Mi blog lah! Το ιστολόγιό μου

18Apr/098

Git clones vs Shallow Git clones

When cloning a Git repository, there is an option to limit the amount of history your clone will have. If you set the parameter to --depth 1, you get the least amount of history, and you create a shallow clone.

The git clone man page says that you cannot push your commits if you have a shallow clone. Apparently, there is no error message when you actually push your commits, so it is a situation that might bring problems in the repository in the future.

Lacking more details on whether pushing commits from shallow clones is bad for the repository, let's measure if there are any gains when someone opts for shallow clones.

Module (gnome-2-26) Full clone (MB) Shallow clone (MB)
evolution 204 189
gtk+ 193 172
nautilus 139 108
gnome-games 127 120
gnome-applets 110 98
gnome-user-docs 108 102
evolution-data-server 84 77
anjuta 76 66
libgweather 69 68
gnome-panel 68 60
ekiga 61 49
dasher 58 49
orca 55 47
gnome-utils 53 48
gnome-icon-theme 51 49
gedit 49 45
epiphany 48 42
gnome-control-center 46 40
gdm 43 38
glib 42 37
gnome-system-tools 33 29
gnome-media 33 30
totem 31 27
gnome-power-manager 31 27
gnome-backgrounds 31 30
brasero 31 29
metacity 29 27
gnome-desktop 28 24
tomboy 27 25
seahorse 24 22
gnome-terminal 23 21
gnome-session 23 20
gucharmap 22 19
gnome-vfs 22 19
glade3 21 19
gconf 21 20
eog 21 18
gcalctool 19 17
libgnomeui 18 15
gtkhtml 18 16
evince 18 15
gnome-themes 17 16
cheese 17 15
file-roller 16 14
empathy 16 15
gok 14 13
gtksourceview 13 12
gnome-keyring 13 12
gnome-doc-utils 13 13
bug-buddy 13 11
zenity 12 11
yelp 12 11
sound-juicer 12 11
libgnome 12 11
gvfs 12 9.9
gnome-system-monitor 12 11
deskbar-applet 12 9.5
libbonobo 11 8.8
gnome-settings-daemon 11 11
gnome-devel-docs 11 11
evolution-exchange 9.9 9.3
gnome-screensaver 9 8.3
vte 8.7 7.5
libbonoboui 8.7 7.4
libgtop 8.4 6.9
libgnomeprintui 8.4 7.1
gconf-editor 8.4 7.9
libgnomeprint 8.1 7
vinagre 7.3 6
libwnck 6.6 5.9
accerciser 6.6 6.3
gtk-engines 6.4 5.4
sabayon 5.8 5.2
vino 5.7 5.3
gnome-nettool 5.3 4.9
mousetweaks 5 4.7
totem-pl-parser 4.6 4.5
at-spi 4.5 3.9
libgnomecanvas 4.3 3.7
atk 4.2 3.7
gnome-netstatus 4.1 3.8
devhelp 3.9 3.2
gdl 3.5 3.2
gnome-mag 3.2 2.9
gnome-menus 3 2.6
hamster-applet 2.8 2.2
gnome-user-share 2.6 2.5
evolution-mapi 2.2 2.1
libgnomekbd 1.8 1.7
alacarte 1.6 1.4
pessulus 1.5 1.3
evolution-webcal 1.4 1.3
swfdec-gnome 1.1 0.94
Total (MB) 2625.6 2349.24
Time (min) 52 37

The git repositories for all modules of gnome-2-26 weight 2.6GB while their shallow clones are 2.3GB. There is a difference of less than 300MB.

Comparatively, if it takes 52 minutes to clone all GNOME 2.26 repositories, their shallow clones save 15 minutes.The speed that was reported by git clone was about 1.4MB/s in this experiment.

Cloning is bound by both your bandwidth and your CPU (especially when resolving deltas). It would be interesting to evaluate if there would be benefits (on git.gnome.org load, speed of cloning) by having daily tarballs of anonymous clones of the modules, so that one can download using HTTP and then simply add their account details and update with git pull --rebase.

With the above information, it makes sense to avoid making shallow clones, especially when you intend to push your changes. Instead, one would dedicate at least 2.6GB for the repositories, and keep them.

intltool-manage-vcs was used to retrieve the repositories.

Update: The GNOME 2.26 modules (2.6GB in size for all their repositories), compresses down to 1.6GB (.tar.bz2).

Tagged as: 8 Comments
7Jan/090

Playing with Git

Git is a version control system (VCS) software that is used for source code management (SCM). There are several examples of VCS software, such as CVS and SVN. What makes Git different is that it is a distributed VCS, that is, a DVCS.

Being a DVCS, when you use Git you create fully capable local repositories that can be used for offline work. When you get the files of a repository, you actually grab the full information (this makes the initial creation of local repositories out of a remote repository slower, and the repositories are bigger).

You can install git by installing the git package. You can test it by opening a terminal window, and running

git clone git://github.com/schacon/whygitisbetter.git

The files appear in a directory called whygitisbetter. In a subdirectory called .git/,git stores all the controlling information it requires to manage the local repository. When you enter the repository directory (whygitisbetter in our case), you can issue commands that will figure out what's going on because of the info in .git/.

With git, we create local copies of repositories by cloning. If you have used CVS or SVN, this is somewhat equivalent to the checkout command. By cloning, you create a full local repository. When you checkout with CVS or SVN, you get the latest snapshot only of the source code.

What you downloaded above is the source code for the http://www.whygitisbetterthanx.com/ website. It describes the relative advantages of git compared to other VCS and DVCS systems.

Among the different sources of documentation for git, I think one of the easiest to read is the Git Community Book. It is consise and easy to follow, and it comes with video casting (videos that show different tasks, with audio guidance).

You can create local repositories on your system. If you want to have a remote repository, you can create an account at GitHub, an attractive start-up that offers 100MB free space for your git repository. Therefore, you can host your pet project on github quite easily.

GitHub combines source code management with social networking, no matter how strange that may look like. It comes with tools that allows to maintain your own copies of repositories (for example, from other github users), and helps with the communication. For example, if I create my own copy of the whygitisbetter repository and add something nice to the book, I can send a pull request (with the click of a button) to the maintainer to grab my changes!

If you have already used another SCM tool (non-distributed), it takes some time to get used to the new way of git. It is a good skill to have, and the effort should pay off quickly. There is a SVN to Git crash course available.

If you have never used an SCM, it is cool to go for git. There is nothing to unlearn, and you will get a new skill.

Git is used for the developement of the Linux kernel, the Perl language, Ruby On Rails, and others.

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , No Comments
20Jun/084

Converting between XKB and XML

I completed the stage that takes keyboard layout files from XKB (X.Org) and converts them to XML documents, based on a keyboard layout Relax NG schema. Then, these XML documents can also be converted back to keyboard layout files.

Here is an imaginary example of a keyboard layout file.

// Keyboard layout for the Zzurope country (code: zz).
// Yeah.

partial alphanumeric_keys alternate_group hidden
xkb_symbols "bare" {
   key <AE01> { [        1, exclam,      onesuperior,  exclamdown      ] };
};

partial alphanumeric_keys alternate_group
xkb_symbols "basic" {
   name[Group1] = "ZZurope";

   include "zz(bare)"

   key <AD04> { [        r, R,           ediaeresis,   Ediaeresis      ] };
   key <AC07> { [        j, J,           idiaeresis,   Idiaeresis      ] };
   key <AB02> { [        x, X,           oe,           OE              ] };
   key <AB04> { [        v, V,           registered,   registered      ] };
};

partial alphanumeric_keys alternate_group
xkb_symbols "extended" {
    include "zz(basic)"
    name[Group1] = "ZZurope Extended";
    key.type = "THREE_LEVEL"; // We use three levels.
    override key <AD01> {   type[Group1] = "SEPARATE_CAPS_AND_SHIFT_ALPHABETIC",
[ U1C9, U1C8], [  any,   U1C7 ]   }; // q
    override key <AD02> {   [ U1CC, U1CB, any,U1CA ],
type[Group1] = "SEPARATE_CAPS_AND_SHIFT_ALPHABETIC" }; // w
    key <BKSP> {
        type[Group1]="CTRL+ALT",
        symbols[Group1]= [ BackSpace,   Terminate_Server ]
    };
    key <BKSR> { virtualMods = AltGr, [ 1, 2 ] };
    modifier_map Control { Control_L };
    modifier_map Mod5   { <LVL3>, <MDSW> };
    key <BKST> { [1, 2,3, 4] };
};

When converted to an XML document, it looks like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<layout layoutname="zz">
  <symbols>
    <mapoption>hidden</mapoption>
    <mapoption>xkb_symbols</mapoption>
    <mapname>bare</mapname>
    <mapmaterial>
      <tokenkey override="False">
        <keycodename>AE01</keycodename>
        <keysymgroup>
          <symbolsgroup>
            <symbol>1</symbol>
            <symbol>exclam</symbol>
            <symbol>onesuperior</symbol>
            <symbol>exclamdown</symbol>
          </symbolsgroup>
        </keysymgroup>
      </tokenkey>
    </mapmaterial>
  </symbols>
  <symbols>
    <mapoption>xkb_symbols</mapoption>
    <mapname>basic</mapname>
    <mapmaterial>
      <tokenname name="ZZurope"/>
      <tokeninclude>zz(bare)</tokeninclude>
      <tokenkey override="False">
        <keycodename>AD04</keycodename>
        <keysymgroup>
          <symbolsgroup>
            <symbol>r</symbol>
            <symbol>R</symbol>
            <symbol>ediaeresis</symbol>
            <symbol>Ediaeresis</symbol>
          </symbolsgroup>
        </keysymgroup>
      </tokenkey>
      <tokenkey override="False">
        <keycodename>AC07</keycodename>
        <keysymgroup>
          <symbolsgroup>
            <symbol>j</symbol>
            <symbol>J</symbol>
            <symbol>idiaeresis</symbol>
            <symbol>Idiaeresis</symbol>
          </symbolsgroup>
        </keysymgroup>
      </tokenkey>
      <tokenkey override="False">
        <keycodename>AB02</keycodename>
        <keysymgroup>
          <symbolsgroup>
            <symbol>x</symbol>
            <symbol>X</symbol>
            <symbol>oe</symbol>
            <symbol>OE</symbol>
          </symbolsgroup>
        </keysymgroup>
      </tokenkey>
      <tokenkey override="False">
        <keycodename>AB04</keycodename>
        <keysymgroup>
          <symbolsgroup>
            <symbol>v</symbol>
            <symbol>V</symbol>
            <symbol>registered</symbol>
            <symbol>registered</symbol>
          </symbolsgroup>
        </keysymgroup>
      </tokenkey>
    </mapmaterial>
  </symbols>
  <symbols>
    <mapoption>xkb_symbols</mapoption>
    <mapname>extended</mapname>
    <mapmaterial>
      <tokenname name="ZZurope Extended"/>
      <tokeninclude>zz(basic)</tokeninclude>
      <tokentype>THREE_LEVEL</tokentype>
      <tokenmodifiermap state="Control">
        <keycode value="Control_L"/>
      </tokenmodifiermap>
      <tokenmodifiermap state="Mod5">
        <keycodex value="LVL3"/>
        <keycodex value="MDSW"/>
      </tokenmodifiermap>
      <tokenkey override="True">
        <keycodename>AD01</keycodename>
        <keysymgroup>
          <symbolsgroup>
            <symbol>U1C9</symbol>
            <symbol>U1C8</symbol>
          </symbolsgroup>
          <symbolsgroup>
            <symbol>any</symbol>
            <symbol>U1C7</symbol>
          </symbolsgroup>
          <typegroup value="SEPARATE_CAPS_AND_SHIFT_ALPHABETIC"/>
        </keysymgroup>
      </tokenkey>
      <tokenkey override="True">
        <keycodename>AD02</keycodename>
        <keysymgroup>
          <symbolsgroup>
            <symbol>U1CC</symbol>
            <symbol>U1CB</symbol>
            <symbol>any</symbol>
            <symbol>U1CA</symbol>
          </symbolsgroup>
          <typegroup value="SEPARATE_CAPS_AND_SHIFT_ALPHABETIC"/>
        </keysymgroup>
      </tokenkey>
      <tokenkey override="False">
        <keycodename>BKSP</keycodename>
        <keysymgroup>
          <symbolsgroup>
            <symbol>BackSpace</symbol>
            <symbol>Terminate_Server</symbol>
          </symbolsgroup>
          <typegroup value="CTRL+ALT"/>
        </keysymgroup>
      </tokenkey>
      <tokenkey override="False">
        <keycodename>BKSR</keycodename>
        <keysymgroup>
          <symbolsgroup>
            <symbol>1</symbol>
            <symbol>2</symbol>
          </symbolsgroup>
          <tokenvirtualmodifiers value="AltGr"/>
        </keysymgroup>
      </tokenkey>
      <tokenkey override="False">
        <keycodename>BKST</keycodename>
        <keysymgroup>
          <symbolsgroup>
            <symbol>1</symbol>
            <symbol>2</symbol>
            <symbol>3</symbol>
            <symbol>4</symbol>
          </symbolsgroup>
        </keysymgroup>
      </tokenkey>
    </mapmaterial>
  </symbols>
</layout>

When we convert the XML document back to the XKB format, it looks like

hidden xkb_symbols "bare"
{
	key <AE01> { [ 1, exclam, onesuperior, exclamdown ] };
};

xkb_symbols "basic"
{
	name = "ZZurope";
	include "zz(bare)"
	key <AD04> { [ r, R, ediaeresis, Ediaeresis ] };
	key <AC07> { [ j, J, idiaeresis, Idiaeresis ] };
	key <AB02> { [ x, X, oe, OE ] };
	key <AB04> { [ v, V, registered, registered ] };
};

xkb_symbols "extended"
{
	name = "ZZurope Extended";
	include "zz(basic)"
	key.type = "THREE_LEVEL";
	modifier_map Control { Control_L };
	modifier_map Mod5 { <LVL3>, <MDSW> };
	override key <AD01> { [ U1C9, U1C8 ], [ any, U1C7 ], type = "SEPARATE_CAPS_AND_SHIFT_ALPHABETIC"  };
	override key <AD02> { [ U1CC, U1CB, any, U1CA ], type = "SEPARATE_CAPS_AND_SHIFT_ALPHABETIC"  };
	key <BKSP> { [ BackSpace, Terminate_Server ], type = "CTRL+ALT"  };
	key <BKSR> { [ 1, 2 ], virtualMods = AltGr  };
	key <BKST> { [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ] };
};

Some things are missing such as partial, alphanumeric_keys and alternate_group, which I discussed with Sergey and he said they should be ok to go away.

In addition, we simplify by keeping just Group1 (we do not specify it, as it is implied).

I performed the round-trip with all layout files, and all parsed and validated OK (there is some extra work with the level3 file remaining, though).

Some issues that are remaining, include

  • Figuring out how to use XLink to link to documents in the same folder (+providing a parameter; the name of the variant), and how to represent that in the Relax NG schema.
  • Sort the layout entries by keycode value.
Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
11Jun/080

ANTLR grammar for XKB, and Relax NG schema (draft)

I completed the ANTLRv3 grammar for symbols/ configuration files of XKB. The grammar can parse and create the abstract syntax tree (AST) for all keyboard layouts in xkeyboard-config.

ANTLRv3 helps you create parsers for domain specific languages (DSL), an example of which is the configuration files in XKB.

Having the ANTLRv3 grammar for a configuration file allows to generate code in any of the supported target lagnuages (C, C++, Java, Python, C#, etc), so that you easily include a parser that reads those files. Essentially you avoid using custom parsers which can be difficult to maintain, or parsers that were generated with flex/bison.

On a similar note, here is the grammar to parse Compose files (such as en_US.UTF-8/Compose.pre). I am not going to be using in the project for now, but it was fun writing it. The Python target takes 18s to create the AST for the >5500 lines of the en_US.UTF-8 compose file, on a typical modern laptop.

I am also working on creating a RelaxNG schema for the XKB configuration files (those under symbols/). There is a draft available, which needs much more work.The Relax NG book by Eric van de Vlist is very useful here.

The immediate goal is to use the code generated by ANTLR to parse the XKB files and create XML files based on the Relax NG schema. I am using Python, and there are a few options; the libxml2 bindings for Python, and PyXML. The latter has more visible documentation, but I think that I should better be using the former.

Update: lxml appears to be the nice way to use libxml2 (instead of using directly libxml2).

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , No Comments
28May/083

Looking into the symbol files

In the previous post, we talked about the ANTLR grammar that parses the XKB layout files.

The grammar is available at http://code.google.com/p/keyboardlayouteditor/source/browse. I'll rather push to the freedesktop repository once the project is completed. Now it's too easy for me, just doing svn commit -m something.

Below you can see the relevant layout files for each country (and in some cases, language), and how the grammar deals with them. First column is filenames from the CVS XKB symbols subdirectory (to be moved eminently to GIT). Last's week discussion with Sergey helped me figure out issues with the symbol files, simplify what information is needed, and what can be eliminated. Second column has Not OK if something is wrong. Third column tries to explain what was wrong.

ad
af
al
altwin
am
ara
az
ba
bd
be
bg
br
braille
bt
by
ca
capslock
cd
ch
cn
compose
ctrl
cz
de
dk
ee
epo
es
et
eurosign
fi
fo
fr
gb NOK Non-UTF8
ge
gh
gn
gr
group NOK virtualMods= AltGr
hr
hu NOK Non-UTF8
ie
il NOK key.type="FOUR_LEVEL" (typically: key.type[something]=....)
in NOK key.type="FOUR_LEVEL" (typically: key.type[something]=....)
inet
iq
ir
is
it
jp NOK key <BKSP> {
type="",   // empty?
symbols[Group1]= [ bracketright, braceright ]
};
keypad NOK overlay1=<KO7> }; // what's "overlay"?
kg
kh
kpdl
kr
kz
la
latam
latin
level3 NOK virtual_modifiers LAlt, AlGr; virtualMods= Lalt
level5
lk
lt
lv
ma
mao
me
mk
mm
mn
mt
mv
nbsp NOK Non-UTF8
ng
nl
no
np
olpc
pc NOK key <AA00> { type=”SOMETHING” } instead of { type[Group1]=”SOMETHING” }
pk
pl
pt
ro
rs
ru
se
shift NOK actions [Group1] = [
si
sk
srvr_ctrl NOK key <AA00> { type=”SOMETHING” } instead of { type[Group1]=”SOMETHING” }
sy
th
tj
tr
ua

Non-UTF-8 are the files that have characters that are not UTF-8 (are iso-8859-1).

Some layouts have key.type = "something" and others key.type[SomeGroup] = "something". Apparently, the format allows to infer which is the group that the type acts upon? That's weird. Would it be better to put the group information? Is it required that the group is not set?

Some files have virtualMods, which I do not know what it is. Is it used?

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
29Feb/081

FOSDEM ’08, summary and comments

I attended FOSDEM '08 which took place on the 23rd and 24th of February in Brussels.

Compared to other events, FOSDEM is a big event with over 4000 (?) participants and over 200 lectures (from lightning talks to keynotes). It occupied three buildings at a local university. Many sessions were taking place at the same time and you had to switch from one room to another. What follows is what I remember from the talks. Remember, people recollect <8% of the material they hear in a talk.

The first keynote was by Robin Rowe and Gabrielle Pantera, on using Linux in the motion picture industry. They showed a huge list of movies that were created using Linux farms. The first big item in the list was the movie Titanic (1997). The list stopped at around 2005 and the reason was that since then any significant movie that employs digital editing or 3D animation is created on Linux systems. They showed trailers from popular movies and explained how technology advanced to create realistic scenes. Part of being realistic, a generated scene may need to be blurred so that it does not look too crisp.

Next, Robert Watson gave a keynote on FreeBSD and the development community. He explained lots of things from the community that someone who is not using the distribution does not know about. FreeBSD apparently has a close-knit community, with people having specific roles. To become a developer, you go through a structured mentoring process which is great. I did not see such structured approach described in other open-source projects.

Pieter Hintjens, the former president of the FFII, talked about software patents. Software patents are bad because they describe ideas and not some concrete invention. This has been the view so that the target of the FFII effort fits on software patents. However, Pieter thinks that patents in general are bad, and it would be good to push this idea.

CMake is a build system, similar to what one gets with automake/autoconf/makefile. I have not seen this project before, and from what I saw, they look quite ambitious. Apparently it is very easy to get your compilation results on the web when you use CMake. In order to make their project more visible, they should make effort on migration of existing projects to using CMake. I did not see yet a major open-source package being developed with CMake, apart from CMake itself.

Richard Hughes talked about PackageKit, a layer that removes the complexity of packaging systems. You have GNOME and your distribution is either Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora or something else. PackageKit allows to have a common interface, and simplifies the workflow of managing the installation of packages and the updates.

In the Virtualisation tracks, two talks were really amazing. Xen and VirtualBox. Virtualisation is hot property and both companies were bought recently by Citrix and Sun Microsystems respectively. Xen is a Type 1 (native, bare metal) hypervisor while VirtualBox is a Type 2 (hosted) hypervisor. You would typically use Xen if you want to supply different services on a fast server. VirtualBox is amazingly good when you want to have a desktop running on your computer.

Ian Pratt (Xen) explained well the advantages of using a hypervisor, going into many details. For example, if you have a service that is single-threaded, then it makes sense to use Xen and install it on a dual-core system. Then, you can install some other services on the same system, increasing the utilisation of your investment.

Achim Hasenmueller gave an amazing talk. He started with a joke; I have recently been demoted. From CEO to head of virtualisation department (name?) at Sun Microsystems. He walked through the audience on the steps of his company. The first virtualisation product of his company was sold to Connectix, which then was sold to Microsoft as VirtualPC. Around 2005, he started a new company, Innotek and the product VirtualBox. The first customers were government agencies in Germany and only recently (2007) they started selling to end-users.

Virtualisation is quite complex, and it becomes more complex if your offering is cross platform. They manage the complexity by making VirtualBox modular.

VirtualBox comes in two versions; an open-source version and a binary edition. The difference is that with the binary edition you get USB support and you can use RDP to access the host. If you installed VirtualBox from the repository of your distribution, there is no USB support. He did not commit whether the USB/RDP support would make it to the open-source version, though it might happen since Sun Microsystems bought the company. I think that if enough people request it, then it might happen.

VirtualBox uses QT 3.3 as the cross platform toolkit, and there is a plan to migrate to QT 4.0. GTK+ was considered, though it was not chosen because it does not provide yet good support in Win32 (applications do not look very native on Windows). wxWidgets were considered as well, but also rejected. Apparently, moving from QT 3.3 to QT 4.0 is a lot of effort.

Zeeshan Ali demonstrated GUPnP, a library that allows applications to use the UPnP (Universal Plug n Play) protocol. This protocol is used when your computer tells your ADSL model to open a port so that an external computer can communicate directly with you (bypassing firewall/NAT). UPnP can also be used to access the content of your media station. The gupnp library comes with two interesting tools; gupnp-universal-cp and gupnp-network-light. The first is a browser of UPnP devices; it can show you what devices are available, what functionality they export, and you can control said devices. For example, you can use GUPnP to open a port on your router; when someone connects from the Internet to port 22 on your modem, he is redirected to your server, at port 22.

You can also use the same tool to figure out what port mapping took place already on your modem.

The demo with the network light is that you run the browser on one computer and the network light on another, both on the local LAN (this thing works only on the local LAN). Then, you can use the browser to switch on/off the light using the UPnP protocol.

Dimitris Glezos gave a talk on transifex, the translation management framework that is currently used in Fedora. Translating software is a tedious task, and currently translators spent time on management tasks that have little to do with translation. We see several people dropping from translations due to this. Transifex is an evolving platform to make the work of the translator easier.

Dimitris talked about a command-line version of transifex coming out soon. Apparently, you can use this tool to grab the Greek translation of package gedit, branch HEAD. Do the translation and upload back the file.

What I would like to see here is a tool that you can instruct it to grab all PO files from a collection of projects (such as GNOME 2.22, UI Translations), and then you translate with your scripts/tools/etc. Then, you can use transifex to upload all those files using your SVN account.

The workflow would be something like

$ tfx --project=gnome-2.22 --collection=gnome-desktop --action=get
Reading from http://svn.gnome.org/svn/damned-lies/trunk/releases.xml.in... done.
Getting alacarte... done.
Getting bug-buddy... done.
...
Completed in 4:11s.
$ _

Now we translate any of the files we downloaded, and we push back upstream (of course, only those files that were changed).

$ tfx --project=gnome-2.22 --collection=gnome-desktop --user=simos --action=send
 Reading local files...
Found 6 changed files.
Uploading alacarte... done.
...
Completed uploading translation files to gnome-2.22.
$ _

Berend Cornelius talked about creating OpenOffice.org Wizards. You get such wizards when you click on File/Wizards..., and you can use them to fill in entries in a template document (such as your name, address, etc in a letter), or use to install the spellchecker files. Actually, one of the most common uses is to get those spellchecker files installed.

A wizard is actually an OpenOffice.org extension; once you write it and install it (Tools/Extensions...), you can have it appear as a button on a toolbar or a menu item among other menus.

You write wizards in C++, and one would normally work on an existing wizard as base for new ones.

When people type in a word-processor, they typically abuse it (that's my statement, not Berend's) by omitting the use of styles and formatting. This makes documents difficult to maintain. Having a wizard teach a new user how to write a structured document would be a good idea.

Perry Ismangil talked about pjsip, the portable open-source SIP and media stack. This means that you can have Internet telephony on different devices. Considering that Internet Telephony is a commodity, this is very cool. He demonstrated pjsip running two small devices, a Nintendo DS and an iPhone. Apparently pjsip can go on your OpenWRT router as well, giving you many more exciting opportunities.

Clutter is a library to create fast animations and other effects on the GNOME desktop. It uses hardware acceleration to make up for the speed. You don't need to learn OpenGL stuff; Clutter is there to provide the glue.

Gutsy has Clutter 0.4.0 in the repositories and the latest version is 0.6.0. To try out, you need at least the clutter tarball from the Clutter website. To start programming for your desktop, you need to try some of the bindings packages.

I had the chance to spend time with the DejaVu guys (Hi Denis, Ben!). Also met up with Alexios, Dimitris x2, Serafeim, Markos and others from the Greek mission.

Overall, FOSDEM is a cool event. In two days there is so much material and interesting talks. It's a recommended technical event.

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
16Nov/078

Droid fonts from Google (Android SDK)

Update 10Feb2009: The Droid fonts are now available from android.git.kernel.org (Download tar.gz archive), under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Ascender (the company who created Droid), has now a dedicated website at http://www.droidfonts.com/ (thanks Rex!). At this dedicated website, Ascender presents the Droid Pro family which has several additions to Droid. For the open-source crowd, it is important to have the initial Droid font family dual-licensed under the “OpenFont License”, which would enable the best use with the rest of the OFL licensed fonts.

Two years ago, Google bought a start-up called Android in order to deliver an open platform for mobile applications. A few days ago the Android SDK has been released and you can develop now Android applications that can run in the emulator. Android handsets are expected at some point next year.

Even if you do not plan to develop applications for Android, you can still run the emulator which is functional, includes quite a few samples, and comes with a browser shown above. To get it, download the Android SDK for your system, uncompress it and run

./android_sdk_linux_m3-rc20a/tools/emulator

An interesting aspect of Android is that it comes with a set of fonts that have been specially designed for mobile devices, the Droid fonts. The fonts are embedded in the Android image, in android_sdk_linux_m3-rc20a/tools/lib/images/system.img, a clever guy managed to extract them and a modest guy corrected me (Damien's blog to download).

The fonts are probably licensed under the same license as the SDK (Apache License), however it is better to hear from Google first.

In the meantime, here is a screenshot of Ubuntu 7.10 with Droid.

Update: To extract the fonts from the SDK, run the emulator with the -console parameter. The emulator starts and at the same time you get a shell to the filesystem of the running emulator. You can locate the fonts in system/fonts/. Once located the full path of a file, you can extract with ./adb pull system/fonts/DroidSans.ttf /tmp/DroidSans.ttf (thanks cosmix for the tip).

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments
2Apr/072

Using SVN for GNOME Translators

Update 3rd June 2009: This is a very old post when GNOME was using SVN for the VCS (now we use git). My blog theme does not show the year, so I am writing this in case you are confused by the post.

Now GNOME uses SVN to manage the development of the software.
To use SVN, the basic relevant commands are described at Getting the most out of Subversion in GNOME.

If you are a translator, the work is further simplified. You would normally new SVN to get a copy of the source code of a package so that you can extract the translation messages of the UI or the documentation. In addition, in some cases you can provide localised images and screenshots.

First of all, if you do not have an account on SVN yet, you need to connect using Anonymous access. You still have all access, however if you want to upload any translations would need to give them to someone else who has such an SVN account.

Furthermore, the source code of a package is often branched during a GNOME release so that when there is ongoing development, the released version of the package is not affected. Branches usually have a name similar to gnome-2-18. The not-branched branch is called trunk (or HEAD, in CVS lingo), where all cutting-edge development usually happens.

To checkout (here checkout means to obtain a copy) the source code of a package.

Checkout trunk as anonymous

svn checkout http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-utils/trunk my-trunk-gnome-utils

Checkout trunk as simos

svn checkout svn+ssh://simos@svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-utils/trunk my-trunk-gnome-utils

Checkout branch called "gnome-2-18" as anonymous

svn checkout http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-utils/branches/gnome-2-18/ gnome-utils-stable

Checkout branch called "gnome-2-18" as simos

svn checkout svn+ssh://simos@svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-utils/branches/gnome-2-18 gnome-utils-stable

To commit you changes means that you send your changes upstream to the project.
In order to commit, you enter the directory you checked out and you run

svn commit -m "Updated Greek translation"

The changes you make typically include updated your language's LL.po file, and also updating the ChangeLog file.

You cannot commit in a anonymous checkout. The system knows that it's you when you are commiting because the checkout command saved the username you used earlier.

In the SVN commands, you can abbreviate checkout with co, and commit with ci. Sometimes this leads to the most common newbie error; you tend to think that co is for commit. In practice you cannot make a mess though, as the command line parameters between the two actions are very different, and the command will fail.

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
9Jan/075

Translating OLPC software

The core OLPC software is developed at http://dev.laptop.org/ using the GIT source code management system.
For the tasks of the translator, one needs to look into the different projects and locate any po/ subdirectory. The existence of this subdirectory show that the piece of software is internationalised (=can be translated).

For example, the core component sugar can be translated. In the main sugar page, and locate the po/ subdirectory that shows up. Click on it and you get the sugar po/ subdirectory with a few translations. Specifically, Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Italian. The italian translation is sadly useless. The translator made a mistake; he saw

msgid "Hello"

msgstr ""

and changed to (WRONG)

msgid "Ciao"

msgstr ""

instead of (CORRECT)

msgid "Hello"

msgstr "Ciao"

Normally, one would need to regenerate the Template PO (POT) file before translating, instead of working on one of the existing translated files. To do so, one needs to download the source code of sugar using the git tool and then use intltool-update -P to create the fresh sugar.pot file.

Tagged as: , , , , , , 5 Comments
29Nov/060

International Call for Artists’ film and video

AT HOME IN EUROPE

Generous European Culture2000 funding enables ISIS Arts (UK) and it’s
international project partners BEK (Norway), InterSpace (Bulgaria) and
RIXC (Latvia) to curate a NEW SCREENING PROGRAMME around the theme of
European Identity for the Big M, ISIS Art’s inflatable touring space.

Daily, more and more European people decide to live in other European
countries. With a shifting concept of nationality it becomes
increasingly important to consider what it means to be European. Is
there such a thing as European Identity and how does it relate to
national identity?
For this programme we invite submissions of films or video works on this
theme from artists of any nationality.

Selected works will become part of the new screening programme which
will tour to the four partnering countries between May 2007 and
September 2007.
Work will be selected through open submission. In order to be considered
individual works must:

  • Have a running time of 5 minutes or less
  • Be single channel and non interactive
  • Address the project theme

Selected artists will receive an exhibition fee of € 300 (The Big M is
not a commercial venture and admission is free). Copyright remains
solely with the artist.

The Big M is a highly stylised inflatable structure that functions as a
temporary and mobile venue for the presentation of video and digital
media. Unique in both design and function, the Big M provides an
alternative to the conventional gallery setting and exhibits work by
emerging and established artists to diverse audiences.
See: http://www.isisarts.org.uk/index2.html

To submit pieces for consideration please send work on DVD, CD Rom (720x
576 dpi QuickTime movie) or mini DV, titled and with a synopsis of 50
words maximum, a CV and a stamped addressed envelope (if you want your
materials returned) to:

BEK
C Sundtsg 55
9. etage
5004 Bergen
Norway

Deadline for receipt of submissions is the 3rd of February 2007

Further inquiries to isis at isisarts dot org dot uk

Further project information can be found on
http://www.athomeineurope.eu/

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , , No Comments
6Jul/06Off

Multimedia support in Ubuntu Linux 6.06

With Ubuntu Linux 6.06, it is much clear how to install those codecs in order to get broad multimedia file support.

In Ubuntu, the multimedia infrastructure is handled by GStreamer; you install GStreamer plugins and any application that uses GStreamer can immediately benefit from the new codec support.

A typical installation of Ubuntu will bring in the free and open-source codecs by default. This includes the base gstreamer plugins package, gstreamer0.10-plugins-base that covers

  1. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstadder.so
  2. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstaudioconvert.so
  3. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstaudiorate.so
  4. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstaudioresample.so
  5. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstaudiotestsrc.so
  6. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstcdparanoia.so
  7. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstdecodebin.so
  8. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstffmpegcolorspace.so
  9. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstogg.so
  10. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstplaybin.so
  11. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstsubparse.so
  12. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgsttcp.so
  13. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgsttheora.so
  14. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgsttypefindfunctions.so
  15. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideo4linux.so
  16. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideorate.so
  17. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideoscale.so
  18. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideotestsrc.so
  19. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvolume.so
  20. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvorbis.so

With a properly encoded multimedia file, you can play music or video with subtitles. Such good codecs are Ogg, Vorbis and Theora. You can also rip CDs; cdparanoia is also there.
By default you also get the good package, gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
It contains

  1. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgst1394.so
  2. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstaasink.so
  3. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstalaw.so
  4. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstalpha.so
  5. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstapetag.so
  6. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstavi.so
  7. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstautodetect.so
  8. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstcacasink.so
  9. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstcdio.so
  10. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgsteffectv.so
  11. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstgoom.so
  12. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstid3demux.so
  13. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstlevel.so
  14. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstefence.so
  15. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmulaw.so
  16. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstossaudio.so
  17. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstrtp.so
  18. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstrtsp.so
  19. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstsmpte.so
  20. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgsttaglib.so
  21. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstudp.so
  22. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideobox.so
  23. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideoflip.so
  24. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstwavenc.so
  25. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstwavparse.so
  26. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstauparse.so
  27. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstdebug.so
  28. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstnavigationtest.so
  29. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstalphacolor.so
  30. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstcairo.so
  31. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstflxdec.so
  32. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmatroska.so
  33. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideomixer.so
  34. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstcutter.so
  35. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmultipart.so
  36. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstflac.so
  37. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstjpeg.so
  38. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstpng.so
  39. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstspeex.so
  40. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstgconfelements.so
  41. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstshout2.so
  42. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideobalance.so
  43. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgsticydemux.so
  44. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstximagesrc.so
  45. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstannodex.so
  46. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstgdkpixbuf.so
  47. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgsthalelements.so
  48. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstdv.so

This includes generic AVI support, access to digital video and Firewire devices, visualisers, the Matroska codec, access to shoutcast servers, the speex audio codec, the flac codec and many more.

At this point, you can install Pitivi, a gstreamer-enabled video editor written in Python that helps you create your own movie. Make sure you install gstreamer0.10-gnonlin which enables non-linear editing in gstreamer.

Up to here you got free and open-source software.

You can continue with more codecs by installing the package gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly. This package is not part of the official Ubuntu distribution; you need to enable the Universe repository. Use System/Administration/Synaptic Package Manager to install these additional packages.
Ugly are the plugins and codecs that may have distribution problems in some countries.

Ugly includes

  1. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgsta52dec.so
  2. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstasf.so
  3. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstdvdlpcmdec.so
  4. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstdvdread.so
  5. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstdvdsub.so
  6. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstiec958.so
  7. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmad.so
  8. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmpeg2dec.so
  9. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmpegaudioparse.so
  10. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmpegstream.so
  11. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstrmdemux.so
  12. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstsid.so

This package will bring in, among others, DVD playback and subtitle support, ASF file support, MP3 support (MAD package) and MPEG2 video playback.
You can also get MP3 support if you install the gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 plugin which is available from Universe as well. This package is probably free to use in any country thanks to the efforts of the Fluendo team.

It appears that if you install ugly, it is good to install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg so that you get support for

FFmpeg plugin for GStreamer

This GStreamer plugin supports a large number of audio and video compression
formats through the use of the FFmpeg library. The plugin contains GStreamer
elements for encoding 40+ formats (MPEG, DivX, MPEG4, AC3, DV, ...), decoding
90+ formats (AVI, MPEG, OGG, Matroska, ASF, ...), demuxing 30+ formats, and
colorspace conversion.

Finally, there is a package gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad with plugins of potentially suboptimal quality. It includes

  1. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstbz2.so
  2. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstcdxaparse.so
  3. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstdtsdec.so
  4. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstfreeze.so
  5. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstgsm.so
  6. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmms.so
  7. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmodplug.so
  8. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstmusepack.so
  9. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstqtdemux.so
  10. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgsttrm.so
  11. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstspeed.so
  12. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstswfdec.so
  13. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgsttta.so
  14. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstvideo4linux2.so
  15. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstwavpack.so
  16. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstxingheader.so
  17. /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10/libgstneonhttpsrc.so

With bad you get GSM audio codec support, MMS support, QT playback support for some formats, Flash (SWF) playing support, Video4Linux2 support, MUSEPACK support and a few more.

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
2Jun/060

Keyboard updates in Xorg

There have been a few updates in Xorg regarding the multilingual keyboard support.

First, a new dead key has been added for Finish, dead_stroke. It appears that Cyrillic would find it useful as the available dead keys are too few to be reused in this case. The moral of the story is that if you want to add a dead_key, justify the necessity and it can be added.
Second, the Compose file nls/en_US.UTF-8/Compose.pre has been updated so that any Unicode keysyms have a value over 0x100000 (if keysym is Unicode keysym and had value < 0x100000, add 0x100000 to its current value). You will not see the change in the previous URL (which shows that CVS only); the updated Compose file is in git.

Third, there was an addition of the Braille input method which closed bug #6296. Braille is already available in the Unicode standard.

Thanks to Daniel Stone for going through these patches.

To get your daily fix on changes applied to Xorg, see the web-based interface to git.

Update (6Feb07): The new location of the compose file is http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=xorg/lib/libX11.git;a=tree;f=nls

Tagged as: , , , , , , , , , , , , No Comments
   Older Entries »

Recent Comments

Tags

10 blog bug cc class dejavu ellak eu firefox font forum gis gnome greece greek gtk gui hellug i18n ide iso language layout Linux nat open-source openoffice package pdf problem proj script tag text ubuntu ui uk unicode wind windows WordPress γραφή ελληνικά λογισμικό χρήση

webpage

Categories

Calendar

February 2012
M T W T F S S
« Dec    
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
272829  

Archives

Meta

Switch to our mobile site