[Live-demo] OSGeoLive 5.5 draft for background image

[Hamish]

Astrid Emde wrote:
..
> and have a question about the background image and sleeves.
> 
> We have the FOSSGIS conference in march and are going to use
> OSGeo-Live in the workshops and we will give the DVD to the
> participants of the conference.

excellent, that's its purpose in life!

> People from the orga team created a desktop image and are
> going to create an image for the dvd cover too.
> 
> I commited the first draft of the background image to the
> svn [2].

note that the graphic there says "5.0" not "5.5"

> My suggestion was to make the image a bit more pale to see
> the desktop links better.

in the artwork/ dir you will see background.xcf.bz2.

If you open that in GIMP and look at the layer list you'll see
a white and black overlay layer. Make one or the other visible
and adjust the opacity level to suit.  (GIMP can open .gz or .bz2
directly without having to un-zip it first)

n.b.: please run 'optipng -o5 filename.png' before uploading.
For really huge .psd and .xcf image data (eg there's a 60mb image
file in there) /please/ bzip2 them before upload, or consider
another place (like flickr) and commit a text file with the link.
huge binary files clog up the Subversion DB backups!


> We could take a version without the FOSSGIS logo and the
> building for the official version. What do you think?

I'm mostly fine with whatever choice is made, as long as it is
not too day-glow fluorescent and the left side is not too busy
so the icons gets lost in the clutter.


Cameron:
> One thing I'm going to strongly push for is that we have one
> generic background image for each release, rather create a
> different image for each conference.

personally I feel that each conference committee should make
it be whatever they like it to be, and a conference-themed
backdrop is a very nice touch to remember it by. If they're
paying the bill for the print run = their choice to do as they
please, not ours..  (but if 3rd parties want something custom
they'll have to contribute that work themselves of course)

I think it would be highly odd for "FOSS4G 2012 Beijing" not
to have its own backdrop image if they wanted one. Ideally 
the conference committee should supply it, and we should give
them good lead time to decide on a design and prepare it (or
have it prepared).


> This is because in the past, the effort required to change the
> background image, rebuild the ISO, then retest everything,
> turned out to be much more work that you would expect for such
> a small change.

over-copying the one file:
  /usr/share/xfce4/backdrops/osgeo-desktop.png
is a very simple task and does not require recertifying the
entire build from scratch. AFAIU if nothing else has changed,
the final ISO build either works or it doesn't. (with a suitable
number of fingers and toes crossed for good luck)


regards,
Hamish