Monthly Archives: January 2013

More hiring! Join the Red Hat desktop team and make a difference!

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We are looking for some more people to join the Red Hat Desktop team. We have some flexibility on the tasks we need these new hires to do, so we are casting the net wider this time. We are open to candidates from anywhere in the world where Red Hat has an office. For the right candidate working from home is an option, but you would still need to live in a country where we have an office. That said candidates interested in joining the 500 people strong and growing team at the Brno office in the Czech Republic will be preferred, especially in cases where we have multiple candidates with similar skill levels.

We are looking for people who would be available to join Red Hat sometime this year, so if you are a student and graduating this summer you can still get in touch. We don’t have a hard list of requirements, but of course experience with any of the below items or similar will increase the likelihood of us being interested, and candidates with existing open source contributions will always be preferred over candidates who has never contributed to an open source project before.

  • GTK+/GNOME
  • C/C++/Python/Vala
  • OpenGL/Clutter
  • JavaScript/HTML5/WebRTC
  • X Windows
  • Touch screen technologies
  • GStreamer
  • D-Bus
  • LDAP/Active Directory

So if you want to join the worlds leading Linux company and help make the desktop rock, please send an email to Tyler Siprova who handles the hiring process for us in the Desktop team. She can be reached at tsiprova(at)redhat(dot)com. Be sure to refer to this blog entry in your email so she knows the context of your application. Be also be aware that I will be at the FOSDEM conference in Belgium in February, so if you are interested I would be happy to sit down with anyone interested to talk about the opportunities we have here at Red Hat, so if this is of interest be sure to request for such a meeting to be set up in your email to Tyler.

Making Firefox love your GNOME Desktop

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One thing we are doing here at Red Hat Brno is maintain Firefox for Fedora and RHEL. The job is mostly focused on making sure we have Firefox available on all RHEL versions with all the latest security fixes, but it also gives our great team of Martin Stransky and Jan Horak some time to work on adding new features to Firefox to make sure it feels like a more integrated part of your desktop. They are currently working on 3 such features that you will hopefully be able to enjoy soon. The first is a patch to inhibit the screensaver when you are watching HTML5 or Flash content fullscreen. So if you are annoyed by having to move your mouse every 3 minutes to avoid the screen dimming when watching The Daily Show this is the fix for you. The second item they are working on is enabling the GStreamer backend in Firefox on Fedora. Which means that if you install for instance H264 support for Totem you will also have H264 support for HTML5 in Firefox. And finally there is also ongoing work on adding support for GIO in Firefox to make sure that any setup that works with GIO in terms of remote file access also works with Firefox, this latest task is taking some time though as it is currently blocking on some code refactoring in Firefox.

A Linux Game Changer?

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So the Linux based Steam Gaming Console has been relased, or at least one version of it. It is called Piston and it seems quite nice looking.

Personally I think this device has a potential to truly transform the Linux desktop and gaming market. If this things takes off it could for instance make linux drivers the top priority for the makers for graphic chips. And people specalizing in gaming oriented high end PCs would also be likely to start offering those machines with Linux.

So I don’t know about you, but I will for sure buy one of these boxes when it comes out :)

Further progress on multistream Transmageddon

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As mentioned in my previous blog entry I am working on multistream handling in Transmageddon. Not been a lot of changes, but I have been able to put in a little time here and there. The changes needed to accommodate this have also cleaned up the codebase quite a bit in my opinion, moving from a forest of variables to a list of python dictionaries. This change makes keeping track of whats happening in the codepath a lot easier as I can now just print the dictionary from the list to see what all relevant values are at a given point. Anyway a little screenshot below to show where I am at:

In-progress support for multiple audio streams.

Still quite a bit of work to do to clean up the codebase and decide how certain things are to be handled (or not handled), but it is getting there. Screenshot above actually demonstrates one thing I haven’t decided on yet, which is how to deal with combining a device preset with a multistream file.

The biggest blocker currently for finishing this work is that the GStreamer encodebin element does not have an API yet for dealing with selecting encoding settings for multiple streams as detailed in this bug report. If anyone got the inclination to cook up a patch for encodebin which adds support for this that would be much appreciated.

Anyway, once I have this completed I think my next step will be to try to add some kind of DVD ripping support to Transmageddon and some basic metadata checking/editing and move the video flipping support into a special menu and add support for enabling/disabling deinterlacing in that same special menu. I trying to figure out as I go along how I can keep the user interface simple and straightforward and add requested features. The question that I continuously ask myself is what features do belong in Transmageddon and what features are of a level where people should go to something like PiTiVi instead.