Coder's Log

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!

I have been asked several times in the past if gupnp is portable enough. I always told them that I don't know for sure but the only problem i see is the low-level networking bits. Nobody really showed interest in actually trying it out on windows but then came Jens Georg. He managed to make gupnp stack and network-light working on windows within a weekend, despite the fact that some of his hours were wasted due to firewalls being enabled after a reboot and him forgetting about it. He has a small video of network-light running nicely on win32 on his blog .