Last week, I took a look at fixing Fedora 30 GNOME Software to get Silverblue 30 to 31 distro upgrades working. The fixes are now available in F30 updates-testing (gnome-software-3.32.4-6.fc30), backported from upstream git.
Check out my YouTube video where I go in more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_7jtwfnZkQ
Up until now, playing video files has been problematic in Fedora as we haven’t been able to include the necessary codecs for popular video formats. This is now changing in Fedora 31 Workstation.
We have two independent changes that landed just yesterday:
These changes together enable .mp4 video playback without having to use extra third party repositories such as rpmfusion.
The openh264 codec is available through the fedora-cisco-openh264 repository that we include by default, but is set to enabled=0. You can either edit /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-cisco-openh264.repo and edit it to enabled=1, or just rely on gnome-software automatically offering to install it and enable the repo when playing videos through Totem (note that you need to grab fixed gnome-software from updates-testing for this to work).
AAC support is enabled through the fdk-aac-free library that is included on the install media.
I am in London this week visiting Richard Hughes. We have been working out of his home office and giving some much needed love to GNOME Software.
Here is the main thing we’ve been working on:
Source selection drop down
GNOME Software now has a drop down list for choosing which source to use for installing an app. This is useful when someone has multiple repos enabled that all provide the same app, e.g. GIMP being available both as an RPM package from Fedora and a Flatpak from Flathub.
Previously, GNOME Software treated each version as a separate app and all the apps that were available from both Fedora and Flathub suddenly showed up twice: once for each source. This made browsing through featured apps and categories annoying as there was much repetition. Now instead GNOME Software consolidates them together into one entry and makes it possible to choose which one to install.
Richard worked mostly on the backend code and I did the user facing stuff. Allan Day helped us over the IRC with all the design (thanks Allan! you rock). It was so nice to be together in once office and be able to bounce ideas back and forth. We are hoping we can maybe start doing this more often.
This work is now on GNOME Software git master and will be in Fedora 30 as part of GNOME 3.32. If you are maintaining a Flathub app where it has its desktop file renamed, please check to make sure it has X-Flatpak-RenamedFrom correctly set in the .desktop file. This is needed for GNOME Software to correctly match renamed apps in Flathub to non-renamed ones available from distros. If the key is not there, it should be just the matter of rebuilding the app and it should automatically appear.
Some apps that have renamed desktop files in Flathub need https://github.com/flatpak/freedesktop-sdk-images/pull/122 to land for this to correctly work. Hopefully we can get this part sorted out next week.
It was a fun week and thanks to Richard for letting me stay at his place, and thanks to Red Hat for sponsoring my travels!
Just one week to GUADEC 2015 in Gothenburg! 7 days!!!
I hope you are all as excited as we are in the local organizing team.
We made a nice badge if you want to blog about the conference. Grab it here and if you are quick, you might be the first person to use it!
And don’t forget to register! https://registration.guadec.org/
See you all in a bit.
We have been working hard over the past 6 months to make GNOME Software even better compared to the previous 3.12 release. Here’s a quick status update what the new 3.14 release brings.
Thanks to the design help from Allan Day and Lapo Calamandrei, we’ve made a number of improvements to the front page:
No need to go back to using command line tools to install plugin for popular apps. They are all now available through GNOME Software in the app details page:
Jim Hall recently published the results for the usability tests he conducted as part of his Master’s program. One of the four apps tested was GNOME Software. We’ve looked through the issues pointed out and have already done a number of changes to take the usability research into account.
New first run dialog which explains what the app does:
Moved the Install / Remove buttons down from the headerbar to a more prominent position:
It’s no longer just Fedora where GNOME Software is supported! Richard has done a lot of work this cycle to make it possible to run GNOME Software on other distros besides Fedora. Stay tuned; a number of distros are going to ship GNOME Software this fall / winter.
I am exaggerating here a bit and it is actually not 500 papercuts fixed, but it is still a TON of small issues fixed, hopefully making the overall experience much nicer.
We’ve also had some very nice fixes (THANKS!!!) from people who don’t regularly work on gnome-software. To point out some:
GNOME Software is set to be the software installer in the upcoming Fedora 21 Workstation release and Richard and I both have been focusing a lot on making it work really well on Fedora.
If you have free time and want to help out GNOME Software, install Fedora 21 Alpha Workstation and give GNOME Software a try and report any bugs you can find. All feedback and bug reports are invaluable and highly appreciated.
Thanks everyone and hope you’ll enjoy GNOME Software 3.14!
Thanks to Allan Day’s design and Richard Hughes’ backend work, I was able to implement application addon support in GNOME Software. This week, we have released GNOME Software 3.13.3 and the addon support is available in the release for everyone to try out.
The screenshot above is for Audacious that was the very first application in Fedora Rawhide to start shipping addon metadata. If you are an upstream author or a package maintainer and want your addon to show up in GNOME Software, it’s pretty easy to do. All that is needed is to drop a small file in /usr/share/appdata/ with the metadata and it shows up. Check out Richard’s blog post I have linked above to see how to do that. Or catch us on IRC, we’re always happy to help.
GNOME Software 3.14.x is going to be the software installer in Fedora Workstation 21, and we’ve already got 3.13.3 available as a sneak preview in Rawhide. Try it, break it, and report bugs!
GNOME 3.10.0 is now available in Fedora 20!
As usual, Fedora tracks GNOME releases closely. Last week, Fedora 20 Alpha shipped with a GNOME 3.10 prerelease, and today have just landed the final 3.10.0 builds, one day after the official upstream release.
If you are already on Fedora 20, getting GNOME 3.10.0 is as easy as applying all available updates.
Otherwise, grab the F20 Alpha live image or upgrade from F19 with FedUp. Do not forget to apply available updates to get the latest 3.10.0 goodies.
And when done testing, leave feedback in the Bodhi updates system: GNOME 3.10.0 update.
It’s hard to believe that it’s already the end of September. The summer is over, unfortunately, and school is in full swing.
Yesterday was the firm pencils down date which marks the end of this year’s Google Summer of Code program, and my internship with GNOME.
Yesterday was also the GNOME 3.10.0 tarballs due date, and I’m proud to have my work included in core modules.
The internship was roughly divided into two. The first half was from late June until GUADEC, and the second half ended just now. My work with the Date and Time settings was also naturally divided into two – one part was redoing the Date and Time panel in gnome-control-center, closely following Allan Day’s mockups, and the other part was implementing a new plugin for gnome-settings-daemon that handles geolocation.
This is all now completed. The new control centre panel landed in GNOME 3.9.90, and the settings daemon plugin in 3.9.91. If you are running Fedora 20, it’s already available there.
My work was not only limited to these two modules. As they say, “When something is broken, fix it” – and I tried to follow that principle as much as I could. This meant adding support for GtkListBox in Glade; adding new listbox API in GTK+ and fixing listbox accessibility issues there; adding new time format modifiers in glib; fixing crashers in geoclue and so on. Whenever things got in my way, I would fix them instead of adding workarounds in my own code.
One of the highlights of the internship was GUADEC. Since the GNOME team is all scattered around the globe (or at least I thought so, previously!), it was a rare opportunity to meet other gnomies face to face.
Truth be told, I’ve now discovered that I am not alone – Andreas Nilsson and Mattias Bengtsson are also from Gothenburg and we are now regularly getting together. If anyone else from that part of Sweden is reading this, please join us for the 3.10.0 beers: https://wiki.gnome.org/BeerInGothenburg/Version3.10
Although the GSoC is over, I will still be around and are going to continue maintaining the gnome-settings-daemon datetime plugin and the gnome-control-center datetime panel. My plans for the 3.12 cycle include splitting out the control centre CcTimezoneMap widget and other related code into a separate library to be able to share code between control centre, settings daemon, gnome-initial-setup, and distro installers.
It has been a productive summer for me and I hope I’ve managed to make the corner of GNOME I worked on more pleasant to use. None of this would have been possibly without my excellent mentor Zeeshan Ali and his work on the geolocation libraries. I would also like to extend big thanks to Bastien Nocera, Rui Matos and Matthias Clasen – thank you, without your code reviews and help I would not have been able to land my work.
Hope to see everyone around, and I hope other GSoC interns are going to stick around as well. Thanks for having me, and happy hacking!
This year, the annual GNOME Users and Developers European Conference was held in Brno. It is a beautiful city and the second largest in Czech Republic, with a lot of history and plenty of activities going on.
The conference venue was provided by the Brno University of Technology and was at a campus that had been converted from a Cartesian monastery, dating back to the 14th century. Take a look at the beautiful courtyard:
Courtyard at the venue. Photo by Ana Rey, CC-BY-SA 2.0.
There was a lot going on and not just talks; the hallway discussions that took place in between the talks and continued at pubs afterwards were perhaps even more important. And after the 4 core days of the conference were over, we had another 4 days of hackfests where we got plenty of stuff done.
My personal highlights included:
Looking forward to Strasbourg 2014!
And last, but not least: thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travels!
I have been around GNOME and Fedora for a while, but haven’t been to any of the conferences before. Up until now!
Arrived at Brno yesterday and met up with other friendly Gnomies. It’s really nice to be able to meet people I only know from IRC face to face. Anyone I haven’t met yet, come and say hi!
Today is the official first day of GUADEC 2013. At 9 am Ethan Lee gave a keynote from a game developer’s perspective and now start the rest of the talks. Looking forward to the next 8 days. Big thanks to the local team for making things run smoothly!
P.S. And anyone who reads this and is NOT at GUADEC, be sure to come next year. It really is a lot of fun!
