There was some complaints not long ago on Planet GNOME about projects using Werror as default for their compile and the value/cost of it. I am currently using latest Fedora Development which comes with an updated GCC version. This is causing the GStreamer build to fail from CVS (and we haven’t gotten around to fixing all the issues yet), but it has actually also shown why having it is a good idea. Cause atm GStreamer is the only multimedia project I am able to compile at all (by turning off werror) using GCC 4.1. Xine, mplayer and VLC are all failing to build for me. So by fixing all these things for previous versions of GCC and other compilers made GStreamer compileable with this latest incarnation. My point is that unless werror is turned on by default nobody is going to bother fixing those warnings, which means that the code is less likely to be compileable as is with other compilers or future versions of your current compiler. Also since the GStreamer community has done this for a long while now, incrementally fixing outr build with new versions of GCC etc., the job of removing the warnings isn’t overwhelming. I think that for some GNOME modules (and most software in general) the job of making them warning free has at this point become so big that nobody can manage to build up the energy to even try.

vmware server

We are planning on supporting Solaris with our plugins. Thanks to Sun we now have a SPARC box in our office to build and test our plugins on for the SPARC platform. Also to have a Solaris Intel build available I looked into the recently announced free vmware server product. Struggled a little to get it going on my Fedora development system as the config problem had some problems finding/using the kernel headers, but a patch called vmware-any-any-update97 sorted me out. One thing I have to say about vmware is that is it a very nice product. When using it you get the feeling of using something very polished and the GUI feels (and is) something actually made for running on your linux system, not an afterthough or sidejob of a GUI meant for a windows system.

GStreamer and GTK on embedded systems

I mentioned earlier some of the things that happened at 3GSM in
regards to GStreamer and GTK+. By combining that information with our current engagements at Fluendo and the dealings we have had at Fluendo in wake of 3GSM I think we are now in a situation where almost every major chipmaker in the embedded sector plans to or is already offering a SDK for their boards and chips using GStreamer for the multimedia handling and GTK+ for the GUI. And what is maybe even more interesting is that these efforts have come about due to the customers of these companies asking not only for a ‘linux SDK’, but for an SDK including GStreamer and GTK+. I don’t know the exact reasons for why our mindshare suddenly have exploded, but apart from the endorsement of GNOME and GTK+ from the major distributions I think we owe a lot of this to Nokia and the Maemo environment. Currently I know of hardware products under development using GStreamer and GTK+ such as TV’s, PVR’s, Media Center solutions, set-top boxes, portable music players, web tablets and mobile phones. It will be a year or two before these products starts hitting the market, but the current development is nothing short of amazing. The chipmakers seems believe that for embedded market will be focus on two major stacks going forward, WinCE and the Linux/GStreamer/GTK+ combo. Pretty cool stuff in my book :)

The effort to create a more beautiful effort is moving us quickly into a situation where the future desktop depends on hardware acceleration provided from the graphics card. The problem is that while 2D drivers are available as free software for the most part, the major graphics cards makers keep their 3D drivers closed. If you wanted good 3D acceleration under Linux the non-free NVidia and ATI drivers has been the way to go for a long time now.

So adding a ‘hard’ dependency on 3d hardware acceleration will implicitly mean we are basing our free desktop on non-free drivers feels like a step backwards. On the other side I don’t feel not going down the route of making our solution more visually appealing and hopefully also more usable is a viable option either, so I am not suggesting that these efforts gets rejected or stopped.

Hopefully the increased use of 3D will also lead to increased interest among free software developers to actually make free 3D drivers (and thus finding enough resources to overcome the difficulty of reverse engineering current cards) or that the increased use of 3d will increase the pressure from distribution makers and consumers to get ATI and NVidia to open their drivers. Anyway I hope I am wrong to be a bit worried about how this ends up and instead this leads to a big increase in contributions to things like MesaGL

It seems that some icons got removed from the gnome-icon-theme recently which has caused both problems and some debate. To me there are two issues here. The first is that I think we should start seeing our collection of icons as part of our ABI stability promise. Removing and changing icons names at regular intervals have been the norm for some time now, and as someone who has worked on maintaining themes its been a pain. Application developers and users also have a right to be upset if icons they IMHO rightly could expect to be there suddenly are gone and their applications breaks due to it.

The issue of wether we should have those icons displayed in Nautilus is another separate issue. I don’t have any strong feelings on it, but I think it would have been a better approach to at least add an option of getting those textual descriptions back through a gconf key enabling emblems. So that the people who wanted to keep textual descriptions could do so by enabling one gconf key and emblems would appear where before ‘hardcoded’ images where used. That solution would also allow for a more i18n friendly setup.

One thing that was worked on by the board last year, or mostly by David Neary, was getting a GNOME webshop going.
Well it seems we got beaten to the punch. Well at least we know what the Gnome looks like now :)

Good wine experience

I used to play the Magic the Gathering card game a lot some years ago. I came across an advertisement for a MtG computer game the other day which made me remember that there used to be a computer version of the original card game. I found the demo online of the original game and tried running it under Wine. Worked like a charm, I was almost suprised when both the installation and running of the game worked perfectly. Only minus was that sound support didn’t seem to work, but still I had some fun hours playing with the simple demo decks :) Good going Wine hackers.

Virgin Radio UK

Usually when you contact a media company through their public communication channels you feel you are sending stuff into the void.
I have had a very positive experience with
Virgin Radio UK in this regard as they have updated their streams page fixing all the issues we have pointed out with them, randing from playlist problems to misnamed stream naming. Anyway now their streams
have perfect playlists and correct naming. A few bugs to sort out on our side still to handle everything, but I am sure we get there. Thanks to James at Virgin Radio for his help and assistance.

Emusic followup

Also Edward at the office signed up for emusic now. He tends to download whole albums more than me so the lack of a nicely working Linux client came up. Found the open source EmusicJ created by Robin Sheat. Works very nicely.