Bytes, Gnomes & Chozo

During last GUADEC, I had a chance to briefly present my project of having a powerful yet simple video game manager and player for GNOME. To make it a reality, a lot of work was needed on the backend side. This article present the release of the first version of this backend, in its release candidate form. Libretro Libretro is a C/C++ API used mainly by retro video game console emulators and game engines. Writing an emulator and writing a GUI application require very different skills, using Libretro allows to isolate the backends (often called modules or cores) implementing the API from the frontends using the API to manipulate them, easying the port of the emulators or engines and offering a multiplicity of cores to choose from to application developers. The main frontend of Libretro is RetroArch and it have been ported across multiple systems. Retro Retro (or retro-gobject) is a GObject based Libretro wrapping library written in Vala. It eases the creation of Libretro...

What an eventful month! Lots of code have been read, produced, reviewed and refused, several code designs have been proposed, but as everything was work in progress, I didn't fell it was exciting enough to blog about it at that time. But here it is! The blog post that explains it all. Multiple displays per machine I mostly spent the third week trying to have multiple displays for a SPICE machine, which implied reading a lot virt-manager's code and some of spice-gtk's code. I achieved to get the maximum number of displays available for a machine and, with Christophe Fergeau's help, to get some good results: we were able to have multiple displays each in its own window, but we were not able to open them up from Boxes yet (the session had to have them already opened). Multiples machines Jakub Steiner proposed a design focusing mainly on having multiple machines running side by side in different windows: It settled what idea would be implemented, and a new bug ...

Strasbourg I just arrived in Strasbourg where the 2014 edition of the GUADEC will take place. The city is beautiful and have an interesting architecture full of half-timbered buildings and lush vegetation, which contrasts a lot with my home town of Montpellier. The GUADEC and my participation to the GSoC for Boxes During the last weeks, I worked a lot with Christophe Fergeau, Zeeshan Ali and Lasse Schuirmann, this GUADEC will be a great occasion to meet them in person and to enhance our collaboration on Boxes. The GUADEC will also be a great occasion to work on Boxes by chatting about (and solving?) pending patches and to chat about Boxes' future during a BoF. I'll also attend Lasse's proposed BoF on pointerless navigation (i.e. keybaord navigation), completing it with my interest on forsaken input devices such as gamepads. Don't hesitate to come and chat with us! Have a nice trip and see you in Strasbourg!

Week #1 I started my work on Boxes on June's 2nd. This first week served as a transition from my examinaton period to the GSoC. I had some unfinished work from my application period: two bugs to solve. The first one was #726252 - Refactor topbar's children into separate classes/modules The patches were pretty much finished but they were not perfect, all they required was some love. It took me time to transition my mind from the student mindset to a more engineering one, but hopefully, the patches were accepted at the end of the week. The second one was #692383 - Allow editing of box name in the tite Just as for the first bug, I had patches ready but not perfect, and they were dependent on work done for the first bug. As it took me time to correct the patches for the first bug, I let this one aside. My project is to add multi-monitor support to Boxes, so I also took time to read Boxes' code, especially the App, AppWindow, Display and Machine classes as they ...

It's all about taking and giving back Some years ago, I discovered the principles of free software while becoming a happy GNU/Linux user (Ubuntu at this time). These principles have changed my vision of the world: I wanted to be part of this movement, I wanted to give back to the projects that gave me so much. This is how I stopped being a laborer and became a computer science student, and I feel that I have enough knowledge to give something back. The Google Summer of Code I am very happy to say that I have been accepted to the 2014 edition of the Google Summer of Code! Applying to this GSOC have been a stressful but already very enriching experience, the coding session haven't started yet but I already learned a lot! I am sure it will be a great experience and that I will learn a lot on software engineering. I decided to apply for GNOME because I simply love this desktop environment, from the experience I have using it to its software libraries. This summer, my...

Welcome to my blog. I am Adrien Plazas, actually studying computer science in Montpellier, France. Here I'll write about my studies, the GNOME desktop environment and video game preservation. I hope you'll enjoy it! =)