Cody Russell

Berlin GTK+ Hackfest 2008!

Planning for the Berlin GTK+ Hackfest is underway! Behdad has been organizing stuff by email, and Mathias is working on finding a venue for it to happen at.

Things that are on the agenda:

• Release planning
• GIO hacking in GTK+
• Canvas discussion
• Generic HTML widget
• GObject introspection stuff
• D-Bus and GSettings
• Session management

Should be really interesting and a lot of fun. And I’m excited because I’ve never been there, and I get to see a friend of mine that I went to school with! 🙂

Emmanuele created a Wiki page and I’ve added some information there, such as who is planning to attend. If you are on that list and are not planning to attend, make sure to let Behdad know and remove yourself from the wiki page. Otherwise, everyone on there please add your travel information to the table as it becomes available, or if you don’t have a wiki account and don’t want one then email me and I’ll add your info.

Sponsors for the Berlin hackfest 2008 are:

Transient windows

I finally committed my patch for Win32 transient windows to svn tonight. This fixes the long-standing #112404 that is probably the most irritating bug for GTK Win32. I’m glad to finally be done with this one!

Console

I’ve been using Windows a lot more since I went to work at Medsphere, and the one thing that bothers me most frequently is the lack of a very useful terminal. I’ve got the Cygwin rxvt terminal installed, and it’s been pretty good except that I sometimes have like three or four of them open and Windows doesn’t have virtual desktops like I have on Linux, so it’s a pain to find the terminal I want. But now I ran across this open source terminal app called Console. It supports tabs and works with any shell program, like the default crappy Microsoft shell or with Cygwin’s bash. It also lets you customize the colors and the opacity of the window, which is not as big of a deal but possibly still of interest.

Medsphere OpenVista CIS Open Source

Yeah, I know Pete and Brad have already posted about it, and both of them have said more about it than I really could, but I want to post anyway! The place I work, Medsphere, has released the source for the OpenVista CIS client. It’s very exciting for me to be a part of this project and team, and it’s great to get to work on open source software. I’ve had the privilege of getting to work with really awesome hackers (Anthony, Bailey, Brad, Cesar, Jon, and Pete), getting to work with Mono and gtk#, and being able to do some hacking on GTK+ itself (next release should have some noticeable improvements for Win32!). Of course, as much as I’ve been learning and hacking GTK-Win32 internals, I would love to see all the hospitals using this software use it on Linux. 🙂

As Pete already mentioned, Medsphere is interested in hiring more gtk# hackers. As a fairly new person there, I think it’s a great place to work and I think everyone there is really awesome. If you’re interested in working somewhere in a Gnome/GTK/Mono type environment, email Pete or Brad.

Hacking

I’ve been trying to do some Win32-related hacking in GTK. I got a couple theme patches for notebook rendering approved, and I’ve got a patch up for review that fixes an issue with windows not receiving enough expose events when they’re being resized. Now I’m trying to understand and fix some issues related to modality and transience of windows. That’s a pretty difficult bug though. Somehow I’ve managed to get Windows XP to have multiple titlebars highlighted as though the windows are focused, although only one of them is focused in the taskbar. I hate Windows.

I’ve also been fooling around with Ruby a little bit, and I installed Rails yesterday. I was initially deceived by its inclusion in Ubuntu’s apt repository. Apparently if you want to use Rails on Linux, it’s easier to just install RubyGems and install Rails and its dependencies through gem. The instructions on the RubyGems site was a little bit inaccurate for installation to your home directory, though. You need to make some environment variable adjustments:

export GEM_HOME=$PREFIX/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
export RUBYLIB=$PREFIX/lib/ruby:$PREFIX/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8

There are some problems with using the version of Rails that’s included in Ubuntu’s apt. Like missing very important features, like ActiveRecord and Initializer.

GTK 2.10 Installer

Jean-Baptiste Note has taken my latest cross-compile build of GTK 2.10 and created a Windows installer. If anyone is interested, check it out! Thanks very much to Jean-Baptiste for that.

He points out that it doesn’t work under WINE, but neither have any previous GTK builds for Win32 so I guess nobody will lose sleep over that. It apparently doesn’t detect the version of Windows correctly or something and assumes that it is in Windows 95 or something.

GConf

I’ve been looking into GConf a little bit, trying to figure out how best
to optimize for things like metacity when they’re starting up. I went
ahead and implemented the batched queries interface that’s described in
the IDL sources but was never implemented for some reason, but that’s
not really the entire solution. It seems like there is something not
happening as expected in the client-side caching when you preload some
directory.

Metacity preloads keys from /apps/metacity or whatever, so you
expect it will recursively preload all the keys. But when I trace the
CORBA method calls I see something like this:

1. All subdirs of /apps/metacity
2. All entries of /apps/metacity
3. … a few unrelated things…
4. Query value /apps/metacity/general/mouse_button_modifier

So, it looks like the client is not caching all the values recursively.
I’m not entirely sure yet, so I’m going to investigate some more in the
next couple days.

GTK Win32 Cross-compile doc update

To anyone who is using my GTK cross-compile docs, there is a small update. The gtk.immodules file was incorrect and has been fixed. Thanks to Jean-Baptiste Note for catching this and reporting it.

Update to GTK on Win32

Brad Taylor and I have been working on getting GTK to cross-compile for Win32 on his system also. We found a couple places where my process only worked for my system but we fixed them and I’ve updated my docs so that hopefully anyone can reproduce this.

I’ve posted my instructions online now, because a number of people contacted me after my last post about this and were interested in building GTK for Win32 also. So, I would like to hear from people and find out if this worked for others. If you have problems with it on your system and find a solution, I can add that to the docs.

I also want to move this over to live.gnome.org sometime. That seems like a more appropriate place for it. I’ll try to do that later this week.

Once again, a big thanks to Tor Lillqvist and everyone on #gtk+ who helped me with getting this stuff going.

Building GTK on Win32

So I sat down and invested some time into building GTK 2.10 on Windows today, with help from Tor. I think Tor usually builds it on Windows using MSYS or Cygwin or something, but I managed to cross-compile from Linux and it seemed to sort of work.

There isn’t really any good and up-to-date documentation online for how to build GTK on Win32, so I made a log of every step of my process so that this can (hopefully) be reproduced by others. We’re never going to get any of the Win32-related bugs fixed if nobody can build it. 🙂 So my next step is to start over from scratch in a different target directory and turn my log into something more concise (there are a lot of trial and error steps in my log where something didn’t work and I had to go back and try something else). And there are a few steps where I had to hack configure scripts directly, and I’d like to be able to figure out real solutions to those steps.