Fedora 13 is out!

As the subject mentions, Fedora 13 is out!

Check out the announcement, and the fancy looking release notes.

Funny tidbit, The Register called it Linux for Applephobes, but failed to mention the enhanced iDevice support, and the features we added for Apple Macs as a Fedora machine.

iPhone and iPod touch support in Fedora

As Martin posted recently, libimobiledevice hit 1.0.0 earlier this week.

As a timeline of what's available in Fedora, here's a list of the features available in each Fedora release for iPhone and iPod Touch users:

- Fedora 11 contains libimobiledevice 1.0.0 and filesystem access through ifuse

- Fedora 12 was the first distribution to ship with out-of-the-box support for gvfs-afc, presenting you with your device on the desktop as soon as plugged in.

- Fedora 13 (and the upcoming Beta) will contain libgpod and Rhythmbox with music syncing support for those devices.

Loads of tweaks are happening now in Fedora 13 to make the experience smoother. Feedback in the bugzillas, as per usual.

Bug fixing galore!

In the past couple of weeks, we've been hard at work fixing bugs for the next Fedora release, Fedora 12.

We've had new releases for Totem - with loads of warnings, crashers, and behavioural bugs fixed -, for gnome-bluetooth - with upstream fixes for some killswitch handling problems -.

I've also helped out fixing bluriness in gnome-settings-daemon, and made gnome-power-manager use the same OSD code as the volume pop-ups.

As a relief from all the bug fixing, I've started working on a Bluetooth input setup helper, which will help you set up a mouse and keyboard on Bluetooth should you find yourself without any connected to your computer. This should be helpful to users of Logitech, or Dell branded dongles.

Some little tools

GNOME 2.28 and Fedora 12 are approaching, so I'm in full bug fixing mode.

I've been using clang on totem-pl-parser as a test:

$ CFLAGS=-I/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.4.1/include/ scan-build -o clang ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/ --libdir=/usr/lib64 --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var

$ CFLAGS=-I/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.4.1/include/ scan-build -o clang make

All the little bugs will be listed in clang/index.html. I fixed most of those, and pushed them using git-bz:

$ git bz file totem-pl-parser/general HEAD~10..

And voila, a nice list of patches, ready to apply.

Secure Simple Pairing support, now in Fedora 11

I updated gnome-bluetooth in Fedora 11, and that new version supports Secure Simple Pairing, an easier pairing mode for Bluetooth 2.1 devices.

The update currently lives in the updates-testing repository, but will be in the normal updates when we've had enough good feedback about it.

If you have Bluetooth devices in your possession that don't work as expected with your systems, and fancied a bit of playful testing, find me at GCDS, and we'll try and fix that.

Entrevue

Just got back from France, where my best friend was getting married to his best friend. I didn't see civilisation for 5 days, and enjoyed food, wine, and the swimming-pool instead.

Just before I left Jackaboutboul interviewed me about the fingerprint reader support in Fedora 11. I hope I gave enough credit to Daniel Drake and Ray Strode for their work, without which mine wouldn't look half as good.

PS: I was tired when I wrote the answers, and my grammar and vocabulary is sub-par. I'm ashamed :)

NB: It doesn't actually look like that

If you read the Phoronix article about the new gnome-volume-control (also seen linked from OSNews), don't worry, the upstream (and Fedora) applet doesn't look like that.


It looks like that.



Ubuntu's mixer applet is a different UI on the old mixer applet in gnome-applets, and not the PulseAudio-powered volume applet now in gnome-media.

In addition to the article being outdated (the treeview with the one-by-one sound event customisation is already gone), it also invents new features such as «the ability to adjust the alert volume on a per-alert basis». God knows where they got that from.

/The guy who did the last gnome-media release

Fedora 10

As Ray mentions, Fedora 10 is out. And we're already working on Fedora 11! Go get the goodness.

Multimedia Remotes support

After the Fedora QA day, working on gnome-lirc-properties and LIRC itself for the new Fedora 10 feature, fixing bugs with Sir Jarod Wilson at the testing, I did a release of gnome-lirc-properties.

The great thing to come out of it was a troubleshooting guide.

So if you had any problems using LIRC, or gnome-lirc-properties in the past, I would advise you to get the latest Fedora Rawhide (an updated Fedora 10 beta will do), and go through the guide!

Living on the edge

If you want to try out the new BlueZ 4 code, and D-Bus API, come to try the upcoming Fedora 10 Beta (coming Tuesday a week). We have BlueZ 4.x and updated obex-data-server, and gvfs working with the new APIs.

gnome-user-share and nautilus-sendto are upcoming as well.

It also allows you to test the PulseAudio Bluetooth integration, if you're feeling particularly adventurous.

LIRC setup! (now in Fedora)

If you have an infra-red remote control, you can now use gnome-lirc-properties, available in Fedora Rawhide. There were quite a few changes and upstream fixes required to make it work, which makes this change blog-worthy.





Thanks to Murray and Mathias for the help getting the changes in upstream.

He does it again!

Frank Scholz is the hero again. The Coherence UPNP framework developer, after bravely fixing many bugs in Rhythmbox' UPNP plugin, added UPNP support to Totem.


Will get integrated in Totem itself in due time.

And after people whinged a lot in my previous post's comments, Carlo filed a lot of bugs, and while some of them are already fixed with newer kernels, others are getting fixed by our very own mjg59 (I know he doesn't like me being so possessive).

And as a proof that filing bugs helps other people, one user added himself to the CC: for all the opened EeePC bugs. Now he can monitor progress, help with testing, and disable his work-arounds when the time comes. Yiipee!

How not to do a laptop support page

While the goal is laudable, pages like this one to support the Eee PC on Fedora 9 are what's broken about hardware support in Linux.

Grant X access to local user root: That's horrendous. Never ever do that.

Now we must [...] modprobe the eeepc module: File a bug against the kernel, with the output of "dmidecode", the module should load automatically on those machines.

Now let's handle some FN keys and events create these files: File a bug against the kernel, the eeepc module should be sending out its events through the input layer, so there's no need to install acpid, or tweak any of its config files.

I'll pass on the gruesomeness of the scripts that call into X from a daemon, remove modules by hand (why would anyone need to remove the PCI Express driver?), and the usefulness of having the camera disabled in hardware (it could also be on all the time, and only turn on the feature when the device is opened).

All in all, people writing those web pages had better spend their time filing bugs against the right components in Bugzilla. That also goes for most of the pages on sites like Tuxmobile. File bugs!

Thanks kernel people

Whoever is responsible for making the rt73usb driver work great out of the box: THANK YOU. I tried it without success when I installed Fedora 8 gold, and now it works brilliantly (and out-of-the-box) on Fedora 9.

Current hacking includes: GPRS/3G support via Bluetooth in NetworkManager, fprintd hacking, and gnome-lirc-properties integration into Fedora (Debian and Ubuntu people, upstream your bleeding patches, kthx).

And for nanobob and Borkis on FIFA: you really didn't need to quit the game when I scored those 2nd goals. Losing against a guy full of margaritas must hurt.

2 down, 3 to go

gnome-obex-send is dead, long live bluetooth-sendto.

Tadas' Google Summer Of Code, mentored by Marcel Holtmann, got us a D-Bus service that does ObexPush and ObexFTP server and client. Last week, I cleaned up Tadas' patch, and sent a big patch to allow bluetooth-sendto feature-parity with the old gnome-obex-send.

nautilus-sendto already got tweaked to use the new program when sending over Bluetooth, and all that code lies in bluez-gnome in rawhide.

This morning, I added ObexFTP support to gnome-user-share. It seems like the right place to allow people to share pictures or music. Already in the newly released gnome-user-share 0.20 and in rawhide.




Next jobs on the line are getting rid of gnome-obex-server, finishing the widgets in bluez-gnome, and porting gnome-vfs-obexftp to gio (although that will probably mean a rewrite using obex-data-server again).

Some work updates

Got back to work on Monday, and got a few things done.

I uploaded the videos Thos made available back in December. They're all easily findable.

In December as well, we (Red Hat) provided Matt Davey with a Bluetooth-enabled Palm. And he committed the patches to gnome-pilot SVN trunk a few days later, getting Bluetooth sync support to the Palm (with a UI, I wrote the pilot-sync code ;). Yay!

Instructions for Fedora here.

Podcasts in Rhythmbox

I mentioned this work a couple of times in the past. It's in Fedora Rawhide, although without the browser plugin. A screencast (as is now the tradition) speaks a thousand words.


For the people using other distros, you'll need the latest devel version of Totem, and the big patch in bugzilla.

Update: Blogger seems to have broken GIF files uploading. Don't open it in EOG. Download it, and open it in your browser. Next time, I'll upload in a format that Blogger actually accepts...

New gnome-phone-manager and Telepathy

I just released a new tarball of gnome-phone-manager, version 0.40. New in this version is the Telepathy backend. It's still a work-in-progress. But it allows you to send and receive messages from any number of phones.

Here's a little screencast:



There are obviously a number of bugs, including the fact that none of the contacts from your phone show up in the buddy list, so you can't send new messages. Try using gnome-phone-manager itself for now, but the future lies here.

PS: Get your distros to update gnome-phone-manager. Fedora has the latest versions in rawhide and Fedora 8. Some distros *cough*buntu*cough* still ship ancient versions.

Audio preview

After gentle poking by Matthias, I cooked up a patch that allows the sound preview to work again for Fedora 8. It will hit rawhide shortly.

Make sure Enable software mixing is enabled in the Sound preferences, and that sound previews are enabled in the file manager prefs. Obviously, you'd want pulseaudio running rather than esd, if you
don't want to tear your hair out when playing video.

My 3 GUADEC tasks

I had 3 main tasks when I came to GUADEC.

1. The USB keys
Mandriva provided us with 500 USB keys with a live distro, the usually-printed booklet, and loads of data provided by the sponsors (I quite liked that AMD chose to have compilers on there). If you didn't attend GUADEC, the booklet and data are available in the SVN repo. Shame they only arrived on Tuesday.

2. The football game
Apart from loads of bruises (and a huge nosebleed for me, thanks Glynn for ducking) and a map reading snafu to get there, it was great. For posterity, if you were there, please add the scores from your team and amend the teams if you got moved to another team. (My team finished second again, just one goal in it...). I should add that 3 hours of football is a bit too much.

3. Bluetooth and GNOME talk
Here's my slide, and the intro sound.

Slide 1

It was great not having any slides, but the video should be available very soon. As promised, here's a link to the use cases we have for Fedora.

More GUADEC-y stuff soon.