Beta packages, Summer of code

Gnome beta portage overlay

Today i have been struggling to create all the necessary stuff to make portage install Gnome beta 2.11.90
The result is an overlay which you can download here (the name sucks, i know). If you don’t know what an overlay is, you most probably don’t want to try this thing, else just search the net on how to set this up. There is also a package.unmask file whose content should be added to /etc/portage/package.unmask, and maybe even more, just try..

Be warned that installing these ebuilds will most likely break things, beside the fact that this is a beta release, the ebuilds are mostly copied from existing ones, so they may be doing wrong things, don’t blame me 🙂

Don’t try evolution, evolution-data-server, gtkhtml !

I also included most recent dbus and hal from gentopia overlay, for completeness. If you know any more appropriate place for this, just tell me, or feel free to copy them anywhere you want, i don’t care.

I managed to compile everything here, and am now the proud owner of a beta gnome desktop which, of course, rocks !

Python bindings for libsexy

I made python bindings for libsexy which are documented as much as the original library, not at all ! The standard procedure ./configure; make && make install applies. I submitted the packages to Chris Chipx86 Hammond, so it should soon land in the libsexy SVN repository

Summer of code

I am participating to the google summer of code with gnome as mentoring organisation, Johan “jdahlin” Dahlin is my mentor, and he rocks. The project was the “Shared music spaces” bounty, but the actual end goal isn’t quite defined yet.

For the moment i have:

• A streaming server, which accept http connections and serve music from a gstreamer pipeline, that’s quite like flumotion, but simpler.
• A python library that allows to play with upnp devices, get external ip, add port mappings. The code is stolen and adapted from Shtoom, maybe we can turn this in a shared lib, so we don’t maintain two version of the code.
• A gstreamer element that dump metadata from the stream on dbus, in a hashtable. This can then be retreived for any “Now Playing” needs, as well as an element that would write back tags from dbus to the stream, for example in the stream server.

The initial goal which is mainly achieved was to have a simple streaming server taking as input any sound that comes out the speakers and streaming that with any metadata to people connecting to the server via simple http streaming.

The most obvious problem with this approach is the firewall/NAT issue, while some NATs can be activated through upnp, passing a TCP connection through a firewall is nearly impossible. Maybe there should be a relay server hosted at gnome, but this is quite impossible too due to legal issues, and bandwidth costs. So basically it works if you have direct internet connection with no firewall, indirect connection through an upnp NAT and no firewall (or upnp-esque firewall), and that’s about it, i don’t know how large this part of the gnome users is…

I’m waiting for more instructions/discussions (*hint*) to continue this thing, in the meantime i fix bugs and polish the code.

I didn’t hear anything from the other gnome SoC’ers, maybe you should do some status report too, would be great 🙂