Planet GNU

Infrastructure updates, including automake bug.
http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnu/hello/hello-2.5.tar.gz (from a mirror) or http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/hello/hello-2.5.tar.gz (main GNU server).

New minor release that fixes some bugs related to class versions and repositories. It also includes more example code reviewed and commented.

There is a quick hack in some system classes in order to properly fix the run-time update system. We do not think this feature will be stable in the next release but we want to have it there as an interesting future work.

Regards

Grr now works under Windows! Another proof of GNUstep's versatility.

Screenshot attached, with the upcoming native WindowsUXTheme. Note the scrollbars, checkboxes, native in-window menus, native window-decorations for windows and panels...

Until now with Iliad it wasn't possible to use the javascript layer to send an AJAX request when uploading files in a form. The problem with traditional file uploads is that it doesn't feel good with modern web applications, especially applications heavily using AJAX like iliad ones.

Since it's not possible to upload files using the browser's XMLHttpRequest object, I choose to use the well known technique of the hidden iframe used as the target of the form, combined with a real XMLHttpRequest used to update dirty widgets once the first request is complete.

Here is how it looks like together with Formula:

read more

!fsfstatus savannah is back up

!fsfstatus savannah is having problems

This week… 1643 commits, in 181 projects, by 231 happy hackers (and 348 were translation commits).

• Quinten Lansu provided a patch for Eye of GNOME to make it possible to select a random image from the collection.
• Banshee dropped both his glade and libgnome (well, gnome-sharp) dependencies . (GNOME bug 589705 and GNOME bug 587320)
• David Zeuthen implemented Expansion for Linux’s MD RAID, there are even screenshots.
• Vinagre got the necessary support to specify an username for SSH connections . (GNOME bug 603736)
• Thanks to Jorge Silva a spanish keyboard layout got added to Caribou, the new onscreen keyboard (GNOME bug 608744)
• Accounts-dialog got a better password strength indicator.
• GNOME-PackageKit got support for the InstallPrinterDrivers command.
• The GVariant serialiser has been merged into glib.
• Kupfer gained the possibility to load plugins at runtime.
• In Nanny Cesar Garcia Tapia added a new dialog to update custom filters, and support for packaged filters configurations.

!fsfstatus cloud9 will be rebooted at noon today to deal with kernel panics. affected: fencepost, www.fsf.org <http://www.fsf.org>, dbd, etc

… having finished a hectic period I must say that leaving for FOSDEM tomorrow morning feels great. I will team up with Daniel Stenberg, Magnus Hagander and of course some GNUs, I know that some of the people at last year’s GNU Hackers Meeting (held the days before FSCONS) will come over to FOSDEM as well . Going to be great meeting Brian Gough and Jose E. Marchesi while I am not stressed of work overload, GHM planning and FSCONS planning. Brian and Jose were organising the GNU Hackers Meeting with me.    … and as always I’ll team up with the FSFE folks.

As for the presentations I will surely go and see:

• Sylvain Beucler talk about GNU Savannah: 100% free software mass-hosting

a topic I find interesting for many reasons, more on that later

• Daniel Stenberg talk about Rockbox: open source firmware replacement for music players

since I missed Daniel talk about this at FSCONS. As a FSCONS organiser I can’t just sit

• Mirko Lindner, Jon Phillips talk about Copyleft Hardware and the Ben Nanonote

I missed Mirko’s presentation at FSCONS as well …. always on the move at FSCONS

And, of course I hope I will be able to do some business (Sandklef GNU Labs) down there. During some breaks I will prepare some presentations at “my” University next week and also prepare a Free Software presentation for a company later on in February (more on that later).

This year I’ll be traveling with Andreas Nilsson and Jeremiah Foster.  Same procedure as last year…

see you there

… did you see how I managed to mention FSCONS 6 times (including that very last)

On Saturday we have a booking at "Le Grenier d'Elvire" (near the ULB Campus) at 20:00. The booking covers everyone who has confirmed by email that they are coming to the dinner. There will be a sign-up sheet at the "GNU Booth" for extra places on the day. Details at http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2010/fosdem/.

Dinner on Friday will be at "Chez Leon" (18, rue des Bouchers B-1000 Bruxelles). Meet at Hotel Astrid Foyer (Place du Samedi 11 Zaterdagplein Bruxelles 1000), we will leave at 20:15 to walk to the restaurant, which is nearby. Full details at http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2010/fosdem/.

Information about Saturday's dinner arrangements will follow, and will also be available at the GNU booth at Fosdem of course.

http://ftp.gluster.com/pub/freeipmi/0.8.3/

FreeIPMI 0.8.3 - 02/02/10
-------------------------
o Support Sun Microsystems OEM SEL events.
o Fix Solaris 64 bit portability bugs.
o In ipmi-oem, fix some Dell options and output given Dell docs
(backwards compatability maintained on options).
- Rename 'get-power-headroom-info' to 'get-power-head-room'.
o Minor bug fixes.
o Minor documentation updates.
o Minor documentation fixes.

A month of the Hurd: Arch Hurd, FOSDEM preparations and a thesis on mobile Hurd objects. Details.

This month, we saw the first booting version of an Arch Hurd system, which seconds the Debian GNU/Hurd distribution that already provides two third of the Debian software archive compiled for GNU/Hurd.

Nine Hurd developers will meet at FOSDEM 2010 on February 6th and 7th in Bruxelles, Belgium. On Sunday, Olaf will be giving two presentations in the Alt-OS Developer Room: Why is Anyone Still Working on the GNU Hurd? (10:30), and Porting KGI graphics drivers from Linux to GNU Hurd (13:00). The day before, on Saturday, Bas will be giving a talk about Iris, his new kernel (18:00, Embedded Developer Room).

Carl Fredrik Hammar finished and presented his thesis Generalizing mobility for the Hurd and passed with distinction. Congratulations! Its abstract reads:

The GNU Hurd features mobile objects in its implementation of filesystem backing stores. This thesis investigates the limitations and security concerns these objects present, and how they can be overcome. This is done in preparation for new applications that feature mobile code and mobile objects. In addition, one such application is studied and implemented, in which mobile code is used to make the ioctl system call more extensible.

So, when are YOU going to do a thesis, or another project on a GNU/Hurd-related topic? Contact us if you are interested!

This week… 2086 commits, in 199 projects, by 268 happy hackers (and 433 were translation commits).

• Anjuta got support to install required packages when creating a new project via PackageKit (GNOME bug 558856).
• Jason Woofenden modified libchamplain so that tiles are now loaded near the middle first; while Simon Wenner work on a local renderer was being merged.
• In GNOME System Tools Milan Bouchet-Valat added encrypted home folder support when creating new users.
• In glib Ryan Lortie added support for a mutex lock that consumes only one bit of storage inside of an integer on systems that support futexes . (GNOME bug 548967)
• Jamie Nicol modified rhythmbox to use artist and album sortnames in query model sorting functions . (GNOME bug 133444)
• Yelp was fixed to work with API changes introduced in latest xulrunner.
• Evolution was changed to not auto-sign when replying to a signed message . (GNOME bug 607595)
• Jean Bréfort added import/export support for transparent objects in Excel files to Gnumeric.
• GDM has been modified to have the “Switch User” item hidden when VT switching is disabled.

We are preparing the release of a GNU/EDMA Stable version. Basically we need to remove some parts that are no longer used and reorganize examples and tests.

This CVS update to version 0.17.0 can be considered quite stable and we do not expect to make any change in the GNU/EDMA core, as said above.

The graphical tools GECB (GNU/EDMA Class Browser) and GIDFWizard (GNU/EDMA IDF Wizard) has also been updated. The GNOME dependencies has been removed and now only GTK is need for using them, and GECB can now show local repository data if the edma_repos.lst file is present.

We will be keep working and hopefully very soon a Stable release will be available

Best Regards
david

Scrollbars now draw properly on Windows using the native WinUXTheme, sizing and placing is correct.

In the screenshot you can see Graphos running with the current version of the native windows theme.

Found a lib the other day that can be used instead of the Arduino IDE. The library is called libarduino.  Using the lib means I can switch entirely to using C when teaching embedded at Gothenburg University/IT University. Only real problem was that the library really wasn’t prepared for producing a stand alone library or for being installed and will therefor not be that easy to use for the students. So I started hacking the makefiles to solve the problems. And now I have a libarduino that creates a static archive (library) and can be installed for later use by other programs (linking the libarduino library (libarduino.a)).

Cool thing is that the makefile for the new program becomes really small. For a new program, do a Makefile looking something like this:

SRC=test1.c

PROG=test1

include <your path>/libarduino/arduino.mk

… and you can now do (among other things)

make

make install

the last target install the application to your arduino.

The first beta of the 0.8.x branch of Iliad is finally out!

The release is only available for GNU-Smalltalk for now, but the Squeak/Pharo version should come next week, and a VisualWorks port is expected too.

read more

Graphos (GAP Vector editor) got undo support. Add/remove shapes (that worked already) and proper undo of moving, inspecting and editing shapes.

This required implementing shallow vs. deep copy of the objects, but the deep copy needs to be smart about which references are indeed duplicated and which not... A bit of fun programming!

Today, I have been invited to talk about Free Software at Chalmers. I’ll start off at 13.15…. I assume it is in one of the rooms in “Hörsalsvägen”

Anyhow, the presentation is open I think, so if you care to come over, just do so

!fsfstatus ftp server upgrade is complete, all services back to normal

!fsfstatus ftp server is being upgraded, will be back shortly

New files are available for download here:

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuzilla/3.6/

and on any mirror sites worldwide. You can find a complete mirrors list
here:

http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

SHA1 and MD5 checksums:

5703665c7f7b0529ea0e5c19a10f01afb0382b34 icecat-3.6-386.tar.bz2
b55017f5938e7a91dfa533abef40bcece9dcde67 icecat-3.6-386.tar.xz
92d36ec52fce302f77434a75e8aa597e22ca0ff0 icecat-3.6.tar.bz2
a675e96015dc883f16e0d846b00cc04e7edb0fbf icecat-3.6.tar.xz
2a9ba65802d45dde3394e7aa69bce1cefbeebb65 privacy_ext.xpi

134568051008255a55cfc28cb3f9b5c6 icecat-3.6-386.tar.bz2
8f1c06ff2837195201c02e7bb99e531b icecat-3.6-386.tar.xz
81ec5a9c407a7206bbd65155054689dd icecat-3.6.tar.bz2
7cdb350f9f85e7d0d4740f456aedd9c8 icecat-3.6.tar.xz
c18d43b09567d16d8c95700c1355b1e0 privacy_ext.xpi

Laterna Magica v0.2 is out! New features are more keyboard short-cuts, JPEG saving and better in-window menus support (NSWindow95Style). The latter feature delayed release another bit of this long-due release, but it works great.

The attached screenshot shows LaternaMagica running on windows using the experimental WinUXTheme which draws several controls native including in-window menus. Note how the menu is attached to the main application window but not to the image window.

LaternaMagica home page

!fsfstatus power issue at colo; a number of machines rebooted, including fencepost

GNU GRUB version 1.97.2 has been released.

GRUB, also known as the GRand Unified Bootloader, is a modular, portable bootloader that supports a number of platforms, including standard BIOS-based PCs, IEEE-1275 platforms (such as the OLPC and some PowerPC/Sparc64 hardware) and coreboot, the free (as in freedom) pre-boot initialization framework.

<http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/>

This is a bug-fix release for a number of problems (excerpt from NEWS file is attached) that were found after GRUB 1.97.1 was released.

Most importantly, it fixes two problems with header files of BSD origin:

- A number of header declarations had their copyright/license headers missing. They had been imported in GRUB Legacy many years ago, and recently found their way into the 1.97 release. Vladimir Serbinenko spotted this problem and fixed it by tracking down the header origin and adding the missing copyright and license.

- In one of those cases (the bootinfo structure, used for booting the kernel of FreeBSD), the original license was the unrevised BSD license with advertisement clause [*], which made it impossible for 3rd parties to comply with GPL requirements and legally distribute GRUB. Again, Vladimir fixed this by rewriting the bootinfo struct declaration.

[*] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

We apologize for the inconvenience; the GRUB project is very strict with license verification, even more with GRUB 2 than with GRUB Legacy, but in this case the problem was introduced very early in GRUB Legacy history.

To the best of our knowledge, all issues are resolved now, but if you were to find any other problem, please don't hesitate to contact grub-devel or mail me directly about it.

A source tarball for the new release can be found at:

http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.97.2.tar.gz

and its GPG detached signature [*]:

http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/grub/grub-1.97.2.tar.gz.sig

[*] You can use either of the above signature file to verify that
the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:

gpg --verify grub-1.97.2.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then run this command to import it:

gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys DEA2C38E

and rerun the `gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
Autoconf 2.61
Ruby 1.8.7

GCC 4.4 is the recommended version for building it, although any version starting with 4.1.3 is supported in this release.

This week… 1900 commits, in 191 projects, by 249 happy hackers (and 339 were translation commits).

• Epiphany now has page cache enabled, as all critical bugs have been fixed and it now needs real world testing.
• Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala added TLS-Remote support to the NetworkManager OpenVPN plugin . (GNOME bug 455142)
• Cheese has been changed to limit webcam framerate to 30 frames per second, as the developers really do not want webcams that claim to support huge framerates to slow down everything . (GNOME bug 607238)
• Enrico Minack updated the Invest applet to connect to NetworkManager to react on network changes . (GNOME bug 605739)
• GNOME Color Manager gained the ability to find and select ICC profiles on mounted volumes from other operating systems (both Mac OS X and Windows ). (GNOME bug 607390)
• Jesse van den Kieboom fixed bugs in the smart converter encoding guessing of gedit and added test cases.
• The GNOME Disk Utility got drive emblems, used to mark RAID and LVM2 “drives”.
• A new workspaces view, matching latest design has been commited to the GNOME Shell, the default workspace view is now a scrollable horizontal list, with a control to switch between it and the previous grid view . (GNOME bug 593844)
• Toms Baugis added the possibility for Hamster to run as a standalone application, instead of being a panel applet.
• The accounts dialog of Empathy gained an extra column in the treeview displaying the status of each account (GNOME bug 605309).

!linuxlibre linux-libre.fsfla.org is back up !fsfstatus, uploading new builds for !gnewsense/mipsel