ken’s blog

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009

I really enjoyed my week in Gran Canaria with all the desktop hackers, it was a great event. Such a great location for a conference. It is great to see such innovative stuff going on for the desktop. This year it was a joint event between GNOME and KDE, which I think was a great idea. However, I really don’t feel like I had enough opportunity to mingle with KDE folks and attend their sessions. I hope we can do more in the future to encourage that.

I think the most interesting thing for me was Telepathy. The telepathy sessions were very impressive, and I spent some great time with the awesome team at Collabora, keep up the great work! I’ll just say it… tubes just make me drool, so much potential to be tapped into. Hopefully after this week, more people are inspired to go out and create amazing stuff that uses telepathy.

Zeitgeist really interests me as well, I have been wanting an easier way for users to interact with their data. Personally I think all interaction with data should be contextual, present the data to the user based on what they most likely want. I can’t wait to see Zeitgeist become integrated in the desktop and really start to blow the socks off of our users.

GNOME Shell is certainly interesting, I am very excited to see people trying to really change they way the desktop behaves. Lets not be afraid to shake things up a bit. However, I am not sold on it yet though. I think there are many issues that still need to be worked out, can’t imagine it can be designed properly and implemented in time for 2.28. I know it won’t be default in 2.28, but I think some of the basic work flow stuff needs to be nailed down before it can be released. It really seems far from that now. It will be exciting to watch it evolve and see how it ends up.

Last but certainly not least, CouchDB. There was some cool demos showing live bookmark syncing in firefox as well as contacts shared between both GNOME and KDE applications (evolution and akonadi). Using CouchDB as a common desktop database for storing configuration and application data makes it very easy to synchronise that data between multiple computers. Just imagine having the same bookmarks, contacts, photos, music, etc all shared between all your computers automatically.

Of course there were plenty of great parties and hacking sessions. The Igalia and Collabora parties were a blast, and two nights we spent hacking on stuff in the hacking room all night. Who needs sleep?

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.

NC Jaunty Release party

The NC Loco has planned a Jaunty release party at the Flying Saucer in Raleigh next week.  If you live close enough to Raleigh, please join us.  Let celebrate, Jaunty is going to be a great release.

What: Jaunty Jackalope Release Party

Where: Flying Saucer
328 West Morgan Street@Harrington
Raleigh, NC 27601
919-821-PINT (7468)

When: Thursday, April 23, 2009
Time: 6-9pm (or until we just can’t party anymore)

Please RSVP to akgraner [at] gmail [dot] com so we can let the Saucer know if they need rope off more space or not.

And don’t forget… bring your friends!

GNOME Journal Needs You!

I am very excited to see GNOME Journal getting some traction again, come join us and make GNOME Journal great again!  Check out Paul Cutler’s post for details.

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’!

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.

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.

We want you!

Foresight Linux release planning

The road to Foresight 2.5 includes you!  Historically we have not provided the level of transparency needed to enable more people to participate in Foresight’s core development.  I am very excited about the packagers that have joined in to help, but I suspect them and others have trouble figuring out what is needed.  They have done a great job of packaging new applications and helping to grow our repositories, and we appreciate that.  However, Antonio (doniphon) and I do most of the distro work, and that is our fault.  We tend to have a good understanding of what needs to be done, and we just do it.  This leaves others either not knowing what they can help with, or feeling like they might step on our toes.

So what do we need to do?  Log all issues we are working on, or plan to work on in FITS (Foresight Issue Tracking System) and continually log our progress on tasks.  Not only does this provides us a high level view of where we are, and what needs to be done, but it also provides a wider audience a list of tasks they can step up and accomplish.

We are going with short 1-2 month sprints instead of long 6 month development cycles.  During these sprints we will continually push features into mainline, continually delivering innovation.

• Sprint Kick off/planning cycle
• A larger meeting to discuss major objectives for the sprint
• Break it down into the top level objectives and create issues for them in FITS
• Hopefully find a driver for each top level objective
• Organize smaller planning discussions, ideally done via FITS
• Break down the top level objective into smaller issues in FITS
• Document requirements of success for each objective
• Assign a mentor
• Assign a due date.
• Create Use Cases for testing

• Tracking and status reporting
• Each assignee will continue to update the progress of tasks via FITS
• Regular blogging of your progress on your piece of the road map, lets make this fun!
• Weekly status reports

• Mentoring
• We should have some more experienced people available to act as mentors.
• Sounding board for ideas
• Contribute to and approve designs
• Help define measurement for success
• Review/approve completed tasks before pushing to mainline

The key for success is maximum transparency, this means using FITS and the foresight-devel mailing list as much as possible. If you would like to participate, please send an email to our development mailing list. You can find information on the lists here.

For a list of objectives we are already thinking of for Foresight 2.5, check out this list

GNOME Live

After some delays… sorry everyone, the GNOME 2.24 Live demos are available. Come and get them at http://torrent.gnome.org.