Coder's Log

I have been meaning to do this for a while and now I finally managed to do it:  Here you'll find tutorial on Boxes . I know the sound quality and volume isn't good and there is other mistakes/issues but I'm not too ashamed as this is the first time I've done this and tools that I needed/wanted were all breaking on my Fedora 18 laptop. UPDATE:  I uploaded an updated version of this tutorial with slightly improved audio. To improve it further, I'll have to re-record the audio or the whole video but right now I don't have time for that. Perhaps in a few weeks..

I was at GUADEC last week like many other cool gnomies. It was a lot of fun, just like very year but I believe this was one of the best, especially how it was organised. The feet marks on the floor were was just an awesome touch that kept on reminding us everyday that good conferences are a result of a lot of hard work. Seems its slowly becoming a tradition of mine since last year for me to stay at one of the organiser's house. :) Last time, I stayed with Lennart for the noncore days and this time I stayed all the days with Xabier and Laura. While they were very busy with their organising duties at the conf, they at the same time did an awesome job as my hosts. Xabier made sure that I don't have any problems what so ever and that I get to eat the best food in town and have a lot of fun. On top of all that, he woke-up 5:15 AM to drive me to airport. TBH I feel pretty bad now, knowing that I can't possibly return the favor. :( Thanks so much Xabier and Laura. You guys are

Some weeks back, Marc-Andre told me that it will probably be helpful for potential contributors if I could write a blog post explaining how new information could be added to libosinfo (the library Boxes relies on for information on various operating systems and their installer medias) so here I'm doing just that. Currently there are two types of information you can add, devices and operating systems. Usually, it'll be the latter that you'd want to add (e.g your favorite OS just made a new awesome release and you want libosinfo to know about it) but for the sake of completion, I'll describe both. Libosinfo keeps its information database in a bunch of XML files. Although theoretically there could be just one XML file but that would have to be really huge and therefore will be very hard to edit/maintain so we keep each OS distro and device class in its own XML file. Libosinfo recursively traverses the following locations, assuming application let libosinfo load its

If you read any of my previous blog entries, you must be now familiar with this 'express installation' concept we have in Boxes. Its pretty neat actually, you just set a few options at the beginning and then you can leave Boxes (or your machine) and when you are back, everything is setup for you automatically in a new box. I have invested a lot of time/efforts on this already and will be spending a lot more time in future as well but I am just one man so can not possibly cover all operating systems out there. That is why I am asking for help from anyone who will be interested in adding express installation support for Ubuntu and Debian while I focus on Fedora and Windows variants. Oh and if you are interested in adding support for some other distribution/OS, that contribution will also be more than welcomed. In any case, happy hacking!

Yesterday we rolled out the second release of Boxes for upcoming GNOME 3.3.3. There are many fixes/improvements in this release to list them all here but the most significant ones in my opinion are: A nicer UI for deletion of Boxes designed for protecting the user from accidental deletion of boxes. Here is a video demo of it in action. Special handling of 'live' and unknown media: Quick launch of a temporary box for it, which is made permanent automatically (only) if anything is installed on the box by the media. Here is a video demo of this behaviour in action. Express installation for Windows XP now works, thanks to important clues provided by Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues. Don't believe me? I have video footage that proves it. UI for setting user and administrator password and in case of older Windows, ability to set product key as part preparation for express installation. Please check out the videos above for demo of this feature in action. Apart from change

Dear readers! If you recall, in a blog post not so long ago I introduced you to the wonderful virtual world I now live in.  Now around the same time I wrote that post, some of the GNOME designers and developers (myself included) felt the need for having a UI as an integral part of GNOME that lets users easily manage (create and destroy) virtual machines and at the same time lets them connect to remote machines. Two of our awesome designers, Jon McCann and Jakub Steiner ) started creating design for this UI. We (as in Jon McCann) named it 'Boxes' as its something that deals with..hm.. boxes. At the same time, we (me, Marc-Andre and Christophe ) kept working on the foundations for Boxes, mainly in the form of lots of improvements to libvirt, libvirt-glib, libosinfo and spice-gtk. About less than a month ago we started implementing the design when the design stabilized a bit. The implementation actually started as a "proof of concept" from Marc-Andre o

The party turned out to be a lot more successful than I thought. I thought only a few people will show-up since there aren't that many gnomies around that I know of. We had lots of nice discussions on various topics especially the future of GNOME and Free SW in general. One of the participants was very interested in having some way to write UIs that work for both big screens and tiny screen of his Openmoko mobile phone, which turned out to be quite an interesting discussion. Taking the EXOPC running Fedora 16 with me was indeed a good idea since almost every participant wanted to see how it works. Although I had to keep telling/reminding everyone that on-screen-keyboard in gnome-shell is not exactly finished, I noticed that people were pretty much already able to use GNOME 3.2 with a touch-only interface. The biggest issue people encountered wasn't the OSK though but the bad touch-screen on the tablet. Some pictures from the event:

If you happen to be in Helsinki tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, don't forget to drop-by at Kaisla to celebrate the awesome GNOME 3.2 release with us. Not only you will get to hang-out and have beers with other cool people in town but also get to try out GNOME 3.2 on a tablet. If you have never been to Kaisla before, this is one bar you must visit if you are interested in beers as they have a rather decent collection of beers from different countries. See you tomorrow at 8pm there!

I have a talk where I'll attempt to brain-wash educate the masses about the awesomeness of Vala language. If you are even slightly interested, please do attend. I also have arranged a BoF together with KDE's Friedrich Kossebau to discuss about the possibility of SSDP (discovery protocol used by UPnP) as a system service. See you in Berlin soon!

We just made our first stable releases  of Rygel after many months of active development. I used to post a blog entry after each release with the full-log but I stopped doing that because some people didn't like it going to planet GNOME and I thought chances are high that other viewer might also be getting annoyed by it. Anways, I would like to highlight some of the changes since 0.8.3: Lots of improvements to our interoperability with other DLNA devices in the market. Many optimizations to search, browse and streaming. More efficient and correct use of Tracker APIs. Richer media hierarchies. Simplified transcoding by use of new 'encodebin' GStreamer element. Preferences UI has been trimmed down to only provide a few options that users actually need. The plan is for this UI to disappear completely in GNOME 3.2 in favor of better (more integrated with rest of the desktop) alternatives. More configurability (through config files, commandline and environment) for p

While it is a well known fact that Rygel is as awesome as this new Intrepid class ship of mine in Star Trek Online unfortunately its preferences UI looks as ugly as this Apart from being ugly, it also doesn't really integrate well in GNOME as there is already a UI that lets you easily specify your file sharing preferences: gnome-user-share. I had some discussions with Bastien on how to fix this and we had agreed on a plan to kill this UI while merging the relevant parts of it into gnome-user-share in July 2010: Rygel: always starts as part of the session. times-out and exits if there is nothing to share. (MediaExport backend) doesn't share anything by default. gnome-user-share uses the MediaExport's DBus API to add/remove folders. While the Rygel parts are mostly in place, Bastien (being a very busy developer) didn't manage to get any time to do the gnome-user-share part and neither did I. :( GNOME 3.0 is happening very soon and Rygel might not get i

Rygel 0.7.6 (A Kiss is But a Kiss) is out! Another micro release to fix the critical regression in 'Year' hierarchy of Tracker plugin. All contributors to this release: Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) Download source tarball from here

Rygel 0.7.4 (Look at the Princess) released! A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.32.0 release. - Fix wildcard handling in search request. - Distribute correct copy of scallable icons. - Provide icons in DLNA standard sizes. - Provide icons in JPEG format as well. - Don't offer transcoding from video to audio and viceversa. This makes sense anyway and reduces network traffic. - Only offer time seeking if duration is known. - Report correct DLNA profile for MPEG-TS HD and WMV transcoder. - List DLNA formats first in the list of supported formats. - Provide correct values for out parameters of GetCurrentConnectionInfo action. - Correctly handle HTTP 'POST' requests. - Correct checks for vala bindings. - Use new 64-bit size property in GUPnP resource API so that we can deal with resources bigger than 2GB. - Fix some (potential) crashes. - Correctly handle a translated string involving plurals. - Don't use deprecated libsoup API. -

GUPnP DLNA 0.3.0 released! Changes since 0.2.1: - New API and tool (gupnp-dlna-ls-profiles) to list all supported profiles - Move API to get a profile to the DLNADiscoverer namespace - Make GUPnPDLNAProfile opaque, add to API documentation - Add support for several AVC_MP4_MP profiles - Print stream topology instead of a simple list in gupnp-dlna-info - Add debug output controlled by an environment variable for eaesier debugging - Beginnings of an automated testing infrastructure - Add relaxed/extended mode properties (more details in the next release) - Use 'bitrate' instead of 'maximum-bitrate' while matching streams - Various bug fixes All contributors to this release: Arun Raghavan Parthasarathi Susarla Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) GUPnP Vala 0.6.11 released! Changes since 0.6.10: - Require and adapt to gupnp-av 0.3.0. All contributors: Arun Raghavan Parthasarathi Susarla Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) Download source tarballs from here

Rygel 0.7.3 (Out of Their Minds) is out! A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.31.6 release. - Add Album-art support. - Add support for sorted Browse/Search. - Don't push data after HTTP response is cancelled. - Advertise support for search by "createClass". - Revive accidently removed XBox hacks. - Fix icon export for uninstalled case. - Simplify plugin APIs to further abstract plugin developers from UPnP details. - Add convenient MediaRenderer APIs for plugins. This involved moving most of the GstRenderer code to core. - Fix seeking once again. - Improve error handling in HTTP request handling code. - Port to new DIDL-Lite contributor APIs. - Port to Vala 0.9.3 and 0.9.4. - Clean-up README and specify build and run-time dependencies. - More debug output. - MediaExport: - Make use of gupnp-dlna for faster, more complete and reliable metadata extraction. - Print a debug message if extraction fails for a file. - Add windows f

Changes since 0.5.7: - Fix crashes in DIDLLiteContributor API. - Remove incomplete and broken DLNA guessing code. Applications should use gupnp-dlna now for all their DLNA needs. - Do set the 'dlna:profileID' property of 'albumArtURI' node and treat it as mandatory as per DLNA guidelines (7.3.61.3). - Prefer non-transcoded resources over transcoded ones when choosing compatible resources for a particular MediaRenderer. - Minor correction to DIDL filtering code. - Some other minor improvements/fixes. Bug fixed in this release: 2187 - GUPnPDIDLLiteContributor class doesn't work All contributors to this release: Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) Download source tarball from here

Rygel 0.7.2 (Dream A Little Dream) is out! A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.31.5 release. * MediaExport: * Support DLNA's 'AnyContainer' upload extenstion. * Only harvest media files. We use a positive list for file extensions to include in the metadata extraction. * Implement fallback to the default (slow) search implementation. * Lower severity for some of the console messages. * Update code according to latest GStreamer Vala API fixes. * Tracker: * Improve Sparql query builder to achieve much better performance and reduced D-Bus traffic. * GstRenderer: * Relicense from GPL to LGPL. * More descriptive default title. - Localization: - Add Simplified Chinese translation. - Add Traditional Chinese translation (Hong Kong and Taiwan). - Updated Spanish translation. - Various non-functional improvements to core and plugins. All contributors to this release: Aron Xu Chao-Hsiung Liao Jens Georg Jorge Go

Rygel 0.7.1 (Home on the Remains) is out! A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.31.4 release. - Implement DLNA's 'AnyContainer' upload extenstion. This allows clients to upload items without having to specify target container. Currently it only works for the Tracker backend. - Report types of items that could be created/uploaded in a container and allow clients to search containers by this property. - Port last bits of C code to Vala. Now Rygel is completely written in Vala. - Make Rygel build/work against both current stable and unstable Vala releases. - Offer SD transcoding in EU profile. Seems certain Sony Bravia TVs only support EU profiles. With this change, they should at least be able to use the SD transcoding. - Two more unit tests. - Provide default configuration for WMV transcoding. - Correctly handle boolean commandline option for disabling WMV transcoder. - External: - Port the external plugin to use the new D-Bu

GUPnP 0.13.4 released! Changes since 0.13.3: - GUPnPService should remove all handlers installed on the shared SoupServer instance when it is disposed. - Fixate subscription timeout to be 300s as per DLNA requirement (7.2.22.1). - Correct type of action argument of GUPnPService::action-invoked. - Remove redundant copying of GValue content in a few places. - Handle multiple variables inside property node in event notifications to be compatible with server-side implementations using older GUPnP - Fix syntax of event notifications with multiple properties. - Add/fix gobject-introspection annotations for various functions. - Some non-functional improvements. Bugs fixed in this release: 2084 - Add scope annotations to various functions 2131 - GUPnPServiceAction is a boxed, not a pointer 2086 - Fix gtk-doc format on all functions in public GUPnP API All contributors: Sven Neumann Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) Zach Goldberg Download source tarball from here ----------- GUPnP AV 0.5.6

Rygel 0.7.0 (Picture if You Will) is out! This release marks the start of the new unstable release-cycle. This is also the release cycle that will be integrated into GNOME 2.31 (and 3.0 eventually). Changes since 0.6.0: - Exit on failure to load any plugins in 5 seconds. - Add icon to preferences UI's desktop file. - Correct error on missing 'Elements' node in 'CreateObject' action from client. - Advertize upload features in 'X_DLNACAP' in device description. - Remove comments from description files as per DLNA requirement (7.2.30.1). - Don't allow comments in DIDL-Lite from client either. This is to satisfy the DLNA Confirmation Test Tool rather than DLNA itself. - Don't advertize unimplemented actions. - autogen.sh should create m4 directory if it doesn't exist already. - Correct Icon path in preferences UI for uninstalled case. - Specify on debug log where rygel is currently looking for plugins. - Localization: - Don't translate al