Older blog entries for svu (starting at number 97)

This blog is dead. TBC on blogs.gnome.org.

So, I got British visa - which means I'll be there! Unfortunately, my stay (in the Etap hotel BTW) will be short: Monday night to Thursday night. But I hope it is going to be great anyway. Especially, I am looking forward to meeting some people which I only know by email/IRC.

See you all there!

During discussion with murrayc on IRC, it was found the position of GNOME regarding the dynamic library versioning is somewhat wague. Now I wonder, does GNOME respect libtool versioning scheme or not?

Slowly, I am starting to enrich base.xml with additional meta-information (and use it in gnome-keyboard-properties). As a first step, I've added non-translatable (who would translate "Microsoft" to Russian anyway?) vendor name. The model choser on my HDD looks like this:

Thanks to GObject (namely, g_object_set_data), the libxklavier ABI will not change, while API will get a set of #defines.

PS. Richard, it is not a problem to automate chosing XKB model using HAL. All you need is a table mapping USB (or any other HIDdy bus) IDs to XKB model names. And a bit of code in g-s-d.

PPS. And it seems I will never ever ever ever get my hackergotchi setup on p.g.o.

Did you hear about the number 13256278887989457651018865901401704640? Or its hexadecimal representation 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0? If you put it on your site, you may be considered violating DMCA, hehe. Because this number is used in HD-DVD encryption. If you do not believe me - use Google..

Yesterday I started keyboard model compatibility page on fd.o. The idea is to have a list of (all) real models compatible with existing xkeyboard-config models. People who use (in X configuration) a model different from the real keyboard name - I kindly ask you to update that table (only if all keys on your keyboard work as expected). Please keep the alphabetic order whenever possible.

Also, from this table it is easy to see that most of the keyboards do not have geometry descriptions (I know, it is just a decorative thing but still ...). Contributions are mostly welcome, as always. I realize, creating geometry description is not a picnic (and I cannot recommend any tools) - but some people still manage it.

Thanks.

Just in case someone missed it, yesterday I published the text explaining various libraries involved in the keyboard handling in X and GNOME.

A number of users complained that in 2.18 the keyboard indicator does not show the short layout names properly after the GNOME session restart - it shows internal XKB identifiers instead. Now I know why. DBUS session envvar avialable to bonobo-activation-server points to the previous (non-existent) session. The bug is half year old :///

2.18 is out. Great. Finally, libgnomekbd has all GNOME keyboard-related libraries consolidated and separately managed - so supporting stable series should be easier for me. I just wonder when libgnomekdb is going to get its own bugzilla entry?

Now, with GSoC about to fire - any students who'd want to improve keyboard capplet and make it usable?

Planetarium

Freedesktop.org won - they got my hackergotchi installed first. p.g.o still does not have it.

Nouveau@Ubuntu

Ubuntu clams to support OSS nVidia driver. Is anybody volunteering to provide snapshot debs for feisty? Or at least some howto similar to this one for Fedora.

... And I wonder, which of the two: planet.gnome.org or planet.freedesktop.org would first put my (corresponding) hackergotchi in place?..