ken’s blog

GNOME Dev Kit gets more help!

The GNOME Developer’s Kit is still alive, thanks to Zhang Sen. My free time has been getting tight, and I am very pleased to have been getting some great help from Zhang. In fact, he is doing the daily maintenance now. I am still wrangling isos and virtual images, and Zhang is doing the daily triage of build failures (the hard work .

Not only has he picked up the daily maintenance, but he has also converted the recipes to use git. He has also packaged gnome-shell, very cool stuff.

GNOME 2.26, live demos available!

GNOME 2.26 is out, including live demos. We have an assortment of virtual machine formats as well as installable DVD isos. Come and get em’!

Pidgin sucks less for IRC

Now that we have the message indicator applet in Jaunty, I decided to give pidgin another try as an IRC client. A little background for those that have not had the pleasure of hearing my constant complaining about how pidgin just isn’t an IRC client, I love xchat-gnome for IRC. I have tried pidgin on many occasions, mostly because I would really prefer use a single app for IM and IRC. Pidgin just never felt right to me, mostly because I felt like it was impossible to follow as many channels as I am generally in.

This has changed now, not because pidgin has gotten better at IRC, but because of the message indicator applet. The message indicator grabs notifications from notify-osd that are based on human to human interaction, and stores them in a little applet in the panel that indicates what might need your attention. Currently only evolution and pidgin support it, but hopefully many more soon (gwibber, please gwibber!). Now when people highlight me in a chat, IM or private message me I see the nice little indicator with a star showing it needs attention.

I am very happy to say I can use Pidgin for my daily IRC use… Yay for a single client finally!

I am sure nobody will be surprised to hear that the indicator-applet is included in Foresight as well, just add it to your panel.

It’s a journey

No, not Journey the hit band from the 80s… wow that takes me back to damn near (or not that near) the beginning of my journey!

I have spent a wonderful 3 years working at rPath, which ended in January. Having made some great friends at rPath, of which I am thankful, and having had some great experiences too. I will miss my rPath family, but will surely stay in touch. Tomorrow I start the next leg of my journey, with Canonical. I will be a Desktop Integration Engineer, working on the desktop team to integrate the fine work being done by the Desktop Experience team into Ubuntu. This is a very exciting opportunity for me, I have really been doing this for the past 4 years working on Foresight Linux. Taking cool stuff people have been working on and integrating it into a distro for broader consumption.

Over the years working on Foresight I have formed some great relationships with our Ubuntu brothers which has lead me to join their team. Joining the Ubuntu Desktop team will change my day job yes, but it won’t change my role or participation in the other work I do outside of that day job. I will still be maintaining Foresight Linux, the GNOME Developers Kit, PackageKit, and whatever other upstream projects I can cause trouble with.

Python 2.6 has landed!

Our favorite snake has found his way in to the QA branch of Foresight. Everyone running QA, please update, test and file bugs in FITS.

This was by far the biggest task associated with the upcoming 2.1 release, so things are shaping up nicely.

Happy New Year

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year, and lots of Foresight for all!

I am trying to resist the urge to make predictions for 2009.  Let’s just say we’ll kick ass in 2009, and leave it at that.

Development isos available

I am always getting asked for Foresight install isos with all the development tools and headers included.  I usually just quickly create one off isos for those people using rBuilder.  I have now added those development isos to my list of images to create for each release and have published 2.0.6 release images for development.  Come and get them here.

Packaging classes coming soon!

Want to learn to package software?  We are planning to start a series of IRC based training sessions on the basics of packaging with conary.  We will begin with the basics, covering just creating local packages and building them locally for your system.  Then next in the series will be slightly more advanced, and will cover setting up your own project on rBuilder, and building packages for others to use with rBuild.

There will be some information sent out to review prior to the class and we will assume attendees are running Foresight Linux either natively or in a virtual machine.  The format will be rather informal, for a strong focus on mentoring in a very hands on environment.  We will begin with creating a package in a web based editor that everyone can follow along with.  Then move on to creating packages from scratch and having mentors available to guide new packagers

I hope to continue both of these on a re-occurring basis for new packagers and for continued practice.  Everyone is welcome to attend.

We have put together a survey, to help gauge interest and scheduling.  Please fill this out, and let us know if you are already familiar with conary packaging and willing to mentor.

Foresight Linux, Distro of the year!

Ars Technica awarded Foresight distro of the year alongside openSUSE.  Obviously I am very excited and proud that Foresight was recognized, but I have to send a big congrats out to the openSUSE guys too.  They have done some great stuff this year, keep it up!

Submission deadline for 2.5

Now that we have all had a few days to digest this, lets get down to business. I have created a wiki page outlining the process and listing the objectives for 2.5 in a table of FITS issues.

Road map

Please look over it, if you have other objectives you would like to add, please file issues assigning the fix version to 2.5. That will make them show up in the table on the wiki page. I am setting a deadline of Wednesday, Nov 19 1200 UTC. To find the time in UTC, run ‘date -u’.

Please get your submissions in! We will quickly review the submissions and update the issues to reflect fix version. I want to start the planning stages pretty quickly after the deadline, gathering requirements and designing the solutions. Please include as much detail as possible in the issues, and please review the issues we already have adding comments. The more information the better.