GNOME 3.10 is coming!

The new release is coming! As has been the case for the past couple of releases, I've mostly been shepherding great work by other contributors, and I'll detail my limited contributions beyond mere bug fixing.

Wayland support

I've done some work on enabling clutter-gtk applications to be able to run on  Wayland though the harder work of implementing sub-surfaces is still pending.

Giovanni has done incredible work on mutter to start moving some of the X11 dependent code inside the compositor, which should allow you to run a (cut down) Wayland session using gnome-shell.

This also means that Thomas Wood's redesigned Displays panel has Wayland support. A perfect storm of changes for one of the only panels that received little attention since the GNOME 2.x days.

The new displays panel with a TV that claims to be oh so small

Date & Time redesign

Zeeshan, through his work on Geoclue2, and Kalev, through his Summer of Code project, have completely redesigned the Date & Time panel. Aside from being easier to setup, it means that we can finally implement the automatic timezone switching depending on your location.

The new Date & Time panel

BlueZ 5 support

GNOME is the first major desktop to ship with BlueZ 5 support, thanks to work by Gustavo Padovan and Emilio Pozuelo Monfort.

The older version was not supported anymore, and the new version allows us to support things like "Just Works" pairing, better support of audio devices (though the PulseAudio 5.x release to support this is only coming shortly after GNOME 3.10) and a much better architecture for a more stable operation.

GNOME 3.12 should see a redesigned Bluetooth panel, to match current best practices on other platforms (such as merging the management and pairing wizard UIs into one).

Bluetooth devices in use

Miscellaneous

Intuos 4 OLEDs

OLED support for Wacom Intuos 4 tablets (as seen above, thanks Przemo), media keys support for MPRIS applications such as Spotify (thanks to Michael Wood and Lars Uebernickel), updated UI for the Universal Access panel (the ever present Matthias Clasen), support for many more fingerprint readers in libfprint (thanks Vasily Khoruzhick).

Redesigned Universal Access panel

And to my contributions

More work on Videos. Totem 3.10 is still based on the same interface as in GNOME 3.8, but some work has been on the master branch towards the new UI, with some of the features getting backported. We have:

• new session management for when Totem crashes
• support for chapters within files (such as Matroska videos)
• Wayland bug fixes in GTK+, clutter and the combined clutter-gtk
• a completed GDBus port
• Working overlaid controls (though their behaviour isn't quite up to scratch)
• Remote files support in Grilo, including support for Recent files
• Started work on merging the various sidebars within the main view (which included landing GtkSearchBar in GTK+)
• libquvi 0.9 support

On top of which you'll find the usual mix of bug fixes, small features, itch scratching, and swamp-draining in finger-pointing fests.

I also spent quite a bit of time on a side project that didn't come to fruition at this time, but I hope to be able to post some details soon.

GUADEC Hardware giveaway: Update

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.

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.

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.

[1]: Or near enough for some of the items :)

[2]: I made my pre-selection based on the possible uses for the hardware.

Did somebody say "FreeFA"?

Little birdy tells me that we're playing football again this year, so don't forget to sign up!

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.

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.

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:

• 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.

The code currently in geocode-glib for IP geocoding will likely move there when the project has been kickstarted.

I hope this clears any misconceptions people might have about geocode-glib, or, more likely, about the future of geoclue.