Category: gnome

Come back from the GCDS

Last week was amazing. So many interesting people here in the island where I was born…

I met a lot of friends from different projects and people I didn’t know before, or maybe just from their emails and posts.

Thank to everybody for coming. Thanks to the attenders, to the boards and the local team (awesome job dudes!).

Tomorrow at 8 am I will taking my flight to Sevilla. And the day after I come back to work… I’m not really happy with the idea of having between 35º and 40º C , but the GCDS was a great for collecting new ideas for Guadalinex. New contacts, interesting projects, to know the next steps in GNOME and other desktop projects… All of that give me energy to  come back to the office and do some hacking 😉

Now I like to hack a bit with some project, like Mago. I was talking with Ara Pulido at the Summit and I think we (guadalinex) will collaborate with them making new test suits. We need them for our project so we like to make them and share with the community.

Well, let’s pack and go to sleep, tomorrow I have an early flight.

Happy hacking 🙂

Last advices for the GCDS

I know it’s a bit late, but I hope this helps.

I’m from Gran Canaria, the place where the event is going to be, so I like to give you some advices and recommendations:

  • Sun protection. Here the sun can burn you if you don’t take some protections. Some times seems like it’s not so sunny, but it could be dangerous if you are from a northern area.
  • Don’t drink top water. The top water here is supposed to be good enough for human consumption, but the true is that nobody here drink it. We always drink mineral water. And also here was a incident a few month ago about top water’s high levels of boron. That now is normal, but you know…
  • Here there is not so many place with vegetarian food but we try to find all kind places for eat nearby the event. You’ll find that info (which will be updated) at the wiki.
  • The important phone numbers are also at the wiki. Remember the international code for Spain is +34
  • In Gran Canaria (Spain), electricity is provided normally at a voltage of 220 V and 50 Hz. But you’ll probably find adapters at the mall (Centro comercial Las Arenas) just in front the event’s place.
  • Here in Gran Canaria we talk Spanish, so you can find useful the list of common words and expressions we have at the wiki. If you already know Spanish, you need have in mind that here we have some different words (eg. Autobus = Guagua).
  • The most useful lines of guaguas (buses) for going from or at the auditorium are the lines 47 and 17.
  • Taxi is also a good option. Probably you’ll pay 4 € for a normal ride (from the Auditorium to the farthest hotels.
  • There will be a infodesk where you’ll find people who can bring you some help. The contact person will be Fabio, but there will be more people there.
  • I will be also around there during the weekend, I can’t be sure about the rest of the week. Anyways, if you need touristic/local information or just any info of Canarias or Gran Canaria, find me (Juanje Ojeda) and ask me 😉
  • If you have a group of people who want place for lunch of dinner, ask for me at the infodesk, I’ve been talking with some places to try to arrange this king of things.

I just like to add that Gran Canaria is much more than beaches and sun. So try to get into the countryside or to different part of the island. They are so different between them hat people usually get surprised.

I’ll highly recommend to visit Teror, Tejeda, Agaete, Artenara (and the Tamadaba pine forest), Mogán, Agüimes, Santa Lucía and, of course Maspalomas. There are more interesting places, but with those you’ll get the idea 😉

Well, we’ll meet you at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 🙂

Help with the Hal deprecation

Hi, I need somebody tell me what is going on with Hal.

Yesterday Carlos told me about Ubuntu’s plans for Karmic and the Hal deprecation. I don’t really know how could I miss this, but I didn’t know before…

Lately I was working a bit with Hal and I kinda like it. As far as I saw, there is a GNOME plan for that deprecation and hal will be split into different pieces which will be integrated into other software. Such a udev-extras, libudev, DeviceKit-*, the kernel itself and so.

I’ve been reading quite a lot about all those changes and I don’t really get the reasons for this move. And I don’t really know how the things will work when the migration be completed.

No more hal at all? No hal-info either? just udev rules (which, btw,  I find really confusing and ugly…)?

I hope someone could help me to see how the things will be at the near future around the hardware layer on GNU/Linux.

Thanks

Track your GNOME bugs from your desktop

Time ago I found an interesting tool for the desktop. It’s  Java client for Bugzilla called  Deskzilla.

I’m not fan of Java at all, but I have to say that the application is very powerful and it’s not so slow…

Basically it let you fill bugs, search bugs (and save the searches) in a way a lot easier than the bugzilla itself. But the coolest thing is it let you make searches offline. It has even a screenshot editor to add marks, texts and more to the screenshots before to attach them to the bugs.

I don’t know, it seems very interesting and useful for who work everyday with Bugzilla.

The only thing is this is not any kind of Free Software/Open Source code, but they have special license keys for free software project.

Actually I ask one for working with GNOME and the give me one and ask me to public it so any GNOME’s bugzilla user can use this software for free.

If anyone want the GNOME key, just take it here.

University Free Software Contest

The last 7th of May I was at the III University Free Software Contest‘s final fase. That event is a really interesting and (IMHO) very important for the free software community world in Spain.

The event takes place at several universities in Spain and have this final fase in Seville. In each university, the student that want to participate, have to start a free software project and follow some rules:

  • The project must be register in a public forge with public Subversion, wiki, maillist and so on.
  • They have to public their progress in a blog, so the people can follow the projects. All the projects’ blogs are syndicated in the contest’s planet.
  • They also have more points if they create a community around their projects.
  • And, of course, the project must have some kind of free software license.

I’ve have the pleasure and honor to be member of the jury to evaluate those projects and it’s really hopeful to see those young students learning how to develop a project with free software tools and methodologies. And some projects are really amazing and are already in few distributions or even OS.

This initiative is very helpful to the people from the universities who have great ideas, but they don’t know how the community works or even the normal developing tools. You know… sometimes at the universities the knowledge is too much theoretically… At least in Spain.

I have to apologize to the organization because in this edition I didn’t do my duty as a member of the jury. The work, my mess with the mail and the chaos inside of my head… But I have no excuses, really and I do regret no to have evaluated the projects, because there were some quite interesting…

Thanks anyway to all the organization and the rest of the jury. By the way, this event is good for me also because some members of the jury are very good friends (and GNOMErs :-P) but living in other places and they come for the final fase so I can meet them 🙂

For example, there are Carlos Garnacho and Alvaro López (alo) 🙂

Well, I do hope this initiative will be replicated in other countries because the students learn a lot and after the contest there are always some interesting projects which are free software 🙂

Some updates

It’s been awhile since the last post. I’ve been a bit busy with Guadalinex and some personal stuff. So here I leave some updates to keep my personal log no so empty…

Parkour:

I’ve got some problems with my back and I had to quit (for a while) with this new passion… Anyway, it was useful because it farce me to go to the doctor make a real check and found old and deeper problems. And what it’s better, it also force me to keep doing some exercise, which is helping me in many ways 🙂

Rock Climbing:

I leave parkour by now, but I’ve started to climb walls again. It sounds kind of weird, but this was a previous passion for me and it’s helping me with my back.

Ok, I’m not climbing like I was doing 8 years ago (that was more or less the last time…), but I’ve decided to start slow. Step by step.

I had to much injuries from my previous climbing period. I don’t want to do the same mistakes again.

I found some artificial walls for climbing but I’m actually doing some boulder in “el Puente de Triana” (the Triana bridge), here in Seville. There are always people climbing and people are very nice and open.

I hope soon I will be able to go to some real rock outside of  Seville…

This reminds me that in Gran Canaria are really good spots for climbing (also fot others mountain activities) so if anyone who is going to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit like to know places, let me know. I¡m from there and I know quite well those places. Just let me know before the summit and we can do some excursion or something 😉

Guadalinex:

There is already the Ubuntu Jaunty, the one we use as base to derive. We were quite busy setting up all the building systems, updating our projects for being working on Jaunty and trying to help Ubuntu a bit with translations, bugs and patches.

No so many patches as I would like, but we are very few people and we spend a lot of time learning how Ubuntu works. There is a lots of procedures, documentation, wiki pages, tools, place from where get info… We are still learning, but I thing the next version and collaboration will be much smoother. And we’ll be more useful for them 🙂

We have alpha already in the streets and we are close to have a beta, which will be more Guadalinex alike.

Ubuntu Jaunty is a really good base. I have to said that for me is one of the best Ubuntu versions in many ways, so I expect Guadalinex be at least as good as Jaunty.

We’ll change some things from Ubuntu, as the notifications stuff. We like the new notifications but we need interaction on them for one of our main projects: Hermes. And the new notification system doesn’t allow to do any interactions.

By now we’ll deactivate this and we’ll use the standard of GNOME, at least, until the new notification implement some kind of solution for those use cases.

Few days off (offline):

I’ll go tomorrow to Vigo (Galician) until Sunday and I’ll be very offline those days. It’s my first time in Galician and I know I will love it 🙂

So many time wanting to go there and just 3 days there… But sure it’s just the FIRST time and not the last 😛

git question

Ok, I’m not really git fan. Actually, I don’t like at all… But I have to use because of some projects and now, that GNOME is moving to Git, more.

Anyway, I use it. But there are some workflows I don’t get well yet. I know the basis and maybe a bit more, but I’m far from a git-poweruser.

There are some docs and interesting threads about git in GNOME, but I have to learn a lot…

The thing is I like to collaborate with some project in which official git repos I haven’t account, so I try to use Github to public and manage my branches.

Although I don’t like git so much, I do like Github. It is a very good web gui for a DCVS and has awesome features…

But here is one of my use cases:

I try to make some changes on a Debian project (live-helper) which uses a git repository. But I work with a friend on some features and changes over the main project.

My first though was: I create a mirror of the upstream project on Guthub, my friend create a “fork” (kind of “git clone” but keeping parent-child relationship on Github) and then he can make so many branches he need and develop the different features and changes.

I like to have one branch where merge all the mature features, but also keeping the upstream mirror. So I create a branch of my mirror and I’m merging there the different features.

I think until here everything is right. If there is a better way, tell me, please.

Keep going… The problem is not all the features are interesting for the upstream projects, so the merged branch is not good place for get patches or merge from. But it is our good branch which we use for our project, so we need keep as is.

But some of our features are integrated in upstream. Which is good and thing we want. The problem is we we pull the changes from upstream, there are some changes identical, but merged or committed in other order. Some times pull a changed we push to upstream make some mess in our history…

And if we like to keep updated the different feature branches from upstream to keep working on this features but with valid and new code, from where we pull those changes?

From our mirror? the merged branch? is there another magic git way?

I know this could be very confusing. I think it’s easy to explain with graphics but my artistic skills are below zero…

But this graph could help (or not…)

I hope some git guru understand some of this uses case and give me some tips to doing better.

BTW, I couldn’t find a way to make more than one fork from one branch on Github, which would have been useful…

NOTE: I have my reasons to dislike git, but it’s now the point of this post. I don’t like flames and I don’t like argue about which DCVS is better, I just like to know how to use better this tool. Thanks 🙂

Guadalinex upadates

As I said on my last post, now I’m working on Guadalinex v6, but in this new version we won’t try to develop a lot of new things as in earlier versions, we have less time and different goals as well.

Our main goals are:

  • Release as close to Jaunty as we could
  • Have the same features already implemented for Guadalinex working fine (updated to Jaunty)
  • Have a really, really stable version
  • Have all the desktop, applications and documentation well translated into Spanish

There is also a implicit goal about trying to push our improvements  to the international free software community. We do have Spanish community, but no much people outside Hispanic community knows well some interesting and useful projects we have.

I have to thanks to the people from Ubuntu who is helping us with Launchpad and all the Ubuntu procedures so we can move a bit to the Ubuntu world. People like Daniel Holbach and others really care about us and the possibility of collaboration.

Now we have a distro registered in Launchpad:

http://launchpad.net/guadalinex

Some projects registered in Launchpad with the old source code imported from the earlier version:

And also a PPA (Launchpad’s Personal Package Archives) where upload packages built for Guadalinex (ergo Jaunty) so people can use our projects in Ubuntu Jaunty. By now there is just a couple of packages recently upgrades to Janty and with some fixes:

Our intention is get our distro ready for our schedule and start to put software we think is useful or needed for our users into next Ubuntu versions. We are just making the foundations.

But there is a lot of interesting and useful software already in Ubuntu or other upstream projects with some internationalization problems, so we must take care of them. We are reviewing the applications and mostly the installer or live system to be sure there is no non translatable parts.

Currently we are working on the Ubuntu live system (casper) to bring some i18n support on some messages the user see and probably doesn’t understand.

In the other hand our projects were made by Spanish developers for Spanish people and they haven’t much i18n support. And we are also working on that.

And for all those Spanish speakers who find hard to search and read documentation in English we are trying to set up a developer documentation wiki in Spanish for all the people who like to collaborate with Guadalinex. This is easier step for a lot of non-English speakers to get involved in any kind of free software community. And with that knowledge they can just collaborate with Guadalinex (but this makes them collaborate indirectly with upstreams projects…) or Ubuntu, Gnome or any project.

At least, I hope so…

Something similar helps me years ago… 🙂
Anyone who want help us or is interested on the project can contact with me or with the rest of the team here, in the irc (channels: , -devel or #guadabuntu) or , if you can read/write Spanish, at the Spanish mail list.

Thanks for reading so boring history I should turn off the verbose mode 😛

Gwibber working on Guadalinex v5 and Ubuntu Hardy

I’ve just discover Gwibber and I found it very nice and useful. It’s a microblogging client for GNOME which support twitter, identi.ca, facebook, fickr, rss and much more. It use webkit and is quite eye candy.
The problem is webkit is not very well supported on Ubuntu Hardy, which means neither on Guadalinex v5.

But you can get it for those systems by adding to your sources.list:

# Gwibber
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gwibber-team/ubuntu hardy main

# Webkit
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/stemp/ubuntu hardy main

And then install the package Gwibber.
Don’t add the ppa from Webkit team on Launchpad because those packages are not working right now.

Well, enjoy this nice piece of software 😉

Break and FOSDEM have finished

It was a really good experience going to the FOSDEM. It was my first, but I hope it won’t be the last.

I had the opportunity of knowing a bit Brussels: the beer, the chocolate, the waffles, the city center… very nice place… errr, but the weather… rains and cold… not really my type.

The FOSDEM itself was amazing. So many people from so different projects (hackers and users).

Kudos for the organization people, they did just great. Huge and great work! 😉

I missed some friends over there but I met new friends and I could talk a lot about the GCDS (Gran Canaria Desktop Summit), which is going to be a very important event. It seems that people from GNOME and KDE are ready for collaborate as much the time over there let us.

I very exciting about the event and all the think are coming with it.

By the way, there are new mail list for the event:

http://mail.grancanariadesktopsummit.org/mailman/listinfo/gcds

Stay tuned! 😉

The other thing I want to write is about my break.  I was in a break of my job for having time for me and some personal stuff. Well, that break is now over 🙂

On Monday I come back, but I have some changes. I’m going to work on a six months project, out of the office (actually at the client office) but in a good a nd interesting (at least for me) Spanish free software project.

I’m really exciting about this too, but I’ll wait until I start (on Monday) to talk about the project and what I’m going to do in it.

Well, I’m keep reading, learning and searching some stuff more that on Monday I have to be prepared 😉

See you! Happy hacking! 😉

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España
This work by Juanje Ojeda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 España.