GUADEC 2016

A GLib look at structured logging

On Friday at 17:00 (Grace) by Philip Withnall

Structured logging is a handy feature of modern log systems, like journald. GLib is growing functionality to allow applications to export log messages in structured form, which allows developers and sysadmins to more easily search and sort log messages to find what they’re looking for.

This talk will introduce the new APIs and give an overview of how applications and libraries should log in the new world order.

A look behind the curtain—how the Foundation runs

On Sunday at 10:00 (Grace) by Rosanna Yuen

Have you ever wondered what the GNOME Foundation actually does? What do the employees do to keep the Foundation running? I will cover the details on what is required to keep the Foundation active and solvent. Come see the challenges we face and maybe even see what you can do to help!

Accessibility and the Free Desktop

On Friday at 16:30 (Ada) by Gaurav Pareek

There are around 285 million visually impaired people in the world, out of which around 38-39 million are completely blind. One interesting fact is that over 15 million of blind people are from India, and similarly a large number is from different developing or undeveloped countries, and poor socioeconomic status. There is a lot of software available for accessibility, and most of it is extremely unaccessible, both economically and socially. This is where Free Software comes in. Free Software desktops, especially GNOME, have made large strides in accessibility in the last few years, and are proving to be an effective way of reaching these people, introducing them to a whole new world of computers.

I’m going to talk about how Free Software enables people to expand upon accessibility software, add regional languages, and helps people in bad socioeconomic settings. I’ll then proceed to show a 2-3 minute demo of how the universal access features of GNOME work, and what we need to improve.

An asynchronous internet for GNOME

On Saturday at 11:45 (Grace) by Jonathan Blandford

While most of the developed world has decent internet access, this is not universally distributed. In much of the developing world, people have very incomplete and spotty access to the internet.

At Endless, we are shipping GNOME into that environment. We’ve had a number of challenges in modifying the desktop to work within these constraints. The end result is a version of GNOME that is useful and relevant both with and without a network enabled.

Anatomy of Endless OS

On Friday at 11:45 (Ada) by Cosimo Cecchi

Endless OS is an operating system based on GNOME, and is one of the first real world deployments to make use of innovative distribution technologies such as OSTree, xdg-app and gnome-software.

During this presentation, I will walk through the architecture of the operating system and the infrastructure that we use at Endless to maintain it and deploy it, including the challenges we faced and what lies ahead for us.

BBQ at AKK

On Thursday at 19:00 (Elsewhere) by AKK and GUADEC Teams

Pre-registration meeting in the AKK beer garden (on campus) and BBQ there. We will provide food, drinks are inexpensive but not free. Bring cash for payment.

Build all the docs in pintail

On Sunday at 17:00 (Ada) by Shaun McCance

Warning: balls will fly

Building GTK+ applications for Windows with MinGW

On Saturday at 14:00 (Grace) by David King

While there have been great strides in building the GTK+ stack on Windows, cross-building for Windows from Linux is still the easiest way for most developers to build their applications. I will demonstrate, using the Fedora MinGW project, how to build a GTK+ application, including a simple installer to bundle all the dependencies into a single distributable file.

Building an automotive platform from GNOME

On Saturday at 11:45 (Ada) by Lukas Nack

With the success of connected cars, there is an increasing demand for a secure, consumer-oriented infotainment platform. The open source application framework “Apertis” serves as embedded end-to-end solution in the automotive environment. With many contributions to the GNOME technologies over the years and its own Free software components, Apertis is truly a unique product in the automotive world which pushes the boundaries of a traditionally closed source environment.

Security is guaranteed by multiple lines of defense, including MAC (Mandatory Access Control) and xdg-app as sandboxing mechanism. D-Bus provides a stable SDK-API to the app-developer.

Centricular Dinner at Hoepfner Burg

On Sunday at 20:00 (Elsewhere)

We are going to visit the beer garden at the Hoepfner Burg (local brewery) and have a sponsored dinner there.

Coding live! with Builder

On Sunday at 11:00 (Grace) by Christian Hergert

This talk will cover the basics of getting started writing a new application with Builder. Christian will live demonstrate creating a project from scratch and share his techniques when writing software for GNOME.

Confessions of a command line geek: why I don’t use GNOME but everyone else should

On Friday at 14:00 (Grace) by Bradley Kuhn

Despite what tablet- and phone-loving pundits say, the laptop is here to stay. When a user wants to watch a movie on a train, they reach for the tablet first. But if they want to do actual, real work, they still prefer the laptop.

Meanwhile, software freedom should always be for everyone, not just technical users and software developers. The GNOME project was one of the first in this history of Free Software to realize this, and seek to create a free software desktop that truly allowed everyone to enjoy the software freedom that those of us had already happily found with Bash and Emacs (or vi :) years before.

This keynote will discuss why GNOME remains best poised to deliver software freedom to everyone, how GNOME continues to be the best welcome-mat for those who want software freedom, and why GNOME remains absolutely essential to the advancement of software freedom for decades to come.

Documentation: state of the union

On Sunday at 15:00 (Ada) by Kat

A quick overview of what’s been happening in the last few years. Hear about where the different docs projects are heading, all the things that have been happening with the team and the most epic of hackfests where the team worked on all the docs.

Flatpak status update and future plans

On Friday at 11:00 (Grace) by Alexander Larsson

Flatpak (previously xdg-app) is a new system for desktop application bundling and deployment. It allows you to build an application once and then deploy on all Linux distributions, running in a sandboxed environment.

This talk will give a status update on where Flatpak is as a project, and how GNOME is using it. Then it will talk about future plans, focusing on what is needed going forward to make GNOME applications work well in a sandboxed environment.

Flow graphs in GNOME and Gtk+

On Friday at 15:30 (Grace) by grindhold

Flow graphs are awesome. Like no other widget, they feel intuitive and are straightforward to use.

In this talk, you will be taken on a short tour that shows you where to find flow graphs in common Free software.

Then, we will look at libgtkflow, a library built upon the GNOME stack that makes it easy for you to use flow graphs in your own Gtk-based applications.

After this we will discuss the future use of flow graphs in GNOME-related software.

GNOME Foundation annual general meeting – Q&A

On Saturday at 16:30 (Grace) by GNOME Board

The annual general meeting of the GNOME Foundation: Q&A with the board.

GNOME Foundation annual general meeting – Reports

On Saturday at 15:00 (Grace) by GNOME Board, GNOME Teams

The annual general meeting of the GNOME Foundation: reports

GNOME Games graph based health analytics

On Saturday at 14:00 (Ada) by Sahil Sareen

An extension of gnome-continuous.

A graph based application to be able to check the health of the GNOME Games built using Python and neo4j.
-*- Check which gnome modules builds are failing/passing/timing out/missing from gnome-continuous builds
-*- Find their dependencies
-*- Run queries on a graph to find out what possibly broke a module; for example, find out which dependencies are used exclusively by the failing modules as an indication that the dependency is broken

** Source code: https://github.com/sahilsareen/GNOMEGamesHealthAnalytics
** Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUzUfVo77PI

GNOME Music: state of the union

On Sunday at 15:30 (Ada) by Felipe Borges

This talk intents to introduce GNOME Music to the audience, briefly go through it’s development history, analyze it’s current state, and announce the plans for the future.

GNOME Software: you’ll never guess what comes next

On Friday at 11:45 (Grace) by Kalev Lember

GNOME Software is an project that started life as an application installer, and over time picked up features such as updating system firmware, distribution upgrades, installation of fonts, codecs, language packs, and handling RPM files and Flatpak bundles. With screenshots, long descriptions and now user-submitted ratings and reviews we’re on parity with several other appstores like the Google play store and provide a fast, stable and beautiful software center. In this talk I will explain about how we built this beast, show off some new features and also talk about the future. I’ll allow lots of time for questions and comments.

GNOME-Sync

On Friday at 17:30 (Ada) by Mehdi Sadeghi

Carry your GNOME experience everywhere.

GNOME: customized desktop for the government

On Sunday at 16:30 (Ada) by Zhenning Li

China is becoming a huge user of open source software. The Chinese government doesn’t only claim not to not use Windows 8, but also encourage the use of Linux, like the city of Munich. All require a customized GNOME Desktop. We need to discuss how to meet a market of millions of desktops.

GTK: are we in the future, yet?

On Saturday at 11:00 (Grace) by Emmanuele Bassi

GTK is an old tool kit; it turns 20 in 2017. While its history is a long, unbroken chain of progress, GTK is, at its heart, heavily based on how we used to do things in GUI tool kits two decades ago. Over the past 5 years, since the 3.0 release, the GTK team has been hard at work into bringing the tool kit internals kicking and screaming into the XXI century. This has inevitably caused some friction with application developers, but it has also opened an entire world of possibilities.

In this talk I’ll outline where we are coming from, what has changed, where we’re going in the future — and how we’ll get there.

Growing an Open Source community

On Friday at 17:00 (Ada) by Lasse Schuirmann

Open source projects are always understaffed. In this talk methods to increase the public visibility of your project as well as gain, keeping and grow newcomers to maintainers will be presented.

All methods are shown on the practical example and how they have – or not have – proven to be useful for the coala community. They focus on lowering the entry barrier as much as possible as well as rewarding successes and building a continuous learning process with the community.

How do/could we store secrets in GNOME?

On Sunday at 11:00 (Ada) by Federico Mena Quintero

This is a summary of the infrastructure that GNOME provides to store secrets like passwords, SSH and GPG keys, and X.509 certificates.

Our infrastructure is more or less adequate within GNOME, but it interfaces poorly with other pieces of infrastructure that people use, like Firefox, 2-Factor Authentication hardware, and password managers for mobile devices.

We will describe some use cases and some ways in which GNOME could be improved to accomodate cross-platform, cross-device, cross-team password storage.

Inspector Gadget

On Friday at 16:30 (Grace) by Benjamin Otte

Many new terms have entered the GTK vocabulary the last year, like gadgets, CSS nodes or box models.

This talk will explain and showcase these new developments in GTK’s rendering pipeline and attempt an outlook into the future.

Integration of Qt applications

On Sunday at 15:30 (Grace) by Jan Grulich

This talk will cover basic information and possibilities of Qt Platform Abstraction and present actual result of our attempt to integrate Qt applications into GNOME, namely QGnomePlatform and Adwaita-qt projects.

Intern lightning talks

On Friday at 18:00 (Grace) by GSoC and Outreachy Interns

Lightning talks of Google Summer of Code and Outreachy interns

Laptops & Tablets manufactured to run a pure GNOME

On Friday at 17:30 (Grace) by Jean-François Fortin

Sh!t just got real!

Lightning talks

On Sunday at 17:30 (Grace)

Fast-paced and focused talks on any and all subjects. You will be able to sign up for these on the day! Talks will be accepted on a first come, first serve basis so turn up early if you want to make it on to the schedule. All talks will be subject to a strict time limit of 5 minutes on stage (including setup). Slides are welcome, but not compulsory.

Making your GNOME app compile 2.4x faster

On Saturday at 10:30 (Grace) by Nirbheek Chauhan

… with the Meson build system on Linux, and ~15x faster on Windows.

Last year, Jussi Pakkanen (the maintainer of Meson) gave a talk about improving the way GNOME apps are built by replacing Autotools with the Meson build system.

This year, I’ll be talking about how we at Centricular worked along exactly those lines and ported GStreamer, GLib, and its core dependencies from Autotools to Meson. Besides the improvements in speed, using Meson provided numerous advantages over Autotools such as cleaner syntax, better cross-platform support, maintainable code, and much more.

I will be talking about our porting journey and make the case that Meson is indeed ready for replacing Autotools in every case we’ve seen so far. The next step is convincing more projects to try out Meson.

Modular UIs for offline content

On Sunday at 15:00 (Grace) by Philip Chimento

Endless devices include a lot of content downloaded from the internet so people without internet connections can have access to it. We create lots of apps to organize and present the content.

We are creating a “modular” system for putting together apps quickly, and it’s built on GTK. (Think one level higher than GTK widgets.) I’ll talk about what such a system should and shouldn’t do, and about pushing some of GTK’s limits.

One does not simply take a bus

On Sunday at 16:30 (Grace) by Andreas Nilsson

An important aspect of humane interfaces is meeting the needs of a variety of people. They all have different skills, restrictions and whims. How do you figure out what exactly those are?

In this presentation I’ll talk about how I used user interviews and personas for that purpose, using them as tools for discussions and implementation of Public Transportation in GNOME Maps.

Picnic

On Friday at 19:30 (Elsewhere) by GUADEC Team

We are going to go to a park and picnic there. Some games, light food, and drinks will be provided.

Privacy & Security

On Sunday at 17:00 (Grace) by Cosimo Cecchi

Discussion about the use of the privacy and security funds.

Reworking the desktop distribution

On Sunday at 11:45 (Ada) by Owen Taylor

The traditional model of a GNOME desktop is tightly tied to the traditional model of a Linux distribution: many packages that are individually installed onto the users system; some are low-level system services, some are core desktop components, and some are applications. While in some ways very
flexible, this model is also fragile: the continuing correct operation of the system depends on a complex dance of installation and upgrades of thousands
of packages. Systems based on free software components, from OLPC, to ChromeOS, to Android have moved away from this model, but are no longer recognizable as a Linux distribution.

Upcoming releases of Fedora Workstation will offer an alternate installation method where the operating system is distributed as an ostree image and atomically upgraded as a whole, while applications are installed on top as xdg-app bundles. The intent is to provide an experience that is much more
robust than the traditional package-based installation, while providing additional flexibility in installing applications. Applications will no
longer be strictly bound to the Fedora package set, making it easy for third parties to provide applications that work across multiple distributions and distribution versions. The talk will go over the underlying technologies and discuss how they interact with a traditional distribution ecosystem, and with
the evolving ecosystem of xdg-app. There will also be discussion of how users, such as developers, need to work differently on such a system, and how we can best enable that.

Shotwell–why?

On Saturday at 14:30 (Ada) by Jens Georg

A short story on taking over a large project and Q&A.

The GNOME Newcomers initative

On Friday at 15:00 (Ada) by Bastian Ilso

Since last year, GNOME has sported a revamped newcomer experience for developers with the move from GNOME Love to Newcomers (https://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers/). The talk is a joint talk by Bastian Ilso and Carlos Soriano explaining what’s new and what lies in the future for GNOME’s newcomers guide.

We want more centralization, do we?

On Sunday at 14:00 (Grace) by Werner Koch

The roots of the Internet can be found in the move from large mainframes to smaller and locally connected machines (Unices or VAXen) Unix. Obviously there was a need to connect to remote machines in a convenient way and not only with manually managed uucp networks.

Eventually in the mid 90ies decentralization was achieved and directly visible due to Gopher and the Web. With the move of the big search engines to a general service providers, things started to revert to the former centralization.

The Internet still looks like a collection of many computers but in reality most system do not anymore work without access to, say, apis.google.com. Unfortunately desktops environments moved in the same direction.
Do we really want to rely on other peoples machines?

WebKit security updates

On Friday at 15:00 (Grace) by Michael Catanzaro

Major Linux distributions have a problem with WebKit security. Whereas major desktop browsers push automatic security updates directly to users on a regular basis so that users don’t have to worry about updates, Linux users are dependent on their distributions to release updates. Well over 100 vulnerabilities that could allow remote code execution were fixed in WebKit last year, so getting updates out to users is critical. This talk examines the disconnect between how the WebKit project handles security issues upstream and how different major distributions do (or do not) handle security issues, shows that WebKit security issues have widespread impact even for users who do not use a WebKit-based web browser, and discusses the security consequences of the split between the original WebKit API and WebKit2.

What makes a web service free as in freedom?

On Friday at 15:30 (Ada) by Cornelius Schumacher

GNOME provides a complete free software desktop. If you run it yourself you have all the benefits of free software, the freedoms to use, study, share, and improve the software. You are in control of what you do with your computer.

The situation is different when using software which is run by others as a service, even if these others run free software. There you don’t have control about what software is run and how. What does that mean for your freedoms? How much control do you still have? Do you know what is happening to your data? Do you have the freedom to switch to a different service? How is your own freedom affecting the freedom of other users of the same service? There are a lot of questions like these.

There are a couple of approaches how to address these questions. There are the user data manifesto [1], the “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read” site [2], the GNU ethical repository criteria [3], and other attempts at covering specific aspects of freedom of web services. But there is no definition yet what makes a web service free as in freedom, which is as concise and elegant as the free software definition is.

This presentation will give an overview of where we are, what approaches to defining the freedom of web services exist, and what is missing. It’s intended to start a discussion which leads to a definition of what a web service has to provide to give users the same freedom as they have when running free software themselves. This is the beginning of a journey and everybody who cares about freedom is invited to join.

[1]: https://userdatamanifesto.org/
[2]: https://tosdr.org/
[3]: https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.en.html

Z10

On Saturday at 21:00 (Elsewhere) by Z10 and GUADEC Teams

Bar evening at Z10. There will be no food available.

ZeMarmot — Open Animation film produced with FOSS

On Sunday at 11:45 (Grace) by Jehan Pagès, Aryeom Han

“ZeMarmot” is a project of 2D animation movie, to be released under CC By-SA/Free Art licenses and fully made with creative Free Software. In particular, it is currently fully digitally drawn on GIMP, video-edited in Blender and sound-edited with Ardour.
Our desktop of choice is GNOME, under a GNU/Linux operating system.

We will present the film project and its status, what happened in the last year since we started the project, but also how we contribute back, since Jehan, scenarist of ZeMarmot, has also been an active contributor of GIMP and other Free Software for several years.

Finally we would like to raise the question: is GNOME ready for the creative artists? We may not have the full answer, but a part of it!

—-

ZeMarmot’s director, Aryeom Han, is a young South Korean director of animation film, whose first co-directed short animation got screened in several festivals and won 2 prices, and later worked on corporate videos and several projects. Together with Jehan, they also won a “Firefox Flicks” price in 2012, in “New Technology” category, for an animation augmented through HTML5.

About ZeMarmot: http://film.zemarmot.net/
Blog: http://girinstud.io/