How to get a bigger icon in the application switcher

[Duncan]

Frank Steinmetzger posted on Thu, 01 May 2014 13:53:21 +0200 as excerpted:

>> FWIW, I'm running kde-live -9999 versions (from the kde overlay) of
>> most packages here(tho I've not updated for about 10 days I'd guess),
>> so it's very likely I'm running a newer kde than you.  But I did
>> experiment a bit with the large-icons switcher, and have a large aurora
>> icon here. (I have the bindist flag on so get the generic aurora name
>> and icons, not the firefox branding.)
> 
> Aurora is the not-yet-published beta, innit? I suppose then you’re using
> an out-of-tree ebuild, because it’s not in portage and you’re speaking
> of use flags.

In terms of firefox upstream, mozilla, yes, aurora is beta (or is it 
alpha?, it's pre-release, anyway).

But that's not what aurora is in gentoo.  In gentoo, it has to do with 
the bindist flag, since for trademark protection reasons, mozilla does 
not allow distributors to call patched versions firefox, unless they get 
official mozilla pre-approval for their patches.  Since that reduces 
distro flexibility and even with a cooperative upstream the additional 
bureaucracy has the potential to delay security patches, etc, some 
distros choose to call their "firefox" something else in ordered to 
continue to be able to apply patches under distro control, while others 
either don't apply their own patches (and may in fact ship the upstream 
built binary itself, since they don't patch it anyway) or take a bit 
longer and jump thru the hoops for approval.

That's why on debian and some of its deriviatives, firefox is called 
iceweasel.  They apply their own patches without jumping thru the 
official approval hoops, and thus can't call it firefox.

Gentoo did something similar when the bindist USE flag was enabled for 
awhile, but at some point I guess a gentoo/firefox maintainer (possibly 
after seeing a bug filed by a user) realized there was no such 
restriction on the aurora name and artwork, which is really quite 
beautiful indeed (I actually prefer it to the official firefox artwork, 
tho that too is far from ugly!), and that the sources tarball already 
ships with the aurora artwork too, so no additional tarball required, and 
now the gentoo firefox ebuilds simply enable the aurora branding when 
USE=bindist.

All that being the long form of what I put in the parenthetical above, 
explaining that I got the aurora icon in the task switcher instead of the 
firefox icon, because I have USE=bindist set. =:^)

<grumble -- not directed at you> People wonder why my posts are so long.  
It's because almost invariably whenever I try to be brief, I end up 
posting the long explanation I had omitted in the original post in the 
interest of brevity, anyway!  So for the most part I've given up trying 
to be brief.  If people don't like my style they always have the right to 
killfile me! </grumble>

Tho as it happens I /do/ have the gentoo/mozilla overlay enabled, and 
/do/ occasionally run pre-releases from there.  But the gentoo/mozilla 
project apparently either doesn't follow upstream as closely as the 
gentoo/kde project does, or they don't have anywhere near the number of 
developers and overlay users helping out, so a lot of the time there's no 
pre-release available even in the overlay, and there's definitely not a 
firefox-9999 live-build available, while kde has live-builds for trunk 
and for branch as well.

So I while I do run the gentoo/mozilla overlay, I don't generally run 
firefox pre-releases, not because I don't want to, but because they're 
not available for me to do so.  =:^(  I do run the betas when they're 
available, and would at least try a live build if it were available as 
well, altho I can't actually say I'd stick with it until I could try it 
to see just how stable it actually is.  I know there's the upstream 
nightly-build binaries that a lot of leading/bleeding edge firefox users 
run, but I actually prefer to exercise my software freedoms and build it 
myself, so...

(Meanwhile, I've actually not updated in near two weeks now, as I've been 
busy catching up on other things.  So while I know firefox-29 is out, I'm 
actually still running 28.  I haven't seen any big stories about possible 
security issues, so...)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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