OpenSUSE Linux and Kernel Development workshop at VIT for ConfER ‘2008

Varadhan, myself and Suresh Jayaraman had been to VIT to conduct a workshop on OpenSUSE and Kernel development on March 28th. Around 120 students and professors had registered for the workshop. The organizers had restricted the registration to 120 due to the size of the Conference hall.

Varadhan and me kicked off the OpenSUSE workshop with 10.3 installation. The workshop covered the basics, development and management tools, handling patches, build service etc. Students were overwhelmed by the visual effects, multimedia support and the innovative single-click install utility. We managed to convince students to migrate from various other distros to openSUSE. They have redhat and solaris labs. We also had a chat with OS research team and varadhan would be closely working with them for collaboration between VIT and Novell in research work.

The OpenSUSE workshop was followed by the Kernel development workshop by Suresh Jayaraman. This workshop was aimed at demystifying the kernel development process and encouraging students towards Kernel development. There were lot of activities in the course of workshop which students enjoyed despite the overshot schedule. I compiled and installed a module in the kernel for the first time

Both the workshops were very well received. The workshop which was originally planned for 4 hrs went up to ~7 hrs with a lot of enthusiasm and interest from the students. There were some students who wanted DVD’s for 64 bit and ppc architectures. We just had DVD’s for 32 bit arch. Prolly we need to request anja for 64 bit and ppc openSUSE DVD’s

opensuse 10.3 on sony vaio

I just got a sony vaio VGNCR220EL  laptop. I like it very much for the look, lighting of the monitor screen and its fast. It had the windows vista installed on it. Vista was very slow with the visual effects enabled and consumed a lot of memory. I wanted a windows system just for playing games which is only one aspect for which I use it.  So I re-installed  opensuse-10.3 on the system. I was amazed to see that all my devices were automatically detected. I did not need search for any external drivers. The xgl effects which comes with compiz fusion is real fast. With the repository such as http://opensuse-community.org/Multimedia, I was able to view all the divx movies after installing the decoders by just one click build-service project had made things a lot easier. I had one problem with the network-manager. Its not able to connect to the wireless network if the access point is hidden. I need to sort that out. I have not yet tried using webcam. Need to see if any external drivers are required for it. On the whole am  really happy with sony vaio and opensuse, and I can work from home now

EDS calendar memory

I just read the blogs from ross, philip and Federico regarding the areas of memory usage in EDS. I completely agree with ross and federico that we should fix the existing code rather that trying to look for a replacement. I too once wanted to write a new libical a while ago using glib, when michael advised me and got me into the right path to fix the memory issues in libical rather writing another one. Federico’s fosdem 2007 talk about the profiling desktop applications also provided motivation for this.  I think what philip is pointing is about the live query cache which is maintained for every client in EDS (EDataCal). The other issues as federico pointed were about the current sequential query of cache and the handling of recurring events.  As federico also pointed out, the human readable content in a calendar view are summary, start/end times, category/alarm/meeting/recurrence icons etc. But there is no need to pass the other contents such as description, the alarm information, sequence etc. to the clients such as a clock applet or a day/month/week view in calendar.  EDS currently does not provide the interface for getting just the summary info.   We are looking at fixing all these issues for evolution-data-server-2.24. Myself and gicmo had discussions about most of the above issues. We are planning to use sqlite database for storing the events and indexing based on time ranges. I was planning to put the design of the new cache in go-evolution.org to get views from everyone, its getting postponed due to some other work. I will try to put it in the wiki soon with some prototype code done for the same.

SLED Beta call

Last week I attended the sled beta since srini had to go for his visa interview. The call was very informative. Guy gave a talk about the multimedia issues w.r.t licensing/trade-mark/copy-rights which stop us from shipping the windows media decoders in order to play .wma files. He also explained how moonlight will be able to play windows media files. He pointed the customers to get the decoders from fluendo and also mentioned the reason why we don’t ship the decoders in sled getting it from fluendo. He was explaining them very clearly and also conveyed the message about how hard our company is trying to get these issues resolved for the customers. Guy also explained that the other OS such as windows also need third party software for dvd playback which sometimes does not strike me as we get the softwares for windows in a dvd along with the dvd players. It would be great if some steps are taken by the dvd player vendors to include the decoding software for linux too. We did not have much issues for evolution. We had a couple of them which was already mentioned in previous calls and just needed some followup.

Multi-linguistic kid

I just watched this video a while a ago. This kid seems amazing. /me wants to get a training from the kid I can imagine many places where this would help

Libical memory management

I started looking into libical code after speaking with michael meeks last week. Libical was holding 2500 memory blocks in a temporary buffer ring and was deallocating them in a round robin fashion. The memory blocks also held the strings which was given to its clients. The clients referring to this memory would not know when the string is going to be free’d. I sent my observation and approach to get this fixed to michael who immediately responded with his comments.  The solution is, now libical would not own the memory for the strings returned to the clients and it would use the buffer ring to manage the memory internally for its use while parsing the strings. This will prevent unnecessary memory being stored in libical for every thread and also fix some random crashers which happen due to the temp buffer. I have listed the functions which have been changed in libical here. The changes in EDS have been incorporated. I will be making similar changes in evolution as well probably by this weekend as I have to get on with listing sled evolution patches which needs to be upstreamed and upstream some eds opensuse patches. The other clients such as clock-applet and external backend’s might need to free the strings returned by the following functions  once the patch gets in. I thank michael in advance for his patch review too

Google calendar is now in svn GNOME!!

Google calendar is now in svn!! It will be available as part of Evolution-2.21.1 (GNOME-2.21.1) release. As mentioned earlier the features it supports are,

• Viewing default calendar
• Creating/modifying/deleting the appointments

It also provides a Gdata library which can be used by other applications to access the google calendar and also be extended to mail and addressbook as well.

Ebby is currently working on the following features,

• Recurrence support
• Scheduling meetings
• Viewing Multiple folders

Evolution-2.22 will be providing a complete support for Google calendar. Am also happy to announce Ebby as the Evolution Google Calendar Maintainer!! Ebby has been working previously in evolution fixing critical bugs during his college days and later he involved himself in the Google Summer of code project where he worked on the Google calendar project.

Google calendar in evolution

Hello world !! Am now starting off with a good news

Ebby had been working on providing a backend for the Google calendar under GNOME/Google summer of code 2007. Amidst lot of hitches in between during the project due to his relocation, he has worked hard to complete it. We are planning to get the work into svn for GNOME-2.22 which means for evolution-2.14. Ebby is now polishing things, for getting the code into svn. According to the recent Soc time-line, code would be hosted between Sep 12 - 14th since code samples are taken through alphabetical order. He explains the work done for Soc here.

Authenticated Web calendars

We now have the support for authenticating to shared web calendars. Milan has added a user-name field in new calendar dialog. Filling the user-name would mean web calendar requires authentication and would trigger a password prompt. Now we don’t require the workaround of passing the user-name/password inside the webcal url as before.

Libical system timezone integration

EDS uses libical library for accessing timezone information. Libical used to maintain its own timezone data and we had to update it, if any zoneinfo changes. With GNOME 2.19.6 libical would read timezones from the system, stored generally at /usr/share/zoneinfo or /usr/lib/zoneinfo or /etc/zoneinfo. The timezone files in libical are not yet removed since win32 would need them. My special thanks to Milan for testing the patch and fixing a crash in 64 bit arch. I thank sankar and andre too for the same. I have tested it throughly in 32 bit machine. Akhil will be building evo in 64 bit machine and will be testing it more. If anyone find any issues, please let know and you will be getting a fix immediately I will work out a patch for win32 too during sometime and remove all the files which we maintain in libical. Now except for systems which use windows, all the others can get the latest time zone using libical.