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.

Shared-mime-info translations now at Transifex.net

Which means translations don't make any more work for me:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2009-October/011087.html

Pushing patches

AFC backend

A couple of hours ago, I committed the AFC backend to gvfs. This means you should now be able to access the storage on your iPhones and iPod Touches. Note that this does not include music syncing yet, as the feature would belong in libgpod.

This feature has also available in Fedora 12 repositories for a couple of weeks. Just make sure you install gvfs-afc.

Moblin work

After updating gupnp in rawhide a bit too quick, I was left with the task to port bickley to gupnp 0.13. Rygel is working nicely with this after a bit of back and forth with Zeeshan. The preferences still need a bit of love though.

I also ported network-manager-netbook to NetworkManager 0.8 with Dan's help.

Finally, dalston's volume control bits got updated cut'n'paste code from the latest gnome-media.

All the patches are sitting in the upstream bugzillas or repos, and are already in the Fedora 12 Moblin packages.

nautilus-sendto plugin API

As promised in the nautilus-sendto module proposal, I fixed up the plugin API, wrote API docs, and exported the plugin functionality.

I've already patched Empathy to carry its own nautilus-sendto plugin, and will be moving the Pidgin and Bluetooth plugins in the near future.

Too many modules

Today I released GNOME 2.28.0 versions of:

- totem-pl-parser and totem

- gnome-bluetooth

- gnome-media

- and gnome-user-share

I also released a new nautilus-sendto, with a revised GNOME-ish version number.

Both gnome-bluetooth and totem are also due 2.28.1 releases to fix a couple of buglets.

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.

GUADEC digits

Have you been to 8, 9, 10 GUADECs?

Let us know! We're still looking for a GNOMie with a perfect attendance.

Bad at updates, Easy 5.1

Looks like I didn't blog one bit after GCDS (or usefully during). I won't do it usefully now either.

gnome-volume-control (in master) has profile switching support. You can now disable devices you're not interested in, and setup 5.1 support for your desktop in 2 clicks.


Input switches (and highlights of the volume control BoF) to come later.

FreeFA!

Remember, tomorrow (Thursday 9th July 2009), 15:00 to 17:00 ¹, is FreeFA.

Join in at around 14:40-45, join us in front of the main University Building. We'll get to the pitch by foot.

Summing up:

• Bring your football kit (trainers, or moulded shoes, shinpads)
• Bring T-Shirts of different colours (at least a clear and dark one)
• Show up at 14:40
  

The teams haven't been set up yet, as we don't know whether we'll have smaller goals available (it's currently setup as a full-fledged 11-a-side pitch).

If you show up late, you won't be able to play...

¹: Might last a bit longer

«Todos es mejor con Bluetooth»

Ladies and gents. Tomorrow, the great Bluetooth presentation! Come and join in the chuckles. A superb presentation that the New York Times calls «Inexplicably enticing», an anonymous KDE developer say it's «Dumbed down, and not Cross-desktop und so weiter».

Where: Palacio de la Música
When: 12:00 to 12:30
Who: Y.T.
What: ¡la mejor presentación de Bluetooth en el mundo!

GCDS: Discrimination by accent

My level of Spanish being what it is, and my accent being what it is, my cab ride to Las Palmas cost me some €60 from the airport, and that's after the cabbie switched off the meter...

Apparently, the «Catalina Park» apartments booked by the nice people at the GNOME Foundation, have a namesake near Playa de Inglés.


From top to bottom: where I wanted to go, where I was, where I ended up (locations provided «by ear», do not try to replicate at home). Yippee!



FreeFA

In other news the FreeFA tournament is going to happen next Thursday, from 15:00 to 17:00. I'll put the details onto the Wiki when I can remember my password.

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.

FreeFA '09

If you're interested in joining in for some «Futbol» at GCDS, add your name to the list on the Wiki, and bring your shoes/shinpads/other bits of kit.

We don't have a date and time settled for it yet, so make sure you check the schedule when at the conference.

As every year, if you don't bring shinpads and you break your leg in two, you'll have little sympathy.

fprintd integration with KDE

I was pointed today to this blog, which shows the integration work being done in KDE with fprintd. Happy to see all that work on the daemon and the documentation is coming to good use.

DBusGProxy introspection, where art thou?

I tried to beat the wash cycle on my washing machine at doing something useful[1].

Tried to add Introspection support to gnome-bluetooth.

The result nearly works, as it seems that there's no bindings for DBusGProxy in gobject-introspection...

** WARNING **: Entry 'DBusGProxy' not found

If somebody knows...

[1]: I played football twice today, and needed to wash my kit again, as I'll be playing tomorrow, though I hope we'll play better than we did this evening, shrug.

A little (geo)clue

Over the past week, I've been working a little on Geoclue stuff.

First up is a Geoclue plugin for gnome-bluetooth, which allows you to set up your Bluetooth GPS device.


This will work best with the patches in the Geoclue bugzilla, so that the selection is instant-apply.

The second piece of work is a Skyhook Geoclue provider. This code manages to put me within 20 yards of my house, though we should be getting NetworkManager's help to get the AP's MAC address.

Finally, my Geoclue Firefox patch should soon be getting reviewed. It's been long enough that I forgot how to build Mozilla (probably a good thing).

As an added bonus, I've sent a patch against NetworkManager to Dan with a gnome-bluetooth plugin, which should allow users to just tick a box to set up PANU Internet access.

Now, we just need somebody reviewing all those Geoclue patches. Maintainer, where are you at?

gdb trick

I had a problem with gnome-bluetooth's wizard, a couple of days ago, that I couldn't reproduce when running under gdb. Turns out that I'm too slow at typing or something, and the problem was a race (though a slow one).

There's a few tips and tricks in this class material. The one I was interested in was:
(gdb) break foobar_new
(gdb) commands
thread apply all bt
continue
end

Then, every time you hit that break point, you'll get a backtrace, and the program will continue. I fixed that bug I saw :)

I'm upstream!

Or at least, my Wacom Bluetooth tablet driver is. I was wondering in which tree it was lost. You'll still need a patch to bluetoothd though.

Simplez! Simple Pairing support now in gnome-bluetooth.

After a furious hacking session (and a bunch of paper-drawn mockups), Simple Pairing support is now in gnome-bluetooth.


Simple Pairing is an optional part of the Bluetooth 2.1 spec, which makes pairing Bluetooth device simpler. For most devices, simply check that the passkey matches on your computer and the device, or for headsets, do nothing, and voila, paired.

Code is in git master, release to follow shortly.

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 :)