J5’s Blog

Shaun,

FC4 does support FLAC out of the box with all the gstreamer based audio players. XMMS is packaged in extras and a quick bug report would most likely get the maintainer to push a new package. We are big supporters of open formats

Looks like my notebook works well with suspend once I did a modprobe -r button. Before it would suspend just fine but upon coming back up it would instantly shut itself off. Jeremy says there is a fix in the works and for right now I can work around the issue by having the suspend scripts unload and load the button module. This is great because my use case is to shut the lid, driver 40 minutes home and open it up. As an experiment I suspended my book at work and unplugged the power. Upon coming back the next morning only one quarter of the battery was used. Jeremy said this is a dismal showing and we could do much better but hey it satisfies my needs. Roughly two days of standby time is fine with me.

Printing

While Alex Larson has been working on the high level API for printing in Gtk+, I have been looking at the print dialog.

I am basing it off of what was drawn up at the Boston Summit and the discussion that followed in various forums. Right now it isn’t much to look at because I have been concentrating on the backend infrastructure. I am working on hooking up a CUPS ipp backend which is largely based off of libgnomecups. The difference is where libgnomecups uses threads to accomplish nonblocking I/O, I am trying to do it with a GSource. It is pretty painful to say the least but fun none the less. As soon as I can get that working I’m going to land it in Gnome CVS.

Máirín Duffy asked me to get the word out. Gnome Women is hosting its first Bug Day this Saturday. Guys and Gals of all skill levels are welcome. If you have always wanted to help out but didn’t know how here is your chance. If you have had previous experiences with Bug Day your expertise is needed once again. Come and meet some of the Woman of Gnome who have graciously elected to make sure this Bug Day goes smoothly. Full details are bellow.

Date: Saturday, January 28th
Time: 9 AM – 9 PM EST
Location: #bugs on irc.gnome.org
Bug Topic: TBD

Bugday Masters: Christian Kirbach (nazgul), Luis Villa (luis)
Deputies: Olav Vitters (bkor), Guilherme Pastore (fatalerror)
Gnome Women Hosts: Máirín Duffy (mizmo), Christine Spang (christine)

Summary: The Gnome Women group are holding their first Bug Day! (For more
details about bug days, see: http://live.gnome.org/Bugsquad/BugDays)

Hey Thomas, my whole collection is in ogg and I won’t even publish my own stuff in a non-free format. I’ve camped out for a consecutive two months and have been known to frequent hippy music gatherings.

But I also like to shower and wear suits. I feel so conflicted.

For a bit now the kernel has been yelling at me on the console that it could not find or load some firmware file. Then it dawned on me bcm stands for Broadcom and Fedora magically had drivers after one of the updates. After getting the ASUS window driver files and compiling fwcutter to cut out the firmware, the kernel stopped complaining and NetworkManager started listing a bunch of networks in the area. I used the ASUS drivers because they came in a zip package. The Compaq drivers were in a .exe softpack and I didn’t have Windows or Wine around to get at the firmware inside. Now all that is needed is for vendors to start allowing Linux distributions to ship firmware and we could have a much better wireless story. Kudos to the bcm4xx project for writing the drivers and the Linux Broadcom 4301 Driver Project which cleanroom reverse engineered the drivers.

Got off an OSDL Printing phone conference. They are putting together a small printing summit where a bunch of us are going to get together and try to hammer out the printing stack in Linux. From vendors, to formats, to driver and desktop issues – it looks like this can be a very productive shindig. It also seems that my schedule has been cleared to concentrate on these issues. Mostly my end will be in the desktop pieces but it is going to be nice to be able to concentrate on one area and really try to nail it down.

Many people compare GConf to the windows registry. The logic goes if it is a hierarchical database of key, value pairs holding system configuration data, it must be bad. That is a very superficial look at what is actually a very useful piece of technology. Is it the next thing since sliced bread (sliced bread having been invented the previous winter)? Not really, but it does enable some pretty nifty things. You see, what I am really interested in is the business logic that GConf enforces rather than the way it represents data.

David Zeuthen keyed me into this thought train, and it really solidified for me while moving Fedora to use gnome-mount instead of fstab-sync (and standard mount) for auto-mounting drives. GConf enforces policy through a couple of layers which rely on a couple of simple rules for determining which layer an application will get an answer to a query from. There is the system layer where all the default values are stored and then there is the user layer where the user can make changes based on their preferences. User always trumps system except for when a key is marked as mandatory. In this case the key is locked down and can not be overridden by the user. This is all very simple but also very powerful. This one system enforces a policy that is both flexable (the user can change the system defaults) and secure (the admin can lock down any keys they do not wish the user to mess with).

How does this relate to gnome-mount? Gnome-mount gets its policy from GConf. Now users can set a certain set of limited options on things like USB keys (such as mounting it sync). Administrators can also easily block anyone from mounting anything at all. NetworkManager works in a similar fashion as does Gnome Power Manager.

Still not convinced? Throw into the mix Sabayon and Stateless Linux, and GConf begins to look more enticing. With Sabayon and administrator can set up a desktop policy simply by configuring a desktop session. Sabyon captures GConf key changes (as well as some other backends such as firefox) and then spits out a configuration bundle IS departments can use to deploy locked down desktops with. Integrating an application with GConf means it can instantly benefit from Sabyon.

What about Stateless Linux? In a stateless world root can not be written to (think live CDs), but we do want to allow the user to save state (think a USB key or network mounted home directory). Doing things the GConf way gets you there in a hurry. We do this in NetworkManager. If a user sets a network up to connect via VPN this configuration is stored in GConf (with the sensitive parts in gnome-keyring I believe). No touching of configurations files in /etc is needed to connect to a VPN network or any network that NetworkManager can handle.

Sure you can do all this without GConf. It isn’t going to save the world and like most things it isn’t always the perfect solution. What it is is a tool which enforces a couple of simple rules for making an application integrate better with the whole system. Security, flexibility and manageability – that is my triple verb of the day.

Update: I forgot to mention that I also use this approach to a lesser extent for desktop configuration of USB printers when they can’t be auto-detected. I am looking to making it more robust.

Update 2: Hey Daniel how about Secure, Manage, Control

I got back to work today after a much needed week of rest. Looks like a fresh slate of consumer printers, scanners, cameras, memory cards, networking devices, laptops, et al. arrived at Ed’s desk. I get first dibs on the printers/scanners because, hey, they’ve got to work before they will be useful in QA . Man some of these things look like space ships.