Re: switching to g-c-c shell? [Was: Re: Control center and capplet merging]

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Havoc Pennington">

> On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 14:15 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> > In these cases, it would be good to be able to find a way to get access
> > without too much trouble like a troubleshooter system that tells you
> > where to go if the default multimedia stuff doesn't work.
> 
> I don't want to be too sarcastic ;-) but if we can write a wizard to fix
> it, why don't we just fix it to begin with without the user clicking
> "next" a few times?
> 
> I'm sure there are a million excuses for this control panel but they are
> all excuses in my book. We can and should do better (especially the full
> distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu who could fix the whole stack).

We kept it hidden in warty, but it snuck back in for hoary. We'll hide it
again in breezy. :-)

One infrastructural leap forward that helps us ditch this is the auto*sink
GStreamer plugins. Very handy, and from my casual testing so far, they work
very nicely.

(As hideous as the Sound crapplet is), Martin has put a "choose your output
device" dropdown in the Sound crapplet in breezy, and some hotplugging stuff
to go with it. If we didn't have so much trouble with middle layers of the
audio stack (read: mixing), this is what the user-interesting functionality
would be. This needs some... "integrationary massage" before going upstream,
but it's a good step.

> I do see the value in configuring a custom default video sink though.  Let
> me go do that now. Not.

So, the argument here is that sometimes XVideo doesn't work, yada yada. In
Windows, you turn "video acceleration" on and off, much like Totem's options
for TV out. Maybe that's one way of keeping it around, but less confusing.

- Jeff

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OSCON 2005: August 1st-5th         http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2005/
 
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