Ubuntu GNOME

Thanks to the hard work of Jeremy Bicha and others Ubuntu GNOME is now an official Ubuntu flavour. Flavours get some infrastructure and support benefits such as ISO creation that make it easier to release and support.

More information on Mir

With the recent announcement of Mir there's been some concern about what this means for Ubuntu and the wider Linux ecosystem. Christopher Halse Rogers who is on the Mir team has written some excellent posts covering some of the major questions: why Mir and not Wayland/Weston, what does this mean for other desktops on Ubuntu and what does this mean for Linux graphics drivers.

Well worth the read.

Mir

Today we go public with the Ubuntu graphics stack for the post X world. Since the beginning Ubuntu has relied on the X server to support the user experience and while it has worked generally well; it’s time for something new. My team is working on a big new component for this - Mir. Mir is a graphics technology that allows us to implement user experience we want for Ubuntu across all devices we support.

In many ways, Mir will be completely transparent to the user. Applications that use toolkits (e.g. Qt, GTK+) will not need to be recompiled. Unity will still look like Unity. We will support legacy X applications for the foreseeable future.

This is a big task. A lot of work has already been done and there’s a lot more to go. We’re aiming to do incremental improvements, and you can find more about this on the Wiki page and in the blueprints. You can help. From today our project is public, it’s GPL licensed and you’re welcome to use the source and propose changes.

It’s exciting times, and I hope you enjoy the results of this work!

Vala support for Protocol Buffers

Recently I was playing around with Protocol Buffers, a data interchange format from Google. In the past I have spent quite a bit of time working with ASN.1 which is a similar format that has been around for many years. Protocol buffers seem to me to be a nice distillation of the useful parts of efficient data interchange and a welcome relief to the enormous size of the ASN.1 specifications.

With Vala being my favourite super-productive language I felt the need to add support to it. Solution: protobuf-vala.

Let's see it in action. Say you have the following protocol in rating.proto:

message Rating {
  required string thing = 1;
  required uint32 n_stars = 2 [default = 3];
  optional string comment = 3;
}

Run it through the protocol buffer compiler with:

$ protoc rating.proto --vala_out=.

This will create a Vala file rating.pb.vala with a class like this:

public class Rating
{
  string thing;
  uint32 n_stars;
  string comment;
  etc
}

You can use this class to encode a rating, e.g. for storing to a file or sending over a network protocol:

var rating = new Rating ();
rating.thing = "Vala";
rating.comment = "Vala is super awesome!";
rating.n_stars = 5;
var buffer = new Protobuf.EncodeBuffer ();
rating.encode (buffer);
do_something_with_data (buffer.data);

And decode it:

var data = get_data_from_somewhere ();
var buffer = new Protobuf.DecodeBuffer (data);
var rating = new Rating ();
rating.decode (buffer);
stderr.printf ("%s is %d stars\n", rating.thing, rating.n_stars);

That's pretty much it!

If you're using Ubuntu (12.04 LTS, 12.10 or 13.04) then you can install Vala protocol buffer support with:

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:protobuf-vala-team/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install protobuf-compiler-vala libprotobuf-vala-dev

Have fun!