Le Weblog à Cassidy

Lot of great GNOME related news this week!

Release of GNOME 2.26

As planned, GNOME 2.26 has been released Wednesday. By running Jaunty I'm already using it and didn't find anything awful to complain about for now.

On the Empathy front, I think we did a pretty good job with this release which should bring some nice new features to users:

• As already announced the Audio/Video support received a lot of love. Theora should hopefully increase the support "out of the box" on most distros. Be sure to have at least telepathy-gabble 0.7.22 installed if you want to use audio/video in Jabber.
• Empathy is now able to send and receives files. The only released connection manager implementing it at the moment is Salut 0.3.8 (XMPP link-local) but don't worry, Jabber support is coming! My implementation in Gabble is basically ready and my branches are waiting for review so it should be released pretty soon.
• Empathy's dispatcher has been completely rewritten. That should improve reliabilty and allowed us to improve the logger to ensure to log messages as soon as possible (and so avoid to lose it if something goes wrong).
• This new dispatcher can now dipatch new style tubes. The API is still a draft but I hope we'll undraft it in the next weeks.
• Chat rooms invitiations are now supported. You can easily invite contacts to join a room and receive a nice notification when you are invited to join one.
• The accounts dialog now have an "Import accounts" button you can use to import your existing accounts from Pidgin. Thanks to its modular design more applications should be supported in futur versions. A Gajim backend should be merged soon.
• We also implemented sound notifications using libcanberra. Be sure to have a sound theme installed if you want to use them.
• Libnotify is also supported now so you can receive a nice notification bubble when you receive a new message, an incoming call, etc.
• Few months ago Matthew did a very complete usability study of Empathy's UI. We continued to fix the problems he raised and polish our user interface in general. I hope he'll be able to update his review at some point to give us more feedback on the latest versions.
• Thanks to the great work of Milo Casagrande the user documentation received a lot of love.
• And of course lot of various bugs has been fixed.

Empathy 2.26.0 (and the needed pieces of the Telepathy stack) is already available in Ubuntu Jaunty. If you are still using Intrepid, you can use the Telepathy PPA to get backported packages from Jaunty (but could have some problems with audio/video due to older GStreamer versions). The 2.26.0 package should reach Debian Sid soonish as well.

As usual, if you experience problem, don't be shine and increase a bit more our bug counts :)

Git migration

The Git migration has finally be announced! Almost all the Empathy developement is already done through Git so that's obvioulsy a great news for us. I think that's also the right decision as that's the tool used by most the developers and external components of the GNOME stack (GStreamer, Telepathy, PulseAudio, Avahi, Cairo...).

Thanks to the release and Git migration teams for managing that.

GNOME Summer of Code

This year again, GNOME has been accepted as an organization for the Google's Summer of Code and students have already started to think about nice ideas of project. Feel free to contact us by mail or IRC (#telepathy@FreeNode) if you are interested to work on Telepathy and/or its integration in the GNOME desktop.

As announced by Rob, I recently started to hack an Abicollab backend using Telepathy tubes. It's based on the existing Write backend to ensure interoperability with Sugar.

See this screencast where an Abiword document is shared to participants who are using Abiword and Write.

My code is quiet rude and still need a lot of cleaning and polishing but that's a big first step. Hopefully, the futur improvements in Telepathy and Abicollab would make possible a rocking desktop integration of the collaboration features in the near futur!

I just made the first public announce of my Elisa RTBF plugin so now is probably a good time to blog about it.

Dear Elisa friends,

I'm happy to announce the first release of the RTBF plugin marked as stable. That means you can easily install it from Elisa's plugins list.

RTBF or Radio télévision belge de la communauté française is the national broadcasting organisation of the government of the French-speaking southern part of Belgium.

This plugin adds support for easy access to RTBF's radio streams and TV news.

This is the perfect plugin if - You are Belgian and want to easily watch the news and listen radio. - You'd like to improve your French by listening cool music (Pure FM is quite nice). - You want to make fun of your Belgian friends by laughing of our incapability to have a gouvernement. - You are an Elisa plugin freak and want to install every possible plugin. :)

Source code, egg file and bug reports are available on launchpad: https://launchpad.net/elisa-plugin-rtbf

Elisa developers are doing a great job in creating a rocking open media center and opening it to external contributions. The last days have seen the arrival of new cool plugins and more should follow soon. Elisa is progressing really fast (there is a new release every Monday) so I strongly suggest you to try a recent version. And if you have a nice idea of plugin, don't hesitate to write it; plugin's design is not hard and the Elisa team is very nice and helpful.

After months of waiting, the file transfer support in Telepathy is finally there!

The spec was merged as a draft last week and the Salut and Empathy branches followed this afternoon. This means that this long-awaited feature will be available in the next releases of Empathy and Salut.

Lot of persons have been involved and worked very hard to make this happen. File Transfer was first started by Marco Barisione as a SOC in 2007. Unfortunately his work wasn't merged directly because we were not completely happy with the specification and wanted to use the not-ready-yet Requests API. This summer, Jonny Lamb resurrected Marco's work, ported it to the new FileTransfer API and polished the Salut and Empathy implementation. I finally gave the last shot these last days by finalizing the spec, porting implementations to use the Requestotron and fixing last bugs. Xavier polished a bit the Empathy implementation and made it ready for merging.

Releases should be out shortly. So, with the future Empathy 0.25.1 and telepathy-salut 0.3.6 you'll be able to send and receive files on your local network using Link-Local XMPP. Our implementation is fully compatible with Apple's iChat but not yet with Pidgin as libpurple doesn't implement the OOB protocol.

Next step will be to implement the File Transfer API in telepathy-gabble in order to be able to send and receive files over Jabber. If people are interested to contribute to Telepathy, implementing FileTransfer in telepathy-butterfly (MSN) or telepathy-idle (IRC) would very valuable contributions. We are also working on the resurrection of the nautilus-sendto plugin too, so we'll be able to easily send files directly from Nautilus!

Thanks to Collabora and Google to have sponsored this work.

File sending in Empathy

I'm looking for a (small) computer that could be used as a media box with Elisa. My requirements, pretty standard for this kind of computer, include:

• S-Video output (or possibility to have a converter to S-Video). HDMI too would be good.
• CPU fast enough to decode HD videos.
• As quiet as possible.
• 5.1 sound card.
• And, obviously, working fine with Linux.

So if anyone has good advice to share, comments are more than welcome. Thanks :)

Thanks to the hard work of the Empathy, Telepathy and Farsight teams, VoIP is finally usable with Empathy. So you can now very easily do audio/video calls using Jingle and SIP. There is still a lot of UI polishing to do but it should basically work, so feel free to test and report problems.

You'll need Empathy 0.22.1, recent versions of Farsight, telepathy-stream-engine, gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-farsight, and a gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg with H263 encoder if you want video support.

If you're using Debian Sid you should have the right versions of the Telepathy stack but need the Debian multimedia repo for video support (which is optinnal).

On Ubuntu Hardy you have to use Telepathy PPA and Medibuntu repos if you want video support. So just add to your sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://fr.packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free

Happy calling!

Thanks to Ross, Dates is now installed on my N810. I played a bit with it and it looks great. So great than I'm considering to use my N810 as an organizer. But I'd really like to be able to synchronize it with the Evolution running on my desktop.

Conduit seems really promising but I didn't see a Maemo port yet. Maybe OpenSync or Sync could do the job too? So, if anyone has some experience in N810 <-> desktop 2 ways synchronization, feedback would be really appreciated.

Thanks!

Dans le cadre de la Linux Copy Party/Install Party mensuelle du BxLUG je donnerai ce dimanche 28 octobre une petite conférence sur Telepathy et l'OLPC. Celle-ci se déroulera aux alentours de 15h30-16h au FIJ.

Le contenu exact n'est pas encore défini mais cela devrait parler de l'architecture de Telepathy, des logiciels existants, des tubes, de comment on utilise cela dans le cadre de l'OLPC ainsi que de l'intégration dans GNOME (Empathy). Je devrais également faire une petite démo à l'aide de deux XO.

Au plaisir de vous y voir.

While Rob is finishing to review the Gabble tubes mega branch, I implemented inet4 and inet6 sockets support for stream tubes.

That means we are now able to export any (ip, port) socket to a tube and create an inet socket binded to the localhost interface to connect to it. So, any network application can easily be exported through a stream tubes to your contacts or to a muc a room.

For example, if you export your socket (127.0.0.1, 22) to muc foo, each participant of this muc who accepted your tube will have a new socket (127.0.0.1, port) created on their box. They'll just have to connect to it^[1] and they'll be automagically connected to your ssh server!

Next step now is to integrate all these cool stuffs to Empathy and GNOME will gain a rocking Collaboration framework!