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Also, Jon Nordby pointed out that the screenshots of virt-manager I copied from virt-manager website are several years outdated.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 ...

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...

Ever since I blogged about me looking for opportunities outside Nokia , I was contacted by quite some companies. Some of them ended-up giving me nice offers but in the end the offer that stood out amongst all was from Red Hat . So last evening, I accepted their offer to join the awesome Spice team. The reasons I chose Red Hat over others were: Red Hat being undoubtedly the leader in Open Source technologies for more than a decade has always been on my 'awesome places to work at some day' list. The Spice project that I'm being hired to work on is simply awesome. They offer good working conditions. I'll be staying in Finland and most likely working from home (unless I'm asked to work at the Espoo office). I will be officially joining Red Hat on May 2 and my last day at Nokia will be on April 21. Before you ask, nothing disastrous is going to happen to GUPnP and Rygel . Of course I won't be spending as many hours on these projects as now but keeping in m...

Here is a decade of GStreamer hacking squeezed into 5 minute visualization using gource. I used the following commandline to create this: gource -1280x720 -s 0.05 --stop-at-end --hide filenames --highlight-all-users \ --file-filter po -a 5 --camera-mode track --user-image-dir ~/hackergotchies \ --disable-progress --disable-bloom --output-ppm-stream - --output-framerate 30 \ | gst-launch-0.10 fdsrc fd=0 ! 'image/ppm,width=1280,height=720,framerate=(fraction)30/1' \ ! ffdec_ppm ! ffmpegcolorspace ! x264enc speed-preset=10 ! avimux ! \ filesink location=gst-dev-history.avi