Bytes, Gnomes & Chozo

The openSUSE Conference was held during May 26–28, 2017 in Nuremberg, Germany. The event was really interesting and the location — Z-Bau — was perfect for this event. GNOME had a booth there, were you could have tried “the GNOME gaming handheld”: a GPD Win running Games on GNOME / openSUSE Tumbleweed ! This handheld definitely caught some attention. 😃 On a more personnal note I have been pleased to meet several persons I am looking forward to work with. 😃 See in Prague for the openSUSE Conference 2018!

GNOME 3.24 will be out in a few weeks and with it will come Games 3.24. This new version will offer a few new features and many refinements, some of which have been implemented by new contributors theawless and Radhika Dua , kudos to them! Find how to get the latest nightly and (soon) stable Flatpak versions of Games on its web page . A Libretro Core Descriptor Specification In its version 3.22, Games stopped using a hardcoded list of well known Libretro cores and instead looked for the right one to run a game by parsing files describing their corresponding Libretro core's capabilities. These files came from the libretro-super repository and were slightly modified to better suit Games' needs. The concept was great but the format of these files proved to be not very well suited for the job: many information were not useful to Games, some information it needed were lacking, the syntax wasn't specified, complex cases like firmwares were implemented in a messy way, ...

Recently I got myself a GPD Win , to make it simple it's a PC in a Nintendo 3DS XL form factor, with a keyboard and a game controller. It comes with Windows 10 and many not too demanding games work perfectly on it: it's perfect to run indie games from Steam and for retro consoles emulation. But who simply want to play video games, let's make it fun , let's put a penguin in it! On this GNOME wiki page I'll report all my findings on Linux support on this machine, focusing mainly on OpenSUSE for the moment. Wouldn't it be awesome to have a fully working and easily installable GNOME desktop running Games and Steam on this machine? 😃

This November from Friday 25 to Sunday 27 was held in Berlin the GNOME Core Apps Hackfest . My focus during this hackfest was to start implementing a widget for the series view of the Videos application , following a mockup by Allan Day. To make this more interesting, I implemented this view using Emeus , Emmanuele Bassi's new in-development constraints based layout system for GTK+. You can find the (clearly unfinished) result here: https://github.com/Kekun/totem-series . I will keep working on it with Victor Toso who did some initial prototype last year . Working at the hackfest was a great experience, interaction with the other contributors was face to face which helps a lot strengthening GNOME as a community. 😃 Thank a lot to Kinvolk and Collabora for helping to make this hackfest a great event!

I didn't blog about Games since quite some time and the app changed a lot since 3.18. 3.20 was quite a small update featurewise: it added support for MAME and Neo Geo Pocket games, added the About dialog, allowed l10n of the application, added a Preferences window listing the available plugins and fixed other small bugs, but this release mainly saw refactoring work with the introduction of the plugins system where plugins allow to list games: the Steam plugin lists Steam games and the SNES plugin lists SNES games. So with 3.20, Games was ready to be improved upon and improvement there was! 3.22 is the first properly usable version of Games The biggest change this cycle is the number of contributors to Games' codebase, first of all with two GSoC interns working on it: Megh Parikh and Ricard Gascons did a great job as I will detail it later. But Games didn't gain contributors only via GSoC: Bastien Nocera has been helping on the project since a year or so and got eve...

Between August 10th to 17th included, I went to the nice city of Karlsruhe for GUADEC 2016. The Trip to Karlsruhe I arrived the 10th at 11 P.M. to Karlsruhe's train station after a 9 hours train trip, it was the first time I visited Germany and by night the city was calm and fresh which was nice after such a trip. Before going to the room I rented for the night I made a small detour to meet some gnomies as they were going out of their restaurant, it was nice to see some familiar faces again. :) The Training Workshops: Discovering GStreamer The 11th I participated to the GStreamer training workshop held by Olivier Crête, it was a really pleasant experience and I hope there will be more workshops during the next GUADECs! The Core Days This year again there were plenty of interesting talks, I won't give details as you can see them by yourself online ... That being said, I helped filming some of these talks which was an interesting experience and I am eager to help ...

This April 2–3 2016 the 17th Journées du logiciel libre (Days of Free Software) were held in Lyon (France) . GNOME 3.20 was demoed on the stand, running on Fedora 24 alpha, and goodies such as t-shirts were proposed to our visitors. Lots of persons came to visit us, from complete beginners to seasoned users and I noticed some patterns in the questions of the beginners: lots of visitors asked whether GNOME is an operating system (or "like Ubuntu"), while others asked if they were able to install it on Ubuntu. On a side-note, we accidentally changed the code of the event box's padlock when locking it at the end of the first day, hopefully Matthieu "starmad" Gautier was there to save the day by brute-forcing the padlock, trying hundreds of combinations, and allowing us to install the stand again and greet our visitors decently. starmad gauging his opponent, photo by Didier Roche To participate to this event and to help on the GNOME stand I had to trip f...