Since everything that Google does has a lot of impact, and since they just released MapMaker, the OpenStreetMap project counter-attacks with a Press Release, so please read it.
Summary is: don’t help Google making their maps, help OpenSteetMap instead!
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.
Since I now have 2 cooking recipes (and more to come), I’ve put them into a Recipes section on my website. And the 2nd recipe is something not as healthy as the 1st one (Merluza a la Gallega) but much more tastier. It is Migas, a cheap and consistent dish for those cold winter days.
), so we probably need improvement there, like having the hack meetings that were discussed recently.After several bugs fixed and lots of debugging, I can say now PulseAudio should be working almost perfectly (still some problems with stuttering sound on low-end machines) in openSUSE 11.0. So, here’s a summary of the things we have done, which I should have bloged about before.
First, we tried to replace the GNOME-upstream volume control with padevchooser (a system tray icon that gives access to all PulseAudio tools), but people complained loudly about the difficulty of just setting the volume with this, they just wanted a volume slider. So, we got back to the upstream volume applet, but changed it to open the PulseAudio volume control instead of gnome-volume-control.
Another problem we found early was PA not working correctly on 5.1 (or other) speaker setups. There was an easy fix, just changing the number of channels in the config file, but there was no GUI, so we added one to paprefs:
With this, you can now control all your speakers individually:
Apart from that, we had to tweak ALSA and SDL configurations to just use PulseAudio when on GNOME, since KDE is not using it, but I think everything should now be ok.
I’m now back home after a couple of weeks of lots of traveling. I first was 4 days in London, visiting my sister, then was 5 days at home, sick with a flu most of the family got while in London, then last weekend to beautiful Salamanca for a conference at the University. Back home on Sunday, still a bit sick, and on Monday flied back to Stansted for a 2 days visit to Michael, for some debugging and bug fixing fun.
So, in this 1.5 days of fun action at Michael’s, I’ve learnt a few useful bits:
), and he has some nice habits in his technique that should help me a lot, now that I’ve learnt them, in my bug hunting work.While visiting Michael and his wonderful wife and daughters, I had the opportunity to meet my sister and family on Tuesday for dinner, since they were visiting Cambridge that day, where they will be moving soon, so I will have the opportunity to visit both my family and Michael (for more debugging and technique learning fun) more often.
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:
(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. 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.
Some more healthy food cooking for your taste pleasure. This time, we’re going to do Merluza a la Gallega (or Hake Galizian style). I personally find hake quite tasteless, so it needs to have some kind of sauce or something that gives it more taste, so the a la gallega part is the way to go.
You need (for 2 people):
And here’s how to do it:
), peel them and cut them into slices:
And these easy steps (it will take less than 1 hour to do it, and this is counting the time the potatoes need to be boiled down, which is quite long, during which you can continue hacking ) make for some healthy food:
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.