During the holidays I managed to get some time to hack on nsntrace . I have mentioned nsntrace on this blog in the past but you might need a refresher: The nsntrace application uses Linux network namespaces and iptables magic to perform network traces of a single application. The traces are saved as pcap files and can be analyzed by for instance wireshark or tshark In May of 2020 nsntrace moved to…
Background In 2015 I worked as a consultant at a large company in Lund. My position was with the build team and one of our responsibilities was managing and maintaining the build system for their Android based phones. The problem I was tasked with solving was the fact that running 'make' for a product after a successful build resulted in a lot of stuff being rebuilt unnecessarily. A stock Android…
I have been interested in the RISC-V architecture for a while. RISC-V is an I nstruction S et A rchitecture, like ARM, MIPS or x86, but it is developed and provided under an open source license. A couple of weeks ago the hifive1-revb development board I ordered from Crowd Supply arrived and I have been using it to get to know RISC-V a bit. The small get-to-know-the-board project I settled on was…
I went to FOSDEM again this year, my fourth year running. I go with a great group of friends and it is starting to become quite the tradition. Maps meeting FOSDEM lines up pretty well with the GNOME release cycle, in that after the conference we have about a month of time to get the last stuff in before the next 6 month development cycle comes to an end. With that in mind we had a quite quick and…
I just released a bunch of Maps releases. 3.21.90 3.20.3 3.18.4 3.16.4 3.14.4 3.12.4 3.10.4 All of them speeding up the fetching of tiles in two ways. By downloading a service file telling us where third-party tile servers are instead of using redirect by proxy Allowing for more consecutive HTTP requests Number 2 is only available by using the (as of now unreleased) version 0.12.4 of libchamplain.…
This is a short post to inform you all that Maps has tiles again. We now get our tiles from Mapbox , with whom we have made an agreement going forward. We access Mapbox through a GNOME based redirect, so that we could redirect to something else if a similar situation would arise again. Maps has been released with the new tiles in the versions: 3.21.4 3.20.2 3.18.3 3.16.3 3.14.3 And I think at…
I recently wanted a way to get a network packet trace from a specific application. My googling showed me an old askubuntu thread that solved this by using Linux network namespaces. You create a new network namespace, that will be isolated from your regular network, you use a virtual network interface and iptables to make the traffic from it reach your regular network. Then you start an application…
Hello all! Right now we are having infrastructural problems with Maps. We can no longer use the MapQuest tiles, see mail thread from maps list archive here for more information. We are working on getting past this and getting a working Maps application released soon. But this is also showing us more clear that we need to get a better grip around the tiles infrastructure if we want to have a Map…
We have now entered beta period for GNOME 3.20 and the release notes for Maps are starting to look final. This blog post will expand a bit on the official release notes, adding screenshots and some reasoning to most of the items. Map bubble re-work For this cycle we wanted to add some more meta-data to our small map bubbles. But at the same time we thought that the bubbles were kind of cluttered.…
Outreachy is the successor of the Outreach Program for Women (OPW). OPW was inspired by Google Summer of Code and by how few women applied for it. The program was renamed to Outreachy with the goal of expanding to engage people from various underrepresented groups and was moved to Software Freedom Conservancy as its organizational home. For this period (December 2015 - March 2016) Maps has two…
We are coming up on the 3.19.3 release this Monday and 3.19.4 will be January 14th which will also be the start of the UI freeze . I want ed to take some time and give an update on what we have done for Maps this cycle and what we can expect in Maps 3.20. Open with browser We have had support to open a location with other applications for a while. New in 3.20 will be Open with browser. That will…
For Maps 3.19.1 release we managed to land some support for showing a GeoJSON layer. This means that you can get a GeoJSON file from somewhere then open it with Maps. Usage The different ways to load GeoJSON with Maps is currently... ... from the command line: gnome-maps file.geojson ... drag the file to a Maps window ... double click the file to open it with Maps In order for double clicking the…
Right now we have quite a number of tasks in our Bugzilla that are suitable for someone that want to get started developing for Map s or GNOME in general. I am going to list some of them here and maybe it will pique someones interest. However finding a first task to work on is not all that one need to do in order to start developing for GNOME. You also need to be able to build and run the latest…
I managed to get a freeze exception to include a new feature in Maps for 3.18. It is now possible to use local, offline, tiles by using the --local command line option. What you need are image map tiles, organized in a standard way in a directory. Then you can point Maps towards that directory and have local tiles usable offline. For instance, I downloaded a bounding box of London. In the…
GUADEC is the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference. This year it was held in Gothenburg. I presented a talk about Client side rendering of maps using MapCSS. I will embed the slide for that talk to this post. There will also be videos later on, as all talks were recorded. After the core days we ha d an o pportunity to gather an informal Maps B oF were interested gathered to talk abou t…
GUADEC is the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference. It is an annual conference taking place in Europe, whose prime topic is the development of the GNOME desktop environment. This year GUADEC will take place at Gothenburg, Sweden on August 7 – 9 the core days at Folkets Hus. I am not sure that people are aware of what a Folkets Hus is, so I thought I'd take a moment to write something…
We want to support an offline mode in GNOME Maps . A mode where you could download an area and have the map data available even if you do not have an Internet connection. The problem is that we are currently using pre-rendered bitmaps. We download them and we show them. This makes supporting an offline mode a bit tough since the amount of data we would have to save would be large. We have talked…
GNOME Maps is a simple maps application being developed in javascript, using the Gjs bindings. The map data for Maps comes from OpenStreetMap which is a collaborative project to create a free and editable map of the world. Maps began as a preview in GNOME 3.10 and is still under active development . How it looks today Two map types are provided, one aerial and one street type. We use the Geoclue…