Rodrigo Moya

Last weekend I’ve been in Valencia for the II GUADEMY, organized by PoLinux (the Linux Users Group of the Universidad Politécnica, where the event took place).

The purpose of this II GUADEMY was to really serve as a starting point for further sharing between free desktops (it’s true it was just about GNOME and KDE, although I’m sure we could easily get other free desktops in), and I really think that it has succeeded. There were some core KDE and GNOME developers around, even though lots of GNOME/KDE Spanish developers were missing (where were you?), and even though not big decisions have been made, I feel that this is the beginning of a new era in free desktops sharing. Of course, it’s a very long trip what we just started, but seeing people from both desktops willing to cooperate as much as possible means we (the people that believe in further sharing) are not that wrong

So, here are my conclusions from what I have seen/heard during this weekend with lovely weather and very little sleep in Valencia:

• We are sharing some stuff now, much more than a few years ago (HAL, DBus, PackageKit, WebKit, poppler, fd.o specs, etc), but we still have a lot of duplication (duplicated screensaver / power management / login manager / etc cores, with lots of security and other issues).
• People generally agree in sharing code, but sometimes in the form of “here’s our implementation, based on our technologies, use it if you want”, which doesn’t work. There were complains about how GIO was written without taking KDE’s KIO people into account, and about KDevelop new code, which didn’t take into account Anjuta’s people. So, we need to fix this.
• We need a process to determine what to share, as Will said in our talk, and, from what I got from Vincent’s talk, Freedesktop.org is in need of an official board that can establish a formal process for accepting standards and implementations, and also it needs to get more KDE people involved so that it’s not seen as a GNOME-only thing. It seems to me the natural way would be to fix fd.o’s situation and use it for further sharing.
• The whole Saturday morning was dedicated to talk about the GUI toolkits’ future, with Carlos Garnacho, Holger Freyther and Javier Fernández from igalia. It was really interesting to see what the future might bring us, since free GUI toolkits need not only to cope with better look&feels, but also with different devices, given the mobile device market is making a lot of use of our technologies.
• Some further examples of things that could be shared: an indexing/metadata system, PIM data access and management.
• I missed Sunday’s talks, since my bus was leaving at 11AM, but I’ve heard there were some joint conclusions in the last session, so let’s see if someone that attended publishes them.
• Vincent didn’t want to believe me, but really, normal Spaniards don’t usually go to places like Los Bestias (details from Jos). I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone, except for stag parties (if you ever go to this kind of parties), but it was fun to see something different, we laughed a lot during the dinner. Fortunately, we arrived a bit late, so we just had to listen to the Karaoke for a few minutes, after that, it was shut down.
• Not related to GNOME/KDE, but I convinced a couple of more people to use their GPSs to record their travels and send them to me for uploading to the OpenStreetMap database, even though one of those guys’ GPS suffered a disgusting accident

Just wanted to end up with a big congratulation to the organizers, they managed to do a great conference, with core international speakers, even though the planning started quite late. Now looking forward to GUADEMY III, which might perfectly take place, why not, in the joint GUADEC/Akademy in 2009.

You can see the slides of my talk here. These don’t include Will’s plan for code sharing process, which I guess he’ll publish soon.

For the first time, I am mentoring a student for this year’s Google Summer of Code, who will be working on a GNOME client for the openSUSE build service.

Mario (ie, the student) seems to be a very motivated person, so I’m willing to see the results of his work this summer, and to have another future contributor to openSUSE and GNOME.

As for the mentoring itself, following Federico’s mentoring HOWTO should make things easier for me, so I hope to do a good job. More news about the project as things progress.

The discussion about how/where to put the activate-desktop-effects thing in the appearance capplet seems to not reach a good solution for all distros, at least for now, so, while waiting for a good solution for all upstream, and since in openSUSE desktop effects means compiz, I added a patch to the simple-ccsm openSUSE package to activate compiz directly from the same place where it is configured.

So, the ‘Desktop Effects’ icon in the GNOME control center:

starts now simple-ccsm, which contains a check box to activate/deactivate compiz.

The old ‘Desktop Effects’ capplet (aka gnome-xgl-settings) will soon die, since gnome-xgl-switch script has been moved to the XGL package, and the hardware database is already on a separate package.

After having implemented the same functionality already available in Fedora and Ubuntu (different implementations of the Desktop Effects tab on the appearance control-center applet) for openSUSE, it is time to come to a common solution for all distros to remove their need to add this functionality. An initial patch is available here.

Still lots of things need to be discussed and clarified, so if you care about activating desktop effects in GNOME, GNOME Control Center mailing list.

For those who don’t follow openSUSE news, here’s a summary of what people did during hack week, including some nice GNOME-related things, as well as improvements for the openSUSE distribution.

Yesterday was the first day with Vincent Untz as a member of the openSUSE GNOME team. For those who don’t know him, he’s one of the top-involved persons in upstream GNOME, having been part of the Foundation board, the release team, and maintainer of several modules, etc, etc, so his role on the team will help a lot in making openSUSE and GNOME better.

Looking forward to see what he helps us getting to.

Last week was Hacking week at openSUSE, so here’s a summary of what I did:

• I moved all my OSM-related packages to the Application:Geo repository in openSUSE’s build service. And I added a couple of packages I needed to build maps for my GARMIN GPS unit: mkgmap and osmosis, which have helped me in making the first 100% free map of Spain for GARMIN GPS units Of course, the map is incomplete (compared to the P2P’ed maps GARMIN users in Spain use), but this should probably get more people to contribute to the maps. Here are some screenshots of the maps on a Que PDA (thanks to Miguel Blanco):
  
• I lost lots of time at the beginning of the week trying to make Mapper (a fork of maemo-mapper to provide more OpenStreetMap-oriented features) work, fixing some build problems (patches are upstream now) and packaging it. It still doesn’t work very well though, crashing a lot, but this will improve soon.
• I started working on a GNOME client for the openSUSE build service. Most of the time was spent doing tests with Python in general and the OSC Python API in particular, so the result is not that fantastic, but at least I’ve got now a good base from where to continue the work. You can find the (clean) work in my git repository:

  git clone http://www.gnome.org/~rodrigo/git/osc-plugins.git

  

After the success of the I GUADEMY, held in A Coruña last year, a 2nd one needed to be organized, with more international presence and, we’ll see if it succeeds in doing that, getting KDE and GNOME desktops to share much more than a few specs/standards. So, the II GUADEMY, thanks to PoLinuX, is going to be held in Valencia, on the East coast of Spain, nice city known for its good weather and the Fallas.

Most Spanish community members from both KDE and GNOME will attend, and this year the hope is to get much more international presence than last year. Also, the focus will be on technologies common to both desktops (rather than talks specific to one desktop, like there were last year), and, given that GUADEC and Akademy will be held later in the year, it is a good opportunity to get with some plans for further integration between the two free desktops. Are you gonna miss it???

More information here.

Release 2.21.5 for gnome-control-center and gnome-settings-daemon are now ready for your testing pleasure. This is the first release of gnome-control-center depending on the standalone gnome-settings-daemon (which was previously part of gnome-control-center), which is also used by the new GDM.

Testing is largely needed, so please report bugs/suggestions/patches to either the gnomecc-list or Bugzilla.

Today’s packaging day at openSUSE, a good opportunity to get your hands dirty with the openSUSE build service, which allows people to build packages for many SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian versions, and to get your favorite piece of software packaged for your favorite distribution.

The action is taking place for the whole day at #opensuse-buildservice in irc.freenode.net. Also, if you prefer to get in contact with fellow GNOME packagers, #opensuse-gnome is the place to go, in the same network.

Some hints for people wanting to attend:

• Packaging standards for openSUSE
• Information about the build service
• You might want to have a try at osc-plugins-gnome, a set of plugins for OSC (the build service command line client) that will be integrated soon into OSC itself, and which offer extended functionality to deal with patches and spec files.
• GNOME packaging policy