Month: March 2010

My first day on Accessibility Hackfest

Accessibility Hackfest Logo

Well today was my first day on the Accessibility Hackfest 2010 on San Diego (where my travel and accommodation costs are being funded by Igalia). Really interesting day, where the hackfest were officially started and we touch a lot of interesting things:

  • Testing discussion: integrate a11y testing infrastructure on GNOME, to catch earlier a11y regressions. Better explained in Peter Korn slides
  • a11y leadership: Willie Walker explained how he thinks the leadership should be oriented, and that he thinks that the a11y team should be more involved with the release team
  • Willie Walker made a full review of GNOME 3.0 accessibility planning
  • Bryen Yunashko lead a talk about press strategy
  • AT presentations
  • Eitan Isaacson explained his plans about the GNOME booth tomorrow

And finally the official CSUN keynote. A really busy day. Taking into account that the previous one was mostly a three-flights trip from Coruña to San Diego, I’m just tired and sleepy. Forgive any error in this post. I’m going to bed. Sweet dreams.

Gnome-shell starts to talk

After spent some time improving cally, reviewing mx new focusable/focus-manager objects and several days configuring my environment (karmic upgrade, broken linkage in my jhbuild environment, etc) I started to check again how to use cally on gnome shell (first look here).

One of the entries in my TODO is start to make the module loading more that a hacking patch. A first solution proposal and a gratuitous rant here.

Other point on my TODO list is check why accerciser and orca froze gnome-shell. Well, accerciser still frozes the shell, but, fortunately it seems that orca now works (more or less) fine without doing anything special (black magic probably):

orca running on gnome-shell

I know that it would be more useful with sound, but as the gnome shell screencast recording feature doesn’t record audio, and I wasn’t able to use recordmydesktop or istanbul, finally I just recorded the sound with my N900, and I was too lazy to create a video with both. If you are curious enough, you can hear the audio of the previous video screencast here.

How I run gnome-shell

During this environment configuration time, I was also looking for a convenient way to run gnome shell. On live gnome, there are two proposed options to run gnome shell:

  • Replace your own WM (with –replace option)
  • To avoid to replace your own WM, run gnome-shell nested (with –xephyr option).

As I said, running some of the accessibility tools leads to froze the gnome-shell. Additionally in my case, running it on xephyr had a horrible performance, so both options were not really useful to me. Finally I chose a mixed option. I just launch a second X server, and launch the gnome-shell here.

So, in brief:

  • Move to other tty with Ctrl+F1
  • Launch other x server: xinit -- :1
  • Execute gnome-session
  • jhbuild shell
  • ./gnome-shell --replace

Then you can just use Ctrl+F9 and Ctrl+F7 to move between your “normal environment” and your “gnome-shell” environment. Probably someone can wonder why it is required to run gnome-session, and not execute directly gnome-shell (without the replace). Well, for any reason if I do that, the performance is also as horrible as with the –xephyr option. In the same way gnome-session load all my configuration, etc. Not a big issue anyway.