Download it from here as always.

Oh, and for good luck, I’ve also uploaded it to badgerports.org (which should now display okay on smaller displays), for use with Ubuntu 10.04, where support for authoring with Moonlight is included. It’ll be in the main Ubuntu 10.10 repository at some point in the future, also with Moonlight support.

Enjoy.

I know monodevelop-debugger-mdb is busted – it’s temporary (until this evening). Or you can install this package manually as a workaround until then. There’s still no support re-enabled in Monodevelop in Lucid for Mono 2.6′s Soft Debugger – this will happen at a later date, once I decide on how to do it.

It didn’t take me long to realise the most obvious way to develop such an editor: GRUB2′s canvas-based layout system has an awful lot in common with XAML, so the obvious choice was to develop using Silverlight (or, more specifically, Gtk.Moonlight). Larval’s internal theme format is XAML files, which are then exported to (and imported from) GRUB2′s simple text based files.

The biggest piece of work, to be honest, is the Managed implementation of a PF2 font reader/writer, so you can design a theme using the regular TrueType fonts of your choice, then have them automatically ported to PF2 format as required.

I look forward to plenty of community input on Larval, once it reaches a point where I’m sufficiently pleased with my (Ms-PL licensed) code to share it with the world. Until then, you’ll have to make do with the above screenshot!

[Edit: If it wasn't obvious, this was mostly an April Fool. Mostly. I DID knock together a Gtk.Moonlight UI, and I *DO* think it's a good idea. But there's no code, and no real desire to write the required amount of cruft]

I ended up speaking with the upstream GRUB2 team (which has certainly lead to a strange alliance in one case) about Colin’s GSOC themes, and as it turns out, the main reason there’s no theme supplied with GRUB2 is that Colin’s themes use non-Free elements (proprietary fonts like Helvetica are used heavily). Since I had learnt the theme format to a basic degree in doing my Ubuntu theme, I proposed making a genuinely Free theme – starting with a Debian theme, and moving on to a generic “GRUB2″ theme afterwards.

As I went along, I found a handful of bugs and feature oddities, which have almost all been fixed with incredible turnaround by Vladimir Serbinenko, the current maintainer of the “gfxmenu” code (there remain some questions regarding RTL support in themes, and how to gracefully deal with different aspect ratios) – and I want to extend my thanks to him for his help. However, at this point in time, I’m pleased to announce a theme I’d consider ready for public consumption.

It’s obviously not perfect, and it uses the old visual style from Debian Lenny, but it’s a fully Free starting point, which hopefully can be deconstructed by others seeking to make their own themes. It ought to scale fully to any 4:3 resolution. And it may explode and eat your disk on any version of GRUB2 Experimental other than r1499. Generally, the README is a good starting point.

Oh yes, an URL. Try http://retro.apebox.org/grubthemes/

I’ve been speaking with some folks on deviantART regarding using their Debian-themed wallpaper in future releases of my themes package, but for now, this should be enough for gfxmenu to get a little more exposure and a little more testing. And, hopefully, shift artist focus back from the theme-incompatible BURG fork to the real GRUB2 project.

Definitely a fine use of your moneycash.

Braaaaaaaak bok boooooook bok bok bkaaawk bok bok bok bok bok:

• Bok bok LiveCD
• Wallpaper bkawk bok bok
• Cluck cluck Gnote
• Booooooook bok Solang bok bok bok

Bok bok booooook Mininova:

4577800beda226d815f98bc8d79521cd  clr-9.10-desktop-amd64.iso
f97179e5b13f3aceb6c9d98d2c7e6ef5  clr-9.10-desktop-i386.iso

Bkaaawk bok bok bok boooooook bok braaawk bok bok booooook bok bok bok 10.04? Bok bok boook charity, bok bok videogames, braaaawk money.

Bok bok.

How this happens license-wise varies, and is one of the primary concerns for game companies (whose code is kept proprietary, late-in-life iD Software games notwithstanding). Sometimes, permissive (non-copyleft) licenses allow a library to be used directly via dynamic linking, or even compiled directly into the end application. Sometimes this is not possible with a library’s Free license – however, a different (typically proprietary) license is also available as an option. The FreeType library for example offers users the choice of the GNU GPL, the world’s most popular copyleft license, or a permissive MIT/X11-style license which obligates the user to advertise the usage somewhere. The Qt windowing toolkit is available these days under a choice of Free copyleft licenses (GPLv3 or LGPLv2.1), or a paid proprietary license.

So, on to a new title. Yesterday was the release day for EA’s The Sims 3. Now, visibly, this game’s Free bits are not part of the game – but are part of the “Cider” compatibility engine based on Wine, used for the Mac “port”. As it is based on Wine, Cider includes buckets of Free libraries, as mentioned in the manual: libpng, libjpeg, dmalloc, bstring, SDL, FreeType, squish, iniParser, ffMPEG, and (generally speaking) Wine. However, this doesn’t always tell a full story – as I implied, sometimes something Free is used under a proprietary license, and often that replacement license does not require any copyright attribution in the game’s manual. Does The Sims 3 do any of this?

Could be, could be. Oh, and for the nascent Sims 3 modding community, that might be your cue for where to start investigating the new custom items’ format.

I confess I’m not sure where certain figures are coming from regarding RAM consumption on media player apps. It’s clear that RhythmBox is pretty lean RAMwise with a library the size of mine, but for all other players, there seems to be some pretty consistent comparative values that can be reached. What I wasn’t expecting was how high Songbird’s CPU consumption would be – I thought its resource gobbling was mostly limited to RAM and disk (as all these players use Gstreamer for playback). Certainly there’s no basis for statements like “3-10x more memory than RB” for ANY player, bugs aside. And bugs should be filed so they can be fixed.

Edit: I had a request for a non-jpg representation of the figures. Here it is. It’s the same file in all cases (an AAC or an Ogg, I don’t remember which), and before anyone asks, I had no apps open other than the players, Evolution, and X-Chat. Someone else suggested I should stop giving the misleading VIRT value from Top, so have re-measured the numbers using gnome-system-monitor’s “writable memory” column, which is probably the best measure I can easily take. So here are those numbers: