All Your Base Belong To Gnome

The Chicago Gnome User Group will be having our first meeting on June
24th at 3:00 pm. The meeting will be taking place at BARcamp Chicago located at 1464 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago IL. This is one block from the Damen stop on the Blue Line CTA train. The meeting agenda is going to include a What is Gnome, Why to use Gnome and Plans for the Chicago Gnome User Group. We also have a mailing list which can be found here. Thanks to
Chicago GNU/Linux User Group for hosting our mailing list.

Chicago Gnome User Group Meeting

When: June 24, 2007
Time: 3:00 pm
Where: BARcamp Chicago, 1464 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago IL

However, not only is the first Chicago Gnome User Group meeting occurring at BARcamp but there is a Foresight presentation along with an introduction to packaging with conary. I look forward to meeting Ken and Paul from the great foresight team. Some other interesting presentations are Introduction to Linux Photography by Jordan Wilberding and Introduction to Home Brewing by Tristan Sloughter. All in all BARcamp Chicago looks to be one great weekend.

Chicago Gnome Users Unite

I have been currently in the planning process for the first meeting of the Chicago Gnome User Group. I have decided to have our meeting be on June 2nd at 3:00 pm. The location will be decided in the next week, I am having the meeting at the same venue as the Chicago GLUG meeting on that same day so I am waiting on that location to be decided upon. So far the agenda for the first meeting is going to have only one presentation, which will be an overview of my ideas for the group. One of my ideas is to have a 5 or 10 minute talking featuring a specific Gnome/GTK application. Another idea is having presentations about the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines and GTK to help introduce users to help contribute back to the communitity. I also want have bug squash days where we work together to try and fix as many bugs in a day as we can. If any of this sounds like fun or if you enjoy using Gnome stop by our meeting. We also have a brand new mailing list which can be found here. Any more information about our meeting will be sent out via the mailing list and it will be posted on this blog.

Bring on the Bling

Last night I gave in and decided to try out some desktop bling for my computer. My pimp'd out desktop can be seen below:



All I had to do was to enable compiz since with Foresight it comes installed by default just not enabled. I also wanted to check out Avant Window Navigator, it is the dockbar that is on the bottom of the screenshot. I also wanted to check out Affinity, it is the new menu that is in the top left corner of the desktop. If you want to install either of them on Foresight use the following commands:


sudo conary update avant-window-navigator
sudo conary update affinity


However, I do have some issues with compiz so if anybody out there has any solutions please let me know. Here are my issues:

• When I switch desktops with the Cube, i.e. alt+ctl+(left or right), it doesn't really switch desktops it just minimizes the open applications and then they will reappear after the cube spins around for the number of desktops I have, so after 4 spins. So to sum up I can't switch desktop with keyboard shortcuts.


• The desktop switcher in the bottom right corner will not display what applications are open on each desktop. It works fine without compiz enabled.

UPDATE:
I fixed Avant Window Manager to the correct name Avant-window-navigator. Sorry for any confusion.

Chicago Gnome User Group

I am interested in starting up a Gnome User Group in Chicago. If you or your friends are interested in joining/helping out with this group please join us in #gnome-chi on irc.gnome.org. If you know any Gnome developers or fan boys in the Chicagoland area let me know if they would be interested in our group.