GNOME 3.16 is out!

Did you see?

It will obviously be in Fedora 22 Beta very shortly.

What happened since 3.14? Quite a bit, and a number of unfinished projects will hopefully come to fruition in the coming months.

Hardware support

After quite a bit of back and forth, automatic rotation for tablets will not be included directly in systemd/udev, but instead in a separate D-Bus daemon. The daemon has support for other sensor types, Ambient Light Sensors (ColorHug ALS amongst others) being the first ones. I hope we have compass support soon too.

Support for the Onda v975w's touchscreen and accelerometer are now upstream. Work is on-going for the Wi-Fi driver.

I've started some work on supporting the much hated Adaptive keyboard on the X1 Carbon 2nd generation.

Technical debt

In the last cycle, I've worked on triaging gnome-screensaver, gnome-shell and gdk-pixbuf bugs.

The first got merged into the second, the second got plenty of outdated bugs closed, and priorities re-evaluated as a result.

I wrangled old patches and cleaned up gdk-pixbuf. We still have architectural problems in the library for huge images, but at least we're up to a state where we know what the problems are, not being buried in Bugzilla.

Foundation building

A couple of projects got started that didn't reached maturation yet. I'm pretty happy that we're able to use gnome-books (part of gnome-documents) today to read Comic books. ePub support is coming!

Grilo saw plenty of activity. The oft requested "properties" page in Totem is closer than ever, so is series grouping.

In December, Allan and I met with the ABRT team, and we've landed some changes we discussed there, including a simple "Report bugs" toggle in the Privacy settings, with a link to the OS' privacy policy. The gnome-abrt application had a facelift, but we got somewhat stuck on technical problems, which should get solved in the next cycle. The notifications were also streamlined and simplified.

I'm a fan

Of the new overlay scrollbars, and the new gnome-shell notification handling. And I'm cheering on co-new app in 3.16, GNOME Calendar.

There's plenty more new and interesting stuff in the release, but I would just be duplicating much of the GNOME 3.16 release notes.

Hardware support news

Trackballs

I dusted off (literally) my Logitech Marble trackball to replace the Intuos tablet + mouse combination that I was using to cut down on the lateral movement of my right arm which led to back pains.

Not that you care about that one bit, but that meant that I needed a way to get a scroll wheel working with this scroll-wheel less trackball. That's now implemented in gnome-settings-daemon for GNOME 3.16. You'd run:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.trackball scroll-wheel-emulation-button 8

With "8" being the mouse button number to use to make the trackball ball into a wheel. We plan to add an interface to configure this in the Settings.

Touchscreens

Touchscreens are now switched off when the screensaver is on. This means you'll usually need to use one of the hardware buttons on tablets, or a mouse or keyboard on laptops to turn the screen back on.

Note that you'll need a kernel patch to avoid surprises when the touchscreen is re-enabled.

More touchscreens

The driver for the Goodix touchscreen found in the Onda v975w is now upstream as well.

And now for some hardware (Onda v975w)

Prodded by Adam Williamson's fedlet work, and by my inability to getting an Android phone to display anything, I bought an x86 tablet.

At first, I was more interested in buying a brand-name one, such as the Dell Venue 8 Pro Adam has, or the Lenovo Miix 2 that Benjamin Tissoires doesn't seem to get enough time to hack on. But all those tablets are around 300€ at most retailers around, and have a smaller 7 or 8-inch screen.

So I bought a "not exported out of China" tablet, the 10" Onda v975w. The prospect of getting a no-name tablet scared me a little. Would it be as "good" (read bad) as a PadMini or an Action Pad?

Vrrrroooom.

Well, the hardware's pretty decent, and feels rather solid. There's a small amount of light leakage on the side of the touchscreen, but not something too noticeable. I wish it had a button on the bezel to mimick the Windows button on some other tablets, but the edge gestures should replace it nicely.

The screen is pretty gorgeous and its high DPI triggers the eponymous mode in GNOME.

With help of various folks (Larry Finger, and the aforementioned Benjamin and Adam), I got the tablet to a state where I could use it to replace my force-obsoleted iPad 1 to read comic books.

I've put up a wiki page with the status of hardware/kernel support. It's doesn't contain all my notes just yet (sound is working, touchscreen will work very very soon, and various "basic" features are being worked on).

I'll be putting up the fixed-up Wi-Fi driver and more instructions about installation on the Wiki page.

And if you want to make the jump, the tablets are available at $150 plus postage from Aliexpress.

Update: On Google+ and in comments of this blog, it was pointed out that the seller on Aliexpress was trying to scam people. All my apologies, I just selected the cheapest from this website. I personally bought it on Amazon.fr using NewTec24 FR as the vendor.

COSCUP 2011: Taipei

Just got back from Taipei, where I attended COSCUP, alongside troublemaker Xan López, both of us having been invited to represent GNOME.

Pre-COSCUP

After a fairly smooth but long flight (followed by a shorter flight from Hong-Kong), I landed in Taipei International Airport where I met Max, holding a card with a GNOME foot and my name on it, at the arrivals hall. Max then drove me to the hotel, or rather, he was my driver to the hotel, as he insisted that I ride in the back seat rather than up front alongside him (I think you'll see a pattern emerging soon).

Our very nice and modern hotel (with “North-European furniture”, as the brochure said, and it did indeed have Ikea branded glasses in the bathroom) was a stone's throw away from the Nangang Software Park MRT (metro) station.

I only saw those on TV when I was a kid.

I proceeded to catch up on my sleep, after a quick look at the TV channels (Hackers!).

Garbage!

The next morning, thanks to Max' helpful cue cards, I managed to get myself a network adapter and cable out of  Guanghua Digital Plaza. This place must be an absolute dream for people who like making their own computers, though the newness of the hardware is dependent on the use. No Bluetooth 4.0 dongles, but the latest in anime shaped USB sticks.

Blade Runner, day time.

After being reminded on the plane quite how important business cards were, I asked the hotel reception whether they could help me get this sorted. After 10 minutes of calls by the enormously helpful receptionist, Max arrived from another airport run with Xan. Ten more minutes of phone calls, Max drove me to the print shop, where they live designed my business cards. It took a good half hour. At which point I should mention that during that whole time Max's wife was in the car, double-parked not very far from the shop. And that Max managed to arrange for the business cards to arrive at the hotel.



Snooze, mail, and we got ready for the speaker's dinner. In the lobby, we met David Cuartielles, the co-founder of the Arduino project, and Pofeng, one of the organisers. Pofeng proceeded to organise for my business cards to be delivered to the dinner we were just going to.


Dinner, num-num, early night.


COSCUP


I'll cut short on the presentations, as most of the slides and videos should find their ways online soon. Jonathan Corbet made a nice feature out of my presentation (which was followed by Aaron Seigo's Plasma active on tablets talk).

Demo time!

Side note, if you cannot access the Linux Weekly News article, you can wait a week, or give to Friends of GNOME, and get a free LWN subscription.


The talk was well received, and a few hardware makers are interested in our approach.


Xan's presentation was also well received, and we started discussing the idea of Epiphany's web applications integration using standardised metadata information, as Firefox also needs such integration.


I would advise future organisers of GUADECs and associated to talk to the organisers of COSCUP in terms of getting staff on the grounds, online social interactions (including COSCUP Cheese), or even the mobile apps for the conference.


Social and touring

Xan hacking.

David hacking.

We tried our best to mingle amongst the conversations during the conference, but it's soon fairly obvious that the Westerners end up together, if only because we were all tourists. Which is how I ended up spending a fair bit of time with the Beijing-based German Ollo, Berlin-based Frenchman Paul Rouget (who's just bad at Mario), Malmö-based Spaniard David, Living-out-of-a-suitcase Xan, and Taipei-based Englishman James.


We spent some time trying to find veggie food for Xan in the night markets, amongst the game arcades, Angry Birds T-Shirts, and potent smell of soy sauce (no, not the same one you have in your cupboard).


The day after the end of the conference, the speakers were invited to a tour of the city. We went up Taipei 101 (where my mild acrophobia made me feel queasy looking down the emergency stairwell, 90 stories to the bottom), and down it for some gadgets shopping, and the most awesomest dumplings in the existence of the world at Din Tai Fung.


This was followed by a visit of the National Palace Museum (where you could see the most amazing work on ivory, and jade, real craftsmanship), and the change of guard at Martyr's Shrine.


Tourist information


The working hours are mostly European ones, but they're not in sync with the sun. So getting out of a dark building at around 10 AM means that you'll be in the noon sun, and nearly blinded. Bring sunglasses.


It's really hot and humid (BBC Weather mentioned 36 Celsius, with 86% humidity for last Monday), bring light clothes. Women can buy a sun-umbrella locally. Bring a napkin/cloth to wipe your face.


It's part of culture to exchange gifts amongst friends. Even if you don't have any friends there yet, the people are so nice that you are bound to feel that they deserve those gifts anyway. Bring gifts, especially foodstuff.


Don't look like a plonker by not bringing business cards to any business meeting (like I did). You can probably get them printed in Taipei (expect to pay around 200NT for 200 business cards, eg. around 5£). Bring name cards (as they call them there).


You're in the Republic of China, not the communist People's Republic Of China.


And read the metro map properly...


Thanks


My wholehearted thanks to all the COSCUP organisers, and the conference itself, for inviting us to Taipei, taking great care of us, and sponsoring our accommodation, to the well-connected Emily Chen (who everyone seemed to know) who proposed me for a talk, Max and his wife, for being the best of hosts (and for the Stephen Chow DVDs!), and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my flight there.


I can now say I've been to Asia, crossing a bridge in Istanbul doesn't really count :)

Small tablet improvements

I recently added two new plugins to gnome-settings-daemon, which should make life a little bit better on tablet computers, such as the WeTab/ExoPC that most MeeGo developers seem to have lying around.

The first plugin is the orientation plugin, which will read the orientation from udev (which itself reads it from the accelerometer), and rotate the display and the input touchscreen as appropriate.

The second plugin is the cursor plugin, which will simply hide the mouse cursor when you don't have a mouse attached to a computer with a touchscreen.

Related to those are two gnome-shell bugs. Related to orientation is this bug about providing smoother XRandR transitions in gnome-shell, and related to cursor is a way to show activity in the shell panel when a busy cursor would be shown.

No screenshots, because a vertical desktop with no cursor isn't that interesting.

If you're interested in testing out this on a WeTab, you'll need the accelerometer driver in the kernel, udev git (or udev 172 when it's released) and gnome-settings-daemon master.

And if you want support for another tablet device, check out this discussion on the linux-input list, and drop me a mail if you need more guidance.