important strategic decisions
Posting our recent decisions for Foresight Linux as sent to the mailing list by doniphon:With the ongoing mess with the gtk2 -> gtk3 migration, followed by
the announcement of the gnome reschedule, and the gnome-shell/unity
rift, we do think our 2 major desktops gnome and xfce are rendered
unusable for the unforeseeable future. Same counts for kde as nokia
started to drop support for qt. Therefore we decided to focus our work
on getting in e19, a major enhancement to enlightements e17, using an
improved and hw accelerated curses library, done by us on a still
private bitbucket repository. This change also involves getting rid of
the much hated combination of pulseaudio/alsa in favour of the much more
modern and stable OSS 4.2, and entirely dropping Xorg and evolving to
Xfree2k. We're looking foreward to provide a superior user experience
soon with fl:3++. We'll shortly set the e19 repository to public, so you
all can benefit (and contribute) after signing our standard contribution
agreement that cedes all your present and future rights to Paris Hilton.
As a side note we'll be moving our default kernel to MinixNG too.
Have a nice day.
Porto, 1th April 2011
The Foresight Linux Council
Scale 9x: Day 3
Sunday
The final day of SCALE 9x arrived far too early, since the Gentoo developers were still recovering from the merriment the previous evening/morning. We congregated in the hotel room Mike & I shared. You know you’re having some good times when hotel security places a call to your room, asking you to keep the noise down.
The hotel experience
The Hilton is a terrible, terrible hotel. I know the organizers needed a bigger venue, and the Hilton provided more rooms. Still. All the Gentoo developers and all the attendees I talked to commented on how much worse the hotel itself was compared to the Westin from previous years. The location is worse compared to what’s in the area, the parking is more limited and expensive, the rooms were more “ghetto,” and the hotel’s prices for everything were ridiculously expensive. $5 for a half-glass of orange pulp, I mean, juice. Next year I may not stay at the Hilton, even though that would be less convenient. The expo actually felt just as packed-to-overflowing compared to previous years at the Westin, so hopefully they’ll have to move SCALE again for next year.
The expo floor
Sunday is usually more sparsely attended at SCALE; Saturday is the “big” day. However, we still had a decent amount of traffic at our booth. We gave away the last couple of LiveDVDs and a bunch more minimal LiveCDs. I just manned the booth all day, since there weren’t any talks that looked particularly interesting. This gave me an opportunity to do some swag-hunting. I picked up some Ubuntu stickers for my laptop, which dual-boots Ubuntu Studio along with Gentoo. I also got to try out the upcoming Unity desktop user interface. I dunno why everyone hates it; in my brief hands-on, it was pretty cool. Plus you can switch back to the “classic” Gnome interface at any time, so there’s no reason to complain.
I picked up some excellent swag from the OpenSUSE booth, including a plush penguin and gecko for my wife. They’re pretty cute. (Side note: I had an awesome chat with their Greek ambassador; we talked about community, and how hard it is to get people to contribute, as well as discussed KDE. I gave him one of our LiveDVDs, since he’s been talking with the Greek Gentoo KDE devs, and in return I got an OpenSUSE 11.3 disc. 11.4 will be released in just a few days!)
The expo floor and conference rooms were much better this year in a key area: wireless internet. This year the SCALE organizers managed to create and maintain a speedy wifi network. I never experienced the dropouts and miniscule bandwidth that plagued previous years. I read somewhere that a 45mbit network was setup, and that it was never oversaturated. The wifi connection, even with over 1000 users, was still faster than my home network. The organizers and admins deserve special thanks for delivering such an awesome experience. I was able to check bugs, upload files, and make CVS commits as I discussed issues with my fellow developers, all without leaving the Gentoo booth.
The machines
Sometime after noon, Robin grabbed me and told me to get my USB stick with the PowerPC ISO. Why? IBM was demoing their massive server, which included a POWER7 blade. They wanted to know if Gentoo would run on it! Our handbook doesn’t list anything more recent than POWER5, so this was a good time to learn more. A few of us headed over to watch Gentoo get loaded onto new hardware. We got a few photos and videos of Gentoo booting on the massive server; here’s one:
It made it through nearly all the boot process, but apparently there are some differences in POWER7 console/tty devices or some such compared to POWER5, so it hung at the inittab step, but still! Gentoo on POWER7! It mostly boots; just needs a couple of trivial changes. That’s fantastic, given that it’s an unmodified ppc64 ISO.
We demoed a few different machines at our booth. I forgot to get any pictures of this year’s gear; sorry. Everything ran Gentoo, of course! We displayed a pair of Cr-48 ChromeOS notebooks, my ThinkPad running Xfce 4.8, an ASUS notebook, an ARM-based Nail board by Tin Can Tools, and a tiny blue XXS MIPS-based firewall/VPN cube by MyCable.
The people
Before I drove back down to San Diego, we got a group shot of current and former developers:
Left to right: vapier, omp, antarus, dertobi123, wolf31o2, nightmorph, solar, wormo, ramereth, robbat2
SCALE was a blast; it was even better than last year. We chatted with all kinds of users, corporate reps, and people from projects like XBMC. Thanks to all the folks that came by our booth and talked with us — you guys rock. I’m looking forward to next year’s SCALE!
Xfce Foundation e.V. launched at FOSDEM!
This year’s FOSDEM was a special one. Read more about it in this mail:
Hi everyone,
as some of you might have read, several of us Xfce developers and
packagers have attended FOSDEM this weekend. There was a lot of talking
and a bit of brainstorming of course. Together we enjoyed food, beer,
talks and also did something that we have been struggling with for
several years now: we launched a non-profit organization for Xfce.
Yes, you read correctly: the
Xfce Foundation e.V.
was founded by a group of us on Saturday afternoon! It still needs to
be registered, so technically it's not an "e.V." (a non-profit
organization registered in Germany) yet. But it will be, we are working
on that.
The eight founding members are:
#1 Christoph Wickert
#2 Landry Breuil
#3 Jens Luedicke
#4 Christian Dywan
#5 Nick Schermer
#6 Jérôme Guelfucci
#7 Jannis Pohlmann
#8 Lionel Le Folgoc
Please give everyone a hug or at least a thumbs up next time they pop
up on IRC. Without them being there this would not have been possible!
The main part next to signing the articles of association (which we
will soon upload somewhere, probably on foundation.xfce.org or
something like that) was to elect the initial Board of Directors of the
Xfce Foundation. Without objections the following people were elected
to the Board of Directors with a 2 years mandate:
President:
Jannis Pohlmann
Vice President:
Nick Schermer
Vice President and Treasurer:
Jérôme Guelfucci
The Board will now take care of the registration process and will meet
up for the first time on March 1st, 2011. There will be a general
assembly for all Xfce Foundation members on March 6th, 2011.
We will soon announce more details about the decisions that were made
and about how you can become an Xfce Foundation member (it's really not
difficult and it won't cost you any money -- but there are obligations
connected to it of course).
After the registration we will create a bank account and a new paypal
account as well in order to collect donations. These donations will be
tax deductible!
Stay tuned for updates on this. I hope you are as excited as we are
about this. I hope it will help a lot in pushing Xfce forward.
Cheers,
Jannis
Proud Founding Members
How To Save Artwork from Weavesilk.com
I just discovered weavesilk.com, which I think is pretty cool. However, it looks like they don’t give you a way to save your generated artwork. If you’re running Google Chrome (or, as I am, Chromium), there’s a trick you can use to save what you’ve created. This can probably be done with Firefox using Firebug, and maybe in some other ways, but here’s how I do it with Chromium.
-
Create your artwork by dragging around.
-
Right-click somewhere on the page and select “Inspect Element.”
-
In the new browser pane that comes up, click to the “Console” tab and enter the following:
``canvas = document.getElementById('render')
img = document.createElement('img')
img.src = canvas.toDataURL()``
-
The browser will probably freeze for a few seconds (or more than a few), and your CPU usage will shoot up. Be patient.
-
Click to the “Resources” tab in the developer pane, and look in the list for something that starts with “data:image/png”. Click it, and you should see your artwork to the right, on a transparent checkerboard background.
-
Right-click the image and select “Save Image As.”
The image will save with a transparent background, but you can open it up in an image editor and add a solid background color if you like.
How To Save Artwork from Weavesilk.com
I just discovered weavesilk.com, which I think is pretty cool. However, it looks like they don't give you a way to save your generated artwork. If you're running Google Chrome (or, as I am, Chromium), there's a trick you can use to save what you've created. This can probably be done with Firefox using Firebug, and maybe in some other ways, but here's how I do it with Chromium.
Create your artwork by dragging around.
Right-click somewhere on the page and select "Inspect Element."
In the new browser pane that comes up, click to the "Console" tab and enter the following:
canvas = document.getElementById('render') img = document.createElement('img') img.src = canvas.toDataURL()The browser will probably freeze for a few seconds (or more than a few), and your CPU usage will shoot up. Be patient.
Click to the "Resources" tab in the developer pane, and look in the list for something that starts with "data:image/png". Click it, and you should see your artwork to the right, on a transparent checkerboard background.
Right-click the image and select "Save Image As."
The image will save with a transparent background, but you can open it up in an image editor and add a solid background color if you like.
How To Save Artwork from Weavesilk.com
I just discovered weavesilk.com, which I think is pretty cool. However, it looks like they don’t give you a way to save your generated artwork. If you’re running Google Chrome (or, as I am, Chromium), there’s a trick you can use to save what you’ve created. This can probably be done with Firefox using Firebug, and maybe in some other ways, but here’s how I do it with Chromium.
- Create your artwork by dragging around.
- Right-click somewhere on the page and select “Inspect Element.”
- In the new browser pane that comes up, click to the “Console” tab and enter the following:
canvas = document.getElementById('render') img = document.createElement('img'); img.src = canvas.toDataURL() - The browser will probably freeze for a few seconds (or more than a few), and your CPU usage will shoot up. Be patient.
- Click to the “Resources” tab in the developer pane, and look in the list for something that starts with “data:image/png”. Click it, and you should see your artwork to the right, on a transparent checkerboard background.
- Right-click the image and select “Save Image As.”
The image will save with a transparent background, but you can open it up in an image editor and add a solid background color if you like.
Update the GeoIP database
GeoIP is a proprietary technology provided by MaxMind that allows the geolocalization of IPs. It provides databases as both free and paid solutions with IP records matching the country and the city. The GeoLite Country database can be downloaded for free and is updated about once a month.The database can be used with the command line tool geoiplookup
First download and install the latest database and license under your home directory, for example ~/.local/share/GeoIP/. Make sure to decompress the database with gunzip. The directory has to contain these files:
GeoIP.datNext create an alias for the command geoiplookup, for example through your ~/.bashrc script put the following line:
LICENSE.txt
alias geoiplookup='geoiplookup -d $HOME/.local/share/GeoIP/'
And done! But why all the hassle? Because your system may not provide the updates on a regular basis. Of course you can set up a scheduled task to download the database right into your home directory.
Update the GeoIP database
GeoIP is a proprietary technology provided by MaxMind that allows the geolocalization of IPs. It provides databases as both free and paid solutions with IP records matching the country and the city. The GeoLite Country database can be downloaded for free and is updated about once a month.The database can be used with the command line tool geoiplookup
First download and install the latest database and license under your home directory, for example ~/.local/share/GeoIP/. Make sure to decompress the database with gunzip. The directory has to contain these files:
GeoIP.datNext create an alias for the command geoiplookup, for example through your ~/.bashrc script put the following line:
LICENSE.txt
alias geoiplookup='geoiplookup -d $HOME/.local/share/GeoIP/'
And done! But why all the hassle? Because your system may not provide the updates on a regular basis. Of course you can set up a scheduled task to download the database right into your home directory.
Xfce 4.8 on BSD flavors
I should’ve made this more clear in the Xfce 4.8 release announcement but for a moment there I forgot that not everyone knows what we developers are dealing with under the hood.
Many users have been asking what the BSD problems are that I mentioned in the announcement. As some of you may recall is that HAL, the hardware abstraction layer that has for the past few years been used for volume and power management as well as a few other things, has been deprecated and replaced by a variety of frameworks. Today there is udev for device information, udisks for volume management, upower for power management as well as ConsoleKit and PolicyKit for session and permission control.
At least udev is strongly linked to Linux and as far as I know is not available on any of the BSD flavors. Unfortunately it is now the only good way to detect storage devices, cameras, printers, scanners and other devices using a single framework. That’s why we use it in Xfce now in situations where HAL provided us with device capabilities and information to distinguish between the different device types before. The consequence is that thunar-volman no longer works without udev and thus only compiles on Linux. In Thunar itself udev remains optional.
I don’t know what the porting status of the other frameworks is. But I am pretty sure not all of them have been ported to other platforms yet which is why I felt the need to express our disappointment in the announcement. For 2-3 years now all this has been a big mess. New frameworks were invented, dropped again, renamed from *Kit to u* and somewhere on the way it became impossible to keep Xfce as portable as it was before. I know that this is nothing new and that BSD folks faced the same situation as they do now back when HAL was invented but I don’t think it has to be this way.
For the question how we can improve the situation I have no answer yet.
Xfce 4.8 released
As the Xfce team announced yesterday, Xfce 4.8 is released.
Congratulations and thanks to all contributors. I hope Xfce will have a bright future. The Xfce team has also created a new website theme for Xfce.org, which is also definitely an improvement. They are still having problems because of the small core developer team. It’s a good time to start contributing now.
Xfce 4.8 will also be in the next Xubuntu release, Natty Narwhal. Lionel Le Folgoc has been and is doing fabulous work to get it in. Thanks to him too. There is also places open in the Xubuntu team. Go fill them.