Category: GNOME

Desktop effects activation

After having implemented the same functionality already available in Fedora and Ubuntu (different implementations of the Desktop Effects tab on the appearance control-center applet) for openSUSE, it is time to come to a common solution for all distros to remove their need to add this functionality. An initial patch is available here.

Still lots of things need to be discussed and clarified, so if you care about activating desktop effects in GNOME, GNOME Control Center mailing list.

New colleague at work

Yesterday was the first day with Vincent Untz as a member of the openSUSE GNOME team. For those who don’t know him, he’s one of the top-involved persons in upstream GNOME, having been part of the Foundation board, the release team, and maintainer of several modules, etc, etc, so his role on the team will help a lot in making openSUSE and GNOME better.

Looking forward to see what he helps us getting to.

Hack week II

Last week was Hacking week at openSUSE, so here’s a summary of what I did:

  • I moved all my OSM-related packages to the Application:Geo repository in openSUSE’s build service. And I added a couple of packages I needed to build maps for my GARMIN GPS unit: mkgmap and osmosis, which have helped me in making the first 100% free map of Spain for GARMIN GPS units 🙂 Of course, the map is incomplete (compared to the P2P’ed maps GARMIN users in Spain use), but this should probably get more people to contribute to the maps. Here are some screenshots of the maps on a Que PDA (thanks to Miguel Blanco):
    que-osm-spain que-osm-barcelona que-osm-madrid que-osm-madrid-sol
  • I lost lots of time at the beginning of the week trying to make Mapper (a fork of maemo-mapper to provide more OpenStreetMap-oriented features) work, fixing some build problems (patches are upstream now) and packaging it. It still doesn’t work very well though, crashing a lot, but this will improve soon.
  • I started working on a GNOME client for the openSUSE build service. Most of the time was spent doing tests with Python in general and the OSC Python API in particular, so the result is not that fantastic, but at least I’ve got now a good base from where to continue the work. You can find the (clean) work in my git repository: 
    git clone http://www.gnome.org/~rodrigo/git/osc-plugins.git

    gosc.png

GUADEMY II

After the success of the I GUADEMY, held in A Coruña last year, a 2nd one needed to be organized, with more international presence and, we’ll see if it succeeds in doing that, getting KDE and GNOME desktops to share much more than a few specs/standards. So, the II GUADEMY, thanks to PoLinuX, is going to be held in Valencia, on the East coast of Spain, nice city known for its good weather and the Fallas.

Most Spanish community members from both KDE and GNOME will attend, and this year the hope is to get much more international presence than last year. Also, the focus will be on technologies common to both desktops (rather than talks specific to one desktop, like there were last year), and, given that GUADEC and Akademy will be held later in the year, it is a good opportunity to get with some plans for further integration between the two free desktops. Are you gonna miss it???

More information here.

gnome-control-center/gnome-settings-daemon 2.21.5

Release 2.21.5 for gnome-control-center and gnome-settings-daemon are now ready for your testing pleasure. This is the first release of gnome-control-center depending on the standalone gnome-settings-daemon (which was previously part of gnome-control-center), which is also used by the new GDM.

Testing is largely needed, so please report bugs/suggestions/patches to either the gnomecc-list or Bugzilla.

openSUSE packaging day

Today’s packaging day at openSUSE, a good opportunity to get your hands dirty with the openSUSE build service, which allows people to build packages for many SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian versions, and to get your favorite piece of software packaged for your favorite distribution.

The action is taking place for the whole day at -buildservice in irc.freenode.net. Also, if you prefer to get in contact with fellow GNOME packagers, -gnome is the place to go, in the same network.

Some hints for people wanting to attend:

Murray vs Jeff

Not sure if I’ve understood what Murray and Jeff are discussing about, but just wanted to add a couple of things:

  • While working at Novell, I have never felt under attack by the GNOME community. It’s true that I’ve had to explain some Novell movements many times to friendly people that didn’t agree with those movements, but I’ve never, repeat, never, felt being attacked by fellow GNOME developers. On the contrary, I’ve always felt at home within them.
  • Murray, you are a person I admire a lot, because of the relationship we’ve had through the GNOME-DB project, which you helped a lot, and for all the other things you do for GNOME. And while you might (or might not, don’t know myself) be right, I don’t think it is clever to use personal attacks as you have done, specially without a medical certificate 🙂 If there is something wrong about Jeff’s behavior, please bring it, respectfully, to whomever might be able to do something about it. Doing it this way will gain you lots of ennemies, which you don’t deserve, specially because most people I know, included myself, have always had a pleasant relationship with Jeff. So, I’m not saying you are lying or inventing things, but, at least for me, this all sounded like science-fiction, given Jeff has always been to me a very helpful person.

Anyway, please let’s discuss things in a moderate and clever manner 🙂

PulseAudio for openSUSE 11.0

In the last few days, we have been working on packaging PulseAudio for openSUSE Factory (what will be openSUSE 11.0), and here are the first results. This page contains instructions on how to run and test it, and Cyberorg‘s blog contains more information and screenshots.

This starts to mark the end of our beloved esound, although GNOME still needs some work, which is one of our next steps, helping upstream GNOME in fixing all the issues.

Version control systems

I left last night jhbuild compiling all GNOME modules, included meta-gnome-proposed, to find this morning it failed on libtelepathy because of missing darcs in my system. Installed it and watched it work until it came to another module needing bzr, installed again, and then, a few minutes later, another module complained about missing mercurial. And so far, so good, but this makes 6!! (if not more, it’s still compiling 🙂 ) version control systems needed to compile GNOME unstable, that is: CVS, subversion, git, mercurial, darcs and bzr.

While I have nothing against people writing/using their own tools for whatever they want, it started to look to me, exaggerating, of course, like the Linux distro market, where, if we continue the trend (fortunately, the number of distros is not increasing, like it did a few years ago), we’ll be having almost a distro per Linux user. So, although I don’t know in detail all of these VCSs to really understand why they all exist, is this really needed? Wouldn’t it be better to have 2 or 3 very good VCSs that fit most people’s needs? If not, I’ll write my own 😀