fidzu : gnome

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

Today's the big release for Oracle Solaris 11, after 7 years of development. For me, the Solaris 11 release comes a little more than 11 years after I joined the X11 engineering team at what was then Sun, and finishes off some projects that were started all the way back then.

For instance, when I joined the X team, Sun was finishing off the removal of the old OpenWindows desktop, and we kept getting questions asking about the rest of the stuff being shipped in /usr/openwin, the directory that held both the OpenLook applications and the X Window System software. I wrote up an ARC case at the time to move the X software to /usr/X11, but there were various issues and higher priority work, so we didn't end up starting that move until near the end of the Solaris 10 development cycle several years later. Solaris 10 thus had a mix of the recently added Xorg server and related code delivered in /usr/X11, while most of the existing bits from Sun's proprietary fork of X11R6 were still in /usr/openwin.

During Solaris 11 development, we finished that move, and then jumped again, moving the programs directly into /usr/bin, following the general Solaris 11 strategy of using /usr/bin for most of the programs shipped with the OS, and using other directories, such as /usr/gnu/bin, /usr/xpg4/bin, /usr/sunos/bin, and /usr/ucb for conflicting alternate implementations of the programs shipped in /usr/bin, no longer as a way to segregate out various subsystems to allow the OS to better fit onto the 105Mb hard disks that shipped with Sun workstations back when /usr/openwin was created. However, if for some reason you wanted to build your own set of X binaries, you could put them in /usr/X11R7 (as I do for testing builds of the upstream git master repos), and then put that first in your $PATH, so nothing is really lost here.

The other major project that was started during Solaris 10 development and finished for Solaris 11 was replacing that old proprietary fork of X11R6, including the Xsun server, with the modernized, modularized, open source X11R7.* code base from the new X.Org, including the Xorg server. The final result, included in this Solaris 11 release, is based mostly on the X11R7.6 release, including recent additions such as the XCB API I blogged about last year, though we did include newer versions of modules that had upstream releases since the X11R7.6 katamari, such as Xorg server version 1.10.3.

That said, we do still apply some local patches, configuration options, and other changes, for things from just fitting into the Solaris man page style or adding support for Trusted Extensions labeled desktops. You can see all of those changes in our source repository, which is searchable and browsable via OpenGrok on src.opensolaris.org (or via hgweb on community mirrors such as openindiana.org) and available for anonymous hg cloning as well. That xnv-clone tree is now frozen, a permanent snapshot of the Solaris 11 sources, while we've created a new x-s11-update-clone tree for the Solaris 11 update releases now being developed to follow on from here.

Naturally, when your OS has 7 years between major release cycles, the hardware environment you run on greatly changes in the meantime as well, and as the layer that handles the graphics hardware, there have been changes due to that. Most of the SPARC graphics devices that were supported in Solaris 10 aren't any more, because the platforms they ran in are no longer supported - we still ship a couple SPARC drivers that are supported, the efb driver for the Sun XVR-50, XVR-100, and XVR-300 cards based on the ATI Radeon chipsets, and the astfb driver for the AST2100 remote Keyboard/Video/Mouse/Storage (rKVMS) chipset in the server ILOM devices. On the x86 side, the EOL of 32-bit platforms let us clear out a lot of the older x86 video device drivers for chipsets and cards you wouldn't find in x64 systems - of course, there's still many supported there, due to the wider variety of graphics hardware found in the x64 world, and even some recent updates, such as the addition of Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) support for Intel graphics up through the Sandy Bridge generation.

For those who followed the development as it happened, either via watching our open source code releases or using one of the many development builds and interim releases such as the various Solaris Express trains, much of this is old news to you. For those who didn't, or who want a refresher on the details, you can see last year's summary in my X11 changes in the 2010.11 release blog post. Once again, the detailed change logs for the X11 packages are available, though unfortunately, all the links in them to the bug reports are now broken, so browsing the hg history log is probably more informative.

Since that update, which covered up to the build 151 released as 2010.11, we've continued development and polishing to get this Solaris 11 release finished up. We added a couple more components, including the previously mentioned xcb libraries, the FreeGLUT library, and the Xdmx Distributed Multihead X server. We cleaned up documentation, including the addition of some docs for the Xserver DTrace provider in /usr/share/doc/Xserver/. The packaging was improved, clearing up errors and optimizing the builds to reduce unnecessary updates. A few old and rarely used components were dropped, including the rstart program for starting up X clients remotely (ssh X forwarding replaces this in a more secure fashion) and the xrx plugin for embedding X applications in a web browser page (which hasn't been kept up to date with the rapidly evolving browser environment). Because Solaris 11 only supports 64-bit systems, and most of the upstream X code was already 64-bit clean, the X servers and most of the X applications are now shipped as 64-bit builds, though the libraries of course are delivered in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions for binary compatibility with applications of each flavor. The Solaris auditing system can now record each attempt by a client to connect to the Xorg server and whether or not it succeeded, for sites which need that level of detail.

In total, we recorded 1512 change request id's during Solaris 11 development, from the time we forked the "Nevada" gate from the Solaris 10 release until the final code freeze for todays release - some were one line bug fixes, some were man page updates, some were minor RFE's and some were major projects, but in the end, the result is both very different (and hopefully much better) than what we started with, and yet, still contains the core X11 code base with 24 years of backwards compatibility in the core protocols and APIs.

09 Nov 2011 10:10pm GMT

After some period of silence, this blog returns in bringing you the latest and greatest news from the Intel Linux Graphics world.

So if you were sad, depressed and crying in despair without having a chance of reading about what was going on with the Intel Graphics for the past days, rejoice!

Those past few days were quite busy on all the projects, and with thousands of emails to keep track of it is hard to select the most relevant news - all of them are! But I'll try to summarize the most interesting stuff that happened for the past few days.

Starting with kernel, as you all already know, we are living in the post-3.1 era now, with the release of Linux 3.2-rc1. It brings lots and lots of fixes and improvements all around, and much more are yet to come.

On Intel Graphics side, the following items caught my attention for the past days:

• Keith Packard sent yet more eDP-related patches, allowing eDP displays connected to the PCH to, well, work . The main issue came from the fact that the driver incorrectly was treating a PCH-connected eDP panel like a CPU-connected one, setting the wrong bits in the wrong places.
• Daniel Vetter has sent out a series of patches for simulating GPU hangs. As you all know, GPU hangs are an (unfortunate) part of a GPU driver life, and there are many factors which could cause them, ranging from incorrect GL instructions to out-of-bounds variables somewhere in the stream of commands and down to hardware failures. Prior to Daniel's patches, the only way to see a GPU hang was by having a hung GPU, so most of them were not easy to reproduce and investigate. Now, it is possible to stop the GPU at will, and see the effects. This is particularly interesting at least for me, because I was working on some tools for doing heuristics analysis of the root-causes of GPU hangs. Now, I can do this task with much more ease.
• Jesse Barnes sent out a new round of planes support, and support for SNB and IVB video sprites. The video sprites support different video formats natively and can do scaling as well, and their support was added to the DRM overlay code with this patchset.
• Ken and Daniel did a bit of cleanup of code specific to some pre-production SNB systems. Now that Sandy Bridge is out there, those bits are not necessary anymore, so they were wiped out.
• Daniel has sent a 13-patch series of pwrite/pread reworking. This patchset fixes some spurious -EFAULTS issues which could lead to kernel issues, improves the performance of pread/pwrite calls on LLC machines and cleanups unused code, replacing them with faster execution paths.
• Also on kernel, I've found an issue which can cause division-by-zero in kernel when accessing power-related registers from userspace, and sent a small patch fixing it. Apparently, the very same issue was already found back in July by Konstantin Belousov. It is a small fix for a potential kernel crashing issue, and let's hope it will be picked up in one of the next kernel pull requests.
• And Jesse Barnes sent out some documentation and cleanup patches for the drm subsystem.
• Still on kernel, but outside of our team's area, one big news for Linux Graphics will certainly make some people out there happy. Yes, I am speaking about Alan Cox moving of basic GMA500 driver out of staging. This driver support accelerated console and non-accelerated KMS on Poulsbo, Oaktrail, Cedarview and Medfield hardware. Note that medfield support in this initial patchset is left out on purpose, as it needs considerable rework to be ready to enter main kernel.

One particular issue worth highlighting is that a long-standing issue on GL-based applications (among which Unigine Tropics and Sanctuary are probably the most notable examples, among many others) was finally fixed, thanks to an amazing work by Eric Anholt, Kenneth Graunke and Keith Packard. This issue can be described as 'small moving ants on top of image edges' or 'flickering pixels'. So if you have had this issue, make sure to check out the patches!

Going to Mesa, out of hundreds of emails and commits, it is hard to choose the most interesting ones. Work on GL 3.0 support proceeds quickly, and new mesa stability release, 7.11.1 is almost out of the door. Our Q&A team did a full testing of this bugfixing release, and haven't found much issues. So prepare yourself, as in few weeks we'll have MESA 7.11.1 out there. Stay tuned for Ian's announcement in nearby future.

But as for mesa master branch, the following patches called my attention the most:

• Eric sent a patch series to add support for GL_EXT_texture_integer on i965 driver.
• More work towards EXT_transform_feedback was done by Dan McCabe and Paul Berry, and Marek from the community side.
• And we had lots of fixes for potential segmentation faults, safety checks, better hardware specification compatibility, piglit-based fixes and other issues from Yuanhan, Eric, Ken, Chad and Ian.

On Wayland side of the force, lots of patches went in those days. Among those, there was an interesting proposal for the screen locking protocol by Pekka Paalanen, and some bugfixing patches from Juan Zhao.

Going to the other components, we had a release of xorg-xserver 1.11.2 RC2, with several crashes and correctness fixes; and new stable pixman 0.24.0 which brings many performance improvements and usage of architecture-specific instructions to improve overall performance over a number of different operations (such as bilinear scaling for example).

And finally, for the intel-gpu-tools, I was working on a new intel_gpu_analyze application, which I was using to tracing and analyzing CPU and GPU performance data during workloads, and also checking on the corresponding power consumption. This is a very experimental code yet, and it lives at my freedesktop.org git for now. But still, I can already do some nice performance analysis like this one.

08 Nov 2011 10:08pm GMT

At LinuxCon Europe/ELCE I had the chance to moderate the kernel hackers panel with Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Paul McKenney and Thomas Gleixner on stage. I like to believe it went quite well, but check it out for yourself, as a video recording is now available online:

For me personally I think the most notable topic covered was Control Groups, and the clarification that they are something that is needed even though their implementation right now is in many ways less than perfect. But in the end there is no reasonable way around it, and much like SMP, technology that complicates things substantially but is ultimately unavoidable.

Other videos from ELCE are online now, too.

07 Nov 2011 3:53pm GMT