Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

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couchdb-glib 0.1

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

As the first step on CouchDB desktop integration, here’s version 0.1 of couchdb-glib, a GLib-based API to talk to CouchDB.

This initial version only allows reading and does all operations synchronously (not a problem in most cases, since the communication is done to the local CouchDB instance, which is quite quick, at least from what my tests show so far). Next releases will have all the missing functionality.

And, well, no screenshots to show, so here’s some example code for you to enjoy.

Source code is in GNOME GIT, under couchdb-glib module.

Posted in CouchDB, Desktop, GNOME, Linux, Technology, Ubuntu, UbuntuOne | 4 Comments »

Desktop data/settings replication

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

In the last UDS, there were some talks about UbuntuOne, the technologies it uses, and how it could be well integrated into the Desktop. Also, there were discussions about how it could be integrated painlessly into upstream projects. So, here’s an idea on how this could be done.

First, it must be said that the easiest (and quickest) way of achieving UbuntuOne integration in Ubuntu would be to just patch/extend applications so that they supported accessing the UbuntuOne server, and have Ubuntu packages use that as default for users with UbuntuOne accounts. That would make most Ubuntu users happy, but it would not benefit at all users of other distributions, and worst, the upstream projects.

Now, if we look at the technologies being used in UbuntuOne, there is one awesome thing, called CouchDB, a project supported by the Apache Foundation, which provides databases (of JSON documents) that can be replicated (and 2-way synchonized) to other hosts. So, what if we had Linux Desktop applications use this for storage of files and settings?

couchdb-in-the-desktop

Well, what would happen is that we’d gain data / settings replication and synchronization for free. And also, if we could come up with standard formats / locations for common information (accounts, notes, mails, calendars, etc, etc), we’d also gain a shared storage for all applications to use, solving the problem of incompatible formats / locations used by similar free software applications.

And other advantages:

  • CouchDB knows already how to deal with conflicts, as this is included in the automatic replication / syncing features it provides.
  • While normal documents in CouchDB are JSON, you can attach any kind of file to any JSON document (even to empty JSON documents), so any kind of files can be stored. Also, it allows users to create as many databases as needed, so storage for different needs can be easily separated.
  • CouchDB provides a sort of revision history, so it could be used for nice stuff like Zeitgeist.
  • This, not being an Ubuntu-only solution, could benefit every Linux Desktop user.
  • UbuntuOne would be a service built on top of this that users can subscribe to. But others could just setup a CouchDB server on their home / company network and use that by just pointing their local CouchDB to their remote CouchDB replication server.

To continue my investigations/playing on this, I’m going to try writing a gvfs backend to manage files in the CouchDB instances. Once that’s done, applications could start just writing their files to couchdb://… URIs instead of file://… ones and enter the replication/synchronization world with just a single change. Next, a GConf/d-conf backend could be added for replicating/sync’ing settings, and so on.

Posted in CouchDB, Desktop, freedesktop.org, GNOME, KDE, Linux, Ubuntu, UbuntuOne | 14 Comments »

GNOME Packaging Day

Monday, January 26th, 2009

In the last few openSUSE-GNOME team meetings, it was decided to do regular packaging days whenever GNOME point versions are released, with the goal of providing bleeding edge updates as quickly as possible. So, next week is that time: along with the GNOME 2.25.90 release on Feb 4th, Thursday Feb 5th we’ll be helding a packaging day to get the latest unstable GNOME release packaged into our GNOME:Factory project (to be used for openSUSE 11.2 but also available for 11.1). It is a great opportunity to find out how to contribute to the packaging of GNOME for openSUSE.

The packaging day will last the whole day long, so just come around #opensuse-gnome IRC channel on FreeNode at any time you want and ask how to help.

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Posted in GNOME, Linux, openSUSE | Comments Off

AdminKit 0.0.1

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Last week it was hacking week for the openSUSE-GNOME team, so I continued working on a little project I started a few weeks ago, which is, in the good old Richard Hughes tradition, a thing called AdminKit, which is a PolicyKit-based framework for allowing user applications to run administration tasks.

Most of the time hacking on this has been dedicated to the PolicyKit stuff, but now everything should be in place, and, apart from the 2 methods I added (RunAsRoot to replace gnomesu/gksu/kdesu, and AddUser as an example of how to use YaST’s command line interface for the operations), more methods (users management, firewall, samba shares, etc) can be easily added. With this and the GUI from gnome-system-tools, I think we can start providing a distro-independent (and acceptable to all of them) set of administration tools for GNOME (and KDE, if they adopt AdminKit), or just add the needed admin functionality to already existing applications. From now on, here are my ideas:

  • Move PolicyKit mechanisms already existing in some GNOME modules (gnome-panel’s SetTime and SetTimezone, for instance) to AdminKit, provided people agree on adopting it
  • See system-tools-backends and reuse as much knowledge/code as possible
  • See at changing gnome-system-tools’ GUI to use AdminKit (once the functionality needed is moved to AdminKit)
  • Add more admin operations, as needed. For openSUSE, we have quite a lot of functionality via yast’s command line interface, and other distros have similar stuff, so anything we need can be added AFAIK.

Get the code with:

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

(cd AdminKit, the other top-level dirs contain unrelated projects)

And, soon, packages at my home build service repository.

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Posted in Desktop, freedesktop.org, GNOME, KDE, Linux, openSUSE, Technology | 9 Comments »

openSUSE build service collaboration

Friday, July 18th, 2008

One of the shortcomings of the openSUSE build service was, until recently, that it didn’t help outsiders (non-Novell employees) in contributing to the distribution’s packages. The build service team worked hard in the last few months, and now it is very easy for external people to send patches directly to be included in the main distribution.

First, you need to create a branch from the package you want to change:

osc branch GNOME:Factory gnome-utils

This creates a branch in your home project (home:$user:branches:GNOME:Factory), so just check it out:

osc co home:$user:branches:GNOME:Factory gnome-utils

Then, just work on changes, and when everything is ok and the package builds, just commit and submit a request

osc commit -m “Changed foo and bar”

osc submitreq create -m “Changed foo and bar”

Before submitting though, it might be wise to re-check your changes:

osc rdiff home:$user:branches:GNOME:Factory gnome-utils

which shows a diff of the changes in your branch.

osc commit/submitreq create will submit the changes to your branch and to the project you branched from (GNOME:Factory in this example), so that maintainers can review and accept (or reject) the submission. Maintainers just need to:

$ osc submitreq list GNOME:Factory

359 new home:rodrigomoya:branches:GNOME:Factory/gtk2-engines -> GNOME:Factory/gtk2-engines ‘——————————————————————-\nFri Jul 18 17:16:38 CEST 2008 – rodrigo@suse.de\n\n- Tag and upstream patches’

360 new home:vuntz:branches:GNOME:Factory/pango -> GNOME:Factory/pango ‘Tag pango64.patch’

363 new home:jproseve:branches:GNOME:Factory/glib2-branding-openSUSE -> GNOME:Factory/glib2-branding-openSUSE ‘Fix bnc#406741′

364 new home:rodrigomoya:branches:GNOME:Factory/fast-user-switch-applet -> GNOME:Factory/fast-user-switch-applet ‘Tag patch correctly’

365 new home:rodrigomoya:branches:GNOME:Factory/gnome-utils -> GNOME:Factory/gnome-utils ‘Tag some patches’

366 new home:jproseve:branches:GNOME:Factory/scrollkeeper -> GNOME:Factory/scrollkeeper ‘Tag patches’

367 new home:jproseve:branches:GNOME:Factory/icu -> GNOME:Factory/icu ‘Tag patches’

368 new home:jproseve:branches:GNOME:Factory/scrollkeeper -> GNOME:Factory/scrollkeeper ‘Tag patches’

which lists all the submissions waiting in the queue, and then just needs to review it:

$ osc submitreq show -d $id

which shows the patch for the submission identified by $id. And then, just accept or reject:

osc submitreq accept $id

osc submitreq decline -m “Your patch is wrong, don’t send me more” $id

Neat, isn’t it? This should help us a lot in getting users’ contributions quicker into the distro, as well as in a better patch reviewing system.

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Posted in Linux, openSUSE, Technology | 2 Comments »

openSUSE 11.1 ideas

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Just recovered from the success of the openSUSE 11.0 launch, the openSUSE-GNOME team is already working on the future 11.1 (expected in December), so we are starting to get feedback for new ideas from users. Anyone can add their own ideas to this page, so if you want something new in either GNOME or openSUSE, add your ideas to the wiki.

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Posted in GNOME, Linux, openSUSE, Technology | Comments Off

openSUSE 11.0

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Today’s release day for openSUSE 11.0, the best openSUSE distribution ever… yeah, that’s true for all new distributions, ok. But it is the release I feel more proud of, since it’s seen a lot of GNOME-related work, as Vincent explains in this interview. And this work will continue in the soon-to-come 11.1.

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Posted in Desktop, GNOME, Linux, openSUSE, Technology | 1 Comment »

Where we are going we don’t need roads

Saturday, June 14th, 2008


Been reading this last week the decadence in GNOME thread in Planet GNOME, so just wanted to add some thoughts:

  1. First of all, I don’t think GNOME is in decadence at all. The development platform does nothing but improve (GTK/glib, new gio/gvfs, libgnome/bonobo/etc disappearing, good bindings for lots of languages, etc), and applications do the same.
  2. We offer incremental updates on each release, a lot of work is done, but it’s true that for some end users, they might not see changes big enough to consider it a new version. So maybe, apart from the time-based releases (which work pretty well, IMO), we should maybe try to have, apart from the individual modules’ roadmaps, some sort of desktop-wide features to accompany each release. If we set, for instance, a “all apps will use gio and support working with remote files” goal, I think that would make a better release feature that end users will better appreciate. Similar desktop-wide goals could be used for each release, which will change, IMO, the user’s impression of the new releases.
  3. I hear some people considering 3.0 should contain a lot of development platform changes. And well, while changes in the development platform are great (that’s why it’s improving all the time), I don’t think the future of GNOME (the desktop) releases should be so tied to the platform. On the contrary, the platform should adapt to the applications being written. Some years ago we did a lots of improvements to the platform because we were writing big apps (Nautilus and Evolution).
  4. Since I started using GPSs, I ended up visiting forums and mailing lists about the subject, finding that most people use illegal software (cracked programs downloaded from P2P networks) and maps (ditto, got from P2P), so if we could offer a free software-based solution for these people, they would probably move on. This is of course just one example, which is even being already covered by OpenStreetMap, but I’m sure there are lots of similar markets out there that we could try to cover better to bring 1000s of new users to our desktop.
  5. As for innovation, this is probably something we need to improve. There is innovation for sure (Gimmie, Pulseaudio integration, Compiz Fusion (not really a GNOME thing, but it’s got GTK-based tools that nicely integrate into GNOME), Banshee 1.0 (try it, it’s great!), Clutter, etc), but it’s true it’s not easy to make revolutionary changes (like using gimmie instead of our current panel, for instance), since it means convincing a lot of people in endless discussions. I think part of the problem is that people working on similar stuff are not put together to come to decisions (like distros working on similar solutions for the same thing :-) ), so we probably need improvement there, like having the hack meetings that were discussed recently.

Posted in Desktop, GNOME, Linux, Technology | 16 Comments »

Summer of Code 2008

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

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.

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Posted in Desktop, GNOME, Linux, openSUSE | Comments Off

Desktop effects activation (compiz)

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

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.

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Posted in Desktop, GNOME, Linux, openSUSE, Technology | 14 Comments »

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