Cody Russell

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.

Gnome 2.16

It was very cool to see that Gnome 2.16 is released! Congratulations to everyone involved with it!

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.

Medsphere

So I went out to California the last two weeks to start my new job, and I got to finally meet Cesar from #mono. Anthony Taranto, Peter Johanson, and Brad Taylor also work there. It was a really fun trip, everyone was fun. I almost went to see SoaP with the rest of the company, but my plane left too early on Friday so I missed out.

Upgrading to Dapper

I’ve been running on Ubuntu Dapper for quite a long time now, and my mom has been using the previous version, the Breezy Badger. So I figured since the official 6.06 release is final, I’d upgrade her machine to Dapper.

I ran into a little bit of a hiccup, and it seems that somewhere along the way her Python 2.4 install had been corrupted. Since stuff like that doesn’t usually “just happen” I filed a bug report on Ubuntu’s Launchpad. It was fixable without too much trouble, by just manually installing the latest python24 package from Dapper. After that the upgrade finished without a problem.

Nobody else has run into this issue that I’m aware of, which is very peculiar. I got a response from one of the Ubuntu hackers trying to get some more information, but by that time I had already forced the upgrade of python24 so it was too late.

Dapper is released!

Exciting news today, Ubuntu has unleashed the Dapper Drake!

Hacking

I’ve been getting back into Gnome related technologies recently, for variousreasons. I started looking into Gnome’s accessibility project, like ATK and atk-spi. It’s pretty cool, I think. I had long ago started to work on a speech recognition interface for Gnome using CMU Sphinx and a Bonobo interface. It never got further than occasionally being able to recognize when I say “hello” and display a popup “Hello, world!” dialog. But it was cool.