openSUSE 11.2 — the art of GNOME
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!
November 12th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
you tease!
November 12th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
[...] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/log/?p=801 a few seconds ago from Gwibber [...]
November 12th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
[...] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/log/?p=801 a few seconds ago from Gwibber [...]
November 12th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
[...] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/log/?p=801 a few seconds ago from Gwibber [...]
November 12th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
great work on both project jim!
i going to get the iso now!
November 12th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Really nice.
Btw what’s that font used in suse welcome menu?
November 12th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Dan, that’s 5th Leg as well.
November 12th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Heh, muj tanecni partner (netechnik) po shlednuti brandingu instalace prohlasil “Dyk to vybpada jako rybnicek brcalnik za mlhou hustou tak, ze by se dala krajet”
(non-Czech speakers: I’m sorry, there is no way to translate the above into any other language, it’ll cease to be funny)
November 12th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
Tak jeste ze to tanecni partneri nemaji na schvalovani
November 13th, 2009 at 1:18 am
[...] | El arte de Gnome en OpenSUSE | Caratulas de [...]
November 13th, 2009 at 1:41 am
KDE is very fine, no doubt but I prefer GNOME, so I’m very glad that the openSUSE team have given it so much time and attention. Thank you very much.
P.S. I was in Brno for All Souls’ Day, everyone was very friendly, my first impression of CZ was extremely positive.
November 13th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
what about this, http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.2/repo/oss/suse/noarch/sonar-icon-theme-11.2.2-1.2.1.noarch.rpm ?
November 14th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
[...] is the default desktop environment, but here is a look at the GNOME part of OpenSUSE 11.2 (traditionally, SUSE has been very pro-choice and over-encompassing, with just a little bias [...]
November 15th, 2009 at 3:38 am
where can I get that mobiln background? looks very cool
November 16th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
anonim: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Moblin:/UI/openSUSE_Factory/i586/moblin-branding-opensuse-0.3-6.2.i586.rpm
November 17th, 2009 at 2:02 am
Novell did it again, this time with the upstream one-canvas g-i-t style. Great job!
I love your Moblin set too.
November 17th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Wow! Impressive artwork!
I’m an happy Fedora user and I’m not going to switch to openSUSE right now, but I really really envy your artwork
November 18th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
[...] http://jimmac.musichall.cz/log/?p=801 a few seconds ago from TTYtter [...]
November 28th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Congratulations ! I’m really thinking that that type of simple and squared-style icons should REALLY be choosen as a default icon theme Gnome 3.
Is there any plan for that ?
Again, fantastic work
–
/!\ Non-native english speaker
December 10th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Hello,
I very appeciate your work, specially on icons and i would like to ask you about Sonar icon theme. When will be final version or will be in openSUSE 11.2 available this theme through updates ? Thanks
December 14th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
@6205 you can install it from the Factory repo — http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME:/Factory/openSUSE_11.2/noarch/sonar-icon-theme-11.2.5-21.1.noarch.rpm
December 19th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
I have suggestion for Sonar theme. Because GTK theme is dark, i believe that tray icons should be redone in monochrome colors like in Humanity in Ubuntu. I’ve acctually tried that, replaced network manager and volume controls from Humanity-Dark theme for dark panels and it looks exellent. Please consider it for Sonar icon theme, it looks much much better..
December 21st, 2009 at 2:09 pm
@6205 There’s a proposal being discussed on such a simple flat symbol style. I’ll add -symbolic as soon as we have a spec.
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2009-December/011143.html
January 29th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
I :heart: the loading screen. That’s amazing… classy, elegant, clean… just flawless bro. Always been a big fan, and I have to admit the novelty has worn off some, but sometimes you can still amaze…
January 29th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Thanks Will. The sympathy is mutual. Loved your GNOME skins. Sad to see you move on to that other platform
February 17th, 2010 at 3:40 pm
Hello, what’s new with Sonar icons, any updates?
February 28th, 2010 at 1:48 am
@6205: Sonar icons are only the suse branded subset of a theme. Most of the work is happening upstream (gnome-icon-theme)
March 29th, 2010 at 10:45 am
[...] community-driven efforts and some of them come from well-known Linux distributions. Sonar The Sonar theme for GNOME was created by Novell and introduced in version 11.2 of openSUSE. Its Gtk+ style [...]
April 7th, 2010 at 9:41 am
[...] Sonar theme for GNOME was created by Novell and introduced in version 11.2 of openSUSE. Its Gtk+ style [...]
December 13th, 2012 at 8:33 pm
[...] Sonart a Novell fejlesztette az openSUSE 11.2-höz. A Gtk+ alapú stílus lágy [...]