Coder's Log

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 first public release of libvirt-glib is out! libvirt-glib wraps libvirt to provide a high-level object-oriented API better suited for glib-based applications. Daniel wrote nice release notes so I'll save myself some time and quote it for more details: I am pleased to announce the first release of the libvirt-glib package, version 0.0.1 is now available from ftp://libvirt.org/libvirt/glib/ The packages are GPG signed with Key ID: 15104FDF Daniel P. Berrange Key fingerprint: DAF3 A6FD B26B 6291 2D0E 8E3F BE86 EBB4 1510 4FDF libvirt-glib comprises three distinct libraries: - libvirt-glib - Integrate with the GLib event loop and error handling - libvirt-gconfig - Representation of libvirt XML documents as GObjects - libvirt-gobject - Mapping of libvirt APIs into the GObject type system As of this release only the event loop integration and some basic APIs for managing domains are provided. The representation of XML as GObjects is a major work

The first release of libosinfo is out! What is libosinfo? libosinfo is a GObject based library API for managing information about operating systems, hypervisors and the (virtual) hardware devices they can support. It includes a database containing device metadata and provides APIs to match/identify optimal devices for deploying an operating system on a hypervisor. Via the magic of GObject Introspection, the API is available in all common programming languages with demos for javascript (GJS/Seed) and python (PyGObject). Also provided are Vala bindings. libosinfo is Free Software and licenced under LGPLv2+. Dependencies Required: gobject-2.0 gio-2.0 libxml-2.0 Optional: gobject-introspection Vala (build-time only) Download http://fedorahosted.org/ releases/l/i/libosinfo/ Homepage http://fedorahosted.org/ libosinfo/

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 finally got my (long awaited) hat! Now back to work...

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!