Coder's Log

Just like every year, I'm a mentor in Google Summer of Code 2013. This year I'm mentoring two students: Mattias Bengtsson , who will be working on implmenting route search in Maps . Since the Maps project was actually started by Mattias himself before he even thought of SoC and he has been working on maps (in general) as his fulltime job for 2 years now, I feel very confident about him being able to deliver. Kalev Lember , who will be working on implementing the new date&time panel in GNOME control center. Kalev has been contributing to different GNOME projects and has been very active in Fedora packaging business. Having had the pleasure of pair programming with him last week, I feel very confident about him delivering his project as well. So I got two awesome students, what could be better? There is the coincidence that both of them are located in ̶G̶o̶t̶h̶a̶m̶ ̶C̶i̶t̶y̶ Gothenburg, the very same city where one of our designers, Andreas Nilsson lives in. Since ...

We just rolled out Boxes 3.7.92 and have now entered code freeze. This means that apart from translations and doc updates, Boxes is ready for the stable 3.8 release (due next Monday). So whats new you ask? Since Boxes 3.6, we have been hard at work, making Boxes an app that is so awesome that it makes you want to use virtual machines if you are not already. :) Boxes is now a lot more reliable, has improved and more impressive UI and has cool new features: Add USB redirection support in new VMs and option to add it into existing VMs. i-e You can use your USB devices (camera, flash drive etc) plugged into host from the guest operating system. Smartcard support . This means if you have an appropriate reader device, you can use that to read information from your smart cards (credit/bank cards etc) from your virtual machine boxes. Automatically download and installation of all virtio and QXL drivers, and spice-vdagent as part of Windows XP and Windows 7 express installati...

I have been meaning to do this for a while and now I finally managed to do it:  Here you'll find tutorial on Boxes . I know the sound quality and volume isn't good and there is other mistakes/issues but I'm not too ashamed as this is the first time I've done this and tools that I needed/wanted were all breaking on my Fedora 18 laptop. UPDATE:  I uploaded an updated version of this tutorial with slightly improved audio. To improve it further, I'll have to re-record the audio or the whole video but right now I don't have time for that. Perhaps in a few weeks..

I was at GUADEC last week like many other cool gnomies. It was a lot of fun, just like very year but I believe this was one of the best, especially how it was organised. The feet marks on the floor were was just an awesome touch that kept on reminding us everyday that good conferences are a result of a lot of hard work. Seems its slowly becoming a tradition of mine since last year for me to stay at one of the organiser's house. :) Last time, I stayed with Lennart for the noncore days and this time I stayed all the days with Xabier and Laura. While they were very busy with their organising duties at the conf, they at the same time did an awesome job as my hosts. Xabier made sure that I don't have any problems what so ever and that I get to eat the best food in town and have a lot of fun. On top of all that, he woke-up 5:15 AM to drive me to airport. TBH I feel pretty bad now, knowing that I can't possibly return the favor. :( Thanks so much Xabier and Laura. You guys are...

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 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!