fidzu : gnome

So this is a blog post not related to Fedora or Red Hat, but rather my personal experience with getting a robo vacuum and robo mop into the house.

So about two Months ago my wife and I decided to get a Robo vacuum while shopping at Costco (a US wholesaler outfit). So we brought home the iRobot Roomba 980. Over the next week we ended up also getting the newer iRobot Roomba i7+ and the iRobot Braava m6 mopping robot. Our dream was that we would never have to vacuum or mop again, instead leaving that to our new robots to handle. With two little kids being able to cut that work from our todo list seemed like a dream come through.

I feel that whenever you get into a new technology it takes some time with your first product in that category to understand what questions to ask and what considerations to make. For instance I feel a lot of more informed and confident in my knowledge about electric cars having owned a Nissan Leaf for a few years now (enough to wish I had a Tesla instead for instance :). I guess our experience with robot vacuums here is similar.

Anyway, if you are considering buying a Robot vacuum or mop I think the first lesson we learned is that it is definitely not a magic solution. You have to prepare your house quite a bit before each run, including obvious things like tidying up anything on the floor like the kids legos etc., to discovering that certain furniture, like the IKEA Poang chairs are mortal enemies with your robo vacuum. We had to put our chair on top of the sofa as the Roomba would get stuck on it every time we tried to vacuum the floor. Also the door mat in front of our entrance door kept having its corners sucked into the vacuum getting it stuck. Anyway, our lesson learned is that vacuuming (or mopping) is not something we can do on an impulse or easily on a schedule, as it takes quite a bit of preparation. If you don't have small kid leaving random stuff all over the house all the time you might be able to just set the vacuum on a schedule, but for us that has turned out to be a big no :). So in practice we only vacuum at night now when my wife and I have had time to prep the house after the kids have gone to bed.

It is worth nothing that we only got one vacuum now. We got the i7+ after we got the 980 due to realizing that the 980 didn't have features like the smart map allowing you to for instance vacuum specific rooms. It also had other niceties like self emptying and it was supposed to be more quiet (which is nice when you run it at night). However in our experience it also had a less strong vacuum, so we felt it left more crap on the floor then the older 980 model. So in the end we returned the i7+ in favour of the 980, just because we felt it did a better job at vacuuming. It is quite loud though, so we can hear it very loud and clear up on the second floor while trying to fall asleep. So if you need a quiet house to sleep, this setup is not for you.

Another lesson we learned is that the vacuums or mops do not work great in darkness, so we now have to leave the light on downstairs at night when we want to vacuum or mop the floor. We should be able to automate that using Google Home, so Google Home could turn on the lights, start the vacuum and then once done, turn off the lights again. We haven't actually gotten around to test that yet though.

As for the mop, I would say that it is not a replacement for mopping yourself, but it can reduce the frequency of you mopping yourself and thus help maintain a nice clear floor for longer after you done a full manual mop yourself. Also the m6 is super sensitive to edges, which I assume is to avoid it trying to mop your rugs and mats, but it also means that it can not traverse even small thresholds. So for us who have small thresholds between our kitchen area and the rest of the house we have to carry the mop over the thresholds and mop the rest of the first floor as a separate action, which is a bit of an annoyance now that we are running these things at night. That said the kitchen is the one room which needs moping more regularly, so in some sense the current setup where the roomba vacuums the whole first floor and the braava mop mops just the kitchen is a workable solution for us. One nice feature here is that they can be set up to run in order, so the mop will only start once the vacuum is done (that feature is the main reason we haven't tested out other brand mops which might handle the threshold situation better).

So to conclude, would I recommend robot vacuums and robot mops to other parents with you kids? I would say yes, it has definitely helped us keep the house cleaner and nicer and let us spend less time cleaning the house. But it is not a miracle cure in any way or form, it still takes time and effort to prepare and set up the house and sometimes you still need to do especially the mopping yourself to get things really clean. As for the question of iRobot versus other brands I have no input as I haven't really tested any other brands. iRobot is a local company so their vacuums are available in a lot of stores around me and I drive by their HQ on a regular basis, so that is the more or less random reason I ended up with their products as opposed to competing ones.

28 May 2020 4:37pm GMT

The KWinFT project with its two major open source offerings KWinFT and Wrapland was announced one month ago. This made quite some headlines back then but I decided to keep it down afterwards and push the project silently forward on a technical side.

Now I am pleased to announce the release of a beta version for the next stable release 5.19 in two weeks. The highlights of this release are a complete redesign of Wrapland's server library and two more projects joining KWinFT.

Wrapland Server library redesign

One of the goals of KWinFT is to facilitate large upsetting changes to the internal structure and technological base of its open source offerings. As mentioned one month ago in the project announcement these changes include pushing back the usage of Qt in lower-level libraries and instead making use of modern C++ to its full potential.

We achieved the first milestone on this route in an impressively short timeframe: the redesign of Wrapland's server library for improved encapsulation of external libwayland types and providing template-enhanced meta-classes for easy extension with new functionality in the future.

This redesign work was organized on a separate branch and merged this weekend into master. In the end that included over 200 commits and 40'000 changed lines. Here I have to thank in particular Adrien Faveraux who joined KWinFT shortly after its announcement and contributed several class refactors. Our combined work enabled us to deliver this major redesign already now with the upcoming release.

Aside from the redesign I used this opportunity to add clang-based tools for static code analysis: clang-format and clang-tidy. Adding to our autotests that run with and without sanitizers Wrapland's CI pipelines now provide efficient means for handling contributions by GitLab merge requests and checking back on the result after merge. You can see a full pipeline with linters, static code analysis, project build and autotests passing in the article picture above or check it out here directly in the project.

New in KWinFT: Disman and KDisplay

With this release Disman and KDisplay join the KWinFT project. Disman is a fork of libkscreen and KDisplay one of KScreen. KScreen is the main UI in a KDE Plasma workspace for display configuration and I was its main contributor and maintainer in the last years.

Disman can be installed in parallel with libkscreen. For KDisplay on the other side it is recommended to remove KScreen when KDisplay is installed. This way not both daemons try to meddle with the display configuration at the same time. KDisplay can make use of plugins for KWinFT, KWin and wlroots so you could also use KDisplay as a general replacement.

Forking libkscreen and KScreen to Disman and KDisplay was an unwanted move from my side because I would have liked to keep maintaining them inside KDE. But my efforts to integrate KWinFT with them were not welcomed by some members of the Plasma team. Form your own opinion by reading the discussion in the patch review.

I am not happy about this development but I decided to make the best out of a bad situation and after forking and rebranding directly created CI pipelines for both projects which now also run linters, project builds and autotests on all merge requests and branch pushes. And I defined some more courageous goals for the two projects now that I have more control.

One would think after years of being the only person putting real work into KScreen I would have had this kind of freedom also inside KDE but that is not how KDE operates.

Does it need to be this way? What are arguments for and against it? That is a discussion for another article in the future.

Very next steps

There is an overall technical vision I am following with KWinFT: building a modern C++ framework for Wayland compositor creation. A framework that is built up from independent yet well interacting small libraries.

Take a look at this task for an overview. The first one of these libraries that we have now put work in was Wrapland. I plan for the directly next one to be the backend library that provides interfacing capabilities with the kernel or a host window system the compositor runs on, what in most cases means talking to the Direct Rendering Manager.

The work in Wrapland is not finished though. After the basic representation of Wayland objects has been improved we can push further by layering the server library like this task describes. The end goal here is to get rid of the Qt dependency and make it an optional facade only.

How to try out or contribute to KWinFT

You can try out KWinFT on Manjaro. At the moment you can install KWinFT and its dependencies on Manjaro's unstable images but it is planned to make this possible also in the stable images with the upcoming 5.19 stable release.

I explicitly recommend the Manjaro distribution nowadays to any user from being new to Linux to experts. I have Manjaro running on several devices and I am very pleased with Manjaro's technology, its development pace and its community.

If you are an advanced user you can also use Arch Linux directly and install a KWinFT AUR package that builds KWinFT and its dependencies directly from Git. I hope a package of KWinFT's stable release will also be soon available from Arch' official repositories.

If you want to contribute to one of the KWinFT projects take a look at the open tasks and come join us in our Gitter channel. I am very happy that already several people joined the project who provide QA feedback and patches. There are also opportunities to work on DevOps, documentation and translations.

I am hoping KWinFT will be a welcoming place for everyone interested in high-quality open source graphics technology. A place with low entry barriers and many opportunities to learn and grow as an engineer.

25 May 2020 10:00am GMT

Meanwhile, in GSoC:

I took the second week of Community Bonding to make some improvements in my development environment. As I have reported before, I use a QEMU VM to develop kernel contributions. I was initially using an Arch VM for development; however, at the beginning of the year, I reconfigured it to use a Debian VM, since my host is a Debian installation - fewer context changes. In this movement, some ends were loose, and I did some workarounds, well… better round it off.

I also use kworkflow (KW) to ease most of the no-coding tasks included in the day-to-day coding for Linux kernel. The KW automates repetitive steps of a developer's life, such as compiling and installing my kernel modifications; finding information to format and send patches correctly; mounting or remotely accessing a VM, etc. During the time that preceded the GSoC project submission, I noticed that the feature of installing a kernel inside the VM was incompleted. At that time, I started to use the "remote" option as palliative. Therefore, I spent the last days learning more features and how to hack the kworkflow to improve my development environment (and send it back to the kw project).

I have started by sending a minor fix on alert message:

kw: small issue on u/mount alert message

Then I expanded the feature "explore" - looking for a string in directory contents - by adding GNU grep utility in addition to the already used git grep. I gathered many helpful suggestions for this patch, and I applied them together with the reviews received in a new version:

src: add grep utility to explore feature

Finally, after many hours of searching, reading and learning a little about guestfish, grub, initramfs-tools and bash, I could create the first proposal of code changes that enable kw to automate the build and install of a kernel in VM:

add support for deployment in a debian-VM

The main barrier to this feature was figuring out how to update the grub on the VM without running the update-grub command via ssh access. First, I thought about adding a custom file with a new entry to boot. Thinking and researching a little more, I realized that guestfish could solve the problem and, following this logic, I found a blog post describing how to run "update-grub" with guestfish. From that, I made some adaptations that created the solution.

However, in addition to updating grub, the feature still lacks some steps to install the kernel on the VM properly. I checked the missing code by visiting an old FLUSP tutorial that describes the step-by-step of compiling and install the Linux Kernel inside a VM. I also used the implementation of the "remote" mode of the "kw deploy" to wrap up.

Now I use kw to automatically compile and install a custom kernel on my development VM. So, time to sing: "Ooh, that's why I'm easy; I'm easy as Sunday morning!"

Maybe not now. It's time to learn more about IGT tests!

20 May 2020 6:00pm GMT

Browsing foundation-list recently, I was honored to see Snowy (and Tomboy Online) hosting mentioned as one of the GNOME CEO goals (scroll to the bottom) for 2010! Unfortunately, the pace of Snowy's development has slowed in the last few months, due in part to both Sandy and my schedules. Despite that, we wouldn't want Stormy to get a bad reputation because of our slacking, so we're going to change that.

We're hosting an IRC meeting in the #snowy channel on irc.gimp.net on Saturday, 23 Jan 2010 at 11:00 AM EDT (16:00 GMT, other time zones) to get ourselves organized, and to recruit your help.

So, if you are a graphic designer that wants to help beautify an awesome open source project, if you're a hacker who knows or wants to learn Django, or even if you're just interested in Snowy, stop on by!

See you there!

10 Nov 2011 4:55am GMT

Today, I'm proud to announce the 2.0 release of the Mono Accessibility project. Spanning a year of intensive work and fixing over 500 bugs, this is truly our best release ever.

This release enables all types of users to access System.Windows.Forms and Silverlight applications from Linux using Orca and other ATK-based Assistive Technologies (ATs), as well as access Linux applications from UI Automation (UIA) based ATs.

What's changed since version 1.0?

Added:

• UI Automation provider support for Moonlight
• UI Automation to ATK bridge for Moonlight to allow Moonlight applications to be accessed by Linux ATs
• Complete implementation of the UI Automation Client API, facilitating access to System.Windows.Forms, ATK-based applications and Silverlight controls for UI Automation Clients.

What is Mono Accessibility:

The Mono Accessibility project enables Winforms and Silverlight applications to be fully accessible on Linux, and allows Assistive Technologies (ATs) like screen readers and test automation tools that depend on UI Automation APIs to work on Linux.

Mono Accessibility is released under the MIT/X11 license.

Get it!

Mono Accessibility is available for a variety of Linux distributions, including:

• openSUSE 11.2 - 1-Click Install
• Ubuntu Karmic Koala - Package Archive on Launchpad
• Fedora 12 - Repository on openSUSE Build Service
• Other distributions - Source tarballs

A Note About at-spi2

Accessing GTK+ applications with the UIA Client API requires the most recent development version of the new dbus-based at-spi2, which is known to cause system instability.

In Fedora, at-spi2 repeatedly causes GDM to segfault. If you do not need this feature, do not install the latest at-spi2 and atk, or our packages which depend on them, which are at-spi-sharp and AtspiUiaSource.

We are working hard to identify these issues and hope to aid the GNOME Accessibility Team in stabilizing at-spi2 in the near future.

Find out more

Navigate to our homepage for all the latest information, and ways to contact us.

10 Nov 2011 4:55am GMT

This entry is cross-posted from my Oracle blog… clearly, seasoned GNOME blog readers will be less excited about GNOME 2.30, compiz and Firefox 6 than my audience over there, many of whom have been using GNOME 2.6 on Solaris 10 for the past 7 years

Much has been written today about the enterprise and cloud features of Oracle Solaris 11, which was launched today, but what's new for those of us who just like to have the robustness and security of Solaris on our desktop machines? Here are a few of the Solaris 11 desktop highlights:

• GNOME 2.30: It may not be the bleeding-edge GNOME 3, but GNOME 2.30 is the most stable version of GNOME ever released, and has many improvements over GNOME 2.6 as found in Solaris 10.
• X.org 1.10.3: See Alan's blog for details of this X server update.
• Updated Firefox and Thunderbird: Solaris 11 ships with Firefox 6.0.2 and Thunderbird 6.0.2 from Mozilla.
• Compiz: Solaris 11 uses this compositing window manager by default, enhancing the desktop experience with judicious use of customizable effects such as translucency, drop shadows and transition animations. (Not supported on all graphics cards, which will fall back automatically to the metacity window manager.)
• Package Manager: IPS is the new package management system in Solaris 11, and it has a full-featured GUI that allows you to quickly browse and install new packages, or perform a live update of your entire OS in a couple of clicks, safe in the knowledge that it can be rolled back to a previous version just as quickly in the event of any problems.
• Time Slider: Making its debut in OpenSolaris, the Time Slider feature that allows you take automatic, periodic ZFS snapshots and explore them in your file manager application now also allows you to make backups to removable media and network devices.
• Network Auto Magic GUI: Allows configuration of the NWAM subsystem, including creation, editing and switching of network profiles and locations.
• Visual Panels: A suite of GUI tools for system administration tasks, such as configuring firewall and SMF services.
• GParted: The venerable Linux graphical disk partitioning tool, now ported to Solaris and included on the Live CD.
• CUPS: The lp printing subsystem has been removed, and Solaris 11 now uses the open source *nix printing technology from Apple, with the same system-config-printer GUI found in several Linux distros.

Solaris 11 is free to download and use for most non-commercial purposes (but IANAL, so do check the OTN License Agreement on the download page first - it's short and sweet, as these things go), and you can download various flavours, including a Live CD and a USB install image, right here.

10 Nov 2011 12:08am GMT