Ubuntu Development Updates: GDM, Kernel, and Ubuntu Phone

• Ubuntu 17.10 Proceeding With Transition From LightDM To GDM

  As part of the switch over to the GNOME Shell desktop environment by default for Ubuntu 17.10, they are also abandoning the LightDM display/log-in manager in favor of GNOME's GDM.

• [Ubuntu] Kernel Team Summary: June 22, 2017

  We intend to target a 4.13 kernel for the Ubuntu 17.10 release. The Ubuntu 17.10 Kernel Freeze is Thurs Oct 5, 2017.

• Ubuntu Phone project failed because it was a mess: claim

  A developer who worked with the Ubuntu Phone project has outlined the reasons for its failure, painting a picture of confusion, poor communication and lack of technical and marketing foresight. Simon Raffeiner stopped working with the project in mid-2016, about 10 months before Canonical owner Mark Shuttleworth announced that development of the phone and the tablet were being stopped.

Tumbleweed Development and Laptop Experience

• openSUSE Tumbleweed Gets Qt 5.9, Linux Kernel 4.11.6, and MP3 Out-Of-The-Box

  Users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system are getting a lot of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software applications lately as a total of seven snapshots were released this week. openSUSE Project's Douglas DeMaio is back to report that openSUSE Tumbleweed is now powered by the latest Linux 4.11.6 kernel, and the GStreamer multimedia framework was updated to the major 1.12 series, adding out-of-the-box MP3 decoding support in the distribution.

• Tumbleweed Gets Qt 5.9, mp3 Out-Of-The Box

  A total of seven openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots featuring new software were released this week along with an upgrade to GStreamer that allows for mp3 decoding to work out-of-the box. The newest stable Linux Kernel 4.11.6 is also available in the latest Tumbleweed snapshot 20170620. Updates in the repositories from the 20170620 snapshot brought both the 52.2 versions of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, which fixed some critical vulnerabilities. Systemd 233 provided a package for a new systemd-umount binary and, with the update of dracut 044.1, supports the new compatibility rule. Fontconfig’s 2.12.3 version fixed the build issues with gperf 3.1 and on GNU Hurd. The Beta 2 version of LibreOffice 5.4 cleaned up the license string and got rid of the Oxygen theme. A removal of support for old, non-systemd distros was made available in the snapshot with libvirt 3.4.0.

• Dell Latitude D630 Tumbleweed Refresh

  I am not quick to buy new things, though I did replace my Dell Latitude D630 about three months ago with a newer Dell latitude E6440. My plan was to deprecate the machine and put it on a "reserve only" status. In my process of setting up the E6440, I found that I used my D630 still but quite differently, it became my home station machine and my E6440 would be my mobile machine that would return back to "base" where I would have it connect as a client to the D630 for keyboard and mouse. It was a rather nice arrangement. Unfortunately, the hard drive died on the D630 and I needed to install openSUSE once again on it in order to continue to use my workspace as I have been. What is $50 on a new hard drive to restore my SuperCubicle, right? [...] I run KDE Plasma for my desktop. I've tried others but the customization options in KDE Plasma just fits my personal tastes best. I have also been real happy with the speed improvements of KDE Plasma in the last couple years and especially those of KDE Plasma 5.10 on Tumbleweed as of late.

GNOME/GSOC Development and Cascade Windows in GNOME Shell

• Code Search for GNOME Builder : GSOC 2017

  I am very happy to be part of GNOME and Google Summer of Code 2017. First of all, thank you for all GNOME members for giving me this opportunity and Christian Hergert for mentoring and helping me in this project. In this post I will introduce my project and approach for doing this project. Goal of the project is to enhance Go to Definition and Global Search in GNOME Builder for C/C++ projects. Currently in GNOME Builder, using Go to Definition one can go from reference of a symbol to its definition if definition is there in current file or included in current file. In this project, Go to Definition will be enhanced and using that one can go from reference of a symbol to its definition which can be present in any file in the project. Global Search will also be enhanced by allowing to search all symbols in the project fuzzily right from search bar.

• [Older] GSOC 2017: And so it begins

  But let’s start from the beginning. Only 4 months ago, I was making my first steps as a contributor in the open-source world. One of the first things I discovered is how amazing and helpful the GNOME community is. I started by trying out a lot of GNOME apps and looking through the code behind them and that’s how I discovered Pitivi, a really great video editing solution. After my first patch on Pitivi got accepted, I was really hooked up. Fast forward a couple of patches and now I have the opportunity and great pleasure to work on my own project: UI for the Ken Burns effect, after being accepted for Google Summer of Code 2017. In this amazing journey, I’ve had some great mentoring: special thanks to Thibault Saunier (thiblahute), who is also my current mentor for GSOC 2017, and Alexandru Balut (aleb), who helped me along the way.

• Pitivi: UI for the Ken-Burns effect

  It’s been three weeks since the coding period for GSOC 2017 started, so it’s time to show the world the progress I made. A short recap: I’ve been working on building a user interface which allows simulating the Ken-Burns effect and other similar effects in Pitivi. The idea is to allow adding keyframes on x, y, width, height properties of a clip, much like we are doing with other effects.

• I Finally Found a Way to Cascade Windows in GNOME Shell [Ed: If your workflow involves "Cascade" like in Windows 3.1x, then you make poor use of virtual desktops, activities, etc.]

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