Category Archives: Free Software

by carlos garcia campos

PolicyKit and CPUFreq Applet

The frequency selector menu has been implemented for a long time now however, there are still people who don’t know such a feature exists. The problem is that it uses a helper program that has to be installed with the suid bit enabled and it seems that some distros don’t do that by default.

Now that PolicyKit has been proposed as an external GNOME dependency, I’ve decided to give it a try. Yesterday I committed a patch to gnome-applets to use PolicyKit (when it’s available) in the cpufreq applet, so that we don’t need to enable the suid bit in cpufreq-selector anymore. The selector menu will be always available by default now. An authentication dialog, provided by PolicyKit-gnome, will pop up when a non-admin user tries to use the selector menu.

PolicyKit-gnome authentication dialog
PolicyKit-gnome authentication dialog

Don’t worry too much about the annoying popup dialog, since the authentication can be remembered forever, so that if you want, you will only see this popup dialog the first time.

by carlos garcia campos

GNOME 2.22 is out!


GNOME 2.22

This release is very special, since it includes an important architectural change, Gio/Gvfs a replacement for GNOME-VFS. Many people have worked hard to bring us a new GNOME stable release with important architectural changes, without regressions and in a six months release cycle. It’s awesome!. Not so much time ago, we didn’t have support for some basic network protocols such as ftp, the connect to server dialog in nautilus hadn’t been ported to Gio/Gvfs as well as many of our core modules, computer:// and network:// weren’t implemented either, etc. There are too many heroes in this release. Thanks to everybody. I love the GNOME community and I’m really happy to be part of it.

Evince 2.22

There are also many improvements in Evince for this new GNOME release:

  • Most of the annoying popups dialogs have been replaced by a message area in the view. Based on the gedit message area.
  • Transition effects in presentations are now supported (Thanks Carlos!)
  • Thanks to the Google Highly Open Participation Contest automatic and kinetic scrolling have been implemented
  • Many many improvements and bug fixes in the PS backend thanks to the use of libspectre.
  • Important performance improvements of speed and memory consumption
  • Many other bugs fixed

Formula 1

The new season starts this weekend. I’m looking forward to watching the first race

by carlos garcia campos

Evince and libspectre

It’s not a surprise that libspectre was thought to be used mainly (but not only) by evince and okular. I’ve just committed a patch to evince to use libspectre when it’s present, otherwise falling back to gs. I haven’t removed the old gs code because libspectre is still too new and it’s not yet shipped by distros.

There are many many advantages of using libspectre in evince, some of them:

  • One of the most important advantages is probably that it’s noticeable faster.
  • Postscript printing improvements: print as PDF, multiple copies (bug #443859), reverse and collate are now supported.
  • Page labels
  • PS specials support in dvi documents (bug #386005)
  • Other bugs fixed: #317106, #499787, #501235, #421879, #445797, #486547
by carlos garcia campos

libspectre 0.1.0 now available

A new libspectre release 0.1.0 is now available.

This is the first public release of libspectre

What is libspectre
==================  

libspectre is a small library for rendering Postscript documents.
It provides a convenient easy to use API for handling and rendering Postscript documents.  

libspectre is free software and is available to be redistributed and/or modified under the terms
of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2,
or (at your option) any later version.  

More information about libspectre
=================================  

Web site:      http://libspectre.freedesktop.org/
The programming manual:      http://libspectre.freedesktop.org/manual
Bug reports and feedback:      https://bugs.freedesktop.org/ Product: libspectre

The full announcement is available here

by carlos garcia campos

Extracting images with Evince

Finally, the patch I wrote to allow extracting images from a PDF has been applied to poppler cvs head (thanks Albert). Evince already supports this feature since 0.7.1 version. Here is a screencast.

Evince images handling
(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~3.0 MBytes)

Images selection is not supported yet, but I’m already working on it 😉

Evince images selection
Select images
by carlos garcia campos

Google Summer of Code 2007

The list of approved projects has been announced!. Iñigo Martínez, a student from the Universidad del País Vasco, is going to be my student to implement annotations support in Evince. We received more than ten proposals to implement annotations support so the final decision hasn’t been easy. I’ve been talking with Iñigo and he seems to be very motivated so I’m quite sure the project is not going to fail this year. Now is time to work and enjoy hacking!

by carlos garcia campos

Nokia N800

My Nokia N800 has just arrived. It’s an awesome device. It’s actually much faster than N770. I haven’t got time to play with it yet, though. Thanks to Nokia for giving me a discount and specially thanks to Fer, who proposed me to receive the discount.

by carlos garcia campos

Evince 0.7.0!

Evince 0.7 has been released. It’s a development release, but I recommend to upgrade since it has some new features and lots of bug fixes.

Nickolay has added a preliminary implementation of history, it’s not finished yet but it’s a good start point.

Since Evince is a single instance application, many people complained because it wasn’t possible to open the same document in multiple windows. This is possible now. A new option “Open a copy” has been added, so that you can open a copy of the current document in a new window.

Presentation mode has also improved a lot. Wouter has added screensaver detection, based on totem code, so that screensaver is stopped when evince is in presentation mode. A new page has been added after the last one to indicate that presentation has finished and how to exit, like in any other presentation tool. Finally, you can blank the screen by pressing ‘b’ if you want to fill the screen with black, or by pressing ‘w’ to fill it with white. This is another feature which is present in other presentation tools.

Many bugs has been fixed in printing. Settings such as scale, copies, collate, reverse, odd/even, etc. are working again now. A new page setup dialog has been added to be able to select paper size, margins, paper layout, etc. Finally, printing to a PDF file is now supported too.

Many other bugs have been fixed too, see official announce for details.

by carlos garcia campos

Buoh is alive!

After almost a year since the last release (0.8.1) Esteban has released a new buoh version, 0.8.2. For more information about this new release and how to get it, visit buoh homepage.

If you like comics, give it a try, it’s a really nice toy

GSyC/LibreSoft

Finally, we have an official logo:

GSyC/LibreSoft
GSyC/LibreSoft Logo