Development diary of a developer sailing on the seas of open-source
After a long time of low-maintenance (as in me being out of the picture and doing mostly releases and some trivial/not-so-trivial-but-quick fixes here and there) period for GNOME-Calculator, it's time to reveal what's happening behind the scenes. Long-story short, pretty late in the 48 cycle two contributors popped up to breathe some life into GNOME Calculator, so much, that I had a pretty hard…
It was a long time since I last wrote, but important news coming up, so I thought it's time to post again. The kind Christopher Davis has spent some time on porting Calculator to GTK4, a process which looks like complete to me know, with the merge into master happening fairly soon. This was a lot of work, given the framework changes, and would be nice to have some testing mileage on it, so I'm…
This post will be about the reason splitting and rewriting part of GNOME Calculator in two as I see it (without absolute knowledge about the project, so if you disagree with anything and/or have any ideas, just let me know), to raise awareness of the process (possibly late, but not too late) The problem GNOME calculator is a handy little application. Long story short, it is a calculator…
So, Google Summer of Code came to an end. I did (try my best to) mentor Ruxandra on her quest to modernize Five or More . Some quick thoughts on the reasoning why using Vala as the language. And no flame-wars intended here. Just my personal thoughts: * GObject with C requires too much boilerplate code * Vala source is translated to C * Most of the games under the GNOME umbrella are in Vala (they…
The fresh new tooling used for development in the GNOME project (gitlab, meson, docker, flatpak) has a lots of potential. Some applications providing nightly flatpaks using Gitlab CI, and while it is nice, I wanted to start with something simple, like taking a screenshot of the application built with Gitlab CI+meson. Did ask on #gnome-hackers, and several hackers jumped right in with ideas, but it…
Five or More This year I have proposed a Google Summer of Code idea (we are in student applications period) for modernizing Five-or-More , a game left out from the last games modernization round, when most of the games have been ported to Vala. Five or More Several people did ask about what this project was, some of them started contributing, so I got in trouble with finding tasks which will not…
I did work a bit on various projects, I will try to summarize and ask for help, as any of these fronts could use help, feel free to contact me if you are interested. Let's start with the netstats (hard)work @antares has done (still under review for merging into libgtop master, #1 merge request on libgtop gitlab): she did investigate a lot to find the best way to get per-process network statistics…
We are getting close to the 3.28 release, we are in the freeze, so it's time for a quick summary of what happened this cycle with the projects I occasionally contribute to. Calculator was the major player this cycle (well, lately, to be more precise) having a quick bugs cleanup (both on gnome bugzilla and ubuntu launchpad), merging of older patches, creating new bugs by merging old patches, here's…
I feel like I have failed as a maintainer of GNOME modules, due to the fact that I have been busy lately with other tasks, and could not really handle my maintainer tasks, bugfixing, but it is November again, Bug Squash Month for GNOME . I will do my best to take the challenge and do the 5-a-day (5 bugs triaged per day) for GNOME this month. Today I had a couple of comments and fixes on System…
Actually, this post should have been a part (the last one) of my "Need for PC" blog posts ( 1 , 2 , 3 ), but this also deserves a separate blog post on its own. So, I have a fresh install on a fresh PC, what do I do next (and why)? Here's a list of the GNOME Shell extensions I use, and the (highly opinionated) motivation for me using them. dash to dock - I need an always-visible or…
As promised, after a long wait, here's some details about the operating system and software I have installed from day-0. This is a shortlist I usually install on each of my computers, so I will also provide a short why for each bullet. A side-note is that, although I tend to use the command-line a lot, the setup contains (only) a single cut-and-paste terminal command, the rest is entirely done…
As promised, back with the PowerMac G5 ATX mod final build pictures, as the PC is already complete and working. Actually, I have built the GNOME 3.22.0 release tarballs for several modules using this (and have tested building other stuff and also a bit of gaming, to see the temperatures, they are OK). Measured power consumption is almost all the time (even with all cores at 100%) below the one of…
When I say everything torn apart, I mean it Preparing the case Choosing a non-mATX-compatible case to start with gave me major headaches, but simply put I have found no mATX case with a similar look. I had to work quite a bit to make the G5 case work with an mATX motherboard. During shipping, as usual for these computer, the outer case stands have been bent, resulting in a less pleasant look. To…
I have realized quite some time ago that my PC is struggling to keep up with the pace, so I have decided that it is time for an upgrade (after almost 6 years with my Dell Inspiron 560 minitower with C2D Q8300 quad-core). I have "upgraded" the video card a couple of months ago due to the old one not supporting OpenGL3.2 needed by GtkGLArea. First I went with an ATI Radeon HD6770 I received from my…
As you might already know, GNOME 3.20 has been released, with a number of improvements, fixes, future-proofing changes, preparations for wayland prime-time. Here's a short list of my favourite features from Delhi: Files search improvements (see here ) Photos has basic photo editing support - crop and filters (see here ) Control center mouse panel revamped (see here ) Keyboard shortcuts window for…
First of all, happy new year to you all (yes, I know we are already in February)! Long time no post, I've been very busy with work, new projects, new clients, new technologies, preparing the move to a new home, the second child, and lot more, on the personal side. Handling all of the above at the same time resulted in a severe change in the amount of my open-source contributions, so I haven't been…
Since the new design of GNOME Mines has been implemented, several people have complained about the lack of colors and the performance issues. The lack of colors has been tackled last cycle with the introduction of the theming support, and including the classic theme with the same colored numbers as we all know from the old days of GNOME Mines. Now, to tackle the performance issues, which in most…
I've been fairly busy recently, so all my colleagues have upgraded to F22 before I did, even though usually I was the one installing systems in beta or release candidate state. After seeing two fairly successful upgrades I decided to take an hour to upgrade my system, hoping that it will fix an annoying gdm issue I've seen recently. Each day after unlocking the system (I cold-boot each day, so…
Recently I've been thinking about the real value of my contributions to free software and open-source software. I've realized that I'm mostly a "seasonal" open-source contributor : I choose a project, do some bug triaging, bug-fixing, and when I'm "stuck" with the project (aka the rest of the bugs/features would require serious efforts and quite some time to implement) I jump to unto a next…
I have a Pirelli P.VU2000 IPTV set-top box which I don't use, but would like to put that to a good use. It runs Linux, has an HDMI, stereo RCA audio output, 2x USB 2.0 and IR receiver + remote, so it'd be nice to have this play internet radios if that's possible (theoretically it is an IPTV receiver + media center, so it should be able to play media). And of course, let's not forget the advantage…
Last cycle Gnome Mines went through a major rewrite and redesign, bringing it to the GNOME3 era. However, not everyone was happy with the new look, and several people mentioned the lack of colors on the numbers as the reason for this. The problem The numbers on the fields communicate the danger clearly. But you have to read them. Several people have reported using the colors as the primary clue…
Happy new year everyone! As we have started a brand new year, it's time for reviewing last year and planning for this one. 2014 Last year was a great one for me, professionally. Although I still didn't get my dream job working full time on open-source and free software, I am still proud for what I have accomplished. Development I have successfully landed a major rewrite in gnome-mines, with both…
I use the terminal a lot, usually with bash or fish shell, and I always wanted some kind of notification on command completion, especially for long-running greps or other commands. The guys working on elementary OS have already implemented job completion notification for zsh shell in their pantheon-terminal project, but I wanted something more generic, working everywhere, even on the servers I am…
A quick update on my new ultrabook running Fedora: After watching the kernel development closely to see if anything related to the built-in touchpad comes in, and nothing came, I have decided to try some workarounds. If it can't work as a touchpad, at least it should work as a mouse. This can be accomplished by adding psmouse.proto=imps to the kernel parameters. The worst thing in this is that…
Redmine issue editing is quite a complex task, with a fairly complex, huge, two-columned form you get to edit (we also have several custom fields, which make this issue even worse). In Trac customized for ubinam , after adding our custom workflow, at the end of the page we had some options for augmenting our workflow, to ease the status updates, like reassignment, quick-fix, start working on an…