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

Forgot to mention in my last blog post that SPICE is not just more efficient at network bandwidth utilization but is also much more faster/responsive. Also, Jon Nordby pointed out that the screenshots of virt-manager I copied from virt-manager website are several years outdated. Here is how the main UI looks like now a days. P.S. I was going to inline this screenshot but blogger.com is not letting me do that. :(

About two months ago I informed  the followers of this blog that I will now be working on SPICE project  for Red Hat . Judging from the questions I was asked after that, I realized that not many people know about SPICE so I thought I write at least one blog entry dedicated to explaining what SPICE is all about. Before I get to SPICE itself, let me first introduce you to the world SPICE lives in. Virtualization and Virtual Machines (VMs) For some reason, I feel that I should leave the definitions to wikipedia  and only quote it so that is what I am going to do: " Virtualization, in computing, is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources. " " A virtual machine (VM) is a "completely isolated operating system installation within your normal operating system".Today, this is implemented by either software emulation or hardware virtualization ". V...

Turns out that not many Free Software maintainers follow the practice of writing proper release logs targetted for packagers/end-users. To justify their laziness, they come-up with lame excuses like "Oh, the user never sees the release log" etc and at the very most copy&paste the (developer oriented) VCS changelog since the last release. Here is how it actually affects a user: Now if you click on the URL provided, you will be taken to a page where there is a lot of information but the one you are looking for: What exactly changed? In this particular case, its just an bugfix release but many times new features are added and users can't know that unless you put that nicely in your release log. So please stop justifying your laziness and take the efforts to write the release log if you are a maintainer of a Free Software project. OTOH, if you are a downstream packager, please copy or link to the upstream release log in your package's changelog that upstream main...

When I bought this printer, I failed to find any Linux drivers for it. I must admit I didn't try hard to find them either since I was very much in a hurry at that time. Since then I had just assumed that drivers for Linux just don't exist. But today I decided to search/try harder to get it working against my fedora laptop. The result was that I found the drivers very easily and after several minutes of efforts, I finally got it working! So I thought it blog about it and provide some pointers so process gets easier for others: Ensure you have 'DefaultLanguage en_GB' line in your /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and your firewall isn't blocking Port 8611 for TCP/UDP. Get the drivers from here . The drivers are available as rpm and deb packages. Once you have the packages downloaded and installed on your system, find out the mac address of your printer somehow. The method I used was to watch for packets in wireshark and pinging the broadcast address of the network. Once ...

Jorn made minor releases of GSSDP and GUPnP today. The main purpose of which is to fix the build on Rawhide. Here is the release announcement: GSSDP 0.6.2 =========== - Reannounce resources after max_age / 2 - 1 instead of after max_age. [Peter Christensen, Jorn Baayen] - Remove unnecessary call to g_thread_init(). [Zeeshan Ali] GUPnP 0.12.2 ============ - Support returning actions outside of the 'action-invoked' signal handler in service implementations. [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen] - Add explicit dependency on gthread. [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen]

Peter Robinson had made RPMS for GUPnP package for a while now but it was until recently that someone got a chance to review them. The first (and IIRC the only) issue that came out was that the build was breaking for all our apps. Here is what was happening: We call g_thread_init() in each of the application because libsoup requires us to do that. If I understand correctly, libsoup needs the threading system to be initialized for locking stuff that is actually a part of glib. While we don't mind putting this call in each of our app, we assumed that libsoup requiring us to make this call will itself link to libgthread-2.0. That assumption is true about libsoup-2.4 built/installed from vanilla release tarballs, subversion repo and debian/ubuntu packages but on Rawhide, it turned out to be false. I (and a bunch of other developer hanging out on #gnome-hackers) had a chat with Dan Winship about this and in the end he agreed to put gthread-2.0 in libsoup-2.4 pkg-config. He said that it...

Recently the c't magazine mentioned our dear GUPnP project and published some pictures of my UI (I am hoping to see it tomorrow *if* Stefan remembers to bring it to office). That resulted in at least one person getting interested in our project. AFAIK, everything worked out of the box on his Fedora Core 6 but he was unable to see anything in any of the client-side tools. After a few mails and some help from Christian , it turned out to be the default firewall settings on fedora.