As of today is the day you can enjoy a fresh new release of openSUSE, the mothership of projects like Banshee, Evolution, F-Spot or Kiwi.

While 11.2 defaults to KDE, we have a solid GNOME release as well. GNOME ships on both the DVD and a separate LiveCD. Now you can actually put the ISO on a USB stick or an SD card and boot from that.

Styling of 11.2 may be a bit different to what you’d expect from SUSE and is a bit of a return to the golden Ximian days. Darker, less saturated shades of the background let your content get all the attention. It’s still green though

Gilouche has been the openSUSE theme for a while now and 11.2 introduces a new default, Sonar. Sonar is a metatheme consisting of window manager decorations and a widget theme. Unfortunately a key element didn’t make it in time — the icon theme. By default you still get the familiar Gilouche folders. You can, however, install the Sonar icon theme from Factory. It’s also the first time we’re using the openSUSE font, 5th Leg, for window titles. 5th Leg is the result of openSUSE’s Hackweek and have to express my gratitude to Novell for this event yet again.

    

SUSE Moblin

Sonar isn’t the only new theme addition though. Building on top of some great design coming from the openedHand/Intel team working on Moblin I’ve experimented with a simple glyph style (although slightly less minimalistic) and an easier workflow for creating such an icon theme. While the font approach ended up as a failure, the SUSE Edition of Moblin is now shipping a theme based on the foundation of the hackweek experiment.

Unfortunately the theme isn’t independent of the widget and WM theme color yet (if any hacker is interested in figuring out how to best recolor the SVG glyphs based on gtk colors, please step forward . The good news is that you can try the complete package on the desktop even if it was designed for a small netbook screen (with a clumsy touchpad). It works quite well if you have enough screen estate.

You can grab the latest and greatest moblin-cursor-theme, moblin-icon-theme and moblin-gtk-engine from my personal repo.

Go ahead, try openSUSE 11.2. We love GNOME too!

Failure IS an option for hackweek . While things looked fairly optimistic on the icon theme/font front, the actual results don’t look so good.

While the chopping script is working fairly well, it’s hardly elegant and really suffers from insanely slow startup time of Inkscape. The “crop” is done thanks to Inkscape’s verbs and requires Inkscape to be called once per icon. Even worse, to clean it up and remove some cruft for the Fontforge import, it needs to be called once again.

Ted mentioned a GSoC project to provide a better interface for external scripting (using dbus), but I haven’t had time to look into it yet. By the time I’ll look at this again, it’s going to be merged in, surely .

Fontforge’ interface couldn’t be in a bigger contrast in terms of speed. Importing SVGs as glyphs and generating a truetype font out of the template is faster than you can release the return key. Sadly FontForge doesn’t expect the font height to be 24pt and all the circles don’t end up as such after the import. I haven’t been able to figure out how to either scale the SVGs up to 1000px in Inkscape or transform after the import in FontForge.

So this has been a rather kind failure. One that doesn’t leave me feeling like I wasted my time.

CSS theme engine

I had an old mockup for a CSS theme that now felt too bubble gummy. After dealing with the hyper-realistic renderings of gnome-icon-theme high res, I enjoy the minimalism of Moblin.

Sadly time has run out as I’ve had some outstanding tasks I needed to handle. Hopefully I can get back to this. The engine just manages to avoid me.

One of the greatest things about openSUSE is happening again this week. Hackweek time seems to also be the only time I have something worthwhile to put on my blog.

I don’t have a very focused plan for this year, but I’d like to investigate the following:

• Stencil icon workflow.

  I’d like to have a single SVG canvas with all my icons and generate an SVG-only icon theme. Ted Gould showed me his nifty script at GCDS that used Inkscape‘s verbs to ‘chop up’ an SVG into individual SVG files, so that part I already know is feasible.

  The untouched ground is importing those SVGs into a FontForge project file to generate a font out of the theme as well.

• CSS gtk+ theme. Robert Staudinger has been working on a gtk+ theme engine that allows a theme creator to use CSS-like language to draw stuff (as opposed to talking to a developer to draw stuff). The project has been on my radar forever and I’ve never really sat down and gotten my hands dirty. Must fix!

Wish me luck!

I must say I’m happy about what I picked for this year’s Hackweek. My back and neck have not enjoyed the hackweek, but all the other body parts did While I am far from finished, I am surprised how much can be done on a font in a week (around 60 hours I would reckon) if I don’t need to worry about anything else.

The glyph coverage is better than what I planned. The typeface is stronger to what I sketched out and I hate there is no programmatic way to get smaller widths or alter x-height. Nevertheless I think the project was a success.

People keep asking what tools I use – Fontforge is the master tool for all this, it’s really packed with features. But I wouldn’t be able to draw a thing in it (even though it does have a large palette of tools), so all the glyphs have been constructed in Inkscape. Big thanks to George Williams not only for the amazing tool, but also for great documentation.

I’ve realized over the week just how much work needs to be done to create a full font family. I always considered the prices to be quite high, but this stuff is years of experience and endless tweaking. I know I’ll never try anything bigger than a display face/headliner in this life. That said, I think now is the perfect time to ask you to come forward and join the fun. Lots of international glyphs I have no idea about need to be done, the spacing fixed, etc. Check out the font from opensuse-art SVN and play with it, improve it. Discussions should take place on the opensuse-art mailing list. Thank you.

Also a big thanks to Novell for a great opportunity to Free openSUSE and Linux in general one step further.

• Download Fifth Leg v 0.1 in OpenType format.

I screwed up with the proportions and the font is way to strong, but I’m liking the process. You can check out the progress in opensuse-art SVN.

I may be taking on something bigger than I can ever finish in a month and hardly in a hackweek, but it is both fun unknown territory and something that is needed badly.

openSUSE uses a rather spiffy Cholla header font by Sibylle Hagmann. The problem is it isn’t a Free nor free font^*, making it hard for the community to produce openSUSE branded material. So you guessed it, I’d like to design an original type to replace it. Apart from Lingdings (bullets font for OpenOffice Impress) I’ve never done this. Partly because the font designer and even type setting community is very pedantic, deeply following a strict set of rules. Good fonts come from a lot of experience. So be warned, this is pure amateurism, a font designed by a non-type-designer.

To help me stay focused, I’ve come up with these attributes I’d like the font to have.

• Simplistic, technical sans serif.
• Heavy. Rounded.
• Will not do normal weight, this is a headline font. ‘Close’ to Cholla Wide Bold.
• Only basic latin glyph coverage for now (a-z, A-Z, 0-9).
• Low contrast.
• Open Font License.
• I don’t aim to kern the font properly this week.

Thanks Garrett for suggesting the name.

A bit late-ish summary of Hackweek, due to our trip to the Karlovy Vary film festival for the weekend. It’s been great fun. I opted not to do my daily soup of icon design. Lapo, Andreas, Cornelius and the rest of the Tango team, thanks for rocking on gnome icon theme while I was gone.

I had lots of fun even before the hackweek started, on the t-shirt designs and helping out with the styling side of things on ideas website. I first scratched my own itch with the SVG guilotine script and then I chose to help out Joe with the cool Banshee web player (on the layout side that is). There’s been a couple of artwork requests I didn’t manage to fulfill last week, so accept my apologies.

Although meeting up with folks in Prague was great, the best thing for me was finally finding some time to learn a few new things. Both git and jquery look like they will save me a lot of time in future.

I hope this hasn’t been the last hackweek. Enjoyed it immensely.