Jannis Pohlmann

Jannis

I am an open source enthusiast, student and musician from Lübeck, Germany. In my free time I enjoy hacking on Xfce and Lunar Linux. I've been a member of both teams since about 2005. Besides developing software, I love to listen to and play music (Guitar, Bass and Drums) and hang out with friends.

Contact me via jannis@xfce.org. My public PGP key is 0x354AFBA6. You can download it from here.

My CV is also available for download.

Tag - xubuntu

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Tuesday, November 25 2008

December plans and recent Xfce developments

I’m currently planning the last few things for my trip to the UDS Jaunty, taking place in Mountain View, California from December 8th to 12th. It looks like Brian will pick me up at San Francisco International on the day of my arrival. We’ll probably have something to eat before he drops me off at the hotel. What could possibly be more awesome than that? I’m very excited to say at least. I’ve also received my hotel reservation already and it looks like I’ll have a twin room on my own for half of my stay.

Ok, back to some Xfce related topics. Last week I submitted our FOSDEM devroom request. We’ll be notified before 2008-11-30 whether we the request is accepted or not. Five days left until we’ll know more - keep your fingers crossed if you haven’t already!

Nick and I have recently started to fix bugs in Thunar. So far we’ve managed to fix and close about a dozen bugs I think. We’re forced to do this due to Benny’s absence but I have to say it’s actually quite a lot of fun to fix bugs in other people’s code! In the end we’ll both have better understanding of how Thunar works. This will soon give us the possibility to push things forward. Not only am I planning to replace thunar-vfs with GIO/GVfs after 1.0 is released along with Xfce 4.6; there are more things that need to be done: adding support for xfconf might be worth considering as Thunar is now one of the last components that still stores its configuration using XfceRc. Also, we could think about using libxfce4menu for detecting installed applications which was actually one of the most important use cases of it that we had in mind before I started writing that library. And of course the list of possible features and cleanups doesn’t end here …

I also have some bad news. It looks like we’re having a bit of a problem with our 4.6 release schedule again. Due to the delay of the second beta, we were forced to delay the third beta as well. Maybe we can sort of fix that by leaving out the third release candidate but we still have to discuss how to handle this.

Monday, October 13 2008

Beta release and personal news

For those of you who are eager to test the first Xfce 4.6 beta: We're running a bit late again. At least the delay won't be that big this time. Most packages are prepared already and the release will be rolled out tomorrow or the day after that I suppose. To be able to do this we had to add several feature freeze exceptions. If you keep in mind however that we stil have the option to sacrifice the second release candidate to keep up with the schedule, the final release date is not in danger yet.

There are also some news related to my person. Last week I received the official sponsorship invitation to the Ubuntu Developers Summit for Jaunty. So if things go well, I'll be able to be in Mountain View in December to represent Xfce when the Xubuntu team prepares their next release after Intrepid! This is very exciting and quite a big thing for me. So far I never made it across the pond and I'm not really happy about having to fly 11 hours or more to get there. But then again you just have to take the chances you get otherwise you'll not receive them anymore at some point. I've already turned down the attempts of Google to get me into their internship program last year which was quite frankly stupid. Anyway, I decided to forget about my fear of flying for once and take this great opportunity I'm offered by Canonical. I still need to sort out a few things, get a new passport and prepare for the event itself but I'm quite happy I made this decision.

Thursday, October 2 2008

News and Xubuntu HugDay

There are only ten days left until the first beta release of Xfce 4.6 and we still got a lot of things to do. Over the past week(s) we’ve been working on new features in xfwm4, xfce4-session and xfce4-appfinder mostly.

Olivier added NET_WM_PING support to xfwm4. This means you can now kill applications which are not responding using a dialog that pops up after a few seconds - great! As a funny coincidence I was just browsing the xfce4-dev mailing list archives a few days ago when I found one of my first posts there which was about a similar feature.

About one or two months ago Auke Kok posted a patch for parallel application startup for xfce4-settings on the mailing list. Brian now took the time to implement it and finally committed it yesterday. It notably speeds up the Xfce startup process.

When we tried to fix the main xfdesktop crash which we thought to be related to libxfce4menu a few weeks ago, I tried to reproduce it by adding ThunarVFS monitoring support to xfce4-appfinder and see if it would crash as well. My modifications were pretty rough and I decided to rewrite the appfinder to make its code more readable and flexible. I’ve been working on this for the last two days and comitted it today. I’ve used recordMyDesktop to record a video presenting the new features again, but this time I also recorded my (creepy) voice! It’s awful to hear how long it took me to pronounce “freedesktop.org menu specification compliance” and how I sucked at mentioning the name of the library it’s based on: “libxfce4menu”. Apart from that I’m glad it worked, so I can continue to plan the video series for 4.6.

On to something else: Last week I’ve been announced the official Xubuntu Xfce4 Liaison and I completely forgot to announce that on the mailing lists … anyway, this reminds me of the topic of this post: today is Ubuntu BugDay with special focus on Xubuntu. If you’re interested in getting things fixed in Xfce 4.4.x or Xubuntu in general, you’re welcome to take part by hugging a few bugs!

That’s it! I’ll try to keep you posted on news about the beta release.

Cheers,
Jannis

Edit: I already fixed the categories problem as you can see here.

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