Safe as Milk

GNOME deployment update

I found another interesting GNOME deployment in a surprising
place – on a GNOME mailing list I didn’t know existed,
gnome-deployment-list.

The primary purpose of the list is to help people deploy GNOME, as opposed to tell people about GNOME deployments, but a year ago, this mail arrived on the list.

It tells the story of a medium sized Belgian company who almost completely abandoned Windows in favour of Debian machines running GNOME. The full details of the deployment, including the pre-migration analysis and the complete migration procedure, are available on the website of the Brussels LUG.

Their computing environment now runs over 65% of their desktop machines on GNU/Linux with GNOME, with estimated savings to the company of €22000.

Their main reason for migrating was not cost, however – it was a requirement for document interoperability. OOo solved this problem nicely, and Evolution and a free IMAP server allowed them to completely remove any Microsoft dependencies they had. The company is now (2 years on from their initial migration) running GNOME 2.6, with some GNOME 2.8 machines in testing.

The extraordinary thing about this story is that, as well as some professional consultancy for training and installation, the migration happened with the support and assistance of a local user’s group, acting out of a will to help, showing that user communities and private enterprise can work together.

Update:

A list of GNOME deployments is available in the GNOME wiki and it is getting pretty long (but not long enough! more inspirational stories needed!). It is also worth noting in this story that the external consultancy was provided by a local Belgian company, Beeznest, and not by a big international company. This aspect of Free Software (the fact that the skills are available locally, and profits feed the local economy) is something else which warms the cockles of my heart. Many thanks to Jérôme of Beeznest and BXLUG for putting together this account.

GNOME deployments worldwide

Following on from Sebastien’s post, I have been doing a little hunter-gathering of some notable GNOME deployments today, so that we have some nice feelgood stories, case studies and quotes of happy GNOME customers when we start writing copy for posters.

I had no problem recalling the bigger ones – Sao Paolo (400,000 users), China (1 million JDS desktops), Extramadura (80,000 desktops although I have seen lots of different figures), and even remembered a couple of smaller but also notable ones (Allied Irish Banks, 7,500 desktops running JDS) and found Largo, Florida with a web search.

I need help though – if you are aware of a sizeable GNOME deployment somewhere around the world, could you add it here? And if you have more resources (interviews, news articles, case studies) for those that I have listed, please add them in too. The first step to telling other people about GNOME’s success is telling ourselves about it.

Thanks for your help.

Statically linked shared objects

OK – I can use the time to share something I found interesting.

Yesterday someone was asking on a mailing list I’m on whether there is a way to ship a library which uses glib as a shared object, but without depending on glib being installed.

That is, he has an API, and uses (say) GObject for his object structure, glib for his portability level and so on. But on install, he doesn’t want to force the person to install glib.

His choices seemed to be

• Ship with glib-2.0.so and do some LD_RUN_PATH magic to find the one he ships with
• Ship statically linked libs, linked statically with glib

and neither of those were particularly attractive.

So I proposed a third solution, which consisted of generating a shared library, but at the linking stage linking in libglib-2.0.a rather than dynamically linking to libglib-2.0.so. And it works!

$ gcc `pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0` -c module.c
$ gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,libtruc.so -o libtruc.so.0.1 module.o /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.a
$ ldd libtruc.so.0.1
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40008000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x80000000)

Look! No glib!

Yves even improved things by finding a libtoolable solution (kind of) – if he wants to build with the static glib, he runs

$ make GLIB_LIBS="/usr/lib/libglib-2.0.a"

to link glib statically.

It’s a pity that pkg-config doesn’t have a –static-libs flag, actually, since this would be a lot cleaner if it did.

Update: Someone (Owen, can I say it was you?) pointed out that this is a horrible thing to do for a number of reasons – first, it won’t work unless your glib was compiled to generate position independent code (in gcc that means compiling with -fPIC), and secondly (which I knew) this is likely to come back and bite you hard in the ass later on if you ever have your shared library linked to an application which is also sharing another libglib-2.0.so.

Why this is so is left as an excercise for the reader

Luis: How about BROKEN and WORKING?

In other news, the GIMP splash competition has found a sponsor (actually, two). Cameron Gregory over at FlamingText.com (which provides free online logo generation, and commercial support for the GIMP) and Federico Lara at mayopi.com (a Peruvian geek clothing company who have a line in GIMP t-shirts) both offered to sponsor a prize.

In the end, the prize will be a GIMP t-shirt or polo shirt (choice of winner) courtesy of mayopi. You can see their designs on the sourcewear site. They’re a cool company, I like them. And while you’re at it, go and set your name on fire over at FlamingText (they don’t call it FlamingText for nothing).

GIMP splash competition news

yosh has finally cleared things up for the splash screen competition, by resurrecting the Contest section that he and Carol (and Helvetix) worked on a couple of years ago. Thanks to him (and to Carol and Helvetix for the fact that the contest section existed in the first place), we now have something of a structure for things like this, which can handle a beating from slashdot.

The new contest site is over at the main GIMP site, and there is a gallery of existing entries.

I am amazed at the creativity of some of the entries – even though most of them are cropped photos or plasmas/skies with gradient maps applied, we have some gems in there like this one, this one, or this one.

It’ll be a tough job to choose one, I think…

So – you know how I said the last few wrinkles had been ironed out? Ooops…

(Sorry Owen and sysadmins).

And we’re off!

So the last few wrinkles have been ironed out, and the GIMP 2.2 splash screen contest is well and truly underway!

Head on over to The splash contest entry page to get instructions for submitting your splash screen, and to the GIMP splash page for even more information. Happy splashing!

GIMP Splash contest update

So – you know what I was saying about being organised earlier? It seems the GIMP user’s mailing list doesn’t allow posts with attachments, which is a disadvantage for submitting splash screens. We will work out an alternative method for submitting during the day, and I will get back to people later.

And the art contests keep on coming…

The GIMP 2.2 will be released in a few days and we are looking for a splash screen for the 2.2 release.

There have been a few very nice propositions thanks to jimmac’s splash screen template, but we are now looking for the definitive 2.2 splash screen.

The lucky winner will be chosen next week by a number of people yet to be identified, and sent to a location to be specified today (we’re working on it…). The winner will get a yet-to-be-printed t-shirt or perhaps some other goodie worth killing over.

As you can tell, this is perhaps the best organised contest ever.

GUADEC logo competition

The GUADEC logo competition closes in a few hours, and it has been a massive success! At my latest count, there were over 90 logo submissions, from around 30 different designers. Several people submitted 7 or 8 entries (or even more) and a huge amount of thought and work obviously went into the submissions.

Now the hard work begins – the Stuttgart organisers are going to have a tough job trimming those 90 submissions down to a shortlist of around 5, from which the winner will be picked.

Leslie Proctor had the wonderful idea of organising a logo gallery at GUADEC, where each of the logos submitted will be on display to show the depth of creative talent and energy in the GNOME community. To all the designers who have submitted entries for the competition (and if you haven’t you still have a few hours), all I can say is “chapeau”, as they say in France.