Coming two weeks after the first beta release, the highly anticipated GNOME 3.30 desktop environment received a second beta release today as Michael Catanzaro informed us via an email announcement. This beta 2 release is tagged as GNOME 3.29.91, and it marks the Software String Freeze stage in the development cycle.

But it doesn't look like it was an easy release for the GNOME Release Team, as Michael Catanzaro reports build failures for several components, including GNOME Boxes, which didn't make it for this second beta release. As a consequence, numerous components weren't updated in this beta 2 release.

• The Joy of GSoC

  Wooo... this is the last day of coding phase of GSoC. I am writing this blog to share my experience and work done in the coding phase. I want to specially thank my mentor David Rosca for his help, suggestions and reviews. This was my first exposure to the KDE community and I am proud that it was great. I really enjoyed the whole program from proposal submission - intermediate evals - then now this final evaluation. Also, I had learned a lot working on my project. Frankly speaking, I didn't knew about i18n and l10n much but with the help of my mentor now I have a quite good understanding of how these works and are implemented. I can truly say this was one of my best summer vacations.

• What’s next for WikiToLearn?

  Google Summer of Code is finishing and many things have been done on WikiToLearn since previous post. A little recap is needed.

  Talking with mentors has been crucial because they told me to focus on finishing CRUD interaction with API backend instead of working on “history mode” viewer.

• GSoC 2018 Final Evaluation

  As GSoC is coming to an end, I am required to put my work altogether in order for it to be easily available and hopefully help fellow/potential contributors work on their own projects. 

  [...]

  At its prestige, through this project we will have tests both for most critical and used operations of Nautilus, and for the search engines we use. Further on, I’ll provide links for all of my merge requests and dwell a bit on their ins and outs while posting links to my commits:

• GTK+ 4 and Nautilus </GSoC>

  Another summer here at GNOME HQ comes to an end. While certainly eventful, it unfortunately did not result in a production-ready Nautilus port to GTK+ 4 (unless you don’t intend to use the location entry or any other entry, but more on that later).

• Pitivi Video Editor Gains UI Polish, Video Preview Resizing

  The latest Google Summer of Code 2018 is allowing some excellent work to be done on some excellent open source projects.

  Among them Pitivi, the non-linear video editor built using GTK and Gstreamer and offering up a basic video editing feature set.

  Over the past few months, Harish Fulara, a Computer Science student, has worked on improving the application’s greeter dialog and on adding support dynamic resizing of the video preview box.

• GSoC 2018: Final week

  Coming to the last week, the activity Note_names is finally developed and being tested on different platforms.

  Principle: This activity aims to teach sight reading the musical notes and their position on the staff by presenting several notes one-by-one with animation from the right of the staff sliding to the right of the clef image. The user will get the combination of all the notes he has learned previously and the current targetted notes from the dataset. Only the reference notes are colored as red and the user is made to learn the notes around it using it as a leverage. One has to correct enough notes to get a 100% and advance to next stage.

• Five-or-More Modernisation: It's a Wrap

  As probably most of you already know, or recently found out, at the beginning of this week the GSoC coding period officially ended, and it is time for us, GSoC students, to submit our final evaluations and the results we achieved thus far. This blog post, as you can probably tell from the title, will be a summary of all of the work I put into modernising Five or More throughout the summer months.

  My main task was rewriting Five or More in Vala since this simple and fun game did not find its way to the list of those included in the Games Modernisation Initiative. This fun, strategy game consists of aligning, as often as possible, five or more objects of the same shape and color, to make them disappear and score points.

• The end of GSoC

  After three months of hard work and a lot of coding the Google Summer of Code is over. I learned a lot and had a lot fun. GSoC was an amazing experience and I encourage everybody to participate in future editions. At this point I’ve been a contributor to GNOME for nearly a year, and I plan on sticking around for a long time. I really hope that other GSoC students also found it so enjoyable, and keep contributing to GNOME or other Free Software Projects.

• Summertime Solus | The Roundup #7

  For those that missed our announcements of last week’s Hackfest, you can watch it via the video embedded below. Most of this roundup will cover the work that has been done since the last roundup (in the specific sections in this blog) as well as the Hackfest, so if you don’t want to sit through the 10 hours of content, feel free to just keep reading.

• Solus Linux & Its Budgie Desktop Seeing Summer 2018 Improvements

  The Solus Project has shared some of the work they've been engaged in this summer with their Linux distribution as well as their GTK3-based Budgie Desktop Environment.

• Community Data Analytics Are Going to Akademy

  If you are interested in community data analytics, you will have several opportunities to discuss them during Akademy.

  Firstly, there will be my talk titled Bringing Community Data Analysis Back to KDE (why the hell did I use "Analysis" there... I only used "Analytics" everywhere so far, odd). It will happen on Saturday at 15:30 in room IE7. The slot is a bit small for the topic, but I'll try my best to create interest. Indeed you can catch me around talks to chat about it, and...

  Secondly, there will be a BoF "Discussing Community Data Analytics" on Monday at 10:30 in room 127. We hope to see people coming up with interesting questions to explore or willing to lend a hand in those explorations. See you there!

• The birth of a new runtime

  Runtimes are a core part of the flatpak design. They are a way to make bundling feasible, while still fully isolating from the host system. Application authors can bundle the libraries specific to the application, but don’t have to care about the lowlevel dependencies that are uninteresting (yet important) for the application.

  Many people think of runtimes primarily as a way to avoid duplication (and thus bloat). However, they play two other important roles. First of all they allow an independent stream of updates for core libraries, so even dead apps get fixes. And secondly, they allow the work of the bundling to be shared between all application authors.

  [...]

  This runtime has the same name, and its content is very similar, but it is really a complete re-implementation. It is based on a new build system called BuildStream, which is much nicer and a great fit for flatpak. So, no more Yocto, no more buildbake, no multi-layer builds!

  Additionally, it has an entire group of people working on it, including support from Codethink. Its already using gitlab, with automatic builds, CI, etc, etc. There is also a new release model (year.month) with a well-defined support time. Also, all the packages are much newer!

  Gnome is also looking at using this as the basics for its releases, its CI system and eventually the Gnome runtime.