Category: community

Joining LiTL

It’s time to tell where I’m going. I’m sure this is not a surprise anymore to many :-)

I’m joining Havoc‘s team at LiTL to work on a very exciting project.

Unfortunately,  I can’t tell anything about the project for now (actually, I think it will take some time until we can say anything). But yes, it’s GNOME-related and involves the development of a consumer product comprising hardware, software, and online services.

I’ll stay in Finland until June doing remote work and then move to London to work on a LiTL office there.

Woohoo!

We need more Roadmap info

The deadline for replying the roadmap info request is today and there are still quite many modules without fresh roadmap. I decided to wait on more week for the replies before starting to prepare the first draft.

Maintainers and developers, wake up! Reply today and win a nice trip to the moon! Just let me know if you haven’t seen any roadmap request in your inbox.

Google Summer of Code 2008 – Accepting student applications!

Google is now accepting student applications!

If you’re a university student and want to contribute to GNOME during GSoC, have a look at our GSoC wiki page, check our list of project ideas, read our wiki page with information for students, and follow the guide for student applicants!

You probably want to contribute to GNOME.
It’s so cool to be part of GNOME!
Our community will rock your world!
Join us!

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!

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.

Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0
This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0.