Lyon GNOME Bug day #1

Last Friday, both a GNOME bug day and a bank holiday, a few of us got together to squash some bugs, and discuss GNOME and GNOME technologies.

Guillaume, a new comer in our group, tested the captive portal support for NetworkManager and GNOME in Gentoo, and added instructions on how to enable it to their Wiki. He also tested a gateway related configuration problem, the patch for which I merged after a code review. Near the end of the session, he also rebuilt WebKitGTK+ to test why Google Docs was not working for him anymore in Web. And nobody believed that he could build it that quickly. Looks like opinions based on past experiences are quite hard to change.

Mathieu worked on removing jhbuild's .desktop file as nobody seems to use it, and it was creating the Sundry category for him, in gnome-shell. He also spent time looking into the tracker blocker that is Mozilla's Focus, based on disconnectme's block lists. It's not as effective as uBlock when it comes to blocking adverts, but the memory and performance improvements, and the slow churn rate, could make it a good default blocker to have in Web.

Haïkel looked into using Emeus, potentially the new GTK+ 4.0 layout manager, to implement the series properties page for Videos.

Finally, I added Bolso to jhbuild, and struggled to get gnome-online-accounts/gnome-keyring to behave correctly in my installation, as the application just did not want to log in properly to the service. I also discussed Fedora's privacy policy (inappropriate for Fedora Workstation, as it doesn't cover the services used in the default installation), a potential design for Flatpak support of joypads and removable devices in general, as well as the future design of the Network panel.

Watch out for DRI3 regressions

DRI3 has plenty of necessary fixes for X.org and Wayland, but it's still young in its integration. It's been integrated in the upcoming Fedora 21, and recently in Arch as well.

If WebKitGTK+ applications hang or become unusably slow when an HTML5 video is supposed to be, you might be hitting this bug.

If Totem crashes on startup, it's likely this problem, reported against cogl for now.

Feel free to add a comment if you see other bugs related to DRI3, or have more information about those.

Update: Wayland is already perfect, and doesn't use DRI3. The "DRI2" structures in Mesa are just that, structures. With Wayland, the DRI2 protocol isn't actually used.

iDevice changes

If like me you jumped the queue of soccer moms, divorced middle-age business men and fanbois on Friday morning, you might have had a new toy to play with this week-end.

The good news

If you use Fedora 13, we fixed up some bugs and you can now mount your iPaid (private joke) on the desktop, and have it show up with a spiffy icon. All the updates are in updates-testing.

upower got the ability to tell you your battery status when plugging in an iDevice, though you'll need gnome-power-manager from master to see it, and even then, it won't show up on a desktop system without a UPS. Still some UI problems to iron out there.

gvfs will now warn you about the device being locked. Again, this change is only on master as it adds new strings.

nautilus-ideviceinfo is nearly ripe for consumption after my wad of bug fixes. I expect the code to move into the GNOME repos soon after the first release.

The bad news

Still no video, music or e-books syncing on the tablet iDevice.

No support yet for the per-app documents syncing. If you have a jailbroken device, you can use iFile to move your documents to the Documents sub-directory of /var/mobile/Applications/application-UUID (make sure to turn on "Application names" in the preferences).

Freezing Totem with text subtitles?

Then ask your distribution to backport the patches.

This has been fixed in Fedora about a month ago.

More website videos and sports

This week-end, I added yet a bit more functionality to our NarrowSpace plugin (ie. the QuickTime compatibility plugin), implementing another bunch of missing Javascript functions.

If you have a website where some buttons don't work, take a look at the output of your web browser (using firefox -debug for Firefox, mozilla -debug for Mozilla, etc.), and you might see things like:

** Message: WARNING: Site uses unimplemented function 'totemINarrowSpacePlayer::GetRate'

Then file a bug against Totem's browser plugin component, with the debug output messages, and the URL to access the page in question. Hopefully, we'll be able to implement the missing functionality, as we've done for the Apple site above.

As for sports, I caught the France - Italy game on Saturday in a local French pub, after having watched England - Israel. And my cousin has made the Solheim Cup team this year (it's the Woman's equivalent to the Ryder Cup). Starts on Friday, I hope she does well.

Random links

Jeez, I'm bad at blogging.This afternoon's footie game brought up some interesting new connections. But after watching MOTD, Philip pointed me to this bug. Peculiar choice of videos to watch.

I've also written a small bookmarklet so that I can swarm (mugshot parlance) with Epiphany. And my VAIO's gone.

A year-old picture, FIFA isn't quite tuned up for my first season as a manager

Lazy^WWindows web, can you help?

Trying to fix a little Totem bug, could anyone with a Windows machine and Windows Media Player 11 copy the output of this page in the comments (of the blog, or in the bug)?

Thanks!

Note that I tried to install it with Wine, but no luck, at all.

Still drunk?

Or is there another reason, Danilo?

Yay, less code

GTK+ now contains the old BaconVolume widget, called GtkVolumeButton. I hope we get GTK+ 2.12 for GNOME 2.20, so that Rhythmbox, Sound-juicer, Totem, Banshee, etc. can use the widget without cut'n'pasting bacon-volume.[ch].

Useless screenshot (you have to try it to believe it)

Many thanks to Ronald for writing the widget in the first place, and Matthias and Christian for the code reviews.

Re: Handling GNOME Bugs

Richard, you should also mention that we don't care what they're watching, smoking, or whether it is of any interest to us.