Breaking the monotony

Oh, HAI

I has other interests too !!!



And now, for the complimentary my life is as screwed up (if not more) than yours link!



This post brought to you by the people complaining of extreme geekiness in this blog
Yes, I know I cheated, but I'm in a hurry here :p

GDM 2.24 aka SMB (Shoot Me Bloody)

That's the name of my proposed WorkOut for FOSS.IN/2008.

What is it about?
It's about getting GDM 2.24 in good enough shape to be considered for adoption by Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandriva, Debian, *BSD; and not just Fedora and Foresight.

What's wrong with GDM 2.24?
Strictly speaking, there's nothing *wrong* with it. It works flawlessly on my system (except for the daemonisation bug/regression, which I had to patch up manually). I've been using it as my primary display manager since 2.23.1, and it has improved to the point of bug-free-ness.

However, there are reasons why most distros are shipping the older 2.20* series GDM instead. The aim of this WorkOut is to make inroads into fixing those problems.

That's all fine, but what *exactly* is wrong with GDM 2.24?
Oh, right. I should impose a hand-waving embargo on myself ;p

History: Sometime around the GNOME 2.18 release cycle, the GDM developers decided that it was high-time someone fixed all the problems with GDM and rewrote it from scratch. For this reason, a rewrite of GDM was started; aiming for the 2.22 release cycle.

However, during 2.22 cycle, GDM 2.20 was shipped due to several regressions. When GDM 2.24 was proposed, it caused intense debates involving the release team. However, it was included since the feature regressions were deemed minor enough.

Some of the regressions are listed below:

• Lack of Themeing support: The architecture of the new GDM is very different from that of the old GDM. And hence, there is no way to "port" the older themes to the newer GDM, and there is currently no inbuilt support for themeing either.
• No `gdmsetup`: The older gdmsetup had several security bugs, and hence was not ported to the new GDM. The configuration file is still the same however, so this is not a really large regression since there's no theming support anyway.
• No XDMCP Chooser in the login screen: This is quite self-explanatory
• No support for timed-logins: This is being worked on actively in-trunk
• No support for backends other than PAM: This means that distributions like Slackware, *BSD, etc cannot use GDM 2.24

The aim of this WorkOut is to fix the above listed regressions, and some of the other regression bugs, TODOs, Visual Glitches, etc. And maybe even add some new features ;)

Details about the How, and When will be posted soon. Stay tuned!

~Nirbheek, hoping to see you during the discussions and @foss.in :)

An important announcement

We interrupt your regular lazy-webbing to make this two important announcements:

A) AutotuA 0.0.1 released! Try it out and report bugs (if you can't follow the instructions in the link given, your services will be required when 0.0.2 is released :)

B) IMO, the two best distros in this world are:

1. Foresight Linux
   • Ken Vandine (one of many) is effing awesome
2. Gentoo
   • The GNOME Team
   • Brent Baude (ranger): master-of-the-PPC-arch
   • Donnie Berkholz (dberkholz): X11, Council, and Desktop Team Emperor
   • Raúl Porcel (armin76): generic bitch; maintains half the arches and Firefox
   • Robin H. Johnson (robbat2): Infra demi-god
   • Zac Medico (zmedico): Portage demi-god

All these people are just too awesome (and too overworked) for words. If I hadn't got myself deep into Gentoo (which led to SoC too), I would've gone to Foresight :)

~Nirbheek,
Who has high hopes for AutotuA, and also hopes the best of Foresight and conary can be brought to Gentoo.

PS: Donnie, congrats once again! ;)

The much-delayed post

*Very* late, this post is. I hope it's not too late yet :)

I'm talking about something that was much-talked about, and people are probably following some of the suggestions made about this, but I think there should be some sort of standardisation.

Here's the header I use for all my GSoC code:


# vim: set sw=4 sts=4 et :
# Copyright: 2008 Gentoo Foundation
# Author(s): Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek.chauhan@gmail.com>
# License: GPL-2
#
# Immortal lh!
#


I encourage all of you to adopt the last two lines in your headers as well :D

AutotuA Weekly Status Report - I (and more ;)

Yes, I am alive and kicking. Although at a much slower pace than I would've liked ;)

So I sent my first weekly report over yesterday, you can either read the (excessively long and probably boring and or confusing) weekly report or you can, well, do something else :P

And guess what, next time onwards, all you have to do is checkout the AutotuA news page or subscribe to the "gsoc" label on this blog to stalk me.

Oh, right, this will also probably be my first post on the FLOSS India Planet!

Hello everyone!~ I'm Nirbheek Chauhan (also called as "slacker #1" by some). I was one of the co-ordinators of this tiny little event in IIT Kanpur's tech-festival Techkriti.

You might have heard about it and maybe seen the awesome speakers (and posters ;) of the event.

You've probably had the pleasure of conversing with the mastermind behind the whole event.

And maybe, just maybe, you've heard about "FOSSKriti" :D

PS: We'll (hopefully) be back next year, so this is shameless advance publicity ;p