New and old apps on Flathub

3D Printing Slicers

 I recently replaced my Flashforge Adventurer 3 printer that I had been using for a few years as my first printer with a BambuLab X1 Carbon, wanting a printer that was not a “project” so I could focus on modelling and printing. It's an investment, but my partner convinced me that I was using the printer often enough to warrant it, and told me to look out for Black Friday sales, which I did.

The hardware-specific slicer, Bambu Studio, was available for Linux, but only as an AppImage, with many people reporting crashes on startup, non-working video live view, and other problems that the hardware maker tried to work-around by shipping separate AppImage variants for Ubuntu and Fedora.

After close to 150 patches to the upstream software (which, in hindsight, I could probably have avoided by compiling the C++ code with LLVM), I manage to “flatpak” the application and make it available on Flathub. It's reached 3k installs in about a month, which is quite a bit for a niche piece of software.

Note that if you click the “Donate” button on the Flathub page, it will take you a page where you can feed my transformed fossil fuel addiction buy filament for repairs and printing perfectly fitting everyday items, rather than bulk importing them from the other side of the planet.

 

Preparing a Game Gear consoliser shell

I will continue to maintain the FlashPrint slicer for FlashForge printers, installed by nearly 15k users, although I enabled automated updates now, and will not be updating the release notes, which required manual intervention.

FlashForge have unfortunately never answered my queries about making this distribution of their software official (and fixing the crash when using a VPN...).

 Rhythmbox

As I was updating the Rhythmbox Flatpak on Flathub, I realised that it just reached 250k installs, which puts the number of installations of those 3D printing slicers above into perspective.

 

The updated screenshot used on Flathub

Congratulations, and many thanks, to all the developers that keep on contributing to this very mature project, especially Jonathan Matthew who's been maintaining the app since 2008.

New responsibilities

As part of the same process outlined in Matthias Clasen's "LibreOffice packages" email, my management chain has made the decision to stop all upstream and downstream work on desktop Bluetooth, multimedia applications (namely totem, rhythmbox and sound-juicer) and libfprint/fprintd. The rest of my upstream and downstream work will be reassigned depending on Red Hat's own priorities (see below), as I am transferred to another team that deals with one of a list of Red Hat’s priority projects.

I'm very disappointed, because those particular projects were already starved for resources: I spent less than 10% of my work time on them in the past year, with other projects and responsibilities taking most of my time.

This means that, in the medium-term at least, all those GNOME projects will go without a maintainer, reviewer, or triager:

- gnome-bluetooth (including Settings panel and gnome-shell integration)

- totem, totem-pl-parser, gom

- libgnome-volume-control

- libgudev

- geocode-glib

- gvfs AFC backend

Those freedesktop projects will be archived until further notice:

- power-profiles-daemon

- switcheroo-control

- iio-sensor-proxy

- low-memory-monitor

I will not be available for reviewing libfprint/fprintd, upower, grilo/grilo-plugins, gnome-desktop thumbnailer sandboxing patches, or any work related to XDG specifications.

Kernel work, reviews and maintenance, including recent work on SteelSeries headset and Logitech devices kernel drivers, USB revoke for Flatpak Portal support, or core USB is suspended until further notice.

All my Fedora packages were orphaned about a month and a half ago, it's likely that there are still some that are orphaned, if there are takers. RHEL packages were unassigned about 3 weeks ago, they've been reassigned since then, so I cannot point to the new maintainer(s).

If you are a partner, or a customer, I would recommend that you get in touch with your Red Hat contacts to figure out what the plan is going forward for the projects you might be involved with.

If you are a colleague that will take on all or part of the 90% of the work that's not being stopped, or a community member that was relying on my work to further advance your own projects, get in touch, I'll do my best to accommodate your queries, time permitting.

I'll try to make sure to update this post, or create a new one if and when any of the above changes.

Old skool GNOME

Some of us were discussing olden UIs during this year's GUADEC, including the original Totem UI. Searching through my old files, I found some interesting screenshots.

That includes an early version of Soundbox, the predecessor to Rhythmbox (it was later renamed to Rhythmbox as the name Soundbox was already used by some piece of software).

CDDB-enabled, incredible

Also of interest, abc, the audio-CD burner equivalent of sound-juicer, a bonobo-ised version of Rhythmbox, early versions of Vanity (my Cheese-before-Cheese webcam tool), and instructions on how to flash my netBook (click the link, you'll be surprised).

And a screenshot of Totem circa June 2002 (the first public release was in July 2002).

Totem with the original interface designed by task-pooper man

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.

Gadgets and gifts

The great sport that is Vincent sent me a copy of Hacking vim for my troubles. Hopefully, I'll be able to get more code written, as requested.


In the free stuff department, last week, a kind soul at Ericsson sent me 2 Sony Ericsson mobile phones, one being the pretty new Sony Ericsson k850i. The other (less interesting) phone is already on its way to one of the gnokii developers without such a device.

I've started playing around with it. It has a good bunch of interesting modes when plugged in via USB, or over Bluetooth, which beg to be (better) supported including:

• MTP device (Rhythmbox and gvfs)
• Mass Storage media player (Rhythmbox)
• ObexFTP over USB and Bluetooth (gvfs, obex-data-server)
• Serial port (NetworkManager, gnome-phone-manager, gnokii)

Funnily enough, poking people at Nokia didn't get me a test phone in the ~2 years I tried. My wishlist is online :)

Remix your brain

Yesterday, I was trying to help out someone who was having problems using his Bluetooth mouse with Fedora 8. Turns out he's got a Toshiba laptop, and the Bluetooth adapter wasn't showing in Linux. You need some sucky code to get it working.

Hobbling to the ToshBT website, I noticed a PS3 theme extractor. Grand!

In between cleaning up my backlog of bugs and TODOs, I implemented setting your ~/.face as the icon for Rhythmbox' UPNP shares.


PS: Best pangram ever: Sex-charged fop blew my junk TV quiz

New Totem

Mathias blogged about one new feature in Totem, the playlist sharing. This allows peer-to-peer sharing of the current playlist using libepc.

I've done 2 releases of Totem today, 2.21.3, the old-school Totem, and 2.21.4, the new Totem depending on the split totem-pl-parser.

This means I can finally commit my big patch for Rhythmbox.

Next up, the big gnokii automake patch.

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...

Better workflow

I just finished writing the code for better Podcast handling in Rhythmbox (feel free to test it). The only thing we're missing is a way to tell the iTunes detection pages that we already have iTunes installed.

So, if you have a Windows machine with Firefox and iTunes installed, could you please attach the output (pertaining to iTunes) of "about:plugins" from Firefox to the bug?

Body popping

Apart from making plenty of security errata in the past week (thanks FLAC...), I've finally started on porting Rhythmbox to the new features of the Totem playlist parser, including using it for Podcast parsing.

What it means is:

• Atom support
• ITPC and iTunes Music Store podcasts support (thanks to PenguinTV)

I'll also try to make sure that those are better integrated into Rhythmbox, eg. when one launches Rhythmbox with a RSS or Atom feed. More on that when the full feature's available.

I got Flash working on Fedora 8 (on my x86-64 desktop), thanks to the integration work that's gone on with nspluginwrapper. And I can now listen to my songs and scrobble even when I'm hacking on Rhythmbox. Throat hurts from so much singing.

On a different note, my ankle problems have subsided (still a minor twinge), and I scored hat tricks on my last few outings, and a goal Thierry Henry would have been proud of (left side of the box, bent shot in the bottom right corner). Yay!

ITMS and the podcast parsing

I'm currently putting the finishing touches to Podcast parsing in Totem, so it can be used for some plugins, such as my favourite Quicktime trailers sidebar feature, as well as giving Rhythmbox Atom parsing.

After finishing Atom and RSS parsing support, I set out to add support for itpc and itms links, as used by iTunes, and supported in PenguinTV. I re-discovered the inadequacies of old-style Unix libraries (when they don't work as advertised, at all).

If you live in NYC, or Seattle, and have a Starbucks at hand, you might be able to help with this potentially nice feature. Clicking on the song would add it to a personal wishlist (a feature which would also be useful for streaming radios as well).