GNOME CPUFreq Applet News

Hadess has proposed gnome-cpufreq-applet to be included in Fedora Core. I’m very happy. Ubuntu has already included it. There are many people who asked to me to add to the applet the possibility of allowing the user to change the cpu frequency. The main problem is that it’s needed to be root to do it. So, I’ve finally written a command line tool that will be called by the applet. If the user or his sysadmin wants can set the SUID bit and the applet will be able to change the cpu frequency. I’ve not still finished it, but I hope to have it soon. Here is a screenshot of what I’ve already done.

GNOME CPUFreq Applet Selector
GNOME CPUFreq Applet. Frequency selector

Dominik Brodowski, a kernel cpufreq hacker, emailed me to talk me about the cpufreq governors. Currently the applet only works with userspace, powersave and performance governors. He also sent me a patch. As soon as I finish with the frequency selector feature, I will work on the governors stuff.

I’ve also received a bug from Debian. I have a lot of work in the applet for the next days.

Funny and productive weekend in Pamplona

I’m a bit tired, we had not much time to sleep this weekend in Pamplona.

On Saturday morning we presented our projects. The first was acs who presented planner and the integration with evolution. Garnacho talked about gnome-system-tools and presented us the new module shares-admin, a nice tool that makes easy to share folders with NFS or samba. I was the next, I could present disks-admin, the other new gnome-system-tools module. I talked about the past, present and future of the tool. Chema showed us Fisterra, a generic ERP (Enterprise Resource Planner). The next it was talk about the Spanish GNOME Development book, and finally Rodrigo talked for a long time about the Evolution architecture.

In the afternoon we worked in working groups and acs presented GNOME 2.8 using ubuntu. The Sunday morning was no less productive, Rodrigo showed how to use jhbuild while some other people continued hacking in working groups.

Personally it has been a great weekend, I’ve learned how to integrate an application with Nautilus by adding a new Nautilus context menu entry. I’ve also added drag and drop support in shares-admin, you can now add a new shared folder by simply dragging it to shares-admin window. And finally I’ve fixed some bugs in disks-admin.

We are now planning the next GNOME meeting in my new university (URJC) in Madrid 🙂

There are more photos of this weekend in my gallery.

Formatting . . . with disks-admin!

I’ve just committed some changes into disks-admin, and you can now format partitions (ext2, ext3, vfat, XFS, ReiserFS, jfs, …).

Disks-admin formatting a partition
Disks-admin formatting a partition

I have tried to not use technical words, since disks-admin is thought to be a user tool, but it’s in fact a sysadmin tool. Sometimes it’s not easy to find the right word in this kind of tools. Tasks like formatting partitions or creating / deleting partitions are more and more needed by the common users.

I want to say that disks-admin is not a gparted clone, since disks-admin is thought to become a complete user-friendly storage manager (not only disks, but cdroms, floppies, …) and not only to manage partitions, but to manage fstab, browse storage hardware, etc.

Disks-admin is still in early development status. The next feature to be implemented will be the partitions management (create and delete), and I hope that garnacho can help me with the fstab stuff.