Desktop Weekly Newsletter - 23 February 2018

Hi all,

Two weeks rolled in to one as I was on holiday last Friday.

GNOME

We’ve been working on a GNOME Online Accounts plugin for Ubuntu One. This will allow you to manage your U1 credentials and share them with services which need them, for example Canonical LivePatch. A MR is being proposed upstream

A bug has been fixed which caused some high contrast icons to be missing in System Settings. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-themes-standard/+bug/1644662

A fix for centering the date alignment in GNOME Shell has been merged upstream https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/merge_requests/12. And we’ve got an upstream review for the work to allow the volume to to amplified above 100%.

There was a regression in the video acceleration work which caused corruption. This has been bisected and now fixed upstream. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105013

GNOME Shell performance with two monitors has had some more work done and should be fixed soon. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/issues/3

Alexander Larsson and James Henstridge have been working on bringing snap support to portals. This work is happening upstream and making good progress. You can read more here: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2018/02/14/moving-a-portal/
The associated work in snapd is here: https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/compare/master...jhenstridge:xdg-desktop-portal-support

In our team meeting this week we decided not to ship tracker by default in 18.04 but will look to enable it in 18.10. You can read more about what Tracker is and does here: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Tracker

GNOME Software in Bionic has support for snap channels now. https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-software/3.27.90-1ubuntu1

General

The daily Bionic ISOs now feature a seeded snap (GNOME Calculator) in place of the deb. This is an early test to help us iron out the bugs before we look to move more applications to snaps in the final release.

Network Manager 1.10 is now in Bionic proposed. Initial testing looks good, but if you find any problems please log a bug. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager

We’ve refreshed the patches to enable hardware accelerated video playback in Chromium. We will distro patch this until such time as it lands upstream. https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/532294

We’ve also been doing work to better support the onscreen keyboard in Chromium under GNOME Shell, and you can test that work here: https://launchpad.net/~osomon/+archive/ubuntu/chromium-osk/+packages

We’ve landed some improvements to BAMF to better match snap applications under Unity 7. https://code.launchpad.net/~3v1n0/bamf/snap-exec-matching-fix

BlueZ 5.48 has landed in Bionic. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bluez/+bug/1747354

Support for themes in snaps is progressing well. You can read more about that work here: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/supporting-desktop-themes-via-the-content-interface/4122

Updates

Chromium: updated stable to 64.0.3282.167 & beta to 65.0.3325.73

LibreOffice 6.0.1.1 is available in stable channel now. And 14.04, 16.04 and 17.10 all have a number of security updates.

A stack of GNOME 3.27 updates have landed in Bionic. This includes things like gnome-keyring, gnome-desktop, gjs, evince, devhelp, dconf-editor, gnome-online-accounts, gvfs, orca screen reader and some games. This is all in preparation for the move to GNOME 3.28 for release. Webkitgtk 2.19 has also landed.

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Does this mean we won’t have to log on Ubuntu Software if we set up Ubuntu One account via Gnome Online Accounts?

You don’t need to sign in to Ubuntu One for the Ubuntu Software app any more to install snaps. That was fixed several weeks ago.

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Thanks Will for these weekly updates. I always look forward to them in my Monday news lineup!

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I am not able to do quick math calculation in GNOME Shell search, I am able to do press the super key and type in 5*8 and get the answer 40 in Ubuntu 17.10, but in testing 18.04 I am not able to do that. Also Calculator entry is missing in Search in GNOME Settings.

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Hello!

With the recent updates, I’ve noticed two problems, namely:

  1. GRUB (from 1.89 + 2.02-2ubuntu4 to 1.92 + 2.02-2ubuntu7)
    The GRUB menu keeps flashing lines. When proceeding, a black rectangle appears that occupies almost the entire screen and when displaying the logon screen, sometimes the mouse disappears.

  2. Network (from 1.8.4-1ubuntu4 to 1.10.4-1ubuntu2)
    My DSL/PPPoE connection is no longer recognized and then I ran out of internet access.

These problems do not generate error messages and in this way I do not know how to report on Launchpad bugs.

I appreciate any further information!

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I can confirm both of these in number 01. In terms of ‘flashing lines’ I’m not sure it’s grub, but perhaps GDM3?? - It seems to happen (for me) intermittently, on boot-up when Grub hands over to GDM3.
Not knowing for sure which package to file against, and keeping fingers crossed that a daily update fixes it, is the reason I haven’t filed a bug too. :neutral_face:

Update: Had a thought - this might be Plymouth causing the lines. I seem to recall a passing error message mentioning plymouth as crashing. I’ll see if I can find that error message.

Thank you for your feedback. Both of those issues are because Snaps currently don’t offer a GNOME Shell search provider interface. That issue has been reported.

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About to be fixed; bug #1752767.

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It’s fixed now - at least in Bionic - no idea about the older releases.

Easily fixable anyway in the meantime :slight_smile:

2 Likes