I was convinced by Zeeshan to help out with making official Fedora RPMS of the gupnp libraries and tools. After looking at the Fedora packaging guidelines I concluded that the only sane way of doing it without to much pain and work was to use Mach which is an tool Thomas Vander Stichele created to allow you to easily set up clean buildroots for any RPM based system. Not having used Mach in a long while I was reminded when setting it up how nicely done it is and what a powerful tool it can be. I has already helped me find quite a few bugs in the spec files I had created for upnp and friends and I am sure that when I submit these spec files to Fedora, the process of getting them approved will be much more straightforward and painless than if I had just made them by fumbling around in my normal install. So I strongly recommend to anyone who needs to build RPMS to check out Mach and afterward say thanks to Thomas for creating it. Thanks Thomas!

After a lot of testing and working with the Fedora packagers I am now happy to say that the current version of Empathy in Fedora is ready for wider use. Just be sure to install the telepathy-haze-mission-control and telepathy-haze packages in addition to Empathy to get access to all the major chat protocols. With these packages I have been able to retire Pidgin from use on my system and take the bold step into the future of instant messaging. The VoIP and video conferencing also works, although due to needing a newer version of gstreamer speex support than currently shipping (will be in the next release of ‘gst-plugins-good’) you might get ‘Darth Vader’ voice when speaking.

There is still a little polish and love that Empathy needs, like supporting file transfer with the various protocols, but I think that for many Fedora users it should already support enough features to be ready for primetime. And you get to taste the new world of easy to use VoIP over Jabber/Google Talk So do a quick ‘yum install empathy elepathy-haze-mission-control telepathy-haze’ and you are set to go!

Been reading some of the comments to the recent GNOME Foundation press release about OOXML involvement. Reading things like the comments on osnews and linux.com leaves me in a state of disbelief.

When you have people like Michael Meeks and Jody Goldberg, who have been working on free software office software for a longer time than most others in the community has even been using free software, it is sad to see people trying to claim they know more about the respective qualities of the ODF and OOXML standards than they do. The claims of being corporate shills sounds even more hollow considering these people have been working on free software office software for much longer than they have been paid to do so. Having known especially Michael for many years and had many a beer with him I it saddens me when people in the community doubt his word. Michael care about free software, but whats maybe more important in this context is that he cares about technical excellence.
And thus he is not willing to claim that the ODF spreadsheet specification is better than the OOXML one when he, based on his eight years worth of hacking experience doing spreadheet software in the context of Gnumeric and OpenOffice, knows it not to be the case.

The question worth asking here is if the community has come to a point where we no longer care about quality and technical perfection in what we do, instead we are going to join the proprietary software vendors in a game of FUD and mud slinging. When I started out with free software it felt as the ethos of the community was that we are not a community of people blinded by pride or arrogance instead we happily adopt and evolve the best of what is out there. If that means adapting to standards and formats originally developed by Microsoft then so be it.

Michael has been tirelessly been promoting OpenOffice for quite a few years now, even working on it and promoting it at a time when most GNOME developers felt it was a bloated and unmaintainable piece of software and most the code comments where in German. Through his and his team’s effort OpenOffice has gone from being something screaming Windows 3.11 when looking at it to something that actually looks like it belongs on my GNOME desktop. And there is no longer a half hour wait for it to start up.

I use OpenOffice.org every day doing my job today. Back in the day when I was at Oracle I couldn’t do that. Not because Oracle refused me to do so, but simply because most of Oracle’s documents where in MS Office format and at that time the OpenOffice filters where not good enough to do the job, so I had to dual boot into Windows in order to write reports for customers, fill in expense reports and so on.

Even in my current job, doing linux consultancy work around free software technologies like GStreamer, Telepathy and Webkit I would not be able to use OpenOffice if it wasn’t for the excellent MS Office compatibility. The vast majority of documents and proposals I receive from our customers are in those formats. I haven’t gotten any OOXML documents yet, but it is only a matter of time and when it start to happen I would gradually be forced back to my old dual booting ways unless OpenOffice supports OOXML in a good way.

So Jody if you are reading this, please don’t listen to the detractors and instead keep up doing such great work. I for one would be sad if I have to install windows on my laptop again because you stopped pushing OOXML in the right direction.

Had a great time at GUADEC this year, better than expected even as I was feeling a bit worn out and tired before it got rolling. Meeting the other members of the community again and hearing about all the plans and efforts underway is incredible energizing and gives renewed energy for ones own part of the greater effort.

Seems tighter integration with internet services and technologies was the topic of the conference.Havoc’s Online desktop of course catching the most attention, but there where other efforts presented too, like Spyro and of course the work the Songbird guys are doing. I also think Conduit will have an important role in our new direction. Of course the question now is what ideas we from the GStreamer community can bring to the table to move this even further forward.

Currently visiting Tim and Heather at their place in Bristol, but flying down to Barcelona this evening. Think the coming weeks will be hectic as in addition to getting the new company rolling I will be packing for my end of August move to the UK. On top of that I have Zeeshan and his girlfriend Ansku coming down for a visit mid-August.

Managed to catch a slight cold here in sunny brittain, hopefully it will clear up once I get back to the sauna which is Barcelona.

After a lot of back and forth I finally got Linux installed on my PS3. Ended up installing Yellowdog Linux. Not sure how much I will be using it though due to the lack of OpenGL support and access to the video card. Would have been nice to run Elisa on it though, but I guess once we get around to doing a DirectFB backend for pigment.

Linux on the PS3 feels a little ‘raw’ due to the graphics issue, and while the Sony people I talked to about it put the blame on NVidia for refusing them to make the GPU available in the hypervisor I think the value for Sony in having people being able to learn how to program for the PS3 under Linux should be big enough to do the needed legwork to get the GPU available with OpenGL support. I could see people even using this box as their primary desktop machine in such a case.

Suprised me also to see that YDL ships GStreamer 0.10.4 on the box, which is rather old at this point. A brand new distro like YDL 5.0 should have been able to update this. My next target is to try and compile the Fluendo plugins on the box to see how they perform. The combination of 64-bit and BigEndian might of course reveal some more bugs even.

DVB and Elisa

Got myself two WinTV NOVA-T-500 cards today. I gave one of them to Philippe so he could come through on his promise to get DVB support into Elisa if I got him such a card. The card is a nice dual tuner one, so its perfect for also making sure we can support watching one program and recording another.

On the topic of donating hardware to people. I have already promised to pitch in on the Delta 44 card that Jono is buying for Tim which I think should also help us resolve the issues that Davyd Madeley reported in his latest blog entry regarding his Alesis io|2 card with GStreamer and Jokosher.

New queue element for GStreamer

One of the things which reduce the user experience of GStreamer today is that the current element used for buffering is not very nice. Meaning that if you have bandwith problems with streaming audio or video it will be very noticeable and give you a less than nice experience. Wim just made sure we took a big step forward in that
regard today with the new ‘queue2’ element commited to CVS. While it doesn’t take us all the way there it do improve upon the current situation a lot. This work combined with Wim’s recent code magic to improve RTSP support should take us a big step forward towards being a very good library for doing network streaming clients.

That the RTP work has been highly anticipated seems obvious based on the huge number of questions about RTP support we get onto gstreamer-devel mailing list. The same goes for the windows support which seems to have a lot of people testing it out. If only we could get more people onto testing our MacOSX support also to make sure it gets rock solid. Hopefully when we get a new release of gst-plugins-good out with both the MacOSX and Windows support included it will get us more users also on the Mac platform.

Jokosher

Getting a new piece of software stable and widely usable is hard and one quickly realize that working on the developers machines is not the same as working for everyone else. Which is was nice to see this blog entry by Niels Kjøller Hansen where he talks about latest version of Jokosher working for him. Still a lot of work remaining for Michael, Laszla, Jono and the rest of the crew before Jokosher has reached its full potential. I guess there are two major items on the todo going forward as I see it which need being taken care of, one being support for more advanced multichannel soundcards for recording, the second being making sure all the needed GStreamer plugins are in gst-plugins-good so distributions can package them easily. Today a few of the needed Jokosher plugins are in CVS of plugins-bad which of course makes it harder for people to get everything they want/need.

Tribal Trouble

I have blogged before about the game Tribal Trouble which is available for Linux. I was happy to see that they decided to
release their sales statistics recently. The most interesting point is probably that Linux sales accounted for as much as 11% of their total sales. I think that is a high enough number to make doing a linux port interestinng, especially for smaller game publishers.
The nice guys at Oddlabs also released the terrain generation engine they made for Tribal Trouble under the GPL.

I also came accross this recent Ryan “icculus” Gordon interview on linuxgames.com. If Linux ever becomes a mainstream games platform I think Ryan personally probably deserves something like 75% of the credit.