As some of you might have noticed I’ve created a repo on GitHub for F-Spot under the mono umbrella – F-Spot on GitHub!

I have left the repository on git.gnome.org/f-spot and will try to sync up changes in master regularly. I’d like to thank the awesome GNOME project for hosting F-Spot and want to be clear that I have absolutely no plans of dropping GNOME support in F-Spot nor diminish F-Spot’s GNOME integration in the future. On the contrary, as the .NET bindings for the GNOME  3  platform are improving I expect to be working on further GNOME integration for F-Spot.

The goal in moving F-Spot over to GitHub is purely for the benefit of its development technically as well as to breath new life into the project through the wider GitHub community and feature set.  Github provides several really cool features, one of the features that I’m looking forward to taking advantages of is the pull request system.

Currently, contributors will typically clone a repository, create a patch that fixes some bug, file that bug in Bugzilla and attach the patch, which then sit and wait in the hope that the developers will notice the bug and accept the patch.  What seems to happen with projects, particularly F-Spot, is those bugs will sit there and bit rot.  Either someone will come alone, see the bug and possibly rebase the patch against git master or it’ll be forgotten until it’s no longer valid.  The pull request interface isn’t some silver bullet, but I see it making the process much simpler and much more discoverable for both patch contributors and maintainers alike.

With the GitHub system, it’s really simpler for any user to come along and fork F-Spot.  Once forked they can fix a bug and do a pull request.  At this point there is a nice list of pull requests or shame list (a list of all the patches I haven’t addressed yet!).  There are some other features such as issue tracking and a built-in wiki that comes with GitHub which I’m not sure if it will get used, but time will tell.

Another goal I have for the project is to port it over to OS X and Windows.  GitHub has a nice client for both platforms as well as conveying the idea that F-Spot is intended to be cross-platform application with GNOME support more clearly than being on GNOME’s git does.

I hope everyone will appreciate this new workflow and will enjoy the improvements that are to come in F-Spot.  I’m excited to continue development on F-Spot and look forward to the future of such an awesome photo management.

Finally got around to find time to write a bit about my attendance of the openSUSE Conference 2012 in Prague.

Overall I found it a quite successful event even when I could think of a few improvements for next time.  I’ve attended quite some talks during the days and also helped recording some of them. But to me the most important thing was to meet and talk to people. Since openSUSE 11.4 is going to go Evergreen very soon there were quite some discussions including two related BOFs and a maintenance hands-on with Marcus from the SUSE Maintenance team as we are planning to use OBS’ maintenance features for the upcoming 11.4.

What I missed was a bit more space to meet and hack a bit. Both venues were a bit short on seats outside of the talks or BOF rooms. But congratulations for a pretty stable wifi network during the conference. I missed it at the hotel though

Apart from that I’ve met some new (to me) people and missed some other community members including some from the board which is a bit unfortunate for the main community event but still there were many good conversations.

Special thanks to Petr from SUSE showing us the city and helping me to find my hotel when I arrived (and everything else) and also the openSUSE travel support program which was sponsoring my travel to the conference.

I’m looking forward to next year’s conference and hope I can attend there as well again.

Although the release of openSUSE 12.3 is yet to come, the people of the openSUSE community contributing to KDE are already at work to bring the best possible KDE experience for the new release.

One of the changes that started off already is the development of a new Plasma theme and color scheme. Based on the original Produkt theme, it has been adapted to be better integrated with openSUSE’s customary green:

[caption id=“attachment_1003” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”][]({{ site.url }}/images/2012/10/snapshot4.png) Widget view[/caption]

[]({{ site.url }}/images/2012/10/snapshot1.png)

Aside from general changes, theming has also been extended to the new logout dialog from the next release of the KDE Workspace (4.10) which will be in openSUSE, and to the logout screen:

[caption id=“attachment_1002” align=“aligncenter” width=“200”][]({{ site.url }}/images/2012/10/snapshot3.png) Lock dialog[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_1001” align=“aligncenter” width=“200”][]({{ site.url }}/images/2012/10/snapshot2.png) Logout dialog[/caption]

Last but not least, the theme extends to the alt-F2 launcher (KRunner) and to the system tray (shown is the new QML system tray from Plasma Workspace 4.10):

[caption id=“attachment_1006” align=“aligncenter” width=“175”][]({{ site.url }}/images/2012/10/snapshot7.png) System tray[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_1005” align=“aligncenter” width=“253”][]({{ site.url }}/images/2012/10/snapshot6.png) KRunner view[/caption]

Don’t forget that everything is a work in progress.

This theme is the result of the hard work of the following people:

• shumski

• Raymond “tittiatcoke” Wooninck

• Alin M Elena

Thanks also go to Melissa Adkins for reviewing the theme from a graphics design point of view.

After my post yesterday on getting openSUSE on the new ARM Chromebook, a lot of interest was generated with discussions on various forms of media – heck I even got Slashdotted (thanks :-) ). I read some but not all of them and even the comments. One thing popped out to me, and I feel I need to clarify some things. Whilst I do indeed work for ARM, my device was a private purchase and not provided to me by my employer.

I was lucky enough to get into work today to have a lovely package waiting for me, a shiny new ARM powered Chromebook! o/ I ordered it specifically to have a good mobile ARM development platform. So after having used the bundled ChromeOS for the first half of the day I decided it was time to get this machine’s Geeko on. Thankfully one of the Google employed developers , Olof Johansson, was kind enough to post his steps to get Linux on the machine.

I spent the last weekend in Prague at the openSUSE conference 2012. It was a great opportunity to visit the wonderful city of Prague and meet old friends from the openSUSE community and get a bit more involved into openSUSE again.

I gave a talk about ownCloud on Saturday where I tried to show some technical details. That could have gone even deeper was the feedback some people gave me so I promise to show more of for example app development next time. Apart from that (and apart from the fact that laptops, projectors and Linux still do not play well) the talk went ok and was well received.

The conference is a joint conference of actually four conferences: The openSUSE Conference, the Czech Linux Days, the Gentoo Summit and the SUSE Labs Conference. Over the weekend it was hosted at the Czech technical university of prague and that was a great venue. Very inspiring that over the whole foyer of the building intersting art sculptures were shown. Unusual for a technical faculty but a great thing. The building is modern and large enough for all the talks and workshops but as a result of that it was sometimes a bit difficult to keep the overview where happens what. Especially because the start- and end times of the talks were not kept in sync over the tracks.

I found it is a different atmosphere on the event compared to the openSUSE conferences of the last years which might have been more focussed around the openSUSE project. This one felt more like an general FOSS event. That is not bad, just different, and since change is obvious and good I look forward to seeing how this influences the openSUSE project in the near future.

I like to thank all involved on the organizing teams for their successful hard work, have a lot of fun for the next two days, I had a lot during the last two days :)

Thanks to Matt Barringer, we now have an Android application for showing the openSUSE Conference schedule, details about talks and presentations and also some information about the presenters.

The application can be found at Google Play Store under name SUSE Conferences and it's, of course, for free. It uses internet connection for downloading the data - there will be wireless network at the site, SSID Conference (get the details during registration/getting your badge).

When you start the application, you can select the conference schedule you are interested in. There are these two conferences now:

• Bootstrapping  Awesome - 2012
• openSUSE Summit - 2012

Make sure you select the Bootstrapping Awesome.

Selecting the conference:	Conference schedule, click on a talk to get more details:
Details for a selected talk, click on the gray star to add it to your personal schedule (turns to yellow):	Talk added to your personal schedule, you still have some time left for more talks :)
Currently downloaded news:

This post is completely OT for openSUSE, but I don’t have a better place to put it to share this useful snippet of information.

Shimano has just released its electronic shifting system for Alfine internally geared hubs. In mechanical Alfine, the gear cable pull is translated into rotation and gear selection by a detachable unit that sits on the end of the hub.  Alfine Di2 SEIS replaces this with a MU-S705 motor unit controlled by an electronic brake lever.  But it also introduces a new hub (SG-S705).  I wondered whether the motor unit can be retrofitted to existing hubs, as I have the original Alfine 11 (SG-S700) on my Genesis Day One, and I’m not completely happy with the Versa drop bar brake lever integrated shifter*.

So I mailed Paul Lange, Shimano’s German distributor, to ask. The answer I got is that the SG-S700 hub can not be used with the Di2 components, because it has a return spring for upshifts, whereas SG-S705 does not since the gear selection in both directions is actively performed by the motor.  If you put a MU-S705 motor unit on an SG-S700 it would be working against the return spring.

As far as I understood it, there is a spring in the SM-S700 cable end unit – I didn’t know there is also one in the hub itself, but I’ll check next time I have the wheel out.  Until then, my dreams of perfect drop bar shifting are just that, because at 400 quid SRP the hub is a big investment.  Maybe Shimano will take pity on me and make a mechanical STI…

* Mostly because there is no little cam decoupling the upshift lever from the cable spool inside the Versa shifter, so sometimes it shifts up several gears at once.