Coder's Log

If you are looking for something technical, this isn't the right entry. Today I wanted to write about one of my cats, Ostikka who left us some hours ago. I wanted to share the story with whoever is interested to know: About two years ago my wife (Ansku) and I thought that we should get ourselves cats as we both love cats. We decided that instead of getting kittens like most people, we try to get some grown-up cats looking for a home. I asked my friend , Riku Voipio (who has 2 cats himself) and he told me that one of his friends, Mikko Tuomela was looking for someone to take his cats as he had to leave to US for education and couldn't take them with him. Soon we were introduced to these two very nice cats, Ostikka and Pentu. Ostikka was 12 years old at that time and Pentu was 8. While both cats are very social, Ostikka just loves to meet new people and isn't the least bit shy. He came to our lap immediately and asked to be scratched on his belly and purred. Pentu ke

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 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: