Planet GNOME

Like every year, the entire Lanedo Crowd is currently attending Guadec. If you’re around as well, we can strongly recommend attending one of the talks we’re giving on:

• Multitouching your apps
• Best Practices in Maintaining Vendor Specific GTK+ Branches
• Tracker’s place in the GNOME platform

Feel free to approach us for a chat or for handing over your CV. ;-)

Long days at GUADEC... Discussing with many teams about how they feel for September, with regads to their work, and the overall picture, and then release team meeting on Monday evening, where we reached a general agreement in favour of a delay. Then back to discussing this proposal, in the Hogeschool lobby, in the advisory board, getting more feedback, refining things.

More drafting of emails & slides on Wednesday morning and finally we took the opportunity of Vincent "Building a strong post-3.0 GNOME story" talk to get the word out.

So if you haven't seen it already: GNOME 3.0 in March 2011.

People are loving the release team, get your sticker at the infodesk (thanks Ryan)

This was not easy, and it was especially difficult for me as I have been running GNOME Shell for months, experiencing all the progress, also because I have been so insistent with so many people to have their modules ported to GTK+ 3.

Of course it's not wasted work (I'd feel so bad if it was), and we actually need to have more modules getting a --with-gtk={2.0,3.0} configure flag (look at this commit in gcalctool for an example), and ported to GSettings (the target date is sill September), etc.

There are still two days to discuss things here, if you have any comment just grab Vincent, Andre, Olav, Karsten, Fred or myself.

OLPC News has an article with the original headline (in fact I took the lazy way out and re-used it). It seems to be posted by ‘Guest Writer’ but the footer of the article says that “Satish Jha is the President and CEO, OLPC India” so I guess OLPC India is in some form involved with the content that is has.

It is an interesting piece. There’s another interesting thread on a mailing list here.

I would have expected it to talk more about the possibilities of doing OLPC stuff in India rather than becoming a somewhat neither-here-nor-there kind of non-committal response to the $35 device that the Ministry of HRD so loudly released. To understand what can bring about the adoption of OLPC India, one would have to probably go back to a post I wrote some time back.

The problem that was highlighted still remains. There is no community of any form,shape or sort around the OLPC in India when compared to OLPC efforts/initiatives and deployments in other countries (the nations that are so eloquently held up as shining examples of OLPC success). There is a significant lack of a downstream community of volunteers and participants and, more importantly, a lack of any sort of publicly discussed plans as to whether any educational institute would volunteer students for a while to keep the deployments going forward. Then of course there is the added discourse around availability of the actual XO hardware.

When I met Dr. Nagarjuna at GNUnify (that’s February this year), he indicated that he was actively looking at using the Sugar Desktop Environment on standard COTS desktops available much easily from vendors because there wasn’t much clarity about the how and when of the hardware availability. In fact, this has been a murmur that has been around for a while – what specifically is the value add of the hardware if the desktop environment is available via a standard Linux desktop/distribution. Which is where an active group of developers working on activities that would be useful in the context of the deployment is a good thing to have. And for that to happen, there needs to be work on building a downstream community – contributors who use the artifacts provided by OLPC and Sugar to develop their own thing.

A distinct advantage that OLPC/XO/Sugar has is brand recognition. Anyone who is peripherally involved in doing things around Free and Open Source Software in India know these names. They may not fully understand the depth of work or, the roadmap of the individual projects, but the name recognition is a jump-off point that should be utilized much more. For example, in a space like the College of Engineering Pune, which has a fairly active mailing list for FOSS related stuff, holding a 2 day event with the aim getting work started on new or, un-maintained activities, teaching the basics of testing/QA stuff would probably be more useful than just wishing about growing a community. I am fairly certain that there would be other institutions like CoEP where a day-long or, similar camps can be organized. Why aren’t they happening ? On that I have no clue.

It’s 3 AM, GUADEC is big fun as usual, I’m in the hotel lobby, and as I have only seen one summary blogpost on planet.gnome.org yet I’d like to mention that GNOME 3.0 will be released in March 2011.

Good night.

Although it is being recommended to use Opera or the latest Firefox 4 beta to watch the GUADEC live video streams, there is another option: Epiphany. Here you can see a screenshot of what is being shown right now in one of the conference rooms, using GNOME 2.28 in Fedora 12:

The support for the HTML5 video tag in WebKitGTK+ was implemented by Philippe Normand as part of his work at Igalia during the last months. The video is reproduced using gstreamer as backend, so if you have the proper support for WebM installed in gstreamer, you can follow GUADEC using Epiphany.

• Good morning from the brief garden!

Together with a big group of igalians, I am spending the week at Den Haag, international city of peace and justice, to attend GUADEC.

Igalia is sponsoring at Silver level again, and several of us will be giving talks during the core days; among them, I would like to highlight 4 projects we have been pushing forward quite actively this year:

• WebKitGTK+: as Luis said during his keynote, GNOME must embrace the web and its technologies and standards (Javascript/HTML). Aligned with that thinking, during the past year we have been working hard in bringing the GNOME port of WebKit forward, improving performance and stability, and implementing relevant new features such as the awesome DOM bindings, the HTML5 video tag support using gstreamer as backend, and an increasingly complete a11y support. There are already many GNOME apps using WebKit and I bet more will do that soon. The talk by Xan and Gustavo on Friday afternoon is a must for those of you interested in these topics.
• Cally: although born as an external library implementing a11y support for clutter, has been recently merged very recently as official part of clutter. Our plans now are to start integrating and extending it so that all the functionality of clutter-based projects like the GNOME Shell can be used by people with disabilities, in a similar way to how can use now the rest of the desktop nowadays. Alejandro Piñeiro covered all this in his nice talk today’s morning.
• Grilo: a solution to avoid reinventing the wheel when trying to access different media providers (both locally and over the internet) in multimedia applications. There are already plugins for banshee and rhythmbox working as a proof of concept, and the GNOME’s MediaServer dbus API is implemented too. Iago will give a talk about this tomorrow early in the morning, an ideal timing for those who want to wake up early after today’s party :)
• Modest: a lightweight, simple alternative to Evolution for all kind of devices, from handhelds to powerful desktop machines. Modest was born for the Fremantle release of Maemo, but has now a nice GNOME version. It has some limitations still, but the UI is clean and fast, and it could be a good complement as part of GNOME to Evolution or derived projects like Anjal, which don’t have exactly the same goals and advantages. José Dapena will talk about Modest tomorrow afternoon during his talk.

And as a warm up for all this, I spent the whole day yesterday at the GNOME Foundation’s advisory board meeting, which was long but quite productive, I think.  It is always good to get an update about what each of the member companies have been doing and are planning to do, and have some discussion about opportunities for cooperation.

By the way, we have some new Igalia t-shirts left. If you want one, just approach any of us and ask!

 

GUADEC 2010, the annual GNOME User and Developer European Conference, kicked off with a keynote speech by Mozilla lawyer Luis Villa. Mr Villa encouraged GNOME to embrace the web, saying that in the struggle between web and desktop, the web has come out on top. Why? Because the web is a powerful, reliable, cheap, available and a constantly improving application platform. This should be a wake-up call for developers of the GNOME desktop suite to design their applications to web standards, including using HTML 5, CSS-like and JavaScript when building or rewriting code.

Mr Villa said that GNOME's cultural values are winning while GNOME code needs to focus on integration with the Internet. He emphasized that community, problem solving abilities and freedom are clear strengths of GNOME, while the development culture should adapt to the new challenges of a web-centric computing model.

Another important presentation was given by Vincent Untz, member of the GNOME 3 release team. Mr Untz announced that the target release for GNOME 3 has been set for March 2011, with a beta release in September 2010. Concern was raised by some developers in the audience that work would be difficult leading up to both the v3.0-beta and simultaneous v2.32 September release. There has been much advancement in the 8 years since the release of GNOME 2, and v3.0 has been highly anticipated for some time already. "Isn't it a bit late?" was another concern that he addressed, saying that as a full platform revamp there was no reason to rush the release.

One significant feature of the conference this year is the webstreaming of all 3 session rooms. GUADEC sponsor Flumotion implemented the setup using WebM, and GUADEC 2010 marks the first major event in the world to use this technology. The streams can be viewed directly from the GUADEC homepage, or by pasting the below links into your WebM-compatible media player. See this compatibility chart for more information. (gnome.org)
* Room 1 (Paris): http://live1.guadec.stream.flumotion.com/guadec/live1.webm.m3u
* Room 2 (Copenhagen): http://live2.guadec.stream.flumotion.com/guadec/live2.webm.m3u
* Room 3 (Seville): http://live3.guadec.stream.flumotion.com/guadec/live3.webm.m3u


All in all, the day was busy with a flood of information and large numbers of excited hackers. Day 2 promises to be even better! Check the schedule to see what talks you will want to attend.

Don't forget about the Canonical Party at 20:00 at Le Paris tonight. Map is here.
Tomorrow will be the Collabora Beach BBQ Party at 19:00 at the Beach Company. You can find more information at the registration desk!

Send GUADEC an email at guadec-list@gnome.org
Join GUADEC on Twitter: http://twitter.com/GUADEC
Follow the GUADEC Twitter channel: http://twitter.com/#search?q=guadec
GUADEC 2010 Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/guadec2010

 

 

Six years ago, we did the first large scale Ogg Theora stream from the 2004 GUADEC conference.

It was a dime on its side to get things ready for this year. I purposely removed myself from the organization, because for various reasons I’m not going to GUADEC this year, but I was hoping the rest of the company would do their part to get this working, and I just provided the necessary prodding along the way. I’ve been told one of the organisers in charge of this got ill at some point and communication went a bit south during that period, so I had some complaints from our support guys that they had to do last-minute rushing.

But the streams are live today, and a few developers here are giddily running around looking at the stream, the image, working on some typical bugs you get when you’re doing stuff like this for the first time (the artifacts on keyframes the encoder seems to have remind me a lot of the Theora bugs we had to squash back in the day, and obviously they are worse on still images, like, say, an empty conference room…)

Go check out the stream and make sure you have a WebM-enabled browser, like the Firefox 4.0 beta or latest Opera.

Congratulations to our intrepid hackers like Zaheer and Andoni for their hard work a few weeks ago on WebM, and I’ve been told Marc-André actually went to Holland just to deliver the encoders :)

First day of the GUADEC main track, and we already have some great news about the future of GNOME. Below is my version, which means that it presents only the conferences I've attented. Lot of cool stuff is also happening in the other rooms!

Luis Villa started this morning, with a very nice conference about what is GNOME made of, the people behind it, and the way it's going. To keep GNOME the best great platform it is, he suggested to move toward the web technologies, and embrace the web as much as we can, demonstrating the capabilities of Javascript to execute the same app in a browser and on the desktop. So the whole point I got was that wild idea that we should develop toward the web and focus a lot more on that. It is definitely a good idea IMHO, but that also suggests that we should drop our "traditionnal" tookits to develop new applications, which is scary, but makes sense since HTML + CSS + Javascript are also capable of great things, as long as you know how to use them. Whatever I got wrong or right, Luis is open to criticism and questions, feel free to contact him if you have constructive feedback about that.

Then came the GNOME 3 Shell talk lead by Owen Taylor, demonstrating the progress made by the Shell since last year since he initially introduced it at GCDS. So we really realized how many improvements landed in just a year, with the new dialogs, app menu, looking glass, and the overall greatly improved appearence. They still have some nice items left on their roadmaps (some work on the tray is expected), but it's already pretty usable and has some cool features in (the inline Empathy integration is changing my life).

I attented right after the "Shell Yes!" talk by William Jon McCann, with some very nice, philosophical introduction, and he had chosen some very nice quotes to explain how we must focus on the beauty of our software, and bringing better applications the world. Then he gos us by surprise, and revealed a terrific roadmap :

Yep, you can read too, they're thinking about making GNOME 4.0 a GNOME OS. And now I'm getting +3000 visistors cause I both mentionned "GNOME 4.0" and "GNOME OS" (and twice more now). Note that this is just their personnal vision, and it not approved anywhere else, and I believe the idea hasn't spread yet. Anyway, we got some cool mockups after, which I believe are maintainted up here : http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell-design/, make sure to check it out, it looks very nice and keeps being improved.

This afternoon I attented the "GNOME State of the Union" talk by Fernando Herrera and Xan Lopez, which was an excellent, hilarious presentation about what happenned to GNOME in the past 10 years, from the death of CORBA, Bonobo, GNOME Panel, to the new dconf, Clutter and all the shiny stuff. Make sure to check the videos when available, you're going to have a great time.

The "Clutter : State of the Union" by Emmanuele Bassi was very instructive, introducing new features for Clutter 1.4, constraints, actions, effects, plus COGL and performance improvements, which means that Clutter is going to get even more awesome by the end of the year, definitely an excellent toolkit.

The last talk was by some more Intel folks who demonstrated their pet projects : Dax, a Clutter-based SVG library, Mash, a library to use 3D models right inside Clutter (3D models + 3D lightning + animation = ❤), and finally another smart guy from Intel taught us the basics (and great rules) of real-time small game programming.

That was an excellent day at GUADEC, make sure to watch the live VP8 stream by Fluendo, and maybe follow me on identi.ca, which is the compressed, real-time version of my daily GUADEC reports. Tomorrow, we're doing the Summer of Code projects talk, don't miss me us!

Tomorrow at GUADEC there will be a session on Google Summer of Code. It will be structured as a lightning talk session where the students will do the talking and present their projects. Attend the session if you want to see the cool stuff that is coming up. It starts at 11:15 in the Paris room. Be there!

The main hall at GUADEC 2010

since I’m stupid and I scheduled the team meeting before I could actually be in The Hague, I had to move the meeting. and, again, since I’m stupid I managed to schedule it against important talks of the day — and my own.

so: the GTK+ team meeting has been moved to the common area after the last talk of Wednesday, July 28th. sorry for the inconvenience I caused, and please don’t hurt me when you see me.

Once again I'm attending GUADEC thanks to my employer Collabora. There are certainly a lot of interesting things going on during these 3 days but I'd like to highlight 2 events that you certainly don't want to miss.

The traditional Collabora GUADEC party will take place on Thursday night at 7pm and will be a barbecue over the beach! Check the parties map for the exact location.

Friday at 9:30 am I'll give a talk called GNOME 3: the Telepathic Desktop. The first part of the talk will be some kind of overview of the cool new stuff we have recently added to the Telepathy framework or which should land soon. I'll also talk about the work we have done to make Telepathy easier to use by third party applications. The second part of the talk will present new features we have added to Empathy during this cycle. I'll also focus on integration of Telepathy in the GNOME desktop in general. I'll have some demos to show hoping they won't fail horribly. :)

Hope to see you there. I know that's pretty early in the morning, especially after the Collabora party but I'll be there in time so you don't have any excuse. :p

edit: Seems there is a live stream of sessions so you should be able to watch the talk even if you are not at the conference.

The highly popular Design Thinking Workshop will have an encore session on Thursday at 15:45 in room Copenhagen. Make sure you sign up at participants list right in the main hall, or drop a mail to cbuss (at) src (dot) gnome (dot) org.

You might have seen pictures of rooms stuffed with whiteboards, all of them covered in colorful post-its, low-res prototypes and toys everywhere, where you can immediately imagine the fun teams must have had working in this environment … this is what Design Thinking often looks like.

Design Thinking is a user-centric method that leverages the creative potential of interdisciplinary teams. It is very agile and fun to apply, as play is a crucial element of the process. It has proven to be very successful in designing highly user-centric products, experiences and services at different places.

Gnome people and the Gnome project could highly benefit from this method in tailoring the platform to the user's needs, especially those not explicitly expressed. The first two workshops were highly appreciated by the participants. It is organized and executed by five trained and experienced Design Thinkers.

Follow the Design Workshop on Twitter to get updates from the team: http://twitter.com/harokkar
Send GUADEC an email at guadec-list@gnome.org
Join GUADEC on Twitter: http://twitter.com/GUADEC
Follow the GUADEC Twitter channel: http://twitter.com/#search?q=guadec

 

(Reposted from Neary Consulting)

Today at GUADEC I presented the results (Slides are now on slideshare) of the GNOME Census, a project we have been working on for a while. For as long as I have been involved in GNOME, press, analysts, potential partners and advisory board members have been asking us: How big is GNOME? How many paid developers are there? Who writes all this software, and why?

By looking at the modules in the GNOME 2.30 release, made last March, we aim to answer many of those questions, and give deeper insight into the motivations of participants in the project.

The GNOME heartbeat - pre-release peaks and GUADEC boosts

Here are our key findings:

• GNOME has a rhythm – there is a measurable increase in activity before release time, and after the annual GNOME conference GUADEC
• While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors
• Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.
• A number of top company contributors are consultancy/services companies specialising in the GNOME platform – Collabora, CodeThink, Openismus, Lanedo and Fluendo are in the top 20 companies. As many of these companies grew initially through work on Maemo, this is a sign of the success of Nokia’s strategy around the GNOME stack.

Company Commits Percentage Volunteer 101823 23.45 Unknown 73558 16.94 Red Hat 70790 16.30 Novell 45349 10.44 Collabora 21684 4.99 Intel 11160 2.57 Fluendo 10218 2.35 Lanedo 10090 2.32 Independent 8922 2.05 Sun 8862 2.04 Nokia 6183 1.42 Openismus 5303 1.22 Codethink 5276 1.21 Eazel 4734 1.09 Litl 4620 1.06 Canonical 4487 1.03 Movial 2988 0.69 Mandriva 2504 0.58 The Family International 2130 0.49 Entropy Wave 2056 0.47 (Academia) 1894 0.44 Mozilla Corporation 1040 0.24

One of the interesting things that we have done for the census is to look at who is maintaining modules by looking at commits over the past two years, and use this data to identify areas of the platform which see lots of collaboration, areas where the maintenance burden is left to volunteers, and areas where individual companies assume most of the maintenance burden.

There are a number of modules in the platform which see a considerable amount of co-opetition, including Evolution, Evolution Data Server, DBus and GStreamer. Most modules in the platform, however, are either maintained to a large extent by volunteer developers, or see the vast majority of their contributions from one company.

I see this information being useful for companies interested in using the GNOME platform for their products, companies seeking custom application development, potential large-scale customers of desktop Linux or customers buying high-level support who want to know who employs more module maintainers or committers to the project.

The GNOME maintenance map, with modules coloured according to the company maintaining them

To recoup the costs of the study, and to ensure that future improvements can be made, the  complete GNOME census report, with additional detail and analysis, is available for sale now on neary-consulting.com, for €500. The release will be published under a Creative Commons licence on October 1st 2010.

As some of you might know by now, I will be attending to GUADEC tomorrow and Thursday.

Despite being involved in Gnome for nearly four years now, this will be my first GUADEC! There, I will be available for anyone having questions on the libpeas plugins engine, and to drink a few beers. As I'm a bit shy sometimes, don't hesitate to call me out if I pass by! :-)

You might have seen the t-shirts around, there are quite a few (twenty!) Collaborans at GUADEC this year.

Like a game of bingo, see if you can spot them all: Gustavo Noronha, Travis Reitter, Youness Alaoui, Felix Kaser, Guillaume Desmottes, Nicolas Dufresne, Jonathon Jongsma, Olivier Le Thanh Duong, Eitan Isaacson, Marco Barisione, Tomeu Vizoso, Cosimo Cecchi, Olivier Crête, Danielle Madeley, Sjoerd Simons, Rodrigo Novo, Senko Rašić, Thomas Thurman, Philip Withnall and Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne.

There are also all twelve members of Collabora Multimedia here.

Collabora is hosting a beach party on Thursday, starting from 7pm. Word on the street says there will also be ninja t-shirts available at some point.

Our Flickr photo stream is up! Come see pics as we take them: events, speakers, people and parties!

Send us an email at guadec-list@gnome.org
Or join us on Twitter: GUADEC

 

My friends in the Hague will slowly start the process of resuming from sleep and dealing with hangover, eventually heading for the conference venue as I write this, because, right, it's GUADEC time, and I'm missing out :-(.

Hope you all have your best GUADEC so far. Wish I was there.

Client/Server architecture

Fairly any non-trivial system consists of more than one process and needs to use IPC. In the most cases there are data-providers and data-consumers. Many people use in that case a broker/server to connect these components.

Such service provides following functions:

Methods

• Register/Announce
• Unregister
• List

Signals

• Appeared
• Vanished

However if you look closer, the message bus already provides these functionality via the org.freedesktop.DBus Interface. (Specification)

Instead of calling register(), you own a name like “your.project.dataprovider.specialprovider” via “RequestName()”. List get’s replaced by the D-Bus method “ListNames()” (additionally filter for your prefix, e.g. “your.project”). The signals are also provided by D-Bus through “NameOwnerChanged”. Although every proper D-Bus Binding should hide these functions behind a nice API. So just look into the documentation….

What are the benefits?

• No need to write and run your own server/broker
• The list of available components is public. No need for special interfaces.
• Stateless, any component can appear or vanish without disturbing the others

Properties

As many languages didn’t natively support the concept of properties, it became common to write functions like GetAttribute/SetAttribute and people also adapted that for D-Bus APIs. However there are good news! We have an Interface for properties. (Specification)

What are the benefits?

• Generic, some bindings also do automatic caching of properties which gives you access to properties without D-Bus calls
• “GetAll()” reduces the overhead of several independent calls
• Change notification via the PropertyChanged signal (as far as I know, only implemented by GDBus)

Thanks for your attention!