¿ Qué estabas haciendo ?

9 years after my first and only GUADEC, I've finally been able to go back to GUADEC, and guess what? It was amazing to be there!

This was a great opportunity to meet plenty of people I only knew from IRC, in particular seb128 whom I have known for 10 years and never met. And let's not forget all our amazing interns from the OPW and GSoC programs, this was very refreshing to see how enthusiastic they all were about GUADEC.

Quick memory drop of the main highlights for this week :

• Lots of tapas, Estrella Galicia and beach ;)

• Summer evenings in A Coruña can get cold, don't forget to take some kind of sweater with you when you travel there!
• In the end, I've done a lot more talking with people in the lobby and sitting in the sunny grass than actual talk attendance
• It's getting harder and harder to keep the existence of the French cabal secret, we'll have to do something about this!
• Huge kudos to the organizers, everything was perfectly organized, network was great (save for the unexpected flood ;), and also thanks to the sponsors for the various parties and for making that event possible

 As for the talks, here are the things I've done/attended during this week:

• I've been to Nathan Willis "How to fix a font" talk, interesting overview of various font issues. He was also looking for ways to get native speakers feedback since he is sometimes designing cyrillic fonts, and it can be hard to know what looks good or not. One possible way of achieving this would be to get the various GNOME language teams involved
• Zeeshan made a presentation about GNOME Boxes, cool as usual, but he could have done better on the photos of me he used ;)
• Marc-André and I gave a talk about building Windows applications from your linux application using MinGW, attendance was on the low side (about 15 people), but everyone seemed very interested in building for Windows. Quick spoiler for the talk: mingw32-configure && make -j4, all the other gory details can be found in our slides
• Together with some members of the French cabal GNOME-fr, I attended a meeting with the board to defend a Strasbourg bid for GUADEC 2013, it was more of a session to discuss about the most important items to have in the bid rather than an actual defence, I summed up my notes in a (French) email. Now we've got work to do :)
• We also had a 2 hour meeting about GNOME Boxes design. Marc-André, Zeeshan and Jonathan were present as well as our designers (Jakub and Jon), our Summer of Code students, Fidêncio and Jovanka, and other members of the SPICE team (Alon and Hans). This was a pretty productive meeting where we could go over the various small issues in Boxes design that were uncovered during development, and discuss with the designers how to best fix them
• Last but not least, on Sunday all the GSoC and OPW interns who could attend GUADEC gave lightning talks to present their work. All the talks went well, and some very cool stuff was presented. It was just great to meet all these new heads and to feel all this energy around GNOME and free software

Fidêncio and Jovanka giving their lightning talks

All in all, this GUADEC was a wonderful experience, I'm very happy to have been there. See you all next year! Hopefully in Strasbourg ;)

The last 3 photos in this post were taken by Ana Rey and are shared under a CC BY-SA 2.0 licence

Outside Boxes

oVirt

Let's start this post with a quick presentation of oVirt (you'll understand why in a few paragraphs...).
oVirt is a free project providing management, monitoring and provisioning of KVM virtual machines on multiple hosts. It comes with a web interface to create and manage virtual machines, hypervisor nodes, storage, ... and with a user portal for those who just want to connect to an already existing virtual machine.
The way the user portal works is that you log into the portal from your browser, then you choose the virtual machine you want to connect to, and a browser plugin will take over and spawn an external binary (these days it's remote-viewer)
oVirt also comes with an extensive REST API which lets you do programmatically the same thing as you can do from oVirt web UIs. Moreover, it has an extensive documentation.

But what about GNOME?

And now we are finally coming as to why I'm talking about all of this :) Lately, I've been hacking on Boxes, and since one of its goals is to view, access, and use shared connection / machine, I've decided it would be fun to make it support oVirt connections! This would make it easier for Boxes users to connect to oVirt virtual machines without having to go through their browser.

librest already provides a good low-level GObject library to access REST services (though it was missing authentication support), so I used it to build a higher level library which wraps the oVirt REST accesses: libgovirt. This library uses GObject and gobject-introspection, which gives bindings to several other languages for free (including vala which is needed for Boxes). It also provides asynchronous methods for all its remote operations.
The library is still young and only implements the few REST operations I needed (list oVirt virtual machines, get VM connection details, generate temporary VM display password, ...), but this is enough for Boxes needs ;)

Once this library was in good shape, using it in Boxes was quite easy as the existing code was modular enough. All I had to do was to add a new URI type (ovirt://), and add a new Machine subclass to handle oVirt VMs, but most of the work is done by the libgovirt library.

This work is not yet merged upstream but can be seen in my personal git repository. After some small cleanups and a libgovirt release, it should be in good shape for an upstream review and integration. As for libgovirt, there is a lot of API to bind (help welcome!), but binding this new 3.1 API will be mandatory to be able to connect to all oVirt-managed VMs. One possible way forward for libgovirt would be to leverage the python oVirt REST binding generator from ovirt-engine-sdk.

And before ending this blog post, mandatory screenshots!

Authentication to an oVirt broker

Boxes from the oVirt broker

Going to FOSDEM!

This is this time of the year again, FOSDEM will take place in Brussels next week-end. This is one of my favourite free software event, lots of interesting talks, lots of interesting people, and lots of energy everywhere. This year, it looks like it will be the best FOSDEM ever! More devrooms, more than 400 talks, more everything!

I've helped again organizing the crossdesktop devroom. Among these talks, I can only recommend the gnome-boxes presentation that Marc-André and Zeeshan will be giving :) While I'm at it, here are a few more shameless plugs: Hans de Goede will be giving 2 SPICE talks in the Virtualization devroom, one general presentation of SPICE, and one where he will describe the USB redirection support in SPICE. And Alon Levy will present his work to interact with an X server through SPICE without using a virtual machine.

Last but not least, there will also be a GNOME booth with some goodies...

See you all there in a few days!

Unpacking Boxes...

For the impatient people running Fedora 16 but who still want to get an aperçu of Boxes, today's your lucky day! I set up a preview repository with all the needed package to install Boxes on Fedora 16.
If you want to try it, download this file to /etc/yum.repos.d and then run  
yum install gnome-boxes && yum update

To go back to your previous setup, you can either use the convenient yum history, or remove /etc/yum.repos.d/gnome-boxes-preview.repo and use
yum remove libvirt-glib && yum distro-sync

Keep in mind that this is a new application still in heavy development, so you're likely to find bugs and missing features. But I'm sure you will enjoy it nonetheless :)

Feel free to join us in #boxes on irc.gnome.org if you have any issues, or if you just want to chat with us.

FOSDEM Crossdesktop devroom

GNOME, KDE, XFCE, ... will be present at FOSDEM this year in the crossdesktop devroom. The call for talks has been out for a few weeks now and the deadline (December 20th) is quickly approaching, it's next Tuesday! So don't delay your talk proposal any further, just email the crossdesktop devroom mailing list now :)

Talks can be specific, such as developing GNOME application with Vala; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2011 schedule might give you some inspiration.

Spicy apples

It has been a few months since I've  been hired by Red Hat to hack on Spice, and I realized I haven't blogged as much as I should have :)

Introduction

First, let me introduce Spice quickly. Spice is a protocol which then gets implemented in clients such as Vinagre (using the spice-gtk widget) and in servers (QEMU or the experimental X11 driver). Using this protocol, the video, sound, keyboard, mouse inputs and ouputs can be abstracted away from a virtual machine. This means you can run a Spice client application on one box to get the display of a QEMU virtual machine running on another box. Or you can have a big server running dozens of virtual machines, and connect to the VM you're interested in from your laptop. Or you use it in a VDI setup where you'll have N different PCs connecting to a single server running N virtual machines.

One of the thing I've done during these few months at Red Hat is to look into building a Mac client for Spice. Indeed, so far we have a linux client (as well as a GTK widget if you want to embed Spice in your applications, a Windows client, but nothing on Mac OS X. Since I was the only one in the team with a functional OS X install, I was volunteered to look into this port ;)

The long way toward Vinagre on OS X

I started by building the gtk+ OS X port. Using these build instructions, it was quite straightforward even though it took some time since there were a few bugs to fix here and there in the stack. Then I realized I needed gtk3 and that I had only built gtk2, so I started again, and fixed some more bugs (the glib maintainers really didn't want me to succeed :-) )

Once I had gtk-demo running, it was time to start thinking about my real goal, getting spice-gtk and vinagre to compile. Luckily, I had made a jhbuild moduleset for these, which I could reuse (after adapting it) for the OS X build since gtk-osx is using jhbuild too. This way, I could focus on the real porting work. The easy bits were tweaking spice-gtk build options to use gstreamer instead of pulse-audio, gthreads instead of coroutines, ... And then I finally had to do some actual porting work ;) This ranged from small fixes due to OS X BSD roots, or to older libraries on OS X, to new code to write because there was some linux/Windows specific code to handle screen detection/resolution changes. And after that, lo and behold, I could connect to my remote VM from my Mac!

Then, with the help of Marc-André, I could tackle Vinagre. This mainly meant making some Vinagre dependencies optional (namely gtk-vnc, gnome-keyring and GtkApplication) because I didn't want to compile/use dbus. After some confusion because of a regression in glib causing Vinagre to crash on startup, I was really thrilled to connect to finally connect to a virtual machine running on my work laptop from my Mac OS X laptop!

While this was great, things were far from being over :) In order for this work to be usable by other people, I had to build an application bundle, this basically means making Vinagre relocatable at runtime. Thanksfully, the work from the people porting gtk+ to OS X came to the rescue once again! They provide an ige-mac-bundler to help generate application bundles for gtk+ applications. I had to tweak it since it's not fully ready for gtk3 yet, and to figure out how to get it to change the location of libpeas plugins, typelibs, pango modules, gdk-pixbuf modules at runtime. The good new is that all these modules provide handy environment variables which help with that (PEAS_PLUGIN_LOADERS_DIR, GI_TYPELIB_PATH, PANGO_SYSCONFDIR and GDK_PIXBUF_MODULE_FILE), but it took quite a bit of trial and error to figure out all of these :) Last but not least, I wrote a few patches for Vinagre to add similar environment variables to locate its data files.

The reward

And here is the final result (disclaimer: it's still a work in progress) :

As you can see in the video above (bigger ogg version here), it's already working pretty well, you can connect to a VM, go fullscreen, sound is working, ... But as always, there are still some improvements to be done...
The most important one is to upstream the various changes I had to make in Vinagre, spice-gtk and ige-mac-bundler. For spice-gtk, this is mostly done, for Vinagre and ige-mac-bundler, I have to clean up the changes first. I also have to make building Vinagre on OS X much easier  And then, there is more work to do to polish the OS X integration, like looking at GtkOSXApplication to get the usual OS X top menu bar, finding a better looking theme, having a native GtkApplication backend, and developing native OS X code for things like monitor detection/resolution changes/... (which is currently not implemented/not working). And obviously, it also needs lots of testing :)

All in all, I'm pleased with the result so far, it's a really good basis for a rocking Spice OS X client! Any takers for working on an iOS Spice client next ?

Public Announcements

GNOME 3 in Paris

Thanks to YoBoY, there will be a GNOME 3 release party in Paris. It will happen on Friday, April 8th, registration is mandatory, and the number of available seats is limited, so register now for the party! There will be some GNOME 3 goodies ;)


Summer of Code

If you are a student, you can now apply for this year Google Summer of Code! GNOME is a mentoring organization this year again, this means you can be paid to hack on GNOME for a whole summer. Just browse our list of ideas for potential projects, or you can just write a proposal for any idea that you care about and would make GNOME even cooler!


Personal Life

I'm really happy to announce that I've started working at Red Hat last week. I have joined the Spice team and I'm looking forward to do great stuff (take over the world, this kind of things ;) with the people working there. Hopefully I'll get my own red hat soon!

GNOME and GSoC 2011

We just got the great news that GNOME got accepted to be part of Google Summer of Code 2011. This is a great opportunity for GNOME, thanks again to Google for organizing this!

The bad news is that the work is just starting for everyone :) We are looking for cool ideas for students to work on during the summer, so if you are working on a GNOME project and have ideas that would make a nice 3 months coding project for a student, please add it to our idea page.

We'll also need mentors for all the students that will have fun hacking on GNOME during the summer, you can already register to be a mentor for GNOME on melange, don't wait, register now :)

Last but not least, if you are a student, be sure to check our ideas list and our information page for students. For now it's preliminary, the ideas will be sorted in the coming week. And you don't have to limit yourself to these ideas, you can also come up with your own cool idea and describe it in your application on Google website. The application period for students hasn't opened yet, it will open in about 10 days for now. However, you can already start thinking about what project you'd like to work on, start playing with the code of the project you'd like to work on during the summer, start discussing about your idea and your application with people involved in the project, ... Remember that in the previous years, we required candidates to show us a patch they had written for a free software project, and it's really likely that we'll do the same this year. You can also drop by on #soc on irc.gnome.org if you have specific questions!

All in all, it should be a fun summer! :)

GNOME devroom at FOSDEM

This is just a public notice to let people know that this year again, I'll be handling the GNOME devroom at FOSDEM. For now I have applied to get one, let's see if we'll be lucky enough to get accepted this year again. This should be announced by the end of October.

But if you are willing to help organize GNOME presence at FOSDEM, don't wait until it's cold and nearly winter to get in touch, just tell me now! And if you have any suggestions about things to improve or things that went well in the GNOME devroom handling in the last years, let me know too!

GUADEC Paper Selection delayed

GUADEC Paper Selection has been slightly delayed, speakers should have been notified today (April 10th), this announcement will be done on Friday April 16th instead. So don't worry if you sent a paper submission and haven't heard from it yet :)

GNOME and GSoC

GNOME was once again accepted as a mentoring organization by Google for their Summer of Code!

The fun will begin later in the summer, but there are already a few things you can do to help:

• add ideas for cool things that could be done during the summer
• apply as mentor
• or just hang around on #soc to guide students looking for help

So you know what you have to do now to help GNOME have a rocking summer!

For the late birds....

For those of you that procrastinated for too long and missed the GUADEC paper submission deadline, I've got insider information... Something tells me the application interface on the GUADEC website will accept paper submissions until 23:59 UTC today (Sunday).
So this is really your last chance to propose a talk for GUADEC 2010 if you were really really late :)

On your mark, get set, go!

Only one day left!

Time is ticking away, the deadline for talk submissions for GUADEC 2010 is tomorrow evening (Saturday 20th 23:59 UTC). If you are planning go give a talk there and haven't applied yet, there's no more time for waiting, better to apply now before it's too late! :)

GUADEC Call for Papers deadline

It's nearly over us, it's coming fast!

If you want to submit a talk proposal for GUADEC 2010 (July 24, 2010 – July 30, 2010 in The Hague, The Netherlands), make sure to make your submission real soon since the deadline is Saturday, March 20th (aka "End of this week").

That's all folks!

One way to help free software projects

Free software projects are always looking for new volunteers to help, new coders, new translators, new documentation writers, ... However, sometimes you want to contribute but can't become any of those, either because you lack time, because you are already involved in other projects, or because you feel you don't have time. For some projects, another way to help is through donations, here are 2 examples for projects I'm involved with.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox has had a plugin for Magnatune for quite a while now. In addition to not being evil (their website says so, it must be true! Joke aside, they give 50% of what they sell to the artist), they give 10% back to the Rhythmbox project for every purchase through its plugin.

And since they are not evil, today they sent a $600 check to the GNOME Foundation (which we chose as the recipient for the money). So you can buy lots of cool music on Magnatune while giving money to the GNOME Foundation at the same time!

Thanks a lot to John Buckman from Magnatune who was a really nice guy to interact with and to Adam Zimmerman for all his hard work on Rhythmbox Magnatune plugin.

libgpod

libgpod is the iPod handling library used by gtkpod, rhythmbox, amarok, songbird, ... It recently gained support for most of the latest devices released by Apple (iPod Nano 5th generation, iPhone, iPod Touch) which were unsupported under Linux until now (thanks a lot to Marcan, Nikias and all the people who helped with that by the way :)

However, this development was made harder by the lack of devices to test the code on, forcing us to look for testers with the right devices and going back and forth with bug reports and bug fixes until things work as expected. So donations to the project (even small amounts) are really helpful so that we can buy these missing devices and move things forward.
This already let us fund an iPod Nano which was a tremendous help to polish support for it in libgpod, thanks to everyone that made that possible. Next on the list are an iPod Touch to make sure the iPhoneOS support is up to par, and a buttonless iPod Shuffle which is so far unsupported by libgpod.

I've already mentioned it here, but if you have old iPods you no longer use , please get in touch, they can also be helpful for testing (thanks Götz!)

FOSDEM 2010

GNOME will be present at FOSDEM and will have its own devroom on Saturday again. The schedule is now final (at least I hope so ;) ). Thanks to everyone who sent talk proposal to help make this room rock this year again!

On a related note, if you're coming to FOSDEM, let us know! This will allow us to print nice nametags (maybe!) for all gnomies around Brussels :)

Why is so hard to find a blog post title?

GSoC 2009




GNOME is a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2009. If you are a student who wants to get paid to hack all summer on free software, now is the time to apply, the deadline for application is on Friday, April 3rd.

You can find a list of ideas that have been proposed by GNOME contributors here but this list is in no way exhaustive so you can apply for any idea you care about and you think would improve the GNOME desktop!


Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox 0.12 was finally released a few weeks ago, it contains a lot of bugfixes and new features compared to the aging Rhythmbox 0.11.6. And development and bugfixing is going on in svn contrary to the impression some people had

There are 2 ideas proposed for the GSoC, one about media player synchronization (to keep Rhythmbox library and you favourite media player in sync), and one about getting information about the currently playing song (to know everything about your favourite group, get stats about the song that is playing, ...). You can find more details on the GSoC idea page on live.gnome.org

Solutions Linux

Solutions Linux will take place in Paris on the 31st March, 1st and 2nd April (this is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday this week). This year it has moved from CNIT/La Défense to Paris Expo/Porte de Versailles so this will be an exciting new experience for exhibitors ;) Mandriva and GNOME-FR both have a booth, you should definitely come to visit us, entrance is free! And there will be tshirts and stickers on the GNOME booth, and plenty of good stuff on the Mandriva booth!

FOSDEM!

It's this week-end in Brussels, so make sure to go there if you don't already have plans for the week-end! I'll arrive in Brussels on Friday evening, not sure I'll be able to attend the beer party. Then I'll enjoy most of the great talks in the GNOME devroom and spend some time on the Mandriva booth as well. And am not sure yet what I'll be doing on Saturday evening, I guess something with the GNOMErs. Or the Mandrivians, we'll see ;)

If you are a GNOME contributor, don't forget the group photo on Saturday at 3.45pm. And there will be cool GNOME tshirts on sale as well.

Well, that's it, I don't really have much to say, this is just some shameless advertising ;)

Bloody spammers

If you are subscribed to a GNOME mailing list, you probably got a really long and off-topic email from me. Except it wasn't me who sent it.

Yesterday, I was spending a nice evening enjoying some good home-made sushis, and when I went back home, I was really surprised to see lots of emails about waking up the world, meeting the new boss, ... And I got very annoyed when I realized that these emails had been sent from my email address to most GNOME mailing lists existing on earth. I felt really bad when I saw some replies showing that some people thought this email really originated from me. So I did the only thing I could do, some limited damage control. I replied to the persons who mailed me directly and to a few select mailing lists to make it perfectly clear that this mail didn't originate from me despite what it seemed.

By looking at the headers of the email, it's quite clear (at least to me) that I didn't send it: it was sent from a US ISP and I'm living in France these days and mainly using gmail as a mailer. Moreover, careful readers of the email (I haven't even read it myself ;) will have noticed that this email is signed "david duke" which is not my name ;).

I think some guy box was taken over by a trojan and that it crawled gnome.org mailing list archives, got my email address from there and gathered the addresses of most mailing GNOME lists and then blindly spammed them. I sent an email to the abuse contact of the ISP, but I don't really expect too much from them.

Now you know about as much as I do about that embarrassing email that some spam bot sent impersonating me. If you know people who got this email and think it was really from me, please spread the word and let them know that I had nothing to do with that. I'd never sent some political email to dozens of mailing lists where it's off-topic, especially not a really controversial one like this one.

That's all folks, let's go back to hack now :)

First news of 2009 :)

New job

In my last post, I was looking for a job. The good news is that I started working at Mandriva 2 weeks ago. I'll be working on the core distro to (partially) replace pixel which means I'll hack on urpmi and bootloaders among tons of other things. Thanks to everyone who helped me with job opportunities!

libgpod

After far too much time, we finally released libgpod 0.7. It contains tons of improvements, the most noticeable being support for the latest Nano and iPod Classic, but there were lots of other improvements: writing of compact artwork files making the iPod more responsive, chapter data support, better iPod model detection, updated python bindings, improved API documentation, ...

There aren't many changes in this release for iPhone/iPod Touch support. However, in addition to the great work from the iFuse team, marcan figured out how to add songs to a jailbroken iPhone using amarok/gtkpod/rhythmbox/. If you add to that the iPod Touch is on its way to being jailbroken, this means that people really insisting on buying those devices will at least be able to use them without iTunes.

FOSDEM

FOSDEM is only a few weeks away now (7th and 8th of February), the GNOME and Freedesktop devrooms are booked and their schedule has been published. You should definitely plan a trip in Brussels if it's not done already :) And don't forget our group picture on Saturday if you are a GNOME hacker!