Category: GNOME

Nautilus Actions

As part of my call for UNIX power for desktop, one of the best proposals, IMO, was Nautilus-Actions. The idea behind it is to avoid the need for writing 10s of Nautilus plugins, by letting the users extend the Nautilus context menus as they wish. So, after a few weeks, and a lot of work from Frederic Ruaudel, the man behind Nautilus-Actions, it is looking now great.

First, it adds a new item to the Nautilus context menu, from which you can add, edit, remove actions:


From this last window, you can configure the details of the actions, which will show up in the menu as soon as you add it.

As it is shown in this screenshot, you can configure all details related to the action, to specify for which combination of files/folders, file patterns and network schemes should the action be shown on the Nautilus context menu.

Looks good, eh? Kudos to Frederic!

PXES

I am in the process of installing many distros on a single machine, and would like to have all of them available at all times (ie, no need to reboot to switch to another one). So, I’ve heard about PXES, which, if I understood correctly, should allow to do that.

Anyone with experience on this able to give some advise?

Memos, notes

Harish: I guess it would be much better than exporting from Tomboy to E-D-S, to make Tomboy use the E-D-S API, and thus share all the notes.

Even more, the sticky notes applet should be using also E-D-S.

Summit remnants

Today, two more things about the summit. Firstly, my baggage, which had been kept in Paris (where I changed flights), arrived today home, with a small hole in it, produced, it seems, by some heavy weight put above it for hours. But, apart from that, everything inside (dirty clothes and some books) seem to be ok. Secondly, I uploaded all photos that I took during the days in Boston.

Back from Boston

Got yesterday back from Boston, after 8 days there, first on a Novell’s desktop team meeting, and then, for the summit.

It was a great week, first because of the high productivity achieved during the desktop team meeting. It really makes a difference to have all your coworkers near and discuss about what everyone is doing. I would really like to have the Boston office closer to where I live, so that I could go many days to work there. Unfortunately, teletransportation hasn’t been invented yet 🙁

Then, the summit was also great. In the last few months, I have come to the conclusion that I don’t like conferences as I used to, but on the other hand, I love more and more this kind of meetings, where all interested people get together for sharing ideas, discussions and hacking. As Luis says, it would be really nice to do some more specialized meetings for getting groups of people to work on something for a weekend.

As for the interesting things about the summit, here are some:

  • People seem to be worried about performance, so expect lots of improvements in this front for the next few weeks. Let’s hope we succeed in creating some sort of GNOME Performance Team, to continously run tests on applications and libraries.
  • Mark committed his new session manager during the summit. It is a complete rewrite of gnome-session, using the services vs applications separation mechanism we talked about in the gnome-session BOF. As discussed during that BOF, it is missing XSMP support, which we should be adding soon. Some other details, like playing login sounds, are also missing.

    One other nice thing about it is that it already includes all the infrastructure to autostart services/applications, so we should not need anymore to hard-code programs to be started on the session.

    I will be testing it in the following few days, but so far the code looked quite better than the old one, much cleaner and much easier to read. Not sure what people will think about a rewrite though.

  • John showed us (Christian and myself) his rewrite of libnotify. While I like the new API (much more GObject-oriented and cleaner to use than the old one), I still prefer the visual style of the original version from Christian. Hopefully the code will be in GNOME CVS soon, so that we can have everyone’s opinions before going further, as to avoid having disagreements when the code lands on some core GNOME module.
  • Lots of Novell projects were announced: BetterDesktop, Tango icon theme, Banshee.
  • As a result of my recent work in trying to improve GNOME startup time, I applied, along with Rodney and Chris Lahey, for maintainership of gnome-control-center. This means I will continue working on my patches for improving gnome-settings-daemon in the next few weeks, to make startup in 2.14 much quicker.
  • Federico is a great guide for restaurants in Boston. If you are in Boston, just follow him at dinner time, you will get great food. He took us once to an Ethiopian restaurant, which was just delicious, and other day, to a nice, smallish, very mediterranean-like, Italian restaurant, where we had another great dinner.

As always, the best thing on these meetings was to meet again all the nice guys, apart from meeting new ones. I won’t try to mention everyone, since I’ll probably forget someone, but I can’t resist mentioning how happy I was to see again, after more than 3 years, Duncan. Although I just saw him for a few minutes on Sunday, it was very nice to see him again.

GNOME startup speed

I have been for a couple of days now looking at improving the startup speed of GNOME, and this is what I’ve found so far (patches not included).

  • gnome-session does a DNS check on the hostname, not sure why. I removed that and things seem to work as before.
  • Some programs in gnome-session are being started with g_spawn_sync. I changed some of them to be g_spawn_async.
  • esd is started twice, once in gnome-session and once in gnome-settings-daemon
  • Screensaver and typing break are not essential services for the startup, so I’ve changed gnome-settings-daemon to start those 2 processes on idle callbacks, so that they are started when everything else is running
  • xrdb is run 3 times in gnome-settings-daemon!

With these changes I’ve gone from starting the session in 12/15 seconds to 4/6 (I even got sometimes that ‘your session has lasted less than 10 seconds’ error after loging out immediately), and, I think, there is a lot of room for improvement still.

Not sending patches yet, since the changes I’ve made are quite ugly so far (commented out code, #ifdef’s, etc), but will be as soon as I get them sorted out.

Update: hadn’t really read Lorenzo’s analysis before, so I guess all the things he points out make much more room for improvement.

Also, bad news is that on the first login, things are quite slower (15/20 seconds), but I guess this could be easily improved by preloading libraries and programs.

Zaragoza hackers meeting

Came back yesterday from Zaragoza, where we had the III hackers meeting. It wasn’t as productive as I expected though 🙁 I thought we could have had people working more intensively in fixing bugs, but only 2 bugs were solved, and very simple ones.

So, it’s clear that we’re doing something wrong. For the people already involved in GNOME (garnacho, kal, telemaco, tapia, juanan, dexem, etc), these meetings are productive, since we dedicate some time to hack on our already ongoing projects, we share ideas, and we have fun together at nights. But for new people, I think we really need some way of having them start working on bugs immediately, so that we can have this sort of weekends be real hacking days, and have them as GNOME contributors right after the weekend.

We talked about this during the weekend, and some possible solutions raised, like re-starting the IRC talks, so that we teach people how to hack before we get together on the weekend. Any other ideas for making these weekends more productive?

Apart from that, as always when meeting with the GNOME Hispano people, it was really fun, lots of laughs, good music (we went to a R&R bar in central Zaragoza on Saturday night), good food and, unfortunately, little sleep.

Also, one of the hopefully productive parts was about the book, since we talked about getting all people more committed to completing it, which is not much work, since we already have around 400 pages!. Hopefully people will respond to the challenge, so that the book is ready before GUADEC 2006 in Barcelona.

Easy fixes in bugzilla

As part of the III GNOME Hackers meeting next weekend in Zaragoza, we are going to introduce new people to the misteries of bug fixing in GNOME. For that, we have decided to try to fix GNOME 2.12 bugs. Unfortunately, it seems people don’t mark anymore their bugs as easy-fix when they’re easy to fix. This makes it hard for us to find easy bugs to work on at the beginning, so that new people can start fixing bugs immediately while we show the basic process.

So, could maintainers please mark easy fixes with the apropriate bugzilla keyword? Thus, hopefully, those bugs will be fixed by Sunday.

Message of the day

Today I completed my patch for the message of the day feature in gnome-session, based on comments added to the wiki.

So now, if libnotify is available, it will use that for displaying the message of the day. Apart from that, it monitors the /etc/motd file, displaying again its contents whenever it changes.

As soon as gnome-session is branched, I’ll submit the patch. For the time being, it’s here (added files here and here).