My entry about the Oxygen cursors

After Harald’s entry about the Oxygen cursors, I wanted to give them a try too.

As the author is our very much Italian ruphy, I asked him about them directly 🙂 And with some sinergy, there are now very interesting news for all you Gentoo users who want to try the cursors 🙂

First of all, I’ve added a live Git ebuild to my overlay for the oxygen cursors. As it’s a live Git ebuild, the cursors are generated when installing from it, this means that it takes some time to have them available, and also that it requires xcursorgen and InkScape (to do the SVG -> PNG rendering). Easily enough, the released copies will be distributed in pre-compiled tarballs, so there will be no dependency over either of them.

While looking at ruphy’s build scripts to build the cursor, I actually thought it would have been nicer to have them using a makefile, so that it would make proper use of dualcore systems (by using more than one job), and it would also make it easier to prepare the ebuild. So I took some time and.. rewrote the whole build system to use Makefiles instead. Thanks to Riccardo, the makefiles are now in the upstream repository, and the ebuild I committed was quite simplified from the one I wrote initially.

The nice thing about make is that you don’t use it only for C/C++ compiled code, you can use it to actually “make” almost anything. I use it for the nxml Gentoo schemas to download the schemas and clean up after itself too. Unfortunately knowing all the possible uses of GNU make is a bit difficult, I suppose I could read about it in the info pages, but as I hate reading a lot on the screen (and I don’t have any eInk-based reader yet – I’m waiting for something with the usability of Amazon’s Kindle and the openness of… nothing actually available), I just added this book to my wishlist… if anybody would like to help me help free software 😉

Anyway, I really do like the new Oxygen cursors, especially the black ones 🙂 Thanks ruphy and the whole Oxygen team!