I recently found, under the rain, next to a book swap box, a pile of 90's “software magazines” which I spent my evening cleaning, drying, and sorting in the days afterwards. Magazine cover CDs with nary a magazine Those magazines are a peculiar thing in France, using the mechanism of “ Commission paritaire des publications et des agences de presse ” or “Commission paritaire” for short. This…
(I worked on this feature last year, before being moved off desktop related projects, but I never saw it documented anywhere other than in the original commit messages, so here's the opportunity to shine a little light on a feature that could probably see more use) The new usb_set_wireless_status() driver API function can be used by drivers of USB devices to export whether the wireless device…
3D Printing Slicers I recently replaced my Flashforge Adventurer 3 printer that I had been using for a few years as my first printer with a BambuLab X1 Carbon , wanting a printer that was not a “project” so I could focus on modelling and printing. It's an investment, but my partner convinced me that I was using the printer often enough to warrant it, and told me to look out for Black Friday sales,…
A few months have passed since New Responsibilities was posted, so I thought I would provide an update. Projects Maintenance Of all the freedesktop projects I created and maintained, only one doesn't have a new maintainer, low-memory-monitor . This daemon is what the GMemoryMonitor GLib API is based on, so it can't be replaced trivially. Efforts seem to be under way to replace it with systemd…
As part of the same process outlined in Matthias Clasen's "LibreOffice packages" email , my management chain has made the decision to stop all upstream and downstream work on desktop Bluetooth, multimedia applications (namely totem, rhythmbox and sound-juicer) and libfprint/fprintd. The rest of my upstream and downstream work will be reassigned depending on Red Hat's own priorities (see below), as…
When I create kernel contributions, I usually rely on a specific hardware, which makes using a system on which I need to deploy kernels too complicated or time-consuming to be worth it. Yes, I'm an idiot that hacks the kernel directly on their main machine, though in my defense, I usually just need to compile drivers rather than full kernels. But sometimes I work on a part of the kernel that can't…
(I nearly went with clutterectomy, but that would be doing our old servant project a disservice.) Yesterday, I finally merged the work-in-progress branch porting totem to GStreamer's GTK GL sink widget, undoing a lot of the work done in 2011 and 2014 to port the video widget and then to finally make use of its features. But GTK has been modernised (in GTK3 but in GTK4 even more so), GStreamer grew…
In 2007, Jan Arne Petersen added a D-Bus API to what was still pretty much an import into gnome-control-center of the "acme" utility I wrote to have all the keys on my iBook working. It switched the code away from remapping keyboard keys to "XF86Audio*", to expecting players to contact the D-Bus daemon and ask to be forwarded key events. Multimedia keys circa 2003 In 2013, we added support for…
Just about a year after the original announcement , I think it's time to see the progress on power-profiles-daemon. Note that I would still recommend you read the up-to-date project README if you have questions about why this project was necessary, and why a new project was started rather than building on an existing one. The project was born out of the need to make a firmware feature available to…
A couple of years ago, we sandboxed thumbnailers using bubblewrap to avoid drive-by downloads taking advantage of thumbnailers with security issues. It's a great tool, and it's a tool that Flatpak relies upon to create its own sandboxes. But that also meant that we couldn't use it inside the Flatpak sandboxes themselves, and those aren't always as closed as they could be, to support legacy…
Despite what this might look like , I don't actually enjoy starting new projects: it's a lot easier to clean up some build warnings, or add a CI, than it is to start from an empty directory. But sometimes needs must, and I've just released version 0.1 of such a project . Below you'll find an excerpt from the README , which should answer most of the questions. Please read the README directly in the…
Over the past couple of (gasp!) decades, I've had my fair share of release blunders: forgetting to clean the tree before making a tarball by hand, forgetting to update the NEWS file, forgetting to push after creating the tarball locally, forgetting to update the appdata file (causing problems on Flathub)... That's where check-news.sh comes in, to replace the check-news function of the autotools.…
This is going to be a short post, as changes to Videos have been few and far between in the past couple of releases. The major change to the latest release is that we've gained Tracker 3 support through a grilo plugin (which meant very few changes to our own code). But the Tracker 3 libraries are incompatible with the Tracker 2 daemon that's usually shipped in distributions, including on this…
*reality TV show deep voice guy* In 2016, we added a way to launch apps on the discrete GPU . *swoosh effects* In 2019, we added a way for that to work with the NVidia drivers . *explosions* In 2020, we're adding a way for applications to launch automatically on the discrete GPU. *fast cuts of loads of applications being launched and quiet* Introducing the (…
On the road to libfprint and fprintd 2.0 , we've been fixing some long-standing bugs, including one that required porting our PAM module from dbus-glib to sd-bus, systemd's D-Bus library implementation. As you can imagine, I have confidence in my ability to write bug-free code at the first attempt, but the foresight to know that this code will be buggy if it's not tested (and to know there's…
TL;DR Use GMemoryMonitor in glib 2.63.3 and newer in your applications to lower overall memory usage, and detect low memory conditions. low-memory-monitor To start with, let's come back to low-memory-monitor , announced at the end of August. It's not really a “low memory monitor”. I know, the name is deceiving, but it actually monitors memory pressure stalls, and how hard it is for the kernel to…
If you remember , back in 2016, I did the work to get a “Launch on Discrete GPU” menu item added to application in gnome-shell. This cycle I worked on adding support for the NVIDIA proprietary driver, so that the menu item shows up, and the right environment variables are used to launch applications on that device. Tested with another unsupported device... Behind the scenes There were a number of…
I'll soon be flying to Greece for GUADEC but wanted to mention one of the things I worked on the past couple of weeks: the low-memory-monitor project is off the ground, though not production-ready. low-memory-monitor, as its name implies, monitors the amount of free physical memory on the system and will shoot off signals to interested user-space applications, usually session managers, or…
After more than a year of work libfprint 1.0 has just been released! It contains a lot of bug fixes for a number of different drivers, which would make it better for any stable or unstable release of your OS. There was a small ABI break between versions 0.8.1 and 0.8.2, which means that any dependency (really just fprintd) will need to be recompiled. And it's good seeing as we also have a new…
While browsing for some internationalisation/localisation features, I found an interesting piece of functionality in Android's developer documentation. I'll quote it here: A pseudolocale is a locale that is designed to simulate characteristics of languages that cause UI, layout, and other translation-related problems when an app is translated. I've now implemented this for applications and…
GNOME 3.32 will very soon be released, so I thought I'd go back on a few of the things that happened with some of our content applications. Videos First, many thanks to Marta Bogdanowicz, Baptiste Mille-Mathias, Ekaterina Gerasimova and Andre Klapper who toiled away at updating Videos ' user documentation since 2012, when it was still called “Totem”, and then again in 2014 when “Videos” appeared .…
libfprint , the fingerprint reader driver library, is nearing a 1.0 release . Since the last time I reported on the status of the library , we've made some headway modernising the library, using a variety of different tools. Let's go through them and how they were used. Callcatcher When libfprint was in its infancy, Daniel Drake found the NBIS fingerprint processing library matched what was…
Good morning from Edinburgh, where the breakfast contains haggis , and the charity shops have some interesting finds . My main goal in attending this hackfest was to discuss Pipewire integration in the desktop, and how it will eventually replace PulseAudio as the audio daemon. The main problem GNOME has had over the years with PulseAudio relate mostly to how PulseAudio was a black box when it came…
In March 1986, my dad was in the market for a Thomson TO7/70. I have the circled classified ads in “Téo” issue 1 to prove that :) TO7/70 with its chiclet keyboard and optical pen, courtesy of MO5.com The “ Plan Informatique pour Tous ” was in full swing, and Thomson were supplying schools with micro-computers. My dad, as a primary school teacher, needed to know how to operate those computers, and…
Fingerprint readers are more and more common on Windows laptops, and hardware makers would really like to not have to make a separate SKU without the fingerprint reader just for Linux, if that fingerprint reader is unsupported there. The original makers of those fingerprint readers just need to send patches to the libfprint Bugzilla, I hear you say, and the problem's solved! But it turns out it's…