Rodrigo Moya

Since I joined the OpenStreetMap project, coverage for most areas has been improving, even though areas, like where I live, go slowly (but steadily) improving, mainly because just a few people work on those areas. That’s really why not only does OSM need volunteers, but also donations of free map data from government agencies and others. UK and The Netherlands already had that kind of donations, as well as the US, which is now mostly complete (streets and highways mainly) thanks to the importing of TIGER data into OSM.

If you live in the US, you are lucky, you have now a map that is usable and that just needs volunteers to check for accuracy and complete it, adding more information to the map (like restaurants, hotels, pubs, etc, etc). For less complete areas, like mine, even companies are starting to use the map, so why not you?

In case you’re wondering how you could do that, see here for tutorials, and remember, if you’re using openSUSE, that packages for JOSM (the program used for editing the maps) is available in the build service.

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.

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

Not sure if I’ve understood what Murray and Jeff are discussing about, but just wanted to add a couple of things:

• While working at Novell, I have never felt under attack by the GNOME community. It’s true that I’ve had to explain some Novell movements many times to friendly people that didn’t agree with those movements, but I’ve never, repeat, never, felt being attacked by fellow GNOME developers. On the contrary, I’ve always felt at home within them.
• Murray, you are a person I admire a lot, because of the relationship we’ve had through the GNOME-DB project, which you helped a lot, and for all the other things you do for GNOME. And while you might (or might not, don’t know myself) be right, I don’t think it is clever to use personal attacks as you have done, specially without a medical certificate If there is something wrong about Jeff’s behavior, please bring it, respectfully, to whomever might be able to do something about it. Doing it this way will gain you lots of ennemies, which you don’t deserve, specially because most people I know, included myself, have always had a pleasant relationship with Jeff. So, I’m not saying you are lying or inventing things, but, at least for me, this all sounded like science-fiction, given Jeff has always been to me a very helpful person.

Anyway, please let’s discuss things in a moderate and clever manner

In the last few days, we have been working on packaging PulseAudio for openSUSE Factory (what will be openSUSE 11.0), and here are the first results. This page contains instructions on how to run and test it, and Cyberorg’s blog contains more information and screenshots.

This starts to mark the end of our beloved esound, although GNOME still needs some work, which is one of our next steps, helping upstream GNOME in fixing all the issues.

I left last night jhbuild compiling all GNOME modules, included meta-gnome-proposed, to find this morning it failed on libtelepathy because of missing darcs in my system. Installed it and watched it work until it came to another module needing bzr, installed again, and then, a few minutes later, another module complained about missing mercurial. And so far, so good, but this makes 6!! (if not more, it’s still compiling ) version control systems needed to compile GNOME unstable, that is: CVS, subversion, git, mercurial, darcs and bzr.

While I have nothing against people writing/using their own tools for whatever they want, it started to look to me, exaggerating, of course, like the Linux distro market, where, if we continue the trend (fortunately, the number of distros is not increasing, like it did a few years ago), we’ll be having almost a distro per Linux user. So, although I don’t know in detail all of these VCSs to really understand why they all exist, is this really needed? Wouldn’t it be better to have 2 or 3 very good VCSs that fit most people’s needs? If not, I’ll write my own

Since SUSE announced the opening of its distro, openSUSE has been taking steps to evolve to a community-driven distribution, and today, another step has been taken with the creation of the openSUSE board. As you can see in the newsitem, the first board has been appointed by Novell, but in the future the board will be elected by the community. And as a proof of the success it’s going to have, the first board includes our Federico!

A friend of mine, who is preparing an exam for working for the government in Galicia, has OpenOffice.org as the selected office suite. While this is great news, that public administrations go the free software route, it is a problem, since she’s asking me about good documentation, and, given my minimal knowledge of OpenOffice, I haven’t been able to answer her questions very well.

So, dear lazyweb, what documentation should I point her to? Helping her means helping getting free software better accepted in users-centered environments (that is, if she’s having problems finding good documentation, lots of people might be in the same situation, given that she’s not the only one preparing exams for the Galician government), so please, where is there good step-by-step documentation for OO.o?

With the summit almost finished, here’s a quick summary of what we came up about control-center development for 2.22 and beyond.

• There should be no distinction between a11y settings and others, a11y should just be part of the “normal” settings, like we did for the preferred applications capplet in 2.20.
• libslab (the library from gnome-main-menu used for the control-center shell) might need to be, either part of control-center itself, or a desktop/platform library. For that, it would need an API review, as well as the removal of Bonobo (used for unique application).
• Should keyboard shortcuts be part of the keyboard capplet?
• A11y keyboard in keyboard capplet?
• Proxy settings might be better placed as part of NetworkManager configuration, given NM allows now the distinction between system-wide and user-specific settings.
• about-me, in its current form, seems quite useless, so it might be a good idea to use it as a configuration point for online desktop.
• What to do with typing break? It might either be kept on the keyboard capplet, or moved to screensaver preferences, or enabled by default with a much friendlier 1st time configuration dialog.
• We’re adding a localization capplet, which will contain settings for time/date, timezone, keyboard layouts and language.
• New screen capplet containing screen resolution, screensaver and xrandr settings?
• PulseAudio integration
• Rename sound capplet to multimedia and add video device support?
• Some of the settings in control-center might be very useful if available from GDM.

Related to the discussion, and seeing all the icons that are in the systray, it would probably a good idea, now that there’s a discussion about a new panel, to have, in the new panel, separate systrays, each of which would be for specific categories (hardware, normal applications, temporary status, etc).

If anyone’s interested in participating in the discussion, please join the control-center mailing list and help us make it better.