Tag Archives: Gnome

Updates

Quiztime

First, a wrap-up of the last Quiztime. For an excellent explanation of the issue, read this comment. Also note that this is not the most nice way to do plugins with C++, it’s a boiled down piece of code I debugged.

Shotwell

I’m not sure if there is some confusion about the current development model of Shotwell. I noticed that some distributions seem to try to pick up the current development branch (0.25.x). I strongly advise against that at this point in time. It has just seen a major change in the Menu handling code and might still have severe usability regressions.
While I appreciate any testing of the code, I would really not have the current unstable version of Shotwell stuck in a released distribution. If you want to try those releases on Ubuntu, there is an unstable PPA available.
So to sum up: Shotwell follows the “traditional” version scheme of “Odd is unstable, even is stable” and roughly tries to stick to the GNOME release schedule.

Quiztime II

So, following up from the last quiztime which was about the importance of explicit linking, another case from the wonderful world of shared libraries.
This time we study the implications of dlopen, its parameters and C++. Consider the program and module below. If you run that, it will crash somewhat obscurely in libstdc++. Why?

#0  0x00007f687b2eb126 in std::ostream::sentry::sentry(std::ostream&) () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
#1  0x00007f687b2eb889 in std::basic_ostream >& std::__ostream_insert >(std::basic_ostream >&, char const*, long) () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
#2  0x00007f687b2ebd57 in std::basic_ostream >& std::operator< <  >(std::basic_ostream >&, char const*) () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
#3  0x00007f687a6f01a0 in Impl::print (this=0x558a9bc1f2e0, str="Hello") at module.cc:24
#4  0x0000558a99de3d1b in main (argc=1, argv=0x7ffca28cf538) at main.cc:31
#ifndef INTERFACE_H
#define INTERFACE_H
#include 
class IInterface {
    public:
        virtual ~IInterface() {};
        virtual void print(const std::string& str) = 0;
};
#endif // INTERFACE_H
#include "interface.h"
#include 
class Impl : public IInterface {
    public:
        Impl();
        virtual ~Impl();
        void print(const std::string& str);
};
extern "C" {
void *entry_point(void)
{
    return new Impl;
}
};
Impl::Impl() {};
Impl::~Impl() {};
void Impl::print(const std::string& str)
{
    std::cerr < <"Some text to print\n";
    std::cerr << "Got passed this: " << str << "\n";
    std::cerr << "=====\n";
}
#include 
#include 
#include "interface.h"
extern "C" {
typedef void *(*EntryFunction)(void);
};
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    IInterface *iface;
    EntryFunction f;
    void *lib = dlopen("./module.so", RTLD_NOW | RTLD_DEEPBIND);
    if (lib == nullptr) {
        std::cerr < < dlerror () << "\n";
        return 1;
    }
    f = (EntryFunction) dlsym (lib, "entry_point");
    if (f == nullptr) {
        std::cerr << dlerror () << "\n";
        return 1;
    }
    iface = reinterpret_cast(f());
    while (true) {
        iface->print ("Hello");
    }
}
.PHONY: all clean
all: main module.so
clean:
	rm -f main
	rm -f module.so
main: main.cc
	g++ -g -o $@ $< -ldl
module.so: module.cc
	g++ -g -o $@ -shared $< -fPIC

Shotwell moving along

I have released 0.25.0 on Monday.

Contrast Tool

contrast-toolA new feature that was included is a contrast slider in the enhancement tool, moving on with integrating patches hanging around on Bugzilla for quite some time.

SSL certificate handlingcertificate-warning

A second enhancement that was introduced is the option to override invalid SSL certificates. This is currenly only available in the Piwigo publisher and might be added to Gallery3 in future, i.e. all services that might be self-hosted on self-signed cerfificates.

 

Enhanced ACDSEE support

0.25 introduces the support of reading ACDSEE’s proprietary image tags such as titles, categories and hierarchical tags!
If you want to try it, there’s a new, unstable, PPA for Shotwell at https://launchpad.net/~yg-jensge/+archive/ubuntu/shotwell-unstable
 

Quiztime!

Say you have a shared library with versioned symbols that has the function init(int *param) defined in two versions, where new_init is made the default for init (that’s what the  @@ means):

#include "shared1.h"
void new_init (int *param)
{
    *param = 0;
}
void old_init (int *param)
{
    *param = -1;
}
__asm__(".symver new_init,init@@VERS_2");
__asm__(".symver old_init,init@VERS_1");

Say you have a second shared library that provides a function do_something() uses that init from the first shared library:

#include "shared1.h"
int do_something ()
{
    int var;
    init (&var);
    return var;
}

And you have an app that just prints the result:

#include "shared2.h"
#include 
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    printf ("Result: %d\n", do_something ());
    return 0;
}

And all of this is cobbled together with the following Makefile:

all: app
libshared.so: shared1.c shared1.h
    cc -o $@ $< -shared -fPIC -Wl,--version-script=version.script
libmoreshared.so: libshared.so shared2.c
    cc -o $@ shared2.c -shared -fPIC
app: libmoreshared.so app.c
    cc -o $@ -L. app.c -lmoreshared -lshared

What's the output of

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./app

Update: Try to answer it without compiling and running it at first.
Update2: I forgot the version.script, sorry.

VERS_1 {
    local:
        old_init;
};
VERS_2 {
    local:
        new_init;
} VERS_1;

More updates

SystemD conf 2016

I will be giving a presentation at this year’s systemd conf in Berlin. If you ever wondered what the hell I am doing during the day, there’s your chance to get a glimpse 🙂

GUPnP going 1.0!

Parts of GUPnP (that is its core, GSSDP and GUPnP itself) will see a 1.0 release together with the next GNOME release. They are quite stable API-wise and functionality-wise now and I think it’s time to give them a proper blessing for that.
After that, master will become more unstable in regards of API, as there are some long-standing bugs and fixes that need an API change as well as new features to be added, such as proper IPv6 support, support for more recent versions of the UPnP standard (UDA 1.1, UDA 2.0), a more GIO-like async API,…

Rygel

We’ve been digging up some annoying age-old bugs or regressions deep down in Rygel for some corner-cases (Did you know that renderer unmute was broken since 2013?)

Shotwell

Some more usability fixes on their way, but the big roadblock of RAW import performance is still proving to be quite annoying. Bit like a hydra, really. You cut of one RAW developer, three new seem to disappear.

Project Lazarus: GtkTerm

I took GtkTerm and poked a bit at its source, mainly for two reasons

  • Dry-run some GTK modernisation that will be necessary in Shotwell as well (GAction etc.)
  • It’s the least worst (sic) of the graphical serial terminals I tried. At least it seems to cope way better with odd USB <-> Serial adapters than t rest of the bunch
  • I use it

Ok, that’s three reasons.
If you want to have a look, head over to its repository at https://github.com/phako/gtkterm

Rygel/Shotwell/GUADEC

  • Rygel is currently mainly receiving maintenance things because reason. This is hopefully changing soonish
  • I picked up Shotwell as maintainer and things are coming along nicely, though its architecture sometimes makes changes that sound really easy very hard (e.g. certain import performance improvements). Most annoying part, though, is that the merging of the awesome map feature is somewhat affected by the recent woes regarding MapQuest’s tile server
  • I’m going to be at GUADEC during its core days

That’s all for now.

Things 'n' stuff

Long time no blog. Sorry about that. Things have gotten a bit busy since I changed jobs in Nov 2013, moving along to the crazy and sometimes insane world of automotive in general and IVI in special. Due to that and a rather unpleasant commute, things in Rygel land have gotten a tad more silent then I hoped, not revolutionary, maybe not even evolutionary. For example, there’s still no ACL support as I promised way back on GNOME.Asia 2013.
I will have to skip FOSDEM this year for several reasons, sorry about that.
For Rygel, I hope to finish the integration of (most of) Cablelab’s changes for their CVP-2 work as they will allow nice and long requested features such as pre-transcoding or transcode caching, server-side trickmodes, simple device-dependent resource reorder (for devices that are too stupid to pick the proper resource). Unfortunately I have found a rather large feature regression with upload that seems to turn out to be somewhat nasty to fix.
That’s all for now.

About a decade too late…

I’m currently working on adding DVD sharing to Rygel and while doing that, I resurrected a tool I wrote in 2005 to aid the tedious process of authoring DVDs on Linux. Today I cleaned it up a bit, gitified it and pushed it to github: https://github.com/phako/authorg
Please be warned that it might kill your data if you don’t read the message boxes carefully and cancel in time (and I mean that seriously, not as a standard disclaimer).

Raspberries and Rygel

First I have to apologize for the delay. I initially announced this in my GNOME.Asia talk almost two months ago.

TL;DR:

Raspbian and hardware-accelerated video decoding in Rygel without X. Follow brief instructions on http://rygel-project.org/raspbian/

What’s this problem?

There are already several solutions in the wild that combine Rygel and the Rasbperry Pi, be it Guacamayo or stock Raspbian. While Guacamayo provides easy server and audio renderer images, none of the existing solutions provide a video renderer.
Why’s that? Well, the RPi is (intentionally) slightly underpowered to do video decoding on the CPU. Howerver, it supports video decoding in hardware.
The issue here is that Raspbian is based on wheezy which only comes with GStreamer 0.10 while the support for hardware-based video decoding on the RPi in gstreamer-omx was only added recently to GStreamer 1.0.x. And since this is wheezy, the Rygel package that comes with it is too old to use GStreamer 1.0.

So let’s just grab the packages from sid armhf, should be working, no?

No it doesn’t. Rasbpian is basically a recompilation of Debian for ARMv5 with hard float ABI, while Debian itself is using ARMv7. So we can’t just copy packages.

So?

Well the good news is that we don’t need to do all the heavy recompiling of GStreamer. Someone already did that for us. This work is available at http://vontaene.de/raspbian-updates/ (from the raspberrypi.org forum).

And what exactly are you doing now?

We provide a Debian repository with Rygel’s packages backported to Raspbian. That’s a bit boring, you say? Indeed. This is only the beginning. There will also be a set of instructions to convert a Rasbian installation into a hardware-accelerated DLNA renderer. The first step to this is a meta-package called raspbian-dlna-renderer which depends on all the other important packages necessary for a complete environment.

What’s working right now?

First, add the following repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://rygel-project.org/raspbian wheezy/
deb-src http://rygel-project.org/raspbian wheezy/
deb http://vontaene.de/raspbian-updates/ . main

The packages on rygel-project.org are signed with my private GPG key, key id 7696ECBF. Then run apt-get update && apt-get install raspbian-dlna-renderer to get all updated and necessary packages.
I’ve modified /boot/cmdline.txt to get a screen that is as empty as possible by adding silent and logo.nologo to the kernel parameters.
You can then launch Rygel as user and play files on the RPi using Helium, gupnp-av-cp from GUPnP Tools or any other DLNA control point.

What’s next?

A next version of the meta-package will probably add auto-starting Rygel as a system service – Maybe we’ll even provide a ready-to-go image…