[wplug-announce] The Open Pitt, Issue 30

Vance Kochenderfer vkochend at nyx.net
Thu Nov 30 21:49:47 EST 2006


PDF version: <http://www.wplug.org/top/wplug-top030.pdf>

                               THE OPEN PITT
      What's cooking in Linux and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania

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Issue 30                       November 2006                  www.wplug.org
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In this issue:
  Three Days in Cambridge: The Boston GNOME Summit
  October Roundup
  Have Your Say

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                               Coming Events

Dec. 16: General User Meeting.  (Time and location TBA, see web site for
         details)

                    The public is welcome at all events
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Three Days in Cambridge: The Boston GNOME Summit
by Patrick Wagstrom

Your Linux desktop environment is a large and complicated suite of
software.  While most people think of the desktop as just the applications
that we interact with--mail clients, web browsers, text editors, and the
like--there is a lot more to it.  Underneath the major Free Software
desktops are massive stacks of libraries that handle everything from
network connections to abstracting filesystems to making your iPod just
work when you plug it in.  Creating all these libraries and making them
work together with the desktop applications takes a lot of time and
coordination, and Internet relay chat and mailing lists aren't always up to
the task.

The solution to this coordination conundrum?  Bring the hackers responsible
for the desktop together in a single shared location and have them plan the
future of the Linux desktop.  That's exactly what happened in late
September with aKademy in Dublin, Ireland and in early October at the
Boston GNOME Summit in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  As a participant in GNOME
and a researcher, I traveled to Boston to take part in this yearly
gathering.  Around 100 people came from as far away as Eastern Europe and
Australia to converge on the MIT Media Lab for three days of hacking and
three nights of socializing.

Unlike GUADEC, the major GNOME users conference, there are no project-based
presentations here.  You won't find someone talking about the new features
of Inkscape or how to use GStreamer.  Instead, each morning and afternoon
the group broke up into several smaller groups to focus on specific issues
such as accessibility, font rendering, keyboard issues, the task-focused
desktop, making GNOME pretty, and testing.  Each session usually had a
single person who was intimately familiar with the subject in charge to
direct discussion and bring newcomers up to speed.

With such broad topics, you have to wonder if anything major could possibly
be accomplished in such a short time frame.  Surprisingly, the answer is
yes--I'll describe some of the progress that was made on particular
sessions that I was involved with and some of the other interesting things
that are coming soon to a desktop near you.

Anyone who has ever tried to build the bleeding-edge version of a desktop
environment like GNOME or KDE is familiar with what sort of a nightmare it
can be.  Dependencies break randomly, documentation is never up to date,
and in general things just don't work well.  Now, imagine if you had to
merge the bug fixes from newer versions of the software back into an older
version--that's exactly what vendors who provide long-term support for
GNOME have to do--and it's a bona fide disaster.  One major issue is that
there is no common build and test system.  While the GNOME desktop has
JHBuild and JHAutoBuild to automatically build the latest versions of the
software, there isn't a tool to test older or specific versions.

Furthermore, there's no way to ensure that key components, such as the
accessibility framework, haven't been broken.  The testing session focused
on strategies to fix this.  One very useful tool that will most likely take
hold is DogTail, a Python scripting library that allows users to script GUI
actions.  Using a set of DogTail scripts, developers can automatically
execute unit tests that would otherwise take direct user intervention.
Improvements in the build and tracking process were also planned, with a
focus on an option to keep track of the stable versions of the software as
well, forcing changes in the application programming interface to become
explicit rather than relying on the current "watch the mailing list for
changes" method that is employed.

The task-focused desktop was another hot topic of discussion.  While many
people use virtual desktops as a method to keep their tasks organized, this
is still suboptimal.  Alex Gravely has been working on a new tool, Gimmie,
that takes some steps toward a task-focused desktop.  One of the major
hurdles toward reaching that goal is the inability to open particular
elements within a file as applications increasingly store their data in
SQLite databases.  David Trowbridge took the time to start hacking on a
library called libwhatup that will provide a common interface for
applications to register methods to open individual elements of a file.
For example, you could tell F-Spot to open to a particular photo, or
Banshee to go to a particular song.  One day this may allow you to
completely log out from a system and log back in to your desktop
environment later with all of your applications in basically the same
state.  Truly a neat idea.

Another frequently raised issue is that the graphical design of GNOME is
too spartan and doesn't have the "sex appeal" of other desktops such as KDE
and Mac OS X.  You've probably never even seen the default GNOME desktop
icons and branding because no distributor actually uses them--they almost
all change the graphics and alter the menus slightly.  It was with this in
mind that the many artists who came to the summit undertook a massive task:
make GNOME pretty.  And they succeeded wonderfully--without resorting to
making it blue like every other desktop.  GNOME is now green!  The quality
of the designs and the speed at which they were produced was truly amazing.
Be sure to look for some nice graphical improvements in GNOME 2.18 coming
to a desktop near you in March of 2007.

Of course, I'd be missing a major component of the weekend if I didn't
mention the opportunity to socialize.  Cambridge is home to both MIT and
Harvard and has no shortage of excellent eating establishments.  Each night
we'd divide up into groups and find whatever food we could in Cambridge,
usually with about 20 or 30 people all ending up at the same location.  The
impressive thing is that the work continued at the restaurants.  It wasn't
always coding, although I overheard people shout "don't spill beer on my
laptop!" on more than a few occasions.  Usually the work focused on larger
vision issues: Where should the desktop be in five years?  Wouldn't it be
cool if monitors just worked?  How do we deal with the issues of
proprietary drivers?  While most of the issues were not ones that would get
resolved sitting around pints in the Cambridge Brewing Company, it's
refreshing to know that the community is aware of them and is planning for
the future.

By now you might be wondering "that's fine, but what about me?  I'm not a
coder!"  While it's true that the Boston GNOME Summit is primarily directed
toward the design of the desktop, that doesn't mean you need to be a coder
to attend.  Anyone can attend, and for the last few years the event has
been free.  Boston locals even put up their couches for other folks to
crash on during the weekend.  If you're really new to the desktop, events
such as the Boston GNOME Summit might be a bit like jumping into the deep
end of the pool without knowing how to swim, but there are plenty of people
to teach you. If you're already a user of the desktop and looking for ways
you can contribute, I highly recommend attending in the future and learning
about your role in making Linux a competitive player in the desktop market.

Patrick Wagstrom is a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University
researching communication and collaboration in Open Source development.  He
has been using Linux since 1994.

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October Roundup

Oct. 19 Special Event: A screening was held of Elephants Dream, a short
animated film produced entirely using Open Source software and released
under a Creative Commons license.  Some of the tools and techniques used in
making the film were discussed.  <http://www.elephantsdream.org/>

Oct. 21 General User Meeting: In addition to the election and other
business (see last month's issue), several brief lightning talks were given
on various topics.  Mark Dalrymple demonstrated some of the capabilities of
Google Earth.  A tutorial on using quickmasks in The GIMP was given by
Vance Kochenderfer.  Also on the graphical front, Patrick Wagstrom showed
off the 3-D desktop effects now becoming available through Compiz and
AIGLX.  Mike Hansell detailed the challenges of running Linux on the
PlayStation Portable.  Rounding out the set, Robert Blackwell described how
he automates unit testing of his Perl code.

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Have Your Say

The Open Pitt relies on contributed articles from people just like you.  If
you've got something in the world of Linux and Open Source to talk about,
let us know and we'll work on getting it published.

How is Open Source used in your business or organization?  Is there some
new project that's caught your eye?  Have you recently tried out a new
piece of software, and how well did it work?  All these topics, and more,
are fair game.  If there's a recent book on a topic you're interested in
from publishers like O'Reilly and Prentice Hall, we can often obtain review
copies.

Don't worry if you're inexperienced or unsure about your writing ability. 
We can help you get your article into shape--you supply the ideas, we'll do
the editing.

To discuss your article ideas, or even if you just have a question, you can
always reach the editors by e-mail at <top at wplug.org>.

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The Open Pitt is published by the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group
<http://www.wplug.org/top/>

Editors: Elwin Green, Vance Kochenderfer

Copyright 2006 Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group.  Any article in
this newsletter may be reprinted elsewhere in any medium, provided it is
not changed and attribution is given to the author and WPLUG.


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