Planet SoC -

Breaking the monotony

bheekling — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:21:00 +0100

And now, for the complimentary my life is as screwed up (if not more) than yours link!

This post brought to you by the people complaining of extreme geekiness in this blog
Yes, I know I cheated, but I’m in a hurry here :p

GDM 2.24 aka SMB (Shoot Me Bloody)

bheekling — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:26:00 +0100

That’s the name of my proposed WorkOut for FOSS.IN/2008.

What is it about?
It’s about getting GDM 2.24 in good enough shape to be considered for adoption by Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandriva, Debian, *BSD; and not just Fedora and Foresight.

What’s wrong with GDM 2.24?
Strictly speaking, there’s nothing *wrong* with it. It works flawlessly on my system (except for the daemonisation bug/regression, which I had to patch up manually). I’ve been using it as my primary display manager since 2.23.1, and it has improved to the point of bug-free-ness.

However, there are reasons why most distros are shipping the older 2.20* series GDM instead. The aim of this WorkOut is to make inroads into fixing those problems.

That’s all fine, but what *exactly* is wrong with GDM 2.24?
Oh, right. I should impose a hand-waving embargo on myself ;p

History: Sometime around the GNOME 2.18 release cycle, the GDM developers decided that it was high-time someone fixed all the problems with GDM and rewrote it from scratch. For this reason, a rewrite of GDM was started; aiming for the 2.22 release cycle.

However, during 2.22 cycle, GDM 2.20 was shipped due to several regressions. When GDM 2.24 was proposed, it caused intense debates involving the release team. However, it was included since the feature regressions were deemed minor enough.

Some of the regressions are listed below:

Lack of Themeing support: The architecture of the new GDM is very different from that of the old GDM. And hence, there is no way to “port” the older themes to the newer GDM, and there is currently no inbuilt support for themeing either.
No `gdmsetup`: The older gdmsetup had several security bugs, and hence was not ported to the new GDM. The configuration file is still the same however, so this is not a really large regression since there’s no theming support anyway.
No XDMCP Chooser in the login screen: This is quite self-explanatory
No support for timed-logins: This is being worked on actively in-trunk
No support for backends other than PAM: This means that distributions like Slackware, *BSD, etc cannot use GDM 2.24

The aim of this WorkOut is to fix the above listed regressions, and some of the other regression bugs, TODOs, Visual Glitches, etc. And maybe even add some new features ;)

Details about the How, and When will be posted soon. Stay tuned!

~Nirbheek, hoping to see you during the discussions and @foss.in :)

GDM 2.24 aka SMB (Shoot Me Bloody)

bheekling — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:26:00 +0100

That’s the name of my proposed WorkOut for FOSS.IN/2008.

What is it about?
It’s about getting GDM 2.24 in good enough shape to be considered for adoption by Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandriva, Debian, *BSD; and not just Fedora and Foresight.

However, there are reasons why most distros are shipping the older 2.20* series GDM instead. The aim of this WorkOut is to make inroads into fixing those problems.

That’s all fine, but what *exactly* is wrong with GDM 2.24?
Oh, right. I should impose a hand-waving embargo on myself ;p

Some of the regressions are listed below: 4e87e507616b0f6891eb01c27ab2bffe

The aim of this WorkOut is to fix the above listed regressions, and some of the other regression bugs, TODOs, Visual Glitches, etc. And maybe even add some new features ;)

Details about the How, and When will be posted soon. Stay tuned!

~Nirbheek, hoping to see you during the discussions and @foss.in :)

An important announcement

bheekling — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:13:00 +0200

We interrupt your regular lazy-webbing to make this two important announcements:

A) AutotuA 0.0.1 released! Try it out and report bugs (if you can’t follow the instructions in the link given, your services will be required when 0.0.2 is released :)

B) IMO, the two best distros in this world are:

Foresight Linux
- Ken Vandine (one of many) is effing awesome
Gentoo
- The GNOME Team
- Brent Baude (ranger): master-of-the-PPC-arch
- Donnie Berkholz (dberkholz): X11, Council, and Desktop Team Emperor
- Raúl Porcel (armin76): generic bitch; maintains half the arches and Firefox
- Robin H. Johnson (robbat2): Infra demi-god
- Zac Medico (zmedico): Portage demi-god

All these people are just too awesome (and too overworked) for words.

If I hadn’t got myself deep into Gentoo (which led to SoC too), I would’ve gone to Foresight :)

~Nirbheek,
Who has high hopes for AutotuA, and also hopes the best of Foresight and conary can be brought to Gentoo.

PS: Donnie, congrats once again! ;)

An important announcement

bheekling — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:13:00 +0200

We interrupt your regular lazy-webbing to make this two important announcements:
A) AutotuA 0.0.1 released! Try it out and report bugs (if you can’t follow the instructions in the link given, your services will be required when 0.0.2 is released :)B) IMO, the two best distros in this world are: 595d865837f1f281da3ef02398737415

All these people are just too awesome (and too overworked) for words.If I hadn’t got myself deep into Gentoo (which led to SoC too), I would’ve gone to Foresight :)

~Nirbheek,
Who has high hopes for AutotuA, and also hopes the best of Foresight and conary can be brought to Gentoo.

PS: Donnie, congrats once again! ;)

The much-delayed post

bheekling — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:37:00 +0200

*Very* late, this post is. I hope it’s not too late yet :)

I’m talking about something that was much-talked about, and people are probably following some of the suggestions made about this, but I think there should be some sort of standardisation.

Here’s the header I use for all my GSoC code:

# vim: set sw=4 sts=4 et : # Copyright: 2008 Gentoo Foundation # Author(s): Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek.chauhan@gmail.com> # License: GPL-2 # # Immortal lh! #

I encourage all of you to adopt the last two lines in your headers as well :D

The much-delayed post

bheekling — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:37:00 +0200

*Very* late, this post is. I hope it’s not too late yet :)

I’m talking about something that was much-talked about, and people are probably following some of the suggestions made about this, but I think there should be some sort of standardisation.

Here’s the header I use for all my GSoC code:

# vim: set sw=4 sts=4 et : # Copyright: 2008 Gentoo Foundation # Author(s): Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek.chauhan@gmail.com> # License: GPL-2 # # Immortal lh! #

I encourage all of you to adopt the last two lines in your headers as well :D

AutotuA Weekly Status Report - I (and more ;)

bheekling — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:01:00 +0200

Yes, I am alive and kicking. Although at a much slower pace than I would’ve liked ;)

So I sent my first weekly report over yesterday, you can either read the (excessively long and probably boring and or confusing) weekly report or you can, well, do something else :P

And guess what, next time onwards, all you have to do is checkout the AutotuA news page or subscribe to the “gsoc” label on this blog to stalk me.

Oh, right, this will also probably be my first post on the FLOSS India Planet!

Hello everyone!~ I’m Nirbheek Chauhan (also called as “slacker #1” by some). I was one of the co-ordinators of this tiny little event in IIT Kanpur’s tech-festival Techkriti.

You might have heard about it and maybe seen the awesome speakers (and posters ;) of the event.

You’ve probably had the pleasure of conversing with the mastermind behind the whole event.

And maybe, just maybe, you’ve heard about “FOSSKriti” :D

PS: We’ll (hopefully) be back next year, so this is shameless advance publicity ;p

AutotuA Weekly Status Report - I (and more ;)

bheekling — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:01:00 +0200

Yes, I am alive and kicking. Although at a much slower pace than I would’ve liked ;)

So I sent my first weekly report over yesterday, you can either read the (excessively long and probably boring and or confusing) weekly report or you can, well, do something else :P

And guess what, next time onwards, all you have to do is checkout the AutotuA news page or subscribe to the “gsoc” label on this blog to stalk me.

Oh, right, this will also probably be my first post on the FLOSS India Planet!

Hello everyone!~ I’m Nirbheek Chauhan (also called as “slacker #1” by some). I was one of the co-ordinators of this tiny little event in IIT Kanpur’s tech-festival Techkriti.

You might have heard about it and maybe seen the awesome speakers (and posters ;) of the event.

You’ve probably had the pleasure of conversing with the mastermind behind the whole event.

And maybe, just maybe, you’ve heard about “FOSSKriti” :D

PS: We’ll (hopefully) be back next year, so this is shameless advance publicity ;p

Wheeeeeeeeeee

bheekling — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:08:14 +0200

So today was the day.
An insane night, on an insane channel.

So we were promised Cake.
Which got a bit delayed,
but the end we got a plate
Which was truly worth the wait

Translation: I’ve gotten accepted into GSoC, and the community bonding period has begun!

A couple of people I know got accepted as well — Satya, Ramnik, and Siddarth. This will be a fun summer *grin*.

I was going through the abstracts of the accepted applications in orgs that interest me, and I found the following to be *very* interesting (in no specific order):

Vim: On-the-fly Code Checker for Vim

I don’t need to say anything about this — it’s simply wonderful.

Pidgin: Master password support for pidgin

Finally, I won’t have to type in three passwords when I start Pidgin. gnome-keyring integration ftw!

GNOME: Reducing memory fragmentation in GNOME

Reduced memory is always more than welcome, and it’s not an easy task at all :)

GNOME: SuperRandom: a predictive listening plugin for Rhythmbox

This should be interesting. I currently have to manually form lists of songs I like to listen to. Time will tell how well this project fruits.

GNOME: Make Evolution use Seahorse widgets for encryption and key selection

No more UI blocking, and no more f-ugly password prompts! Fun, fun, fun =)

GNOME: Integrated Media Management for GNOME

This has always been a major missing feature in GNOME. This gets implemented, and I owe the student+mentor(s) a beer each *g*

GStreamer: Media service to transcode video and audio in different formats

If this integrates well with the above GNOME project, things will take a turn for the better w.r.t media in GNOME.

Moinmoin: Extending moin’s groups to LDAP and other external sources.

We use MoinMoin for our internal wiki, and authentication is done against LDAP. So needless to say, this project will make management of roles using LDAP groups quite straightforward.

BZFlag: BZFWeb, a web-based BZFS admin interface.

Just today we were talking about implementing a basic web interface for BZFlag in Django over the summer, and this thing comes up :)
Although our idea was to let people select server options using the webinterface, and then connect to the server, this project would be a good thing to keep an eye on.

FFmpeg: Generic frame-level multithreading support

This will rock for everyone with more than one core. This doesn’t include me, but includes the Navya Server ;)