately, the person who uploads the changes to the Ubuntu repo is
responsible of making sure the contents of the package adhere to
policies and standards).
So, not a problem.

I could however just make a comment on this, and that is: why would
secrecy be important as far as Debian/Ubuntu packaging is concerned? 
I'm sure that if you can meet existing Debian or Ubuntu devs, and get
them to sign your gpg signature personally, there's no technical
requirement to include your real personal information. I haven't looked
this part up, so I don't know if there is a policy for this. The
important thing is to be able to trust the source and be able to
identify it.

> On 05/27/2013 at 4:07 PM, lukefromdc at hushmail.com wrote:
> >
> >I installed UbuntuStudio 13.04 to an extra partition, very nice
> >job everyone, it looks great by default and it not a whole lot
> >different a UI than what I've done with Cinnamon. Theme is 
> >different in some ways, but I was still instantly reminded of the
> >original 2008 default appearance.
> >
> >I then began the job of installing Cinnamon, which is now 
> >available in
> >Ubuntu's repos and installed fine along with the Nemo file manager 
> >it
> >works with. That part was easy, NOTHING else was.
> >
> >Here were the issues I ran into:
> >
> >configuration steps then required:
> >
> >mkdir ~/.themes
> >download "GNOME" black theme (could put into a deb)
> >extract to ~/.themes
> >
> >Switch menu to "start-here.png" in ubuntustudio-icons
> >Could be done by overwriting /usr/share/cinnamon/theme/menu.png
> >or manually in menu-settings by selecting 
> >/usr/share/icons/ubuntustudio/places/24/distributor-logo.png
> >

Re-adding the vintage theme is kind of a project on its own, and
currently we don't have a "ubuntu studio" theme at all. Themes should be
packaged separately, while the desktop meta should then depend on the
theme package. 
There might be a new theme for 14.04, in which case it will be default.
The vintage theme I think would be a nice addition.
We should use the now removed ubuntustudio-looks package for that.

We're not sure that having separate metas for each DE is the right way
to go currently. Me and Len have been discussing alternatives, like
providing settings and theming for existing DEs, so that we don't need
to maintain any DE at all.
We can probably make the custom menu work on any DE without providing
our own meta for the actual DE. 
That means, we could let the user choose between any of the existing
desktop environments, and get the Ubuntu Studio custom menu and theming
for it while installing Ubuntu Studio (as well as the kernel, realtime
privilege, and whatever minor things we set up).

I'm still working on a Gnome3 meta, and would like for us to go through
with the Cinnamon meta as well for the time being.

So, now to business.

Initially, we need to make changes to two sources. The seeds and the
meta package. 
I think it's best we create a separate seeds file and meta package for
experimentation for now. I'll set one up for the
ubuntustudio-contributors team tomorrow. 

You'll need to do two things, provide me with your LP id, and set up a
testing environment for the meta install.

I'll need your LP id to add you to ubuntustudio-contributors, which will
grant you access to the not yet existing repositories and PPAs.

Also, for testing the desktop meta once we're done building it, you'll
want to begin with a DE-less ubuntu-minimal system. An easy way to set
that up is to install only the core system in Virtualbox, using the
mini.iso. Then, take a snapshot of the state before you add any DE to
it. So, it's easy to revert each time you want to retry adding it.

Here are the links to the mini isos

32bit
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/saucy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/mini.iso
64bit
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/saucy/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/mini.iso

You could essentially do an an install on a real machine for this too.
Just need to make sure you don't have packages installed that you
wouldn't have from just installing ubuntu-minimal and
ubuntustudio-desktop-cinnamon.