With the release of GNOME 2.30, Nautilus has reverted to browser mode as the default. So long, spatial mode! In Fedora 13, Xorg now relies on udev rather than hal for automatic hardware detection. Bonus note: I noticed Totem now remembers the last-played playback position. Fedora and GNOME keep getting better with time.
Troubled by duplicate emails in your Evolution inbox? You need the remove-duplicates plugin! It slices, it dices, and it comes complete with its own patch set and Makefile. Currently, upstream is tracking this effort here: GNOME Bug 587011 – evolution-kill-bonobo unable to build remove-duplicates
You love chatting over IRC, IRC is life, and you need your IRC client to support fullscreen mode! Look no further: xchat-gnome requires only a trivial patch to support fullscreen. For more information, see Fullscreen support for xchat-gnome (GNOME Bug 445638). Yes, xchat-gnome needs your love!
Duh! To receive files from a phone or other Bluetooth-enabled device to a laptop running Linux, make sure to enable the “Receive files in Downloads folder over Bluetooth” option in GNOME File Sharing Preferences. Notes: Bluetooth on Fedora
A few things I have learned: DDL (Data Definition Language) varies significantly from one SQL implementation to another. It is much easier and faster to maintain an application for a single database backend rather than across many. libgda is great when you are designing an application specifically meant to manage arbitrary databases. libgda is overkill when all you need is to maintain a simple, local embedded database. SQLite is fast, lightweight, well-documented, and backed by an active IRC support community. Keep database-related code restricted to as few source files as possible. The SQLite source code is an excellent reference for understanding how to implement commands like .import. Using Git (or any modern version control system) saves an enormous amount of time.
Evolution accepts whitespace in the hostname field. When sending email, it fails due to invalid hostname. This has now been fixed, thanks to input from Alan Matsuoka. Reference: GNOME Bug 533465 – Evolution account editor accepts white space in host name as valid
Upon quitting Totem, I heard a ping. This came from xchat-gnome (via the sound-notification plugin). It turns out gnome_sound_play was being used to play the sound, which defaults to the ESD backend: gnome_sound_play("../../data/message.wav"); ESD has been superseded by PulseAudio in most major distributions. I would prefer moving to a GStreamer-based backend, so I rewrote the code to use GStreamer. However, the ping still didn’t work while I was playing music through Totem. ...
Ticking “Away” worked like a charm on xchat-gnome, but unticking it didn’t do any magic. This turned out to be a bug fixed upstream (GNOME #462031). Grepping the code revealed a rather trivial fix, which on further lookup was part of the Fedora 9 build. I ended up filing a bug report (Fedora #430883). A package was released with the stated fix, which crashed xchat-gnome whenever one tried to set or unset away: ...