Et tu, Cthulhu

Be sure to check out the openSUSE community week currently underway. The GNOME-centric part of the community has its own program for the week.

The snow-shoveling I’ve been taking part in over the last couple of weeks is best described with a set of graphs:

So far, we’ve been able to lop about 23 seconds - or 48% - off the time it takes to boot openSUSE 11.1 on this particular netbook, without sacrificing much in the way of functionality. It boots straight into GNOME and its usual trappings, including the panel, Nautilus, “slab” main menu, nm-applet, PackageKit updater, printing applet (written in Python…), CUPS, etc.

It’s important to note that this time is measured from the moment bootchart starts until everything settles and is ready to use, easily identified in the chart as the moment where CPU activity falls to the baseline of noise from bootchartd itself.

It’s also important to note that this is on a netbook with a slow CPU, slow-to-init X driver/graphics hardware and fast SSD I/O. I’m hearing a lot of numbers being bandied about these days, e.g. “distribution Foo boots in 10 seconds”, and these numbers are meaningless without hardware specifications and a list of features you get. GNOME delivers a different feature set from Xfce, and netbooks and workstations usually perform very differently. Then there are questions of flexibility; is the system open-ended? Can you get server features by just installing packages and configuring them?

IMO, openSUSE has had unacceptable boot times on workstations for a long time now. Hopefully these changes will make it into future releases, upstream where possible.

For more details, see the wiki page. Note that for various reasons I haven’t been able to keep the text up to date. The graphs are representative, though.

My talk, La comunidad GNOME para principiantes (The GNOME community for beginners), seems to have gone over well here at ENLi 2008 (the 2008 National Linux Meeting in Puebla, Mexico), with a big audience and interesting followup questions. The slides are available as a collection of plain PNG and JPEG images in a zip archive (use the link above).

I’m having an excellent time. Will post some pictures from the conference later.

Update: Pictures.

My wonderful audience

 I clearly didn’t bring enough openSUSE discs

My laptop went south a couple of days ago, so I’m having to make do with a screen that is bigger but endowed with fewer pixels. This has been a source of frustration, especially in Evolution, where I depend on the efficiency afforded me by the tri-pane view. Crank down the resolution a bit, and it’s suddenly not so efficient - there isn’t enough space to display the subjects in the message list anymore. The problem is compounded by useless mailer “Re:” and mailing list prefixes.

So, since I don’t need to see the mailing list and reply status repeated for every single mail, I cooked up a little patch to trim the subjects in the message view. When applied, it makes available a new column in View -> Current View -> Define Views… -> Edit -> Fields Shown… -> Available Fields. This column implements the trimming, and can be used instead of the traditional Subject one:

Traditional	Trimmed

The patch applies to both Evolution 2.22 and 2.24, although unfortunately, a couple of nasty, new bugs are preventing me from running the latter. If you happen to be running openSUSE Factory like me, and Evolution 2.24 is preventing you from getting work done, you can get my unofficial 2.22 build for Factory from the build service. It includes the above patch as an added bonus.

A friend of mine, Vegard Munthe, works for FAIR, an aid organization that ships used but working computers from rich (or industrialized, or first world, or whatever you want to call it) countries to poorer countries for re-use in school labs there. As part of the deal, the computers are shipped back for reprocessing when they are no longer working, to avoid them piling up and causing all kinds of environmental problems. Not so long ago they received their first return shipment - according to Vegard, getting the permits to ship and import what basically amounts to a pile of toxic waste was quite the challenge.

Fun fun fun! Congratulations to Vegard & crew on this important milestone.

I just finished touching up that GDK backend for rendering toplevel windows to Cairo image surfaces I briefly presented at GUADEC. It now compiles with the latest GTK+ trunk, and it even has a page with instructions for how to check it out and build it. There are some examples too.

With time, I can hopefully get this to production quality levels.

Check out Felix’ eye-tracking data for the openSUSE installer. The possibilities! Obviously, this can also be used for awesome.

Oh, and also, I’m back from Istanbul. It felt sad to leave that place behind. I suspect I got extra sentimental because it reminded me so much of my first few weeks in Mexico - hanging out in a profoundly unfamiliar place, having no grasp of the language, getting by on smiles and gestures (of which some were also new to me), learning lots every day. Scary and thrilling, maybe even romantic. More of that, please.

A day and a half left of the conference. Some pictures from the awesome, Collabora-sponsored Bosporus cruise, sightseeing, etc. below. Everyone seems to be having a good time.

At GUADEC 2008. Istanbul is a fun and interesting place, and the talks aren’t all that bad either. Not much time to write or code, though.

As a followup to my previous GHashTable post, Benjamin encouraged me to time the swfdec test suite - “make check” in the tests dir is consistently 4% faster with the patch.

Also, I have patched packages for our brave openSUSE Factory users: