I should point out that the gstreamer-plugins-default problem is down to a mismatch of version of libcdio caused by the latter trying to be installed from the packman APT component. If there's not a new gnome-panel package posted in the next couple of days, I'll build one against the appropriate evolution-data-server and libwnck.

Oh, and I was right about gnome-session, so I'll be rebuilding that too.

Oh dear. Inevitably, some of the packages were held back while I was doing my apt upgrade, so I then went to install them afterwards, assuming that they required some new packages, and here's the result:

dhcp1:~ # apt install bug-buddy control-center2 control-center2-devel eel
eel-devel evolution evolution-data-server evolution-data-server-devel
evolution-devel evolution-pilot evolution-webcal gedit glade gnome-media
gnome-media-devel gnome-menus gnome-panel gnome-panel-devel gnome-panel-doc
gnome-system-monitor gstreamer-plugins gstreamer-plugins-default
gstreamer-plugins-devel gstreamer-plugins-excess gstreamer-plugins-extra
gstreamer-plugins-extra-mad gtk-sharp2 gtkhtml2 gtkhtml2-devel libcddb
libcddb-devel libcdio libcdio-devel libgda libgda-devel libgnomecanvas
libgnomecanvas-devel libgnomecanvas-doc libgnomedb libgnomedb-devel libgnomesu
libgnomesu-devel libwnck libwnck-devel mergeant nautilus nautilus-cd-burner
nautilus-devel planner sound-juicer vcdimager xmms-devel evince
gnome-presence-applet mozilla-bonobo poppler
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  gnome-panel: Depends: libecal-1.2.so.2
               Depends: libwnck-1.so.16
  gnome-presence-applet: Depends: libgalago-gtk.so.0 but it is not installable
                         Depends: libgalago.so.1 but it is not installable
  gstreamer-plugins-default: Depends: libcdio.so.4
                             Depends: libcdio.so.4(CDIO_4)
E: Broken packages

Now, libecal is provided by evolution-data-server, and libcdio by, well, libcdio, both of which are in that list. Looks like they've been built against the wrong versions. Also, why include a package built against galago when there are no galago packages available? Tsk tsk tsk...

Nice one SuSE - GNOME 2.11 packages are now available in supplementary. They're built against GTK+ 2.6, not 2.7, so it'll be an interesting comparison with GARNOME. Hopefully now that 2.8 has been anointed as the GTK+ version for 2.12, SuSE's next set of builds will include this. Anyway, you can add it as a YaST source at the above location, or I'll pop an updated sources.list up for APT users once I've finished installing them.

This means that usr local bin packages will now be based on these packages, and any packages I have to update (eg gnome-session - I bet suseplugger and susewatcher are still auto-started, as still no gnome-volume-manager) will hopefully get done this week. I may even update dbus so that I can do g-v-m too.

It's looking really nice, first thing I'll say, especially as you can't see it in the screen shot below is translucent cursors! I suspect this is a cairo thing, and it's very cool. Utterly unnecessary, but totally cool. As I continue to play around, I'll post more, but for now, here's a couple of handy things.

• garnome start script - this assumes you've installed on your SuSE box using GARNOME into /opt/garnome - stick it somewhere in the standard path (e.g. /usr/X11R6/bin).
• garnome login manager session - adds GARNOME to your login manager (GDM/KDM/etc) - stick it in /usr/share/xsessions

Screenshot:

2.11.90 is out, baby! Feeeeeel the power - GTK+ 2.7, Cairo, evince, services-admin, gnome-keyring-manager - oh man!

It's available as a GARNOME release, which is currently building on my machine, it's up to Evolution so far. Once it's built (and I've added geektoys, mono, etc etc) I'll have to make sure I build the Clearlooks engine, since that's what I'm using at the moment, and give it a whirl. I'll also create a fresh user for screenshot purposes.

[JHBuild is blocking on #311958 for me]

Cool, We now have Planet GNOME UK, which includes my blog amongst others. This means that I'm now syndicated on the following sites:

Planet SuSE
• Planet N
• Planet GNOME UK
• Planet (Former) Advogato

Also, my webcam is now back online - yay!

It's finally made it onto the ABC site. This report reports twelve bombs and four detonators (making the sixteen reported yesterday) as having been found in the car at Luton station. There's a suggestion they were left there for someone else to collect, but this doesn't seem to hold water - the car was seized by Police six days after the attacks. Had the bombers known they were going to die in the blasts, and had planned for the car or bombs to be picked up by another person or gang, that seems a very long time to leave it, especially as it was on a seven day parking permit, so one more day and it would, in theory, have been impounded anyway. It really does seem more likely that they expected to be returning to that car, and its cargo.

There are also pictures available, including X-Rays of one of the bombs:

• ABC version
• BBC version

ABC News: "They bought roundtrip train tickets and paid for long-term parking two of the details that are prompting the intelligence community to question if the four London bombers intended to die."

Still no mention of the sixteen bombs to be found, I think I shall email Five Live later today to ask about their report.

Five Live reported this afternoon that ABC News in the States had stated that police searching the car found at Luton Airport after the attacks on July 7th had found sixteen bombs in the car. This seems to add further weight to the theory that these men did not realise they were going to die, but were manipulated into carrying out the attacks, perhaps thinking they were merely going to be planting the bombs.

However, I can't find anything on ABC's site (even in their coverage of the blasts) about this report. Can't find it on the BBC's coverage either. I always find disappearing news stories suspicious.

Paul: Which webcam do you own, and what do you want to use it to do?

• Frustration with JHBuild hit "stuff it" point
• Running a GARNOME build overnight

Now, if only GARNOME had an automated tinderbox function like JHBuild

Welcome to Planet SuSE, Paul Mellors.

Paul is in the process of converting from the Less Free OS^TM to SuSE, and is sharing his experiences with the world.

Time was when you had to be a serious backbone provider to get a .net - what is the world coming to?

Overcoming (I hope) the mozilla problems I've encountered by manually checking it out, and then doing jhbuild buildone --no-network mozilla.

Alas, gnome-python/pygtk fails due to a problem with autogen.sh/aclocal which I'm having problems figuring out. This generates all sorts of other problems, as the majority of modules that fail to build are a result of not having pygtk. (Most of the rest are due to mozilla, so hopefully I'm on top of them)

Anyone who's got pygtk to build under jhbuild, I'd love to hear how.

Had another look at last night's dbus build log, seems it was because it was trying to do something to the permissions on /usr/lib/monodoc/sources which is of course owned by root.

So, I'm now doing a tinderbox build as root.

Looks like I'm in business.

Hmmm, you need Pyrex installed to be able to build D-BUS. Thing is that JHBuild doesn't install Pyrex (or if it does, it does it later), so that appropriate modules aren't available to its Python install, resulting in D-BUS failing to build.

Have installed Pyrex manually into my jhbuild path, and restarted the tinderbox, I'll leave it going overnight. The tinderbox status for this build is here, although note that D-BUS failed to install this time. I'll have to hit Bugzilla and Bugzilla in the morning.

Decided to do a tinderbox build, will periodically upload the latest tinderbox status to http://home.rubberturnip.org.uk/jhbuild-logs/.

I finally succumbed to the temptation:

# jhbuild build

I'd like to welcome Marcus to Planet SuSE.

For a long time Marcus' Advogato blog appeared to have been abandoned, but he's started writing again recently, and I'm thrilled to have him on board, he works on various different things at SuSE, and he's probably best known for his work on WINE and gPhoto.

It's my brother's wedding tomorrow, so all the best to David and Cheryl as they prepare to start their new life together. We'll be over in Liverpool for the wedding, so any urgent emails may be slightly delayed in being responded to.

Justin: Think that's US news going mad again, the BBC reports that the two men detained yesterday have been released without charge, and the police are searching for "four would-be suicide bombers".

This caught my eye this morning - reports that the evidence linking the alleged perpetrators of the bombings on the 7th with Pakistan may not be quite as watertight as the authorities would have us believe.

I believe this will be buried by today's news, which is very convenient.

And oh yes, today is the eleventh anniversary of Blair being elected Labour leader.

• University College Hospital incident "stood down" by Police
• Reports on Five Live that St Albans Station has been closed following a security alert, nothing on the BBC News site as yet though

So, as Roger would say: Who benefits?

There had been concerns earlier that the small size of the blasts today may have meant that there was some sort of chemical or biological agent released, but Met Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair just said that the blasts were broadly conventional.

That should read University College Hospital, London.

Just reported on Five Live: A man has been arrested by armed police by the gates of Downing Street, other pictures have been seen by reporters of people running down Whitehall - wasn't sure if they meant "suspects", the public, or the security services though.

Awaiting a statement from the PM, he's holding COBRA talks at the moment.

Armed police have been deployed at University College, London.

Updated galeon and abiword-beta-* packages.

The AbiWord packages are the latest development version. 2.3.4, and the Galeon ones are built against SuSE's newly released packages of mozilla version 1.7.10.

BBC Reporters' Log:

Andrew Marr: They [ministers] will be trying to establish whether this is a series of hoaxes.

Crispin Thorold: someone said something about smoke [at Warren Street], someone else said something about a loud bang.

Brian Wheeler: The police cordon [at Oval] has been moved further back.

Justin: No reports of gunfire on the BBC - suspect that's in accurate.

Looks like a scare attempt rather than a serious attack, possibly a copycat I suppose (three tubes and a bus), although someone on Five Live said a police officer (not an official spokesperson - watch this space, wait for the story to be dropped or denied) said there was an unexploded device at Shepherd's Bush, possibly in addition to the man who apparently threatened to blow himself up before running off.

Have committed en_GB translations for:

• beagle
• evince
• gnome-keyring-manager

which means that Beagle will no longer say Results X through Y of Z, but Results X to Y of Z, and also that all the proposed modules for 2.12 are 100% (well, as of right now) translated to en_GB. Now onto the desktop and developer modules.

Well, after a fashion, I've uploaded gimp-beta packages - these are the new development version, 2.3.2. You'll want the 2.3.2-1 packages in order for them to work properly, due to me not reading the release notes properly before building the 2.3.2-0 packages.

Okay, so I now have about three weeks off before we head down to Soul Survivor, so here's a little list of things I'm going to try to do during that time. Note that some or all of these may end up not happening depending on what else ends up eating my time, so don't depend upon them till they happen:

• Get more GNOME apps properly translated to en_GB as we move toward 2.12
• Try to get the latest 2.11.x release, including GTK+ 2.7.x built on SuSE 9.3 for insane testers to play with
• Okay, that's quite a short list, but the second one certainly will take a lot of time...

Oh yes, I've enabled RENDER and Composite in my X server, and I'm now running xcompmgr to do nice drop shadows and window fading. I have to say, it's rather gorgeous. Looking forward to some of these nifty features making their way into mainstream WMs.

Set up a new Mac Mini in the library at college today, to run Accordance. First real dabbling I'd had with OSX, and I have to say that on the whole it was pretty nifty. Good to be able to use a real shell (given that I'd heard that the default shell was TCSH, which I haven't really used in a good few years. Setting everything up was very easy indeed, system config was intuitive, and for printing (which regular readers will know is a current bonnet-bound bee of mine), it supports IPP, like all modern OSs should [aside for users of a certain Less Free OS].

Only played for a couple of hours, including the initial system setup, but I have to say full marks to Apple, it was almost as simple to setup and get started with as SuSE Linux! Worth saying that the graphical wizardry was very impressive, but much cooler things are just around the corner in the world of X.

A couple of gripes:

• I only seemed to be able to run one instance of the terminal emulator at a time, now this may have been because I hadn't found the right option, but it seems a dumb default
• The transparency on the terminal window didn't work quite right, if transparency was enabled, text that was cleared from the window was still visible "in" the transparency - wierd...

Man, building The GIMP sure cooks your CPU:

Didn't even stop there, as I type it's hit 77C, and reckon it could hit 78.

Rar! Go Nat!

...and in slightly saner news, Amanda and myself took a walk around the big lake at Nottingham University this afternoon, and I took a bunch of photos.

Photos are here.

Great night watching Dr Who last night, quite a few people came, and we got up to the end of Boom Town, at about midnight, before college was being locked up and we had to call it a night.

• Committed en_GB translation for the new gnome-power-manager module
• We exchanged contracts on our house in Watford this morning, we complete a week on Monday
• Building new gimp-beta packages - version 2.3.2

Tomorrow is almost a day off, got a couple of errands to do at college, but that's it thanks to getting the report in today.

Been out at the pub tonight with a few guys from college, good fun and good beer - what a combo!

Tomorrow night, to mark the end of the Contextual Theology Programme, we're having a little bash in the Common Room where we're showing all thirteen episodes of this year's Doctor Who. Starting at 16:00, which is the deadline for the CTP reports, we'll be going through till 01:45 or so.

In attendance will be a 4ft inflatable Dalek amongst other things, and I'll have my camera. It's going to be alien, booze and snack-tastic.

I love a good rainstorm, but this is ridiculous:

Just been reading Planet SuSE on a PC in the college library. The PC is running a Less Free OS^TM, and I'm having to use its default browser. Reminder that I need to fix the CSS so it doesn't only display the header image on Firefox/other Mozilla-based browsers. Also, using Notepad do compose a blog entry is horrible, I keep forgetting it's not a real text editor, and hitting Esc.

Good to see that the authorities are trawling for poor hackers who might not really trust them. Anyone else feeling jumpy anytime they hear a helicopter these days?

Report is in - w00t!

Mr Love has new inotify kernels for SuSE 9.3. What's new?

I have updated Beagle packages to take advantage of this. Get 'em while they're hot! If you update your kernel to these new ones, make sure you get the new Beagle build too.

Keep reading Roger's blog - the plot goes on thickening, and a couple of thoughts from me:

• No enquiry? I can see that investigation is a priority, but are the civil service, and the security services really spread so thin that they can't do both?
• It's very convenient that the alleged suicide bombers took identifying belongs with them that were apparently able to withstand the blasts of the bombs
• It's also very convenient that they left explosives in the car at Luton ready to be found by the authorities. If they knew they were going to die, why leave it there? Why not use the lot in the bombs?

Could it be (with thanks to Roger for this postulation) that these guys knew that they were off to do some damage, but were being manipulated and had no idea they were going to die?

CTP Report is finished, and will be handed in tomorrow.

Liverpool 3-0 TNS - the long walk of defending the title begins.

Have now done updated Beagle packages adding new packages, libbeagle[-devel] - this is the new C API for Beagle which allows other applications to access data indexed by Beagle. It requires an updated libxml2, which is also available. Have also done updated galeon packages, which ensure that Galeon can access Mozilla's libraries, previously 'secure' sites wouldn't work - whoops...

[Ref]
Have downgraded glib2* on my build machine for the time being, and I'm now packaging up the new versions of gaim and beagle. These packages are now uploading.

Please note that the new beagle package has no new features enabled, it's just an update with the same feature set, I'll work on dependencies for new features when I have time. It does however, require an upgrade of gmime, which I'm also uploading. Get them here.

[Ref]
Roger, you may want to check out the Five Live website, and look at their Listen Again section.

Roger: Now, I didn't have Five Live on all day, but very nearly, and I have to say I don't recall hearing that, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen - look forward to hearing if the BBC get back to you about Power's appearance.

Welcome to the Planet Andreas. Andreas works for Novell::SuSE in Germany, in fact I think he was there when I was, talking about staying power...

Work starts on the CTP placement report today, due in 16:00 on Friday, and 6000 words required, so far I have ~100.

The most interesting thing for me about Thursday was Bush's initial comment to the press, now, I know it's been quoted that he said "The war on terrorism goes on" (Ref), but I was listening, and sure sounded like he said "is on", like you might say "game on". There was excitement in his voice, this dragged things back onto his agenda.

And now, we can expect our civil liberties to be severely curtailed, top of the agenda will be ID cards, although I defy anyone to prove that the ID card scheme as currently proposed would have prevented Thursday's attacks, assuming they were genuine terrorism of course (Ref).

Got back last night about 23:00, second week of placement was good, although seriously overshadowed by Thursday's attacks. There's not a lot to say that hasn't already been said by many other people (although, as always, you should read Roger's blog), except a comment that was made in a letter published in yesterday's Independent, War on terror isn't the answer, if it was, Israel would be the safest nation on earth. The answer is to get people to the negotiating table, this is demonstrated by the experience of the ANC and the IRA.

GTK+ issues on SuSE 9.3, I suggest anyone having problems building GTK+ apps read this.

Photos from my placement will be in the gallery before I go to bed tonight.

So, wow, Live 8! The Who just finished, what a gig, what a day! I was in tears even before the end of U2's set. Edinburgh seems to have gone extremely well too.

There are more protests in Scotland in the week, as well as a gig at Murrayfield. Keep the pressure on, no-one should starve in the the 21st century, no-one should die of preventable diseases, no-one should grow up without even a primary education. Make it history, end poverty. Do. It. Now.

Anthony and Mark's ordination in Manchester tomorrow, then I'm off back down to Watford.

Justin: The number is: +44 7717 999 999.

More details here.

Join the Virtual Rally, I did:
.

All the best to Karen who's in Edinburgh raising a fist for me, and forming part of the white band later!

Today is the great garden clear-up.

Latest progress:

Back in Nottingham, after being offline in Watford since Sunday evening. Have uploaded two entries that I wrote while offline.

Ouch! Too many emails: