Category: general

Session Management in 2.24

In 2006, Dan Winship presented some ideas about the future of session management in GNOME. He wrote the initial code and defined this nice architecture which turns gnome-session into a more generic session management system and makes it easier to eventually replace the current XSMP-based session management with a saner and less cryptic D-Bus-based protocol in the future. On June 2007, he made a code drop on a branch called new-gnome-session and stopped working on that (for various personal reasons).

Since October 2007, I’ve been sparsely working on this new code (with full support from Dan) on my spare time by filling some gaps, fixing bugs, implementing missing features, etc. So, now the code reached a functional state and I’ve just merged the new-gnome-session branch in trunk. Vincent Untz and I will be working on making the new code shine for 2.24.

If you want to know the general ideas around the new gnome-session, read:

http://live.gnome.org/SessionManagement/NewGnomeSession

Most of the design and features described there are already implemented (if not all).

If you want to know what’s still missing and want to help us, read:

http://live.gnome.org/SessionManagement/Todo

The new gnome-session is fully compatible with current session clients (GnomeClient and others) and no code changes are required on existing apps. However, some simple changes are necessary on some basic components that run during the session such as gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-panel, nautilus, metacity, gnome-keyring, etc. I have most of the patches ready and I’ll be filing bugs for each component soon (actually, I’ve made other necessary changes in some modules during the 2.21/2.22 cycle already).

Big thanks to Dan! This important move would not be possible without his support and invaluable efforts.

There’s still a lot to do during this development cycle.

Testing and patches are more than welcome!

Leaving Nokia

I really enjoyed my time at Nokia and Finland. I was very lucky to directly work with very talented and generous people. I’ve made some good friends here and it will be hard to say goodbye soon. My last day at Nokia is March 28th.

It’s too early to tell about what I’ll be doing in the near future. Exciting stuff, for sure. :-P

Update: Xan, Tommi and Johan (who doesn’t have a blog) are leaving too. See you around guys! :-)

GNOME Roadmap – Information requests for 2.24 sent!

As part of our roadmap process, we’ve sent the roadmap information requests to all module maintainers/developers. If you are a maintainer/developer of a GNOME official module and haven’t received the cited message, just let us know about which modules we’ve missed.

As usual, as soon as we have a first draft of the GNOME 2.24 roadmap, we’ll heat up some discussions in desktop-devel-list about this and the future stable releases of GNOME in order to get feeback about the roadmap, discuss about potential cross-module plans, and so on.

On 2.22, we’ve made important changes in our Desktop and Platform. The upcoming 2.24 release has an important role on consolidating those changes and preparing the ground for pushing the project to new directions. Let’s make it happen!

Context-sensitive menus

I was just wondering why do we show disabled menu items in a context-sensitive menu? In this case, showing disabled operations to the user doesn’t bring any useful information. For example, have a look at this context-sensitive menu for a mounted USB stick in the Nautilus desktop area (see bug 522739):

context-menu.png

What’s the point of showing all those disabled items? If it’s a context-sensitive menu, it should show only actions that make sense it that context, right?

I see the point of having disabled menu items in a main menubar for the sake of bringing awereness of all available actions in an application. However, for context-sensitive menus, it just doesn’t make any sense. Am I missing something?

Musical Snapshot III

It’s been a long time I don’t bring a musical snapshot. Actually, it’s been more than 5 months since my last one. Wow. Because of that, it’s kind of difficult to summarize everything I’ve been listening to. My addiction to jazz is getting stronger every day. I bought Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary (quite nice!). During my vacation in Brazil, I had the chance to buy quite many albums from brazilian artists. I also tried some african and mexican stuff. So, here it goes…

Jazz

Shit, the list is so long that I don’t know where to start… Freddie Hubbard, Miles Davis, Joe Henderson, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Max Roach, Kenny Dorham, Ornette Coleman, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, … I’ve listened to more than one album with each of those guys. I have some special remarks though. Hubbard’s Straight Life album is just amazing (featuring an all-star band with Hancock, Henderson, Benson, Carter, and DeJohnette). I became a big fan of Joe Henderson after listening to his Inner Urge album – very Coltrane-ish. He even has the same sidemen than in Coltrane’s most famous albums: McCoy Tyner and Mr. Elvin Jones. Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus is a great album. I took some time to listen to Coltrane’s My favourite things some more times (this one only loses to A Love Supreme, my personal favourite jazz album). Ornette Coleman’s Tomorrow Is the Question! is quite interesting too. Got the classic Savoy Live Sessions of Charlie Parker, the roots of bebop (such Koko, Ornithology, and so on). Here’s the winners list:

  • Inner Urge (Joe Henderson)
  • Straight Life (Freddie Hubbard)
  • Red Clay (Freddie Hubbard)
  • Somethin’ Else (Cannonball Adderley)
  • My Favourite Things (John Coltrane)
  • Complete Savoy Live Recordings (Charlie Parker)
  • Saxophone Colossus (Sonny Rollins)

African

I’m from the most african state in Brazil. African culture is simply part of me. I listened a lot to two Richard Bona albums. Quite musical stuff. The afrobeat of Femi Kuti is really nice.

  • Tiki (Richard Bona)
  • Reverence (Richard Bona)
  • Shoki Shoki (Femi Kuti)

Mexican

Federico was really kind and sent me some really cool initial references of Mexical music. This is just the beginning of my research on the mexican world.

  • La Sandunga (Lila Downs)
  • De México y del mundo (Chavela Vargas)

Brazilian

During my vacation in Brazil, I had the opportunity to buy quite many albums from brazilian artists. Got two new Mônica Salmaso’s albums. I’m a big fan of her. I finally managed to buy Max de Castro’s Samba Raro. This is one of the electronic music albums I’ve ever listened to. Really nice compositions, high quality arrangements. The latest Djavan album Matizes is quite boring. Carlinhos Brown’s A gente ainda não sonhou is cool. Highlights:

  • Céu (Céu)
  • Iaiá (Mônica Salmaso)
  • Noites de gala, samba na rua (Mônica Salmaso)
  • Samba Raro (Max de Castro)
  • Nêga (Luciana Mello)
  • A gente ainda não sonhou (Carlinhos Brown)

GNOME Foundation Annual Report 2007 released!

cover.pngbackcover1.png

In 2006, Dave Neary and others started this new tradition by producing the first GNOME Foundation annual report which has got very positive response from community. So, we decided to follow the new tradition by preparing the GNOME Foundation annual report 2007!

I’ve been slowly working on it for a few months with invaluable contributions from several people. The report is now available (1860 KB, PDF) in GNOME Foundation’s website.

We’ll soon send nice hard copies of the report to the Advisory Board members and existing GNOME event boxes. Our plan is to also print a bunch of extra copies to be used for promoting GNOME on events around the world. Feel free to request some copies for your local GNOME event.

This year, we chose Lulu.com as the printing service in order to allow us to easily print more copies on demand and to make it possible to anyone to order personal hard copies by just paying for the printing (the price goes 100% to Lulu.com, no revenues to GNOME Foundation). You can buy a hard copy of this report directly from Lulu.com here.

Many thanks to:

  • the writers: Federico Mena-Quintero, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Vincent Untz and Behdad Esfahbod;
  • the photographers: Frederic Crozat, Michael Dominic, Vincent Untz, Kushal Das, Juan Carlos Inostroza and Garrett LeSage;
  • the designer: Andreas Nilsson;
  • the text reviewers: Paul Cutler and Stephanie Watson;
  • the adviser: Dave Neary.

I hope you enjoy it!

Update 1: In the first paragraph, when I wrote “Last year”, I actually meant “In 2006”. I fixed this to add clarity. :-)

Update 2: The price for printing the report at Lulu.com doesn’t include any revenue to the GNOME Foundation! That’s the price of the printing service which goes 100% to Lulu.com! Yes, it’s relatively expensive.

FOSDEM

It’s been more than 2 weeks since FOSDEM and I haven’t written anything about it…

As I said before, this was my first FOSDEM. I have to say that it is a really nice FLOSS conference. It’s different than any other conference I’ve ever attended before because it’s very focused on communities and development.

I arrived on Friday morning with some other Nokians (Tommi, Marius, Daniel, Johan, Lassi and Zeeshan). It was pretty nice to arrive early because we had the whole day for some sightseeing in Brussels. Found Vincent walking randomly in the city and we had this nice chat about collaboration, communities, GNOME, Nokia,  roadmap, etc. The beer event in the evening was fun but too packed.

I prefered to stay most of the time in the GNOME booth and because of that I didn’t see many talks. This was a nice way to meet a lot of new people and hang out with some old GNOME fellows. The OLPC’s XO brought a lot of curious people to our booth. We sold quite many t-shirts and distributed a lot of promotion materials. I saw Ken’s talk about GNOME Developer Kit and Emmanuele‘s talk about Clutter talk. Both quite interesting. It’s very nice to see OH guys trying to bring the case of Clutter as an animation framework for desktop applications. We need to explore this more. It seems that Havoc has some interesting ideas on this regard (to be discussed during the GTK+ Hackfest this week). Unfortunately, I missed Alp’s WebKit talk. Vincent and I had this quick chat with Cornelius Schumacher (from KDE e.V.) about possible paths for collaboration between GNOME and KDE.

Thanks everyone who made my first FOSDEM a really nice experience! I took some pictures, all of them are in this album.

GNOME @ Google Summer of Code 2008

As you probably know, Google is organizing one more edition of their Summer of Code (GSoC) program.

GNOME has participated in all GSoC editions as a mentoring organization with some nice results in terms of contributions and new contributors. So, we want to participate this year too!

Our first organization kickoff meeting will happen on March 6 at 18h UTC in the -admin channel (irc.gnome.org). We’re looking for volunteers to help us to organize GNOME’s participation in GSoC 2008. So, if you want to help in any way, join us!

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