Archive for August, 2008

P4A documentation, the first mask

I’m taking a bit of time (before leaving for a week of pure holiday) to write some pages of the P4A manual.

After the latest post about P4A’s I18n I’m now working on the first mask page, containing documentation about building widgets, displaying them in the mask, using layout managers (frames, fieldsets, canvases, sheets) and using the field.

Work is nearly completed, I think I’ll finish it today and that will be great!

We still have a lot of parts that need documentation, you can find the list here, you know… your help would be really appreciated!

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recordMyDesktop audio troubles with Hardy

A few days ago a bought a new laptop: a DELL Inspiron 1525 (T8100 processor, 4GB RAM, 320GB hard disk). I chose it because all hardware (except the wireless card) is Intel based (audio/video) and I like Intel’s policy about open source drivers.

Everything is working smoothly, I had to configure nothing! Compiz works wonderfully and everything else too.

But here comes a little problem, I need to create screencast, the built-in mic is not so good thus I plug-in an external mic and start gtk-recordMyDesktop.

Ugly surprise, the audio is choppy and I can’t get it to work… I tried some workarounds found here and there but none is working :-(

Another problem, when I record a long screencast, gtk-recordMyDesktop hangs during the export phase.

I didn’t experience none of these troubles with my old laptop (DELL Inspiron 6000).

Can someone point me in the right direction?

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Multilingual applications with P4A

How translations work and how to create multilingual applications in P4A.

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5 + 1 beautiful designs for Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex”

A quick overview of some of the most interesting (IMHO) mockup designs for the upcoming Ubuntu release, in strictly alphabetical order ;-)

Click the name to visit its official page, click on the image to enlarge it.

1. Dusk

2. Kin

3. Kith
First version:

Second version:

4. Personification

5. Wall-light

6. The hidden mockup: Union
2 of 5 designs above are deeply inspired by the Union theme, which was proposed for hardy. I think it’s still wonderful:

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9 + 5 things you’ll get with Fedora 10

Fedora 10 will be released on 28th October 2008, let’s take a look at what some of the upcoming features, 9 of them have been accepted by the team, 5 more are still in the “proposed” state. If you want you can check the whole list.

9 accepted features

1. Connection Sharing
This feature will allow to set up an ad-hoc wifi network on a machine with a network connection and a spare wireless card so that other machines will be able to join the first network using the new shared one.

2. Glitch Free Audio
The PulseAudio sound server will be rewritten to use timer-based audio scheduling instead of the traditional interrupt-driven approach. This approach is already used Apple’s CoreAudio and Windows Vista’s audio subsystem and has many advantages such as reduced power consumption, minimization of drop-outs and flexible adjustment of the latency to the needs of the application.

3. OpenChange
Integrating the libmapi library from OpenChange, tools such as kdepim and Evolution will become first-class clients of a Microsoft Exchange Server.

4. Security Audit
A new security too will be added to Fedora 10, called sectool. It can be used as a security audit and as an intrusion detection. It consists of set of tests, library and textual/graphical frontends. Administrators will be able to run selected tests, groups or whole security levels with ease.

5. Better Webcam Support
subject says it all :-)

6. Better Remote Support
A new graphical frontend will be developed to make it easy to connect and configure Infra-Red remote controls. Users will be able to remotely control multimedia applications such as rhythmbox and totem with this feature.

7. RPM 4.6
The new major RPM version (after years) will add a lot of new feature, replacing the old RPM 4.4

8. Haskell Support
Haskell is a growing programming language, Fedora 10 will have a better support for it, adding a lot of packages for the language itself and many softwares written in Haskell.

9. Artistic 1.0 License Removal
This is not a feature as we classically think but it will bring a lot of polish in the license ecosystem removing all packages licensed only under the Artistic 1.0 license.

5 proposed features

1. Better Startup
The team is writing a software (Plymouth) to make the startup experience flicker-free, seamless and shiny. This new software will get rid of RHGB, start before “/” is mounted and doesn’t require an X server.

2. Better printing
The printer configuration GUIs will be overhauled to look friendlier and more in line with modern desktop applications. In addition, the configurator won’t need root privileges anymore.

3. Port reserve
This feature will integrate the port reservation utility into Fedora 10, preventing RPC services from taking specified privileged TCP ports. It will do this by reserving them at boot, and providing a mechanism for releasing them on demand. This is important for non-RPC services which require privileged ports, such as CUPS.

4. Python-NSS
This will be mostly invisible to a user, adding Python bindings for NSS/NSPR and allowing Python programs to use the NSS cryptographic libraries for SSL/TLS and PKI certificate management.

5. Save to Bugzilla
Fedora 10’s installer will be able to save bug reports directly to Fedora’s bugzilla, making it easier to debug the installer. Check a video of this feature in action.

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P4A 3.0.2 is out

We’re not on holiday yet, time for a new minor release :-)

Changelog:

  • a small change was done on P4A_Array_Source to enable the usage of empty array_sources without warnings
  • tooltips are now automatically translated at rendering time
  • P4A_DB_Source::saveRow() now reads pk values back from Zend_DB_Table::insert() gaining better functionality with auto increment primary keys
  • jQuery UI was updated to 1.5.2
  • a small bug with P4A_I18N::_normalize() method was solved
  • p4a_focus_set() javascript function was reworked to avoid a javascript warning in firebug
  • loading a P4A_Array_Source with a simple array of data now does not create the “0″ field anymore, it’s been renamed to “f0″ to avoid problems with some PHP configurations with numerical object properties

Download P4A 3.0.2

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