Libre

Time for a Quickly reboot?

Quickly is the recommended tool for opportunistic developers on ubuntu. When we created it 3 years ago, we made some opinionated choices, which is the essence of the project. We had back then a lot of good press coverage and feedbacks (Linux Weekly News, arstechnica, Zdnet, Maximum PC review, Shot of jak and some more I can’t find on top of my head…) Some choices were good, some were wrong and we adapted to the emerging needs that happened along the road.

Quickly: a path forward?

Seeing the amount of interests we saw around Quickly the past last years was really awesome! Now that we have some more detailed view on how people are using the tool, it’s time to collect and think about those data to see how we can improve Quickly. With all the new tools available like hangouts on air, it can be also now time to experiment how we can use them and use this opportunity to have a very open collaboration process as well as trying to attract more people to contribute to it.

Announcing session-migration now in ubuntu

Just fresh hot of the press, session-migration is now available in quantal. This small tool is trying to solve a problem we encountered for a long time as a distributor, but had to postpone it way too long because of other priorities. :) It basically enables packagers and maintainers to migrate in user session data. Indeed, when you upgrade a package, the packaging tools are running under root permissions, and only hackish solutions was used in the past to enable us to change some parts of your user configuration[1], like adding the FUSA applet, adding new compiz plugins on the fly… There are tons of example when a distribution needs to migrate some user data (logged or not when the upgrade is proceeding) without patching heavily the upstream project to add a migration support there.

Added rhythmbox radio support to unity music lens

Just got it merged (and will be freshly available in Unity 6.0 coming soon in quantal)! I spent few hours last week to add rhythmbox radios (and writing unit tests) for the music lens. It's been a long time I didn't write some serious vala (I guess last time was for unity's Alt+F2). I confirm it's still not my favorite langage ;) Coming back to the radios, they will now show as the last row (after tracks, albums and eventually online purchase ones), and they respect (if the metadata are provided in rhythmbox) to every usual music lens filters.

Android ICS on wetab (exopc slate)!

Spend few hours installing Android ICS (Cyanogenmod built for x86) on my exopc tablet and playing with it. I've never been impressed by Meego installed on it as a developer preview, performance and feature-wise. I've found yesterday evening those instructions and links about a corvusmod rebuild of cynagenmod and I gave it a try! Of course, as this is not an arm device but x86 one, not a lot of applications are working out of the box, but overall, the UI is totally functional and browsing the web is a delightful experience.