Category: Linux

GUADEMY

A quick summary from Guademy this past weekend:

  • It’s been great to know more KDE people in Spain, since we (GNOME Spanish crowd) did just know, very well on the other hand, Antonio Larrosa, who now will not have to stand with 10s of GNOME hackers all the time and shout GNOME!! with them 🙂 All of them were great guys, and some just came recently into the KDE project thanks to Google’s summer of code. But this does not prevent them from being very passionate guys, like Rafael Fernández, with very good ideas.
  • Ismael Olea has cut his hair!!!! It took me a few seconds to recognize him. But as always, it is a pleasure to listen to his crazy ideas, some of which, if I’ve understood them correctly (Ismael is on a higher level than us mere mortals 🙂 are quite interesting for free software.
  • We need a much better Free desktop platform!! (more on this later…)

A big special thanks go to the organizers, who have done a great job, with details that only people from Galicia can have, like having all day a table with fruits, coffee, juices, organizing a great dinner, with typical Galician food and drinks (queimada, which is now an official part of everything organized in Galicia). I hope they have time enough to rest, because it has been an exhausting work for them.

OpenStreetMap

While learning more about GPS on Linux, I’ve came across OpenStreetMap, a community project to create free maps for everyone to use. Since the maps is one of the biggest problems I’ve found with my TomTom (not being up-to-date, not including almost none off-road paths, being too expensive to update, etc), I’m starting to record my routes to upload them there and help thus in the creation of the free map of the world.

I haven’t really looked yet at the details on how you edit the routes, but the theory seems quite easy:

  1. You record your routes with your GPS unit in GPX format
  2. You load that GPX file into one of the OSM editors. With this, you add information to the route you just created, like identifying streets, paths, motorways, etc
  3. You upload the resulting file to OSM and that gets included in the full map

One of the nicest things, in theory still, seems to be osmarender, which is a tool to create a SVG file out of the OSM data created with the OSM editors. This means you can create a map out of a GPS track, or, that is, create your own maps!

Right now, Britain seems to have the best coverage, Spain being just partially covered. So, while the map itself is still not too useful (at least for me), it looks a very promising project, which just needs people all over the world to contribute to the map. So, if you have a GPS unit that can record routes to GPX, please start doing so whenever you can. If you are lazy enough to not want to learn all the process, just send me the GPX files or wait until I learn and I describe the process here.

More to come as I learn more about the whole process…

GPS on Linux

I’ve recently acquired a TomTom Rider GPS device for my motorbike. While being based on Linux (that’s one of the reasons I chose the TomTom instead of others), all procedures to update it are described in the documentation as being done from Windows. And, while talking with other friends about it, they all update it via Windows (poor guys 🙂 ), so I feel a bit alone in the GPS on Linux field. I have been getting lots of docs about some tweaking by hand on the SD card, as well as some app development things, but I still feel there are lots of things my fellow Windows users do that I’m not able to do (like using GPS software on their desktops to create tracks to be uploaded to the TomTom). So, dear lazyweb, any pointers on GPS software on Linux?

Atomato mailing list

I have been doing a bad job on getting people interested in Atomato, mainly because of my lack of time for working on it. But now this is going to end, with the creation, yesterday, of the Atomato mailing list. If interested in the project, please subscribe, and if you sent me some mail in the last months about it, it would be great if you could resend it to the list once subscribed (if not, I’ll forward those mails to the list myself in a few days, once all interested people are subscribed).

Update: the web interface seems to not work at all, not even the admin interface, so the only way to subscribe to the list is to send a mail with the subject ‘subscribe’ to this address.

(not yet another) survey

Some people I know very well from the Spanish free software community,
and which are now involved in university, have asked me to forward the
below announcement, to ask people to participate on a survey. It’s not
yet another survey, it is one in a series of projects from that university to study how free software works, which I think is interesting for GNOME. They have already done some GNOME studies, for
instance:

http://libresoft.urjc.es/Papers/index_html

http://libresoft.dat.escet.urjc.es/cvsanal/gnome2-cvs/

Find below the official announcement, I’d be grateful if you could do
the survey.


Dear FLOSS developer,

MERIT at the University of Maastricht along with the University Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid) are studying how developers contribute code to Free /Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. This is an extension of our previous research projects such as flossproject.org, flosspols.org, flossworld.org, and libresoft.urjc.es.

In this study, we are looking for survey respondents like you, who contribute to at least one of a small number of projects that we have selected for the study.

Therefore, we would like to ask you to participate in a small survey and to fill in our questionnaire, which you will find online at

http://libresoft.urjc.es:9999/Survey/

To fill in the survey takes not more than 10 minutes of your time.

Of course, all personal information will be kept strictly confidential, no personal information will be revealed to third parties, and the information obtained will be properly aggregated and anonymized so that no data about named individuals will be published. We also would like to point out that this study has only academic and no commercial purpose, and the resulting analysis will be freely available.

Rishab Ghosh ,MERIT (Board member, Open Source Initiative)
rishab@dxm.org

Ruediger Glott, MERIT
Ruediger.Glott@INFONOMICS.unimaas.nl

Gregorio Robles, URJC
grex@gsyc.escet.urjc.es

Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, URJC
jgb@gsyc.escet.urjc.es

Keyboard control center applet

We have been discussing about the best way to reduce the overcrowded preferences menu, that is, the number of control center applets. The ideal solution, which we are discussing on the Control Center mailing list, is to have a new control center shell. More news on that soon.

The other things we discussed was about merging some of the applets, since some seem redundant. A good example is the keyboard capplets, which are 3!:

  • Keyboard applet, to set basic settings like layout and cursor blinking, and not so basic things, like the typing break.
  • Keyboard shortcuts.
  • Accessibility keyboard settings.

So this looked like the best candidate for the first merge, so after some discussion, two of them have been merged in the mockups below:


The a11y bits were not merged, mainly because the a11y guys seem to think it is better to keep it separated. And merging it with the already crowded keyboard preferences dialog seems a bad idea, given the a11y capplet has its own tabs, which would be inside the keyboard prefs capplet tab.

Any comments, suggestions, etc, please send it to the Control Center mailing list.

openSUSE build service

While in Boston, I learnt more in detail about openSuSE’s build service. It allows people to build packages for any software they feel like, and is not reduced to support SuSE OS only, but other distributions (like Ubuntu and Fedora right now) also.

So, for testing my brand new account, I added a new package to my Home project, nautilus-actions. It was an easy task because I had the SPEC file already done, and had only to modify a couple of lines to adapt it to latest nautilus-actions release. I didn’t even have to build the packages myself, just adding the needed files to the repository (much like how CVS works) and triggering the builds on the server 2/3 times until it built correctly. Right now, I’ve got packages only for SuSE distributions, but I’ll add shortly Ubuntu and Fedora targets to the repository.

The Linux Desktop

Being last week in Boston, for a Novell desktop team meeting, I met some people from SuSE, including Duncan MacVicar from Chile (hard to know he is from Chile with that name :-). Very nice guy, and while being KDE people, with lots of ideas and plans that mostly matched mine. Mainly, Duncan and I agreed in that KDE and GNOME should be seen as different frontends to the Linux Desktop, and this Linux Desktop should be a complete set of specifications, interfaces and shared storage data for both frontends. We talked about some things that could be shared, like addressbook and calendar data (and concurrent access to it) and Will Stephenson, another of the SuSE guys I met last week, told us about his plans to add an evolution-data-server backend for KDE, for live data sharing.

Things like Freedesktop.org should have more influence on both GNOME and KDE, so we should try to push for more specifications there. Once we have a shared infrastructure, 3rd party developers would choose one or the other based on the same reasons people choose Visual Studio/Java/Borland/.NET/etc to develop Windows applications now, and users would choose one or the other for whatever reason they feel like.