gnome.conf.au miniconf Things were busy here when I stuck my head through the door: pads of sticky notes had just been passed out and the room was full of people writing GNOME pros/cons/suggestions and pasting them on the whiteboard. There was a good turn out amongst the gnomes; a larger room might have been nice. In the (rather unseasonal) heat the room felt a little close. At one point it was asked if there was any way of turning on the AC, and someone suggested that everyone turn off their laptops. Much laughter. 1 OpenSolaris and GNOME ? Glynn Foster I?ve been reading {link:Tim Bray?s blog|http://tbray.org/ongoing/} for a while now, and the few mentions he made of OpenSolaris made it sound interesting. Glynn beat this quite soundly ? Solaris is so cool it makes my eyes bleed. I don?t think it?ll run on any of the Franken?puters I have lying around which is unfortunate, but the hot word is that people are working on getting it to run in a Xen user domain ? so I?ll get to play with it in a bit, God willing and the creek don?t rise. Dtrace is just as cool as everyone?s been saying. Glynn is apparently still learning his way around it, but he showed us a sort of strace analogue using dtrace, and then showed us a dramatically cooler version that traced all function calls and returns, nicely indented to show call depth. He also mentioned that you can create a top program that monitors IO usage. Truly cool. There actually seems to be a lot of ~~very~~ cool stuff in the new Solaris, and I really want to play with it. 1 GTK+ on ice ? Bernard Blackham GTK+ has apparently had the ability to migrate programs between X displays for some time now (since around 2.4 or so). However, currently the only program that this actually works properly for is the GTK+ demo app. This is being worked on in Gnome CVS, and has apparently been fixed. So, we?ve got display migration. We could migrate from a display on one machine to a display on another, but Bernard?s presentation was more about CryoPID: ?migrating? a running program onto the same machine, but over a reboot, using the process suspension of the new Linux suspend support. CryoPID will freeze an entire application, saving the state to a file, which can then be restored on the same machine after you?ve rebooted. Or, you can restore it on another machine. If the destination machine has different libraries, then you can include the libraries used on the source machine. As someone in the audience pointed out, your obligations under the GPL may be rather interesting. Aside from this issue, though, the concept is very useful. Backup up long?running processes, send binaries that are actually usable to other people, configure software for you family and send it to them. There are a few problems ? most IO is handled OK but sockets are a bit of a problem: if the other end tries to send you data when the app is suspended, the connection will be reset and hence closed. However, if your app reconnects if it detects it?s lost the connection you won?t have any problems in that regard. So far CryoPID is Linux only, and for graphical apps relies on a recent (i.e. CVS) GTK+. Qt doesn?t yet have display migration, but should it get it then apparently CryoPID should work relatively straightforwardly. The web page for CryoPID is {link:available here|http://cryopid.berlios.de} if you?d like to play at home. 1 GNOME?ifying games ? Callum McKenzie Callum gave an groovy presentation on how he?s been making the GNOME games follow the GNOME style more closely. Games in general tend to have terribly arbitrary user interfaces, and not necessarily just in the extreme like Mario jumping to select user interface elements. Tetravex was the example Callum used; the Tetravex buttons behaved nothing like usual GTK+ buttons ? odd highlighting etc. In general, he?s making efforts to ensure that game UI elements behave as much like the non?game equivalents as much as possible. The discussion of the change of the UI to using Cairo for rescalability was also very interesting. Fairly recently none of the games in the GNOME games package was resizeable; now almost all of them are. Using Cairo hasn?t been witout problem though ? there are slow downs when using bitmaps, and when animating things. As a whole, though, the end result is good ? finally when you try to resize your solitaire game, you?re not going to be disappointed. 2006-01-24 19:07:24.0 2006-01-24 19:07:24.0