“Black and gold, black and gold…”
Ubuntu:
The heron took off… nuff said! It’s running on all of my machines for quite some time now… I’m happy! I leave the marketing-talk to the people that know this kind of business *g*
gdm-face-browser:
A first look at what will become the OpenGL/clutter-based face-browser for the new gdm…
With still a lot of work left on the graphics-side, it will take some time until I can start integrating it into gdm. But it’s rather weeks than months.
clutter:
During my ongoing entanglements with clutter I deeply miss support for mipmapping. But that will land in a patch I’m writing atm. It will do wonders to the nasty shimmering during scaling and zooming of text and images (well, textures really) in the gdm-face-browser. Check this stand-alone example-screencast…
Thanks to a tip from Matthew Allum I grabbed Ivan’s current clutter-branch, which offers a rewritten cogl (clutter’s core GL-abstration if you will), that will make written the patch a lot easier. Sofar I worked against clutter-0.6.2.
Big Buck Bunny:
Not really news anymore, but still impressive none the less was watching “Big Buck Bunny” at its world-premiere in Amsterdam. I don’t want to give away anything or provide spoilers for the people that still have not seen it. But let me say this… it is cute and funny short-film, which showcases blenders capabilities wielded by capable artists. The whole atmosphere of seeing and hearing this second OpenMovie as a 35mm print in a cinema gave me goose-bumps! It was a wicked feeling being aware of the fact that I was witnessing a small part of movie-history in the making there at the Studio-K cinema. Also seeing “Ubuntu” being explicitly mentioned in the movie-credits gave me a cozy feeling. Thanks so much to the whole blender-community and the foundation for producing something so cool that once more is a shining example of OpenSource. I can’t wait to get the DVD of the movie and the game! After the movie I had the chance to talk a bit with Andreas Goralczyk, Brecht Van Lommel, and Ton Roosendaal… a 10 on the OpenSource-rock-star-scale *g* What a terrific experience all this was!
gtk+-hackweek interviews:
This weekend I should get the time - finally - to edit and upload the first bunch of interviews from the gtk+-hackweek in Berlin. Big big sorry for the delay! Anybody who wants to offer hosting- and/or mirror-space?
April 24th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Why are the faces moving around?
April 24th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
@iain: It’s me triggering (via keystrokes) removal and adding of list-entries to test the layout-algorithm and implicit animation. For the reason behind this see the spec of the gdm-face-browser at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/GdmFaceBrowser The “chaotic” arrangement is just an extreme example to expose the visual artefacts of the missing mipmapping. It has nothing to do with the final behaviour of the face-browser. Besides this is still very early code and much of it is just exercising clutters API.
April 24th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Awesome! Great job. Keep these fantastic work flowing into Ubuntu.
April 24th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Firstly, fantastic work, I didn’t realise anyone was actively working on this spec to make it a reality.
Is this just an animation system you’re developing for GDM that’ll be as themable as the current implementation (i.e. changing the look of the faces as well as position etc.). If not, have you tested this with a single face to see what it’d be like. Many users have a single-user environment that might result in an empty looking GDM…
Once all this is sorted out the only thing that’ll be missing for a totally smooth experience is accelerating the transitions between X sessions (especially on log-in/out) and transitioning from the startup screen (usplash) to GDM. I can’t imagine either of which will be particularly easy tasks though.
April 24th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
have you considered that red hat is currently developing a gdm rewrite which will replace the old gdm? maybe you can team up with them so that you do not do work on a gdm which will be discontinued soon.
April 24th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Looks really nice, kudos.
April 24th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
@ brownknight: I’m glad you like it sofar.
@ Nicholas Telford: Well that’s my job at Canonical. It will be a straight forward face-browser with some theming-capabilities (background, logo, layout). It will not be everything and the kitchen-sink. Since it’s far from done there hasn’t been much testing yet… I’m still way in the pre-alpha phase. But I have put some thought into the topic of different numbers of people on a system. See the spec on the gdm-face-browser. The transitions between the usplash, gdm and gnome-session are indeed tough nuts to crack! That’s not part of this spec though.
@ pirast: I’m well aware of the new gdm written by RedHat. I will integrate the face-browser only with this new design. That’s the reason it’s not part of Hardy Heron. See the spec.
@ joolz: Thanks!
April 24th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Nice job. Reminds me of your work on the photo browser some years ago. I guess you won\’t be able to throw the faces around though
April 24th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Really, really, really nice work. Worth the wait
Was interested in seeing what you had in store for the gdm face browser since i first saw it on the ubuntu proposals. This could prove interesting for colleges too. If you make sure the bluetooth stack is initialized with the gdm you could do interesting things like have the bluetooth ssid act like a key by giving the pc the login name so when Harry, Sally and Tom are near a computer in the college then it would only show Harry, Sally and Tom’s avatar. Or better yet focus into Harry, Sally and Toms avatar from a collage of over 500 avatars 
nifty stuff.
And they said eye candy couldn’t be productive 
Keep up the great work 
I’m working on telepathy account management for the about me capplet to start making it more usefull but I plan to expand onto other protocols, not just IM ones.
Allowing a web friendly os to have the ability to know when people are in the room and who is in the room could be very interesting. Being able to watch a movie with friends on elisa for example and have it automatically scrobble what your watching or listening to for everyone in the room. And taking that concept further you could add this functionality to the user switcher panel applet. Your blog posts are obviously inspirational
April 24th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
ps. your blog does not render correctly in firefox 3 Ends up with two macslow.thepimp.net banners instead of one.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:43 am
But how am U supposed to click my face when it’s FLYING AROUND THE SCREEN!?!?!?!
But seriously, this looks great.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:43 am
"But how am U supposed to click my face when it’s FLYING AROUND THE SCREEN!?!?!?!"
Whoops, missed the ‘I’ key…
April 26th, 2008 at 3:58 am
Incredible work there MacSlow! I am so glad gnome is embracing opengl for widgets now, and clutter looks like it can do some incredible stuff! Wonder if GTK3 will be a combo of like glucose+clutter…..
Nicholas - To answer your question on fixing the flickering between the splash screen, VT’s and X, look out for kernel mode-setting. It is coming out for intel chipsets first, and it will make it so the linux kernel actually changes the modesettings like resolution, refresh rate, etc. so that the kernel drivers don’t fight with the userland X driver, it also means kernel panics could be displayed like the windows BSOD! Not that you’d get one at all though
Keep up the good work!
April 30th, 2008 at 5:20 am
I\\\’m drooling. That is really awesome. One question, as a lover of KDE and, of course, Kubuntu, will I be able to use gdm-face-browser with KDE? (I assume I will, but I didn\\\’t see anywhere to select a desktop.) Also will it be themable so as make it look like it belongs with Kubuntu. Keep up the great work.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:21 am
Why not use some face recognition software, e.g. in
http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~hanlen/vision/facelinks.html
in order to automatically produce the username for the user,
or choose his/her picture for him/her?
The user would just need to type his/her password, instead of
having first to choose from a lot of (confusing?) pictures.
May 27th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
In the past you were working with pigment, now that you have been developing with clutter, can you please make a similar comment than in http://macslow.thepimp.net/?p=115 when you compare pigment and clutter. Now you have worked with both tools, nobody better than you to make this comparison. I want to develop (in C) a videoconference interface with some of these tools. In pigment i miss the animation/timeline that clutter has (in pigment only there are animation/timeline control with python bindings.), in the other side a think that the support for Gstreamer seems better in pigment, what do you think?.
Good job with the gdm-face-browser, i like it!!!!
May 31st, 2008 at 7:03 pm
@ Jacob: Some gut-feeling inside tells me that pigment and clutter will join development-forces to some extend… e.g. resulting the the very good gstreamer-integration of pigment being ported to clutter… same goes for pigments solid python-bindings. If I were you I would wait for that and go with clutter.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:28 am
Is that title inspired by the Sam Sparro song?
June 27th, 2008 at 8:55 am
@ Sam: It certainly is.
July 20th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Really nice.
But i hope it will be as attractive with a SINGLE user
July 25th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
I would like to know if the new GDM Will make it into Intrepid? I couldn’t find any information at your blueprint.
There is also no milestone set in which alpha the new gdm-face-browser maybe released.
I hope that I am not too curious. But it would be nice if you could enlighten me.
Regards
Achim
December 16th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
There are many tools aviable to use the finger print reader under linux. I’m thinking of fprint, or thinkfinger, and many others that I don’t know. However this piece of hardware is not integrated into the system. This occours expecially at login: a finger print reader user finds very stupid the idea of entering his name with the keyboard and then pass the finger.. Since all people in the world is having a different fingerprint, you could simply login passing your finger on the device. No keyboard for the username; no extra time or actions for. If your fingerprint is recognized, OK, otherwise login failed.
)
This is just an example; fingerprints are useful in many other contexts that in linux are not used (firefox for example).
I was just wondering if you at canonical are aware of this ideas, that are not only mine. Many other people is just thinking on why they should first enter their name and then pass the finger. And if you think that finger readers are not so common, think that Dell is selling this on every laptop.. Lenovo and many others too…
What do you think about? Are we missing the train? Is this included in the spec? (sorry dude, it’s too long, and asking a question is easier
Michele
December 24th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Hi! Great job!
Where i can download sources code for testing? O.o