Rodrigo Moya

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

  

I have been running with a 10.3 openSUSE system updated to FACTORY for some time now, but last week, I downloaded the boot ISO to test a fresh installation. And I was immediately delighted by the new installer, which seems to be the same as always but with a much better UI.