One seldom mentioned new features of Fedora 7 are the new directories in the $HOME directory. These are due to the xdg-users-dir program from the Portland xdg project. In other news, Hello Planet Fedora.
When I started my fresh Fedora 7 install I found several directories in my $HOME i never saw before. Among them:
- Applications
- Download
- Videos
- Music
- Templates
I was surprised because I haven’t seen that mentioned anywhere recently. But it was ok since I already knew that this was Portland xdg related. The directories are created by the xdg-user-dirs.
The xdg-user-dirs have the aim to create and also manage directories with pre-defined functions like “Music directory”, “Video directory”, “Documents directory”, and so on. These are also localized and are managed in the $HOME./config file.
If you want to change the pre-defined values simply modify the config file. If you want to delete a directory, point it to your home directory and afterwards trash the directory itself – in other cases the directories might be re-created.
In other news: Hello Planet Fedora! My blog has been added – well, at least the Fedora related posts. Thanks for that, I just hope that I can meet the readers’ expectations. We will see.
As a short introduction to these who are not familiar with me: In the Fedora world I am a small package maintainer who sometimes writes a howto or a bug report or tries to keep an eye on the German FedoraWiki. Outside of Fedora I also write about KDE and Linux in general. And that’s it, I guess.
/home/liquidat 
Hi,
What makes you think xdg-user-dirs is related to the Portland Project? I mean, it’s not even mentioned on the Portland wiki page you inked to.
For the record, xdg-user-dirs was simply just proposed on xdg-list@freedesktop.org some months back… If I understand Portland correctly (and I could be wrong), Portland is more about.. other things.. stable API for ISV’s… than proposing and marketing brand new cross-desktop technology.
Also, there was a hefty flamewar on fedora-devel-list re xdg-user-dirs; kinda surprised you missed that 🙂
I connected “XDG” with Portland a bit too fast, I guess. Seems to really be “just” a fdo project.
About the flame war: I’m not subscribed to fedora-devel-list because I see myself mainly as a package maintainer of packages which are not related with the core in any way.
Also, the traffic is much too high for not being so deep involved.
Still difficult to understand Fedura completely. I always try to learn something new in this. Its so wast that every time I get something new in it.
it si mentioned in release notes:
http://fedoraproject.org/release-notes/RELEASE-NOTES-en_US/sn-Desktop.html#sn-xdg-user-dirs
cornel, with “mentioned recently” I meant it was not mentioned in the blogosphere or discussed at the maintainers list.
It was however, as already mentioned, also discussed at fedora-devel-list, but I don’t check with that list, as I pointed out.
Where do we find the “spins” referred to in this wiki? I don’t want to download a whole dvd…
”
For the first time, Fedora includes several different spins, which are variations of Fedora built from a specific set of software packages. Each spin has a combination of software to meet the requirements of a specific kind of end user. In addition to a very small boot.iso image for network installation, users have the following spin choices:
GNOME and KDE desktop environment based bootable Live images that can be installed to a hard disk. These spins are meant for desktop users who prefer a single disk installation and for sharing Fedora with friends, family, and event attendees.
A regular image for desktops, workstations and server users. This spin provides a good upgrade path and similar environment for users of previous releases of Fedora”
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F7ReleaseSummary
nevermind, they’re only on the torrent site. I was looking at the ftp site. http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
specs, I think that went to the wrong blog, no one talked here about the spins.
Is xdg going to be integrated into the rest of GNOME? I noticed that Epiphany still downloads files to a folder on the desktop rather then the xdg created dir..
I’m pretty sure that this is a process which takes place at the moment, meaning that you will see more and more adoption over time.