Nacho's Blog

At the beginning of this year my old Dell XPS M1530 ended the warranty. After a few months trying to decide between a Lenovo and a Dell, I decided that for my work and also because of the great support they provide no matter in which part of Europe you are, I bought a Dell M4700. This was more or less right after I was at GUADEC and to be honest, since then it was quite a nightmare to make it work correctly in Linux.

The first distribution I tried in that moment was Fedora 17. I was working mostly. I needed the nvidia proprietary driver, ’cause nouveau didn’t work for my graphic card. Maybe too new at that time? This was ok, I installed the driver and it worked quite ok. What really pissed me off was that the touchpad didn’t work at all like a touchpad but like a normal mouse. The first thing that I did was to check if Ubuntu supported this laptop. In their web page it was saying that they did. (It was a lie) How you can support a laptop if it is not correctly working? Anyway after some more research I’ve found out that the touchpad in this laptop uses a new ALPS protocol not supported by the kernel.

In this post I could tell you all the insane things that I had to do to manage to finally get it working. But I will just put you here the steps that you have to follow in case that you are with a Fedora 17 or 18 and you have the same problem.

• First of all follow this tutorial http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Building_a_custom_kernel to build the kernel.
• You will need to modify it before building it to convert the PSMOUSE to a module.
• Get the alps.c code from this fork of the kernel https://github.com/bgamari/linux/tree/alps
• Follow the steps in this other post http://mikebeach.org/2011/04/15/correctly-recognize-alps-touchpad-on-dell-e6510-in-linux/ to rebuild the psmouse module.

If the problems with the NVIDIA driver and the touchpad weren’t enough, a couple of weeks ago after some update in Fedora 18, I started to get hangs in my wireless connection. My first thought was, how is that possible? I am running Fedora 18 but with my custom Fedora 17 which has the touchpad working. Just this week after a post from Alberto Ruiz pointing me to the proprietary driver of Broadcom, I decided to install the broadcom-iwl package and now it is working as it never worked before.  Thanks again Alberto for opening my eyes.

And that’s it. Is this how Linux will conquer the world? Dunno, every time that I want to install Linux into a computer I always end up getting a lot of troubles. Unless we get something done at the respect we will really not reach all the normal people out there who just want to install an Operative System and work with it. To be honest I really encourage people to use the proprietary drivers if you are having these problems too.

Finally I want to thank Ben Gamari for the help provided on this touchpad topic and for reverse engineer the new Alps protocol.

It’s been quite a long time without blogging about anything so I will take finally some time and write about the latest and greatest things that I’ve been doing in this last few months.

That’s it, some of you may have heard that GNOME is moving to Python 3 and since last week we are already using it in the gedit master branch. The plugins in the gedit module are already ported and working, although they need some testing so if you are brave enough and you want to try, some feedback is appreciated. About the other python plugins that we maintain in the gedit-plugins module we are just missing a couple of plugins. One of them, the dashboard is waiting for Seif and the syntex plugin is waiting for Jose. Hopefully they will be soon ported and we will be able to merge the wip/python3 branch into master.

I have been considering this for quite a while already. I just want to say that it has been quite a while developing gtranslator and it was very nice while I was developing it and also translating to Galician. But right now I really don’t do anything else that keeping it up to date with latest gtk+ deprecations. If somebody wants to take the maintainership feel free. I can teach whoever it wants to start contributing to it, if not I will continue making small fixes to keep it building with latest GTK+ but forget about getting any bug fixed from my part.

As you may know I’ve been working already for a few months in NICE and It has been a great experience so far. Working in the product DCV (Desktop Cloud Visualization) which allows you to run OpenGL applications remotely using VNC with a really good quality it has been something new and challenging for me but also an incredible experience where I am learning a lot and enjoying with my new Colleagues, some of them you may already know them, Paolo Borelli and Paolo Maggi, the ones in charge of gedit too for so many years.

Apart from making an update in my life I would like to point out that NICE is hiring again and there are a few open positions that somebody might be interested in. Go to our webpage for open positions and have a look at it and if you are interested, send us your Resume.

Dear GTK devs I’ve been encountering some problems in the current behavior of the latest versions of GtkFileChooserDialog, so just in case It is me that I don’t understand the current behavior I’ll put them here:

• Right now when we want to open a file a in gedit the Recently Used item is selected. This is a really really bad behavior in my opinion for applications like gedit or gitg where we already provide a way to go to the recently used documents and what we really want is to show the directory where the user is working as it is highly probable that will want a file or directory from the directory it is working on or from one near to that one. Please recommend us a way to get back the previous behavior so we will not have to do crazy things like listening to map and unmap signals to place the right directory to show in our specific applications.
• Another problem that I have been encountering and I don’t know if it is a new feature or a bug, is that if I click on the list view of directories and I press enter in a directory, the new directory is opened but the focus changes to the Location entry instead of keeping it in the list view. Please let me know if there is some API or a way I can use to get the previous behavior back. If it is a bug I can even provide some patches.

Another important thing coming along in the gedit channel is the resurrection of the GObject bindings for libgit2. The good thing about this bindings is that as we added support for GObject introspection they come for free with support for vala, python and javascript.

Jesse has been doing a great job here, updating the bindings and adding the missing API, probably he will point you out at some point his new pet project but for now it is kind of top secret 🙂

If you are interested on helping out with the bindings, testing them or writing the so boring unit tests you can find the repository in my github. Once they are ready or we have a serious user for them, we will probably move them to the gnome infrastructure and make a release.

I think after so long without posting anything it is time to put some of the cool stuff we were doing lately.

One of the side effects of staying in Italy last month for a couple of weeks was that I had the weekend without anything productive to do. So Paolo Borelli and I decided to make a mini gedit hackfest where to decide the next directions to take for your favorite Text Editor of the GNOME desktop. The cool thing about staying in Italy and not having anything to do was that we autoinvited ourselves to Lapo Calamadrei’s home to discuss about some gedit’s design problems, to fix some bugs and mainly to eat, drink and enjoy of the cool views from Tuscany 🙂 Thanks Lapo for the great hospitaly that you gave us 🙂

If anybody is interested we have also updated the roadmap that you can find here. The main taskes to be done are:

• Port to GtkApplcation
• Make use of the new GMenu
• Use GResources (this will be great for the Windows port)
• Finish the new sidepane (currently a work in process in the branch: wip/newpnael)

If anybody is interested on helping here will be much appreciated.

Apart from this, I also invested some time resurrecting the Win32 port of gedit. Thanks to Dieter I managed to get it working again but there are still a few problems in Gtk+ 3 in order to get an stable release. At least I would like to see the theming working on Windows XP correctly. For those interested, Dieter passed a really great startup tutorial for those who also would like to try out Gtk+ 3 in win32. I hope he will finish it and publish it soon with some great scripts to make our life easier.

As you may know gedit-code-assistance is a gedit plugin that provides right now real-time error highlighting for languages supported by CLang, that is C, C++ and Objective-C. You can see how it looks in jesse’s post. I just want to indicate in this post that gedit-code-assistance has finally landed on fedora 16. So if you felt lazy before to try it out now it should be just a matter of yum install gedit-code-assistance. I am pretty sure that you will like it if you try it. 😉

Quite a lot of changes in my life lately, I finally moved back to Poland and I have got also a contract with NICE. In this company I will be working with some known gedit developers as the past maintainer Paolo Maggi and one of the actives right now Paolo Borelli. I am really exciting about this opportunity and I hope everything will go fine. The only side effect is that I will not have that much time to invest on gedit and the other modules that I maintain but I will still be around.

Just a quick announce that I just released a new version of gedit-latex. This new version has got a lot of clean up and it is now using the snippet plugins to insert the latex templates, this will improve the usability. You can also check the NEWS file.

PS: like usually already packaged for fedora 😉