The Open Pitt What's cooking in and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania Issue 30 November 2006 www.wplug.org

Three Days in Cambridge: The Boston GNOME Summit by Patrick Wagstrom Your Linux desktop environment is a and Australia to converge on the MIT familiar with what sort of a nightmare large and complicated suite of soft- Media Lab for three days of hacking it can be. Dependencies break ran- ware. While most people think of the and three nights of socializing. domly, documentation is never up to desktop as just the applications that Unlike GUADEC, the major date, and in general things just don't we interact with—mail clients, web GNOME users conference, there are work well. Now, imagine if you had browsers, text editors, and the like— no project-based presentations here. to merge the bug fixes from newer there is a lot more to it. Underneath You won't find someone talking about versions of the software back into an the major Free Software desktops are the new features of or how older version—that's exactly what massive stacks of libraries that handle to use GStreamer. Instead, each vendors who provide long-term sup- everything from network connections morning and afternoon the group port for GNOME have to do—and it's to abstracting filesystems to making broke up into several smaller groups a bona fide disaster. One major issue your iPod just work when you plug it to focus on specific issues such as ac- is that there is no common build and in. Creating all these libraries and cessibility, font rendering, keyboard test system. While the GNOME making them work together with the issues, the task-focused desktop, mak- desktop has JHBuild and JHAuto- desktop applications takes a lot of ing GNOME pretty, and testing. Each Build to automatically build the latest time and coordination, and Internet re- session usually had a single person versions of the software, there isn't a lay chat and mailing lists aren't always who was intimately familiar with the tool to test older or specific versions. up to the task. subject in charge to direct discussion Furthermore, there's no way to en- The solution to this coordination and bring newcomers up to speed. sure that key components, such as the conundrum? Bring the hackers re- With such broad topics, you have to accessibility framework, haven't been sponsible for the desktop together in a wonder if anything major could pos- broken. The testing session focused single shared location and have them sibly be accomplished in such a short on strategies to fix this. One very use- plan the future of the Linux desktop. time frame. Surprisingly, the answer ful tool that will most likely take hold That's exactly what happened in late is yes—I'll describe some of the pro- is DogTail, a Python scripting September with in Dublin, gress that was made on particular ses- that allows users to script GUI ac- Ireland and in early October at the Bo- sions that I was involved with and tions. Using a set of DogTail scripts, ston GNOME Summit in Cambridge, some of the other interesting things developers can automatically execute Massachusetts. As a participant in that are coming soon to a desktop near unit tests that would otherwise take GNOME and a researcher, I traveled you. direct user intervention. Improve- to Boston to take part in this yearly Anyone who has ever tried to build ments in the build and tracking pro- gathering. Around 100 people came the bleeding-edge version of a desktop cess were also planned, with a focus from as far away as Eastern Europe environment like GNOME or KDE is on an option to keep track of the stable versions of the software as well, October Roundup forcing changes in the application pro- Oct. 19 Special Event: A screening demonstrated some of the capabilities gramming interface to become expli- was held of Elephants Dream, a short of Google Earth. A tutorial on using cit rather than relying on the current animated film produced entirely using quickmasks in The GIMP was given “watch the mailing list for changes” Open Source software and released by Vance Kochenderfer. Also on the method that is employed. under a Creative Commons license. graphical front, Patrick Wagstrom See SUMMIT, p. 2 Some of the tools and techniques used showed off the 3-D desktop effects in making the film were discussed. now becoming available through and AIGLX. Mike Hansell Oct. 21 General User Meeting: In ad- detailed the challenges of running Coming Events dition to the election and other busi- Linux on the PlayStation Portable. ness (see last month's issue), several Rounding out the set, Robert Black- Dec. 16: General User Meeting. brief lightning talks were given on well described how he automates unit (Time and location TBA, see various topics. Mark Dalrymple testing of his code. web site for details) Elephants Dream - The public is welcome at all events Page 2 The Open Pitt November 2006

Have Your Say The Open Pitt is published by The Open Pitt relies on contributed book on a topic you're interested in the Western Pennsylvania Linux articles from people just like you. If from publishers like O'Reilly and Users Group you've got something in the world of Prentice Hall, we can often obtain re- Linux and Open Source to talk about, view copies. let us know and we'll work on getting Don't worry if you're inexperienced Editors: Elwin Green it published. or unsure about your writing ability. Vance Kochenderfer How is Open Source used in your We can help you get your article into What is Linux? Linux is a kernel, the core of a computer oper- business or organization? Is there shape—you supply the ideas, we'll do ating system, created by Linus Torvalds. It is some new project that's caught your the editing. typically packaged as a distribution, which in- eye? Have you recently tried out a To discuss your article ideas, or cludes the extra programs necessary to make a new piece of software, and how well even if you just have a question, you computer functional and useful. Since 1991, it has grown from a one-man project which ran did it work? All these topics, and can always reach the editors by e-mail on one computer to one with thousands of con- more, are fair game. If there's a recent at . tributors running on everything from personal organizers to million-dollar supercomputers. SUMMIT, from p. 1 pretty. And they succeeded wonder- What are Open Source and Free Software? The task-focused desktop was an- fully—without resorting to making it blue like every other desktop. Open Source and Free Software provide you, other hot topic of discussion. While the user, with the opportunity to see the source many people use virtual desktops as a GNOME is now green! The quality code of the programs you use. You are free to of the designs and the speed at which use it, share it with others, and even make method to keep their tasks organized, changes to it if you wish. While the Free Soft- this is still suboptimal. Alex Gravely they were produced was truly amaz- ing. Be sure to look for some nice ware and Open Source communities differ in has been working on a new tool, Gim- their philosophical approach, in practical terms mie, that takes some steps toward a graphical improvements in GNOME they share nearly identical goals. Learn more 2.18 coming to a desktop near you in at task-focused desktop. One of the ma- and . jor hurdles toward reaching that goal March of 2007. is the inability to open particular ele- Of course, I'd be missing a major This newsletter was produced using Open ments within a file as applications in- component of the weekend if I didn't Source and Free Software. creasingly store their data in SQLite mention the opportunity to socialize. Cambridge is home to both MIT and Copyright 2006 Western Pennsylvania Linux databases. David Trowbridge took Users Group. Any article in this newsletter the time to start hacking on a library Harvard and has no shortage of excel- may be reprinted elsewhere in any medium, lent eating establishments. Each night provided it is not changed and attribution is called libwhatup that will provide a given to the author and WPLUG. common interface for applications to we'd divide up into groups and find register methods to open individual whatever food we could in Cam- desktop, that doesn't mean you need elements of a file. For example, you bridge, usually with about 20 or 30 to be a coder to attend. Anyone can could tell F-Spot to open to a particu- people all ending up at the same loca- attend, and for the last few years the lar photo, or to go to a partic- tion. The impressive thing is that the event has been free. Boston locals ular song. One day this may allow work continued at the restaurants. It even put up their couches for other you to completely log out from a sys- wasn't always coding, although I over- folks to crash on during the weekend. tem and log back in to your desktop heard people shout “don't spill beer on If you're really new to the desktop, environment later with all of your ap- my laptop!” on more than a few occa- events such as the Boston GNOME plications in basically the same state. sions. Usually the work focused on Summit might be a bit like jumping Truly a neat idea. larger vision issues: Where should the into the deep end of the pool without Another frequently raised issue is desktop be in five years? Wouldn't it knowing how to swim, but there are that the graphical design of GNOME be cool if monitors just worked? How plenty of people to teach you. If is too spartan and doesn't have the do we deal with the issues of propriet- you're already a user of the desktop “sex appeal” of other desktops such as ary drivers? While most of the issues and looking for ways you can contrib- KDE and Mac OS X. You've prob- were not ones that would get resolved ute, I highly recommend attending in ably never even seen the default sitting around pints in the Cambridge the future and learning about your role GNOME desktop icons and branding Brewing Company, it's refreshing to in making Linux a competitive player know that the community is aware of because no distributor actually uses in the desktop market. them—they almost all change the them and is planning for the future. By now you might be wondering Patrick Wagstrom is a Ph.D. candidate at graphics and alter the menus slightly. Carnegie Mellon University researching “that's fine, but what about me? I'm It was with this in mind that the many communication and collaboration in artists who came to the summit under- not a coder!” While it's true that the Open Source development. He has been took a massive task: make GNOME Boston GNOME Summit is primarily using Linux since 1994. directed toward the design of the