Improving MATE desktop environment

[mategsoc-blog]

I just can't believe it!

I passed the final evaluation!

I must admit, that this semester begun 3 weeks ago and I literally had no time to code on MATE. I don't want to whine about it, but my last semester was not so successful, so now I really have to push the limits. (student hostel and other things are on risk). That's why I couldn't code sadly.

But I passed the final evaluation! I don't know what to say. I'm really happy and sad at the same time, it feels like I did not really deserve it...

Anyways I'll try to finish the project, now I really have to! :) I think I'll post future updates here, if you are interested :)

[mategsoc-blog]

I'm so close to finish the window manager...

...but Life simply doesn't let me.

In the middle of the week I was pretty busy with moving, since the next semester is starting tomorrow and I had to move to my student hostel. Of course I had some bad luck again, for example the virtual machine could not get an internet access, since the network is pretty restricted here and I had to ask for support to solve the problem. After several hours we did it. (don't ask, it is pretty complicated here, strict laws, etc.)

But I did code, still the window manager, and I'm sooo close to finish, Life just doesn't let me. The upstream Gnome source is super handy when porting to GTK3, but the themewidget.c/.h file simply does not have an upstream GTK3 port and I'm a little stuck now. I wanted to finish it this weekend, but I couldn't. I really hope I will be done with it within the next days.

[mategsoc-blog]

Still the window manager

This week I was still busy with the window manager, which seems to be very big, but thanks to the Mutter source I found, I'm making some progress. After the loss of some code (see previous post), I continued to code, see my GitHub repo for commits. (although I have some commits I did not push yet)

But sadly next week I'll have to move to the capital city, since my next semester at the university is going to start and I don't know how much time I will have for this project. Which is sad, since I'm ~far from being complete. Only a handful of modules left (and I'm done with some other packages, like the terminal too, which are not on the list), if the remaining components will be hard like the window manager I don't know how I will finish everything until the final evaluation.

[mategsoc-blog]

I just can't believe this...

This made me so angry I have to write it down...

That f--ing virtual machine just deleted the content of a huge file with heavy modifications, actually the window managers /src/ui/theme.c file, which is 6k+ lines of code, and all my work is gone now!

I saved the file, shut down the virtual machine, and the next time I started it the file was totally empty!

This is some really great news. I'll have to start it over again. I shouldn't work on these late hours. And I should commit more often...

[mategsoc-blog]

Sadly not so much progress

This week I had some other "undelayable" things to do, so in the middle of the week I was almost offline. That's why there is not much to report.

When I was able to work I was still busy with the window manager, then I tried to hack the next available modul (the control center), which was actually dependant on the new window manager, so I got in a dead-end. (and by the way I successfully screwed up my local repo without commiting the changes, so I lost a decent amount of work. Congratulations to myself.)

By the way there is already a user with GTK3-ish MATE terminal, which is awesome :D Although it is buggy (surprisingly?), it is great to see someone already using my code :) But I'm already afraid of bug hunting in the whole desktop environment... :D

[mategsoc-blog]

Notification themes are still not done, but image viewer is!

Sadly I did not manage to finish porting the notification themes, but I did as much as I could. All the 4 themes are only one last step away from being gtk3 compatible, I just need some more research and time.

But in the meantime I went to the next package, the image viewer, which I successfully ported. Looking at the GNOME image viewer's source was a great help. It's awesome when there is a working upstream port to get ideas from :)

And by the way, I got an e-mail from a random stranger, who sent me a link with SolusOS' Consortium window manager, which is a metacity fork for gtk3. Although it's not yet ported, I don't know if it's going to be, but I'll definitely look at SolusOS' current window manager to search for a gtk3 compatible metacity fork. I hope I'll find some source somewhere.

[mategsoc-blog]

Pluma done, hacking the notification daemon

This week I spent a lot of time with finishing the Pluma port, and it's finally done. Even the plugins. Although the commit is full of whitespace correction, it's still big, 440 new lines in the biggest commit. But after Stefano suggested, I disabled the whitespace correction, so from now on it won't generate so huge commits, just what matters.

Today I updated the wiki page, since it was a bit outdated. The window manager still waits for itself to be done, but it is really huge and there is no Gnome upstream counterpart (to steal code from), so it will get delayed a bit.

After finishing Pluma plugins I went to the panel, and after some work Stefano said he already ported it (which is actually a big help), so I went to the notification daemon. Porting the daemon itself was a one line modification, but the themes are hard. I'm working on the Coco theme right now, I hope I will finish it tomorrow.

That's it for this week.

[mategsoc-blog]

I passed the midterm evaluation!

Okay, I must admit I don't deserve it, but in August I really would like to make up for it, since it's my summer job.

So in the middle of the week I was still coding the window manager, but on Friday I ported MATE terminal to GTK3, It was easier since the upstream GNOME terminal shares a lot of common code with MATE terminal and I could use it as a source. (it is GTK3 compatible of course)

And right now I'm porting Pluma, MATE's text editor, while I'm digging in Gedit's source as well. This is a bit harder since it depends on GtkSourceView 2/3, and if I'm right it has heavy changes in its API. But still, the Gedit source is useful!

[mategsoc-blog]

Hacking the window manager

This week I was busy with MATE's window manager. The same scenario: datatypes and functions have been dropped and Google is useless since there is little documentation/mailing list archive/forum posts about gtk2->gtk3 migration. And MATE's situation is different, since we want to stay compatible with gtk2 as well. But I'm doing it!

By the way today is the day when we can start filling midterm evaluation forms. The final results will be published on August 2nd. I'm curious and nervous a bit.

[mategsoc-blog]

Last two weeks

At first, I would like to apologize for this huge delay. I'm still in England, my internet connection is provided by a mobile phone, so that's why I did not write.

These weeks we had done some things. As you can see on the wiki page, we are almost at half of the full porting. (though there are still many hard things to do left)

Stefano did a great work with libmatekbd. In the upstream Gnome the devs dropped libgnomekbd and libxklavier and implemented the functionality in other packages. I talked with them (IRC log) and they suggested that we should drop those libs as well and use newer ones. But Stefano said that for MATE porting the packages would be the best solution because of the different infrastructure MATE has. Those libs are big and to be honest for me it seemed like an impossible task but Stefano ported it within ~2 hours. Many thanks for the help, Stefano!

On the other hand we managed to port mate-file-manager and mate-polkit, and right now I'm porting mate-window-manager to GTK3.

And by the way, I should mention that there was an OpenSUSE Conference in Greece and Stefano had a great presentation about MATE. I hope it will attract more people to MATE!

[mategsoc-blog]

I had a short holiday

This week I had a short holiday with my friends from the university. It is some kind of habit, after every semester we go to Agárd for 3 days and we celebrate and drink and grill and go to the beach, etc.

This one was from July 3rd to 5th, so in the middle of the week I was offline. (specifically I went to Budapest on 2nd) So a great piece of my week went away. But this was my only planned, fully offline holiday for this summer, so don't panic, I will spend time with MATE.

By the way I'm going to England from 10th to 25th, but I will likely have internet connection so I will continue to work there.

After this "little" introduction let me talk about what have I done this week:

We have merged the GTK3 compatible mate-desktop package from my fork to the upstream repository.

I have forked debian-packages to update them for GTK3 compatibility as well.

About Caja (mate-file-manager) I have talked with a GTK expert (ebassi) who told me a great solution to be able to port Caja to GTK3. The problem was with libunique and GTK3 and its new features.

libmatewnck and mate-dialogs seems to be compatible with GTK3.

So I'm progressing with it, even if it seems slow :)

[mategsoc-blog]

Learning

This week was better for MATE since I successfully managed to set up a proper and perfect dev. environment via Oracle Virtualbox. Though it was a bit hard and it took long to figure everything out (thanks Stefano!), I managed to install an openssh server, so now I'm able to connect to my virtual machine via MATE's file manager and terminal. (It means that the virtual machine is actually just sitting on the dock since I'm connecting to it via host's applications. It's awesome and funky!)

I also prepared a site on MATE's wiki to track and show the status of GTK3 development. The site is going to be frequently updated since I want to progress and MATE 1.8's exact package-list is yet to determine. mate-keyring is may be replaced by gnome-keyring, some packages may be dropped as is and so on. But it's shown on the wiki page too.

So actually this is all I done this week. I know it's not much, but in the middle of the week I had to trip to the capital city to move out from my student hostel, then this weekend I had other things to do, so... And even gtk2, gtk3 and MATE is huge, so I'm still in the learning stage. Yesterday for example I found the GObject Introspection's tutorial and doc., I hope it will help me to understand the source better!

[mategsoc-blog]

First days

To be honest I'm a little late with my coding since my final exams period ended just 3 days ago.

I began real coding last Saturday when I set up my development environment and git.

We wanted to start with setting up the build daemon (automate), but my ISP here is a crap and I just couldn't reach the daemon's site. We still don't know why.

So we skipped this and went straight to gtk3 development. My first task was to port mate-desktop to gtk3, so I forked it and made a branch.

Porting to gtk3 seems hard to me, since they changed a lot function names and behaviors and even dropped complete datatypes. So the porting can be very tricky and circuitous. I hope I will get used to it.

After porting was done I successfully packaged and signed it with my GPG key.

But then something wrong happened, because when I rebooted my system MATE simply didn't stand up. After logging in my machine just hang and I couldn't do anything. I accessed the root shell, tried to reconfigure the packages, I even purged the whole MATE d.e., but it didn't help. Long story short: my dev. environment broke in just one day - maybe because the infinity installed packages, I can't think of anything other cause.

That's why I'm installing a virtual machine right now on my computer, I hope it will be better.

[mategsoc-blog]

Welcome!

My name is Semmu and I'm participating in this year's GSoC (2013).

My task will be to improve MATE desktop environment by implementing gtk3 support for its core components - thus gaining all the fantastic new features and freshness of gtk3, while still being compatible with gtk2 as well.

I personally use this desktop environment since a ~year. I had to make the switch when all these brand new desktop environments came up and even Gnome dropped Gnome2. Then I found MATE and I fell in love. It gives the user free hand to customize at will, lives great alongside gtk3 and it's really fast.

So this summer I will spend most of my time coding and improving MATE.

Wish me luck!