Fedora, GNOME

Instant Messaging in Fedora Workstation

Posted on by eischmann

Instant messaging in Fedora Workstation is suboptimal. The current default IM client – Empathy – doesn’t work very well. It’s an app that was designed for GNOME 2 and is not a good citizen in GNOME 3. Mainly because of its multi-window nature. Having a separate roster window makes sense if the app uses a status icon, and when you close the roster window, it stays online, and you can always bring it back from the status icon. Empathy used to work that way, but in GNOME 3 status icons were declared deprecated. Empathy now doesn’t have the status icon and if you close the roster window, it goes offline, so if you want to stay online, you need to have a roster window floating around all the time.

So fix it, you would say. The problem with Empathy is that no one really wants. The app hasn’t seen any significant development for several years. The original author – Collabora – is not interested in developing it any more and no one else wants to pick up the development. Mostly because the app has quite complicated architecture.

The only advantage of Empathy was integration into the Shell. You could reply directly in notifications and you had all the current chats in the systray, so you didn’t have to use the app, which itself didn’t really fit in GNOME 3. But the latter feature was removed in GNOME 3.16, the Shell doesn’t have the systray panel, that hosted the chats, any more.

Because Empathy no longer has any user experience advantages and its development prospects are zero, we’ve been thinking about replacing it with something else. Pretty much the only other GTK+ IM client with support for a wide range of networks is Pidgin which used to be the default client before it was replaced by Empathy. Would it be a viable option? Here are some of my findings:

  • While Empathy has zero development, I really can’t say that Pidgin has any vital development. If you look at its stats at OpenHub, you’ll find out that there has been pretty small activity in the last couple of years, and it’s definitely declining.
  • Pidgin can run in a single window mode due to a plugin which I built in Copr if anyone is interested in trying it out.
  • It relies on the systray status icon and I don’t think it will be very simple to get rid of it.
  • There is a Pidgin integration extension for GNOME Shell, but in 3.16 it only shows notifications (it doesn’t show the content of the messages in notification, you can’t reply in notifications) and provides contacts for desktop search (not a in transparent way because Pidgin is not recognized as a search source and you don’t find it in search settings). Overall, the plugin is not very useful any more.
  • Pidgin is not integrated with GNOME Online Accounts. It’s kinda lame that you let users connect to their online accounts and then the default IM client doesn’t know about it and they have to do it again in its settings.
  • Pidging is not integrated with Contacts app.
  • Pidgin is a GTK+ 2 app. The developers started working on the GTK+3 port 6 years ago. Although most problems seem to be solved, the last update is two years old. Looking at the development pace, I’m not sure it will ever happen. Without GTK+3, you can’t run on Wayland, you can’t reasonably support HiDPI monitors. It simply doesn’t make Pidgin a good fit for a modern system Fedora Workstation wants to be.

Simply going back to Pidgin would not really help much long term. Right now, it’s probably a better client than Empathy, with at least some development activity. On the other hand, it doesn’t integrate well with GNOME, it doesn’t support modern technologies. So for Fedora it’d be a short-term solution if we decided to give up IM completely eventually which might be the case after all.

Pidgin in single-window mode.
Pidgin in single-window mode

Instant messaging networks are nowadays walled gardens. Several years ago, the open source community was using Jabber and it looked like we might get some interoperability and openness in popular IM networks as well. XMPP looked promising. This trend has completely reversed lately. Not only do we have more closed networks with their dedicated clients (Whatsapp, Viber,…), but the adoption of Jabber, the only truly open IM network, has been declining. I’m still a heavy user of integrated desktop IM clients, but I hear more and more often that people don’t care about IM integration into the desktop and rather chat in the web browser (Messenger, Hangouts,…).

What about you? Is well-integrated IM in Fedora still important to you or you don’t care any more?

37
Red Hat

DevConf.cz 2015: Useful Info

Posted on by eischmann

I just returned from FOSDEM (will have to write about it when I have more time) and DevConf.cz is just a few days away, so I jumped into the final preparations right from the airport. Are you going to DevConf.cz? Here is some useful info:

  • Venue – I have spoken to several people who were completely surprised that DevConf.cz was not going to be at the campus of FI MUNI, but at the campus of FIT BUT. You can find instructions how to get to the new venue on the conference website. So make sure you’re going to the right place 😉
  • Streaming – can’t make it to DevConf.cz? No problem! We most likely will stream all six talk tracks. The stream will be available on our Youtube channel. It will also be linked on the conference website. The program starts at 8am UTC every day. If you miss the stream, no worries, recordings will be available on our channel as videos immediately.
  • Party – the conference is not just about talks and workshops. There will be a conference party on Friday. Again in Klub Fléda. You can get a ticket at the Red Hat booth at the venue during Friday. Make sure you’ll get it early enough because the limit is 600 people and we can’t exceed it because of safety limits of the club. Speakers and volunteers won’t need to get a ticket because their badges will serve as such.
  • Apps – you can have the schedule and important info in your pocket. We’ve created apps for Android, Blackberry 10, SailfishOS, just look up for them in respective catalogs. We’ve also created a DevConf.cz guide for Guidebook.com apps. You will find a schedule and important and useful info in it, all for offline usage.
  • Lightning talks – got an idea for a talk? You still have a chance to talk at DevConf.cz 2015, you can propose a lightning talk in the morning, people will vote during the day, and those with most votes will be picked for the last hour of the schedule.
  • Refreshment – besides your brain you also need to feed your stomach at the conference. We will have refreshment at the venue again so that you won’t die of hunger if you stay there listening to talks all day long. As a response to demand, we will have Club Mate (not for free, but for very reasonable price)! At the campus, there will be a nice cafe open if you’d like to have better coffee, some dessert, or beer (they have great beer Richard from a local microbrewery). If you want a full meal, there are several good restaurants within 100m from the campus including a really good Thai place.

See you in Brno!

0
Uncategorized

Django Girls Workshop at DevConf.cz 2015

Posted on by eischmann

One of the events that is co-hosted with DevConf.cz 2015 this year is Django Girls Workshop. It’s organized for females who want to learn to code websites using the Django framework. It takes place in our lovely Red Hat lab on the campus of Faculty of Information Technologies of Brno University of Technology on the 5th of February, one day prior the conference.

It has free admission and thanks to sponsors (Red Hat and ElasticSearch), you can even get financial aid to travel to Brno and get accommodation. The deadline for registration is on January 15th, so don’t hesitate and sign up!

0
Uncategorized

Fedora at DevConf.cz 2015

Posted on by eischmann

DevConf.cz 2015 is just three weeks away, and the schedule was announced a few days ago. There are 150 talks and workshops in three days and Fedora plays an important role in it, especially on the last day which is mostly devoted to Fedora and thus called Fedora Day. Let’s look at which Fedora-focused talks the schedule offers:

Fedora Atomic – Collin Walters
Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop – Christian Schaller
Vagrant for your Fedora – Tomáš Hrčka, Josef Stříbrný
Using Fedora as a base for the IoT revolution – Peter Robinson
Fedora: State of the Project – Matthew Miller
CentOS for Fedora – Karanbir Singh
Fedora Workstation Roadmap – panel discussion with the Workstation working group
Automation with Fedora in Taskotron – Tim Flink
Google, ownCloud and your Fedora Workstation – Debarshi Ray
Bodhi2, MirrorManager2, progit, FAS3, anitya, the-new-coolness… What’s going on in Fedora infra? – Pierre-Yves Chibon
Fedora Server – getting back to roots – Stephen Gallagher
Fedora Release Engineering Today – Dennis Gilmore
Life of a Fedora Cloud image – Kushal Das
Discuss environment and stacks in Fedora – Honza Horák
SCE wide system assessment for upgrading Fedora – Petr Hráček
Fedora Council Joint Session – panel discussion with the Council members
Packaging Workshop – Matthias Runge

 And these are just talks that are focused on Fedora, there are much more talks that are on technologies which are very related to Fedora. So don’t hesitate and come to join us in Brno on Feb 6-8th!

1
Fedora, Red Hat

F21 Release Party in Brno

Posted on by eischmann

I finally found time to write a blogpost about our F21 release party in Brno office of Red Hat. It took place on the release date – December 9th. It was, as always, well attended. It’s hard to estimate the total number of attendees, but it was definitely over 100. Unfortunately, F21 DVDs had not arrived yet, but we still had other swag for people to take: Fedora product stickers, Fedora logo stickers, case badges, badges, pins, flyers,…

It was also the first time when we had all presentations in English. The event is primarily aiming at the Czech community, so it was always in Czech, but there are quite a few foreigners in Brno office and one of them asked if the presentations could be in English and because no one objected, we switched to English.

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Me demoing Fedora Workstation

I delivered the first presentation. It was on Fedora Workstation. I didn’t have any slides, and demoed all changes GNOME right away. The next presentation was by Petr Hracek who spoke on how to set up Android Studio via DevAssistant in Fedora 21. Then Dan Vrátil and Jan Grulich spoke about KDE Plasma 5 which you won’t find in Fedora 21, but you can easily try it from Copr and it will be included in F22. The last talk was by Fedora program manager Jaroslav Řezník who spoke about the recent changes in governance: Fedora Council, working groups, and also about “products” themselves. Too bad I didn’t find anyone in our office who could talk on Fedora Server, there were quite a few people interested in that.

Audience
Audience

Pictures were taken by Jiri Folta and you can find more of them in his G+ album.

1
Fedora

Let’s Plan Events in EMEA!

Posted on by eischmann

At EMEA FAD in Leverkusen, we started planning events and activities in EMEA for the fiscal year 2016 (starts on March 1, 2015). Right after that, I asked others, who couldn’t attend the FAD, to provide their input. Today, I put it all together on a new wiki page that should help us organize events where we want to promote Fedora in the next year.

I’d like to make the event planning more sophisticated. In the last two years, we’ve made a really good job in budgeting. We know where we will be and how much it will cost. Now, I’d like to add something more, so that we know why we will be there, what impact it will have, and if it’s somewhat aligned with the overall strategy of the Fedora Project.

That’s why the list of events on the wiki page is much more detailed than it ever was. And it’s not a closed list, you can still add an event if you want to go represent Fedora there and need support from us (even if you don’t need support, we still appreciate if you add the event, we’d like to know where Fedora is present). Based on this table, we will create a budget for the next year, and based on this budget, we will get money from Red Hat for events and activities in EMEA, so if you apply now it’s much easier to provide you with some funding because once the budget is finished we have to cover anything else from reserves and leftovers and those are very limited.

The new planning should also discover our shortcomings and help us work on them. So far, we, for example, don’t have any events planned outside Europe (nothing in Africa and Middle East 😦 ). The only well-covered region is the Central Europe. We don’t cover the Balkans (Former Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria) at all, no events in the Baltic countries, just two in Scandinavia. No events is such large countries as France, Poland, or Spain. We’re also too focused on traditional Linux/FOSS events where the audience usually already knows us and we don’t go to events that are a bit of our comfort zone, but our target audience is there (events for developers, makers,…).
I hope we will improve this a lot in FY2016.

3
Uncategorized

Getting Ready for Fedora 21

Posted on by eischmann

I’ve been using Fedora 21 on my home computer since alpha, so it’s really nothing new for me, but I’m really excited about the release. In my opinion, it will be the most significant release since Fedora 7 when Core and Extras got merged. It’s also been the most stable release of Fedora I’ve used.

While Fedora QA guys are working on the final polishing as that F21 can meet the final criteria, ambassadors are getting ready for the release. Last week, the vendor finally delivered stickers of new products and case badges for the EMEA region:

Image

DVDs are also on their way. In EMEA, we decided that we would only produce Workstation DVDs, we won’t need any special image from the release engineering which will speed up the process. The vendor promised me that if we provided them with ISO by Friday afternoon they would deliver the DVDs on Wednesday December 9th which is the release day! So if everything goes well, physical media won’t be behind the images for the first time in the history. And it should go well because if Fedora 21 is declared gold at the go/no-go meeting on Thursday we can take the latest image that has been declared gold and send it to the vendor right away.

Artworks for DVD sleeves and disks are also ready (thanks to inkscaper):

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Image

And where to get them? At release parties! You can even organize one and ask for support in form of media and swag.

21
Fedora, JBoss, Linux, Red Hat

DevConf.cz 2015: Last Call for Papers!

Posted on by eischmann

The deadline of the CfP of DevConf.cz 2015 is really close (Dec 1st). So if you’re still thinking about submitting a talk, stop thinking and proceed to an action: CfP online form 😉

Talks on Fedora or on stuff related to Fedora are especially welcome because the third day of the conference will be Fedora Day where all such talks may find their home.

DevConf.cz is the largest developer conference devoted to Red Hat technologies (Linux, Fedora, JBoss, cloud, virtualization,…). The last edition had almost 100 talks and workshops and around 1000 visitors. The 2015 edition will take place in Brno, Czech Republic on Feb 6-8.

devconf-logo

0
Fedora, JBoss, Linux, Red Hat

Fedora Day @ DevConf.cz 2015

Posted on by eischmann

DevConf.cz is the largest developer conference devoted to Red Hat related technologies (Linux, JBoss, OpenShift, OpenStack,…). This year, there were around 1000 attendees which is a sizable number for a deeply technical conference. Because we were hitting the capacity limits of the venue, we decided to move the event to a different university campus which offers more rooms – FIT BUT. For those who attended GUADEC 2013: it’s the same venue.

The next DevConf.cz will span three days again – February 6-8th. And like this year we’d like to make the last day a Fedora Day. I think the Fedora Day was a success this year. Matthew Miller delivered his FPL’s keynote on Fedora.Next, representatives of working groups spoke about their progress, and there was overall an interesting discussion about the direction Fedora was taking. Not counting Flock, DevConf.cz is a conference with the largest number of Fedora contributors, so why not to use it for discussions, planning, and hacking?

I’m also in talks with the CentOS guys whether they want to join us for the Fedora Day and make it a Fedora & CentOS Day. I think there are quite a few topics the two projects can discuss.

DevConf.cz’s CfP has been on for some time and will be open till Dec 1st. If you have an interesting topic for a talk, workshop, or hackfest, submit it. And even if you don’t, consider attending. I assure you that you will enjoy the conference. You will have a chance to attend a lot of Fedora-related talks and meet many interesting people from the project.

devconf-logo

0
Uncategorized

Fedora @ LinuxCon Europe 2014

Posted on by eischmann

The 4th edition of LinuxCon Europe took place in Düsseldorf, Germany, last week and Fedora was there again like at the first three editions. It was the first time the Linux Foundation asked us to pay a fee. In the past, we got a booth and 4 passes for free. This time, we had to pay $750 for the booth and 3 tickets (we could get 4, but only 3 people signed up for the booth duty) which I think is still a good deal because the standard ticket to get to the event is $600. And I also think it’s an amount that is worth paying to have Fedora at the event.

LinuxCon Europe differs from other Linux and open source conferences. The audience is very different. It’s mostly (upstream) developers, devops, an consultants. So you’re not “selling” Fedora to average users who have little or zero experience with Linux. At LinuxCon, you’re selling it to very experienced users. One would say you don’t have to introduce Fedora to such users. But the opposite is true. Not many people can keep their fingers on the pulse of the industry and know about everything that is going on in the world of Linux. And if we want more corporate users of Fedora, and perhaps corporate contributors eventually, we need to promote Fedora to them.

People were more interested in Fedora Server which is different from most events where people are mostly interested in Workstation, but it’s not surprising considering the audience. It really helps to advertise a specialized product because you can clearly say: if you’re interested in server OSes, this is what we have for you and it has these interesting features. That’s why I’m glad we have Fedora Server. From the marketing point of view, it’s much more appealing to have a solution (server product) than just a lego to build it. Quite a few people were interested in Fedora as a future of enterprise Linux because what they work with and care about is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We had two demo computers at the booth. One was showcasing Fedora Workstation with GNOME on Wayland and the other one had Fedora Server running with Cockpit, so that people could check out one of the main features of Fedora 21 Server. We also had a plenty of swag (stickers, case badges, badges, DVDs, fliers,…). A lot of Fedora users stopped by to grab a sticker for their computer. Some of them use Fedora on servers or cloud in production, some use it on developer machines.

LinuxCon is also great for networking. You can meet people from all kind of open source projects, from companies where they use Linux heavily, you can learn how they use it, what their needs and expectations are etc. We were lucky that our booth was on a very visible place and Fedora was the only community distribution which had a booth there. So we were getting quite a lot of people at the booth and I brought a handful of business cards of interesting contacts.

I would like to thank the Fedora Project for paying the booth fee and covering lodging for me. I’d also like to thank Christoph Wickert for doing the booth duty with me and Felix Kaechele for not only doing the booth duty, but also for being a local organizer (accommodation, driving, contact for shipping, evening program,…).

Hope to see you at LinuxCon Europe 2015. Where? It hasn’t been announced yet AFAIK.

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Our booth (©Linux Foundation)
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