The new laptop has finally arrived, exactly 50 days after I placed my order. It was delivered to my house on the 20th, but I could only get it on Saturday since I was at college. The build quality seems to be solid, and performance is superb (that is, unless I try to run Vista on it, which seems to choke in certain circumstances even with 2GB of RAM). My Flickr page has more pictures of the laptop.

• I’ve been thinking of writing this for more than four months now - especially ever since I saw this post. This should ideally go into the wiki, or even better, a nice developer’s guide to GNOME lockdown document. I don’t think I’m qualified enough to cover all the possible issues that a developer might come across, but here are two issues that I think all GNOME application developers should be aware of:
  • Make your application Sabayon friendly
    Federico’s GUADEC presentation covers some of the guidelines applications must adhere to in order to work nicely (and to not to break) in deployments managed by Sabayon.
  • Respect desktop-wide lockdown options
    I have tried to describe all the general, desktop wide lockdown settings in the guide that I wrote as a part of the SoC. In brief, there are Gconf keys which control (or at least are supposed to control) the global, desktop wide access to the following features:
    • Command line access, ie arbitrary command execution
    • Screen locking
    • Printing and print setup
    • Saving to disk
    • User switching

    If your application allows users to do any of the above, please ensure that the relevant Gconf keys are read first, and then the feature should be enabled.

  During the next one month, I’ll try to find out cases where software do not adhere to the recommendations in Federico’s slides, or to the desktop-wide lockdown options, and submit bug reports (possibly with patches) as and when required.

• I have been sufferring from a terrible headache for the last three days, and I have not been very responsive to emails, IRC pings, etc. Apologies about that.

Read more about the initiative here.