Broadcom CrystalHD 70015
Fabiano Fidêncio will be working on integrating the GStreamer plugin for it upstream, and making sure that the default experience with those devices is good in Fedora. The less powerful 70012 card is now in my 6-year old Dell laptop to test Fabiano's work.
Dell Wireless 5520 3G modem
The 3G modem that's been ousted from the Dell laptop to make room for the CrystalHD will go to Aleksander Morgado, in his "torture chamber" (his words) for ModemManager.
iPod Touch 2G
The iPod is going to Adam Reviczky who's going to look into Notes syncing over IMAP (hopefully, it looks like the device might be too old) and for mobile website testing.
Tuesday, 6 August 2013
Sunday, 21 July 2013
Week-end hacks #2
More thumbnailer work, as it's something I can do 20 minutes of, and then go and do something else.
As my thumbnailers were starting to get samey (either the code would spit out PNG/JPEG data, or would create an actual GdkPixbuf), I've created a skeleton file that handles most of the dirty work. It's available on github.
I've also created a MOBI thumbnailer, that's integrated to gnome-epub-thumbnailer and in release 1.2.
As my thumbnailers were starting to get samey (either the code would spit out PNG/JPEG data, or would create an actual GdkPixbuf), I've created a skeleton file that handles most of the dirty work. It's available on github.
I've also created a MOBI thumbnailer, that's integrated to gnome-epub-thumbnailer and in release 1.2.
Saturday, 20 July 2013
GUADEC[1] Hardware giveaway
I'm cleaning up my hardware chest, and giving away some hardware to a good home. I intend on travelling with those that I found a new home for at GUADEC. All of them are in good working condition. If there is a charger or power supply, it will be a UK one.
Drop me a mail with your intended usage (preferably GNOME or kernel related), or need some more info about the devices.
Up for grabs
Palm Pilot Tungsten E2
The predecessor to all your new-fangled smartphones. This one could even do Bluetooth syncing using gnome-pilot, all those years ago. Might be nice as a remote control of some sort, or legacy support for Pilots.
D-Link DIR-615 Wi-Fi N router
Works with DD-WRT. Would be great to work with DD-WRT or associated on a way to configure those through a GNOME UI à-la Airport base stations.
HP iPaq 914
Euro plug. Apparently this can't run Linux... Yet!
DXR3 card
Offload your MPEG2 decoding to this PCI card.
iPod Touch 2G
Too old to run any recent iOS, but good enough to show off your web apps skills, or work on Notes sync with IMAP servers.
Broadcom Crystal HD mini-PCIE 70015 and 70012
2 video decoder cards usable with Linux. You'd need to port the GStreamer plugin to GStreamer 1.0 to get those (or one of those at least).
Plantronics and Motorola Bluetooth headsets
Not the newest devices, but they work.
Red Hat branded power adapter
USB to Nokia/Motorola with this retractable extension lead.
On their way to a good home [2]
Logitech MX 5000 pack and diNovo keyboard
Space-age mouse and keyboard set. Benjamin Tissoires will be getting the (now not so much space age as grubby and outdated) pack to hopefully implement HID++ 1.0 in the kernel.
The diNovo keyboard is a nice little Bluetooth keyboard for a media PC or the likes, even has the tiniest of trackpads.
Logitech 9000, PS3 Eye and Creative OV511-based webcams
Hans de Goede will get those to make them work out-of-the-box in Fedora, and upstream, trying to clean up some hacks he gave me for those a long time ago.
No-name USB GPS dongle and Tom-Tom Bluetooth GPS
For Zeeshan, just in case he gets bored implementing geoclue2.
Nokia N82 and Palm Centro
For Dan Williams. ModemManager's testing gear is growing.
Belkin G and Dell 1450 Wi-Fi USB dongles
Giovanni and Jasper will enjoy those Wi-Fi dongles that will create bugs in gnome-shell's network menu and the new aggregate menu.
[2]: I made my pre-selection based on the possible uses for the hardware.
Friday, 19 July 2013
Did somebody say "FreeFA"?
Little birdy tells me that we're playing football again this year, so don't forget to sign up!
Monday, 15 July 2013
Week-end hacks
Last week, I picked up a Kobo Mini e-reader from my local FNAC store for (less than) 40€ and loaded it up with books from the latest Humble eBook Bundle. As generic document icons aren't really that great to recognise the books, I wrote a small thumbnailer for it, which is now available in GNOME git.
The release is available on the GNOME FTP site, and somebody packaging it up for Fedora would be greatly appreciated.
The other week-end hack was a way to run a program with user-defined DNS servers, rather than relying on the system's /etc/resolv.conf file. It only supports IPv4, but it was good enough to run a few command-line utilities with those specific DNS servers.
Some DRM-free e-books.
The release is available on the GNOME FTP site, and somebody packaging it up for Fedora would be greatly appreciated.
The other week-end hack was a way to run a program with user-defined DNS servers, rather than relying on the system's /etc/resolv.conf file. It only supports IPv4, but it was good enough to run a few command-line utilities with those specific DNS servers.
Thursday, 4 April 2013
Geocluing the desktop, slowly
Over the past couple of months, Satabdi has been working during her Outreach Program for Women on geocode-glib, and Zeeshan more recently joined us to help with cleaning up some of the code.
As Satabdi's program is now finished (though not her involvement!), and a new GNOME development cycle has started, I'll try to explain where geocode-glib fits in, and answer some questions on the future of Geoclue.
(Reverse-)Geocoding
First and foremost, geocode-glib is a geocoding and reverse geocoding library. It uses Yahoo! web services for this, though we're investigating using Nominatim for this in the future.
This replaces the convoluted implementations for those two services in geoclue (3 if you include Address as a service). The API should be mostly stable now, and we'll soon start porting a few applications to it (Evolution and Empathy come to mind).
The library also includes a GeocodeLocation object. This will be useful later.
GeoIP
geocode-glib, thanks to Satabdi's work, includes a GeoIP server, to be installed on GNOME servers eventually, which uses data from MaxMind to locate a user connected to the Internet from the IP address. We also have a client library to access this server.
This is usually good enough to locate a user in a city, or a country, which would help us with many integration points in GNOME, such as the upcoming Date and Time panel re-design.
But this code isn't really for you, app developers.
Geoclue
A fine project, but the codebase is showing its age (dbus-glib!), and the decision, well, not to take decisions on which backends to use for various services make it fragile. This is a maintenance problem, both for in terms of making sure all the services are kept working, and that geoclue itself is kept stable.
So we'll start a reimplementation of Geoclue. The goals are:
I hope this clears any misconceptions people might have about geocode-glib, or, more likely, about the future of geoclue.
As Satabdi's program is now finished (though not her involvement!), and a new GNOME development cycle has started, I'll try to explain where geocode-glib fits in, and answer some questions on the future of Geoclue.
(Reverse-)Geocoding
First and foremost, geocode-glib is a geocoding and reverse geocoding library. It uses Yahoo! web services for this, though we're investigating using Nominatim for this in the future.
This replaces the convoluted implementations for those two services in geoclue (3 if you include Address as a service). The API should be mostly stable now, and we'll soon start porting a few applications to it (Evolution and Empathy come to mind).
The library also includes a GeocodeLocation object. This will be useful later.
GeoIP
geocode-glib, thanks to Satabdi's work, includes a GeoIP server, to be installed on GNOME servers eventually, which uses data from MaxMind to locate a user connected to the Internet from the IP address. We also have a client library to access this server.
This is usually good enough to locate a user in a city, or a country, which would help us with many integration points in GNOME, such as the upcoming Date and Time panel re-design.
But this code isn't really for you, app developers.
Geoclue
A fine project, but the codebase is showing its age (dbus-glib!), and the decision, well, not to take decisions on which backends to use for various services make it fragile. This is a maintenance problem, both for in terms of making sure all the services are kept working, and that geoclue itself is kept stable.
So we'll start a reimplementation of Geoclue. The goals are:
- Trimmed down API, just for positioning
- Smaller, but more integrated, selection of ways to get the positioning (GPS from your integrated WWAN modem, Wi-Fi AP data, IP address, no discrete GPS or manual location)
- Power-saving, by aggregating requests from all the applications
- and finally, privacy, where only applications that you allow to request your location can get it, and only with an accuracy as needed for the application.
I hope this clears any misconceptions people might have about geocode-glib, or, more likely, about the future of geoclue.
Friday, 1 February 2013
Power management in GNOME 3.8
In the past couple of weeks, apart from reviewing very many patches for gnome-control-center (especially for new and re-designed panels), I've been working on updating the power management handling in GNOME.
Test suite
The first change is that we have a test suite (currently with 15 separate tests) to test interaction between gnome-settings-daemon's power management and various session and system components. This is thanks to Martin Pitt, and his work on python-dbusmock.
We'll try and add new tests as bug reports come in to avoid regressions, although some cases will remain untested because of limitations in our logging.
Screensaver and backlight interaction
With gnome-shell becoming the sole screensaver (after the removal of fallback mode, and the obsoletion of gnome-screensaver), we've been able to streamline the code handling the various screen backlight power levels.
Your screen will now turn off as soon as the screensaver kicks in, moving your mouse in the screensaver will turn it back on for 20 seconds before turning off again, and when to dim (if you've chosen so) is dependent on whether you're on battery or not, and the default idle time (eg. if your screen turns off after 5 minutes of inactivity, the screen will dim after 4). This makes the behaviour more consistent, and predictable, compared to the mish-mash of settings we had before, where some delays were available for change in the UI, and others only through GSettings or gnome-tweak-tool.
Those constants are separate from the code, and exported to the test suite so they are flexible and can be changed if the behaviour doesn't exactly match what users are expecting.
The other change relating to that, is that the screen shield will now always pop down when the screensaver kicks in (thanks to Giovanni for the gnome-shell work). This doesn't mean that you'll have to enter your password each time, but only after the "lock delay" if you've set one.
We've also added a number of nice touches, like the screen turning back on for a short period when you plug or unplug your laptop, made sure that your laptop screen gets turned off and your session locked when closing the lid and turn off the backlight for machines where suspend causes the backlight to come back on temporarily (as seen on MacBooks).
Very very idle
We've also added a long-requested feature: the ability to force logout after a period of idle. This is useful in kiosk and computer lab situations, and is only available through GSettings. As we've added support for this feature (warning prior to logging out, with the screen turning on for a couple of seconds when the warning shows up), we've realised that the infrastructure is the same for automatic suspend/hibernate situation. This means I expect to change the default "long idle" behaviour to suspending. This will still be changeable in the Power preferences. This should land after 3.7.5, and don't worry, we'll make this change very visible in the release notes :)
Test suite
The first change is that we have a test suite (currently with 15 separate tests) to test interaction between gnome-settings-daemon's power management and various session and system components. This is thanks to Martin Pitt, and his work on python-dbusmock.
We'll try and add new tests as bug reports come in to avoid regressions, although some cases will remain untested because of limitations in our logging.
All clear
Screensaver and backlight interaction
With gnome-shell becoming the sole screensaver (after the removal of fallback mode, and the obsoletion of gnome-screensaver), we've been able to streamline the code handling the various screen backlight power levels.
Your screen will now turn off as soon as the screensaver kicks in, moving your mouse in the screensaver will turn it back on for 20 seconds before turning off again, and when to dim (if you've chosen so) is dependent on whether you're on battery or not, and the default idle time (eg. if your screen turns off after 5 minutes of inactivity, the screen will dim after 4). This makes the behaviour more consistent, and predictable, compared to the mish-mash of settings we had before, where some delays were available for change in the UI, and others only through GSettings or gnome-tweak-tool.
Those constants are separate from the code, and exported to the test suite so they are flexible and can be changed if the behaviour doesn't exactly match what users are expecting.
The other change relating to that, is that the screen shield will now always pop down when the screensaver kicks in (thanks to Giovanni for the gnome-shell work). This doesn't mean that you'll have to enter your password each time, but only after the "lock delay" if you've set one.
We've also added a number of nice touches, like the screen turning back on for a short period when you plug or unplug your laptop, made sure that your laptop screen gets turned off and your session locked when closing the lid and turn off the backlight for machines where suspend causes the backlight to come back on temporarily (as seen on MacBooks).
Very very idle
We've also added a long-requested feature: the ability to force logout after a period of idle. This is useful in kiosk and computer lab situations, and is only available through GSettings. As we've added support for this feature (warning prior to logging out, with the screen turning on for a couple of seconds when the warning shows up), we've realised that the infrastructure is the same for automatic suspend/hibernate situation. This means I expect to change the default "long idle" behaviour to suspending. This will still be changeable in the Power preferences. This should land after 3.7.5, and don't worry, we'll make this change very visible in the release notes :)
*I* am not suspending by default
Inhibit
But you don't want to suspend, you really don't.
GNOME supports the draft FreeDesktop "Idle inhibition" specification, as implemented by KDE, which hopefully means that more third-party applications should start behaving better when playing back films, in presentation mode, or for large overnight downloads. This should hopefully get out of draft status before the GNOME 3.8 release.
We also have a gnome-session-inhibit tool available in gnome-session for your scripting needs.
Colophon
All the changes mentioned should be available in GNOME 3.7.5, and I will be available to take complaints at FOSDEM this week-end.
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