• The Beauty of Dash to Dock Extension on GNOME 3.32

  You may find many articles on the net guiding you to install Dash To Dock extension on GNOME. But there are very few ones to speak more about experimenting with it. This article explores the features of this one Extension to show you possibilities it can give to your GNOME 3 desktop environment. You can enable click to raise/minimize window, change the icon size, color the dock or make it transparent, make the dock to mimic Unity Launcher, reposition it to any edge of your screen, etc. You will find my experiments below, like, make everything looks larger to help friends with vision impairments, using GNOME 3.32 desktop on GNU/Linux. Finally, happy tweaking!

• Review: KDE Neon

• Kate History - KDE 4 Porting

  During my web site upgrade, I reviewed the old stuff I had hosted on my long gone web sites but still archived here locally. An interesting thing I stumbled on are the KDE 3 -> 4 porting screenshots of Kate I saved in 2005.

  They actually show pretty nicely how far we have gone since 2005 with our development stack.

  The KDE 3 -> 4 transition was a large hassle. It did take weeks of work just to get Kate back into an usable state.

Released a month ago on March 13th, GNOME 3.32 brings numerous improvements over previous versions of the open-source desktop environment used by numerous GNU/Linux distributions. Today, the first point release, GNOME 3.32.1, is here to add a stability and reliability layer by fixing bugs and updating translations.

"GNOME 3.32.1 is now available. This is a stable release containing four weeks' worth of bugfixes since the 3.32.0 release. Since it only contains bugfixes, all distributions shipping 3.32.0 should upgrade," said Michael Catanzaro on behalf of the GNOME Release Team.

• Rewarding our Friends of GNOME

  After my somewhat dark post about being a Free Software maintainer, a very significant number of people got in touch and asked how can they help me, and GNOME, more actively than saying “keep up the good work, we love y’all”. And so I thought that maybe we are not advertising well enough the various ways to contribute to GNOME beyond actually getting involved with the daily activities of the project.

  The potentially most effective way to help GNOME is by donating to the GNOME Foundation and spreading the word. GNOME Foundation has two donation programs: one-time donations, and Friend of GNOME.

  Becoming a Friend of GNOME is my favorite. The Friends of GNOME donation program is a monthly subscription where you can select a community member. The selected member will send you a thank you post card. Did you know that I can be adopted as a hacker through Friends of GNOME? Not only me but various other great community members!

  I’m happy to say that many Friends of GNOME adopted me already! Naturally, I’m supposed to send thank you postcards.

• Podman Support in Builder

  For years now, Builder has had rich abstractions for containers built right into the core of the IDE. Builder even knows the difference between build and runtime containers which naturally maps with Flatpak SDKs like org.gnome.Sdk vs org.gnome.Platform.

  With the advent of operating systems focused on immutability, like Fedora Silverblue, developers are going to be increasingly developing in containers.

  The technology underlying projects like Toolbox is podman. It provides a command-line tool to manage containers without a daemon by using the various container APIs afforded to us in modern Linux.

  Bridging Builder’s container APIs to support podman was pretty painless on my part. A couple hours to choose the right abstractions and implementing them led me to a missing piece in podman; passing FDs to the container.

  The reason that Builder requires this is that we often need to communicate across containers. An easy way to do that is over a pair of pipe() since it is anonymous. By anonymous, I mean we don’t need to share any file-system hierarchy, IPC or network namespaces, or even PTY namespace.

  The most important piece that requires this in Builder is our GDB-based debugger. We use GDB inside the container so it has native access to things like build sources, libraries, symbols, and more. This is all orchestrated using GDB’s mi2 interface over a PTY, with a second PTY for the target process. When GDB lands on a breakpoint, we know how to translate paths between Builder’s container (usually Flatpak) and the target container (in this case, podman). Doing so ensures that we open the right file and line number to the user. Fundamentals, of course.

• Nirbheek Chauhan: GStreamer and Meson: A New Hope

  Anyone who has written a non-trivial project using Autotools has realized that (and wondered why) it requires you to be aware of 5 different languages. Once you spend enough time with the innards of the system, you begin to realize that it is nothing short of an astonishing feat of engineering. Engineering that belongs in a museum. Not as part of critical infrastructure.

  Autotools was created in the 1980s and caters to the needs of an entirely different world of software from what we have at present. Worse yet, it carries over accumulated cruft from the past 40 years — ostensibly for better “cross-platform support” but that “support” is mostly for extinct platforms that five people in the whole world remember.

  We've learned how to make it work for most cases that concern FOSS developers on Linux, and it can be made to limp along on other platforms that the majority of people use, but it does not inspire confidence or really anything except frustration. People will not like your project or contribute to it if the build system takes 10x longer to compile on their platform of choice, does not integrate with the preferred IDE, and requires knowledge arcane enough to be indistinguishable from cargo-cult programming.

• Sam Thursfield: The Lesson Planalyzer

  I’ve now been working as a teacher for 8 months. There are a lot of things I like about the job. One thing I like is that every day brings a new deadline. That sounds bad right? It’s not: one day I prepare a class, the next day I deliver the class one or more times and I get instant feedback on it right there and then from the students. I’ve seen enough of the software industry, and the music industry, to know that such a quick feedback loop is a real privilege!

  Creating a lesson plan can be a slow and sometimes frustrating process, but the more plans I write the more I can draw on things I’ve done before. I’ve planned and delivered over 175 different lessons already. It’s sometimes hard to know if I’m repeating myself or not, or if I could be reusing an activity from a past lesson, so I’ve been looking for easy ways to look back at all my old lesson plans.

  Search

  GNOME’s Tracker search engine provides a good starting point for searching a setof lesson plans: I can put the plans in my ~/Documents folder, open the folder in Nautilus, and then I type a term like "present perfect" into the search bar

On September 5, 2018 GNOME project announced the release of GNOME 3.30.

Version 3.30 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements and new features.

This release features some significant performance improvements. The entire desktop now uses fewer system resources, which means you can run more apps at once.