Year: 2011

I really want to just synchronize two directories on multiple machines. I don’t want to worry about IP addresses and things like that and I don’t want to store my private files “in the cloud”. Has anyone done a cute hack using ssh, avahi and inotify for GNOME? Note: I don’t want to backup a folder like DejaDup wants me to do, I want live multi-master replication. Unison also fails for me, as it currently doesn’t work in Fedora 15, and has to be run manually. Ideas?

GNOME Color Manager has shown 2D CIE 1931 plots for a couple of years now, but as all color savvy people know, a gamut is a 3D object, and a 2D slice can be horribly inaccurate and misleading sometimes.

To fix this, I worked for a couple of hours at the weekend to produce a 3D gamut graph using clutter:

It’s then a simple case of clicking and dragging on the hull to rotate it. Long term, there will be a way to compare the different device gamuts, but I’ve not worked out a good way to show this in the UI.

To accomplish the new plot I’ve reused a lot of the math from icc_gamin, and a lot of the setup code from the viewer example program for mash, and also used a lot of the cleverness in clutter-gtk.

To play with the new toy, you’ll need to install clutter-gtk and mash, and be building gnome-color-manager from git master.

The soon to be released gnome-color-manager 3.1.1 (unstable) will have a hard dependency on colord. Please could distribution people start making packages for colord and including them in your distributions development channel now please. I’ve done an example .spec file if that helps.

At the moment, upstream ghostscript and foomatic already use the DBus interface of colord, but this is a soft dependency. If colord is not present, they both use the non-color-managed code. If you have a spiffy distro that has a “suggests” or “recommended” attribute available for packages, it’s probably a good idea to add that for foomatic and ghostscript-cups.

Thanks.

I’ve just submitted my talk about colord to LGM 2011 in Montreal. I’m hoping I can get some kind of sponsorship, as talking at LGM would be really great.

I’m hopefully presenting at the Open Printing Summit about the same topic too. Exciting times!

Matthias and I have been working on the network panel for a large chunk of this week, now we have NetworkManager 0.9:

Quite a lot of stuff works, but there is lots more to do. If you’re using odd connection types like WIMAX, we would appreciate any help testing. At the moment, editing the low level connection details is done in nm-connection-editor, but we’ll roll this functionality into the panel for 3.2. I’ve upset the translators enough already.

If you’re testing, ensure you also rebuild NetworkManager and network-manager-applet using jhbuild.

Till has just merged my foomatic patch upstream that adds colord support. This means we now have ghostscript and foomatic support for colord, and I just need my CUPS patch committed to make everything magically work. I’m going to backport all my patches into Fedora next week, although hopefully in a few months we’ll have new releases of all the projects.

Slowly but surely, we’re getting there.

Just in case anyone else happens to stumble on this random error message when building CUPS locally:

./cupsd: symbol lookup error: ./cupsd: undefined symbol: cupsArrayNew3

Just remember to do make install before you try running cupsd.

One of the best parts of working at Red Hat is that you are encouraged to do things properly, even if they take a long time. I guess the logic is that if you’re going to be supporting the code in RHEL for years and years, then it pays to do it the right way, and not use some evil hack that’s going to break for a customer at some inopportune time.

As some of you might know, I’ve been hacking on colord for a few months (at the same time as PackageKit, upower and GNOME3!) and am now starting to get some upstream progress. To fix color management when printing, we really need to integrate with quite a few layers. This afternoon I rewrote pstoraster and pdftoraster into gstoraster, and added the required hooks to get the ICC profile from colord. I’ve still got to do the same for foomatic-rip, and then that’s the “query” side of the problem finished.

The next part, is to finish the work done by Tim Waugh, so that CUPS registers devices and embedded profiles with colord. With all the patches in place, it basically means that making a printer color managed becomes trivial.

Thanks go to Till Kamppeter for reviewing the different iterations of the ghostscript filter code patch, and initially pointing me in the right direction. Now I’ll brave CUPS upstream and try to get the other patch accepted there.

This is probably all a bit late for GNOME 3 and Fedora 15, but you can be sure that GNOME 3.2 and Fedora 16 will look consistently beautiful across all different types of devices. If you are feeling brave and want to try it out, try the “icc” branch of cups, the “colord” branch of gnome-color-manager, and the recently released colord 0.1.3.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: YUM is getting a DBus API.

Dear rpmfusion. Please build codec packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. My wife is stuck in bed and wants to watch a movie.

Thanks, The Hughes Family.