2008 Google Summer of Code Highlights

andrewmin writes "SoC 2008 has begun, and with 175 organizations and 1125 students it looks better than ever before. Here's a quick run-down of a few programs that, if they are finished, will definitely be making their way onto your machine."

GRUB GUI?

[Anonymous Coward]

Adding a GUI to the upcoming GRUB 2 because its black and white terminal interface is scary? Doesn't GRUB already have a GUI? That pretty blue screen at bootup?

E17?

[Doobian Coedifier]

Cross-platform is now officially the hottest thing for desktop environments. First, KDE announced that KDE 4 was being ported to Windows and OS X. Now, the lesser known Enlightenment project is doing the same thing. Student Dzmitry Mazouka is now porting the Ewl and Etk libraries to the Win32 platform.

How about finishing Enlightenment 0.17? I've been waiting for almost 8 years now...

definitely be making their way onto your machine

[John Hasler]

Nope. I see nothing there that will be on my machine in the foreseeable future.

Re:definitely be making their way onto your machin

[RiotingPacifist]

Until grub2 has a security module so that i can lock down what you can boot too, im happy with grub, even if grub2 looks nice.

Hell i have 1 second time-out & hidden menu so i never see it anyway, grub doesn't need any nice interface as it shouldn't need to be seen other than when you have a problem in which case a nice UI just adds another thing to go wrong.

Re:GRUB GUI?

[Knuckles]

Editing menu.lst hardly qualifies as a GUI.

Re:E17?

[bigstrat2003]

Spot on, man. Everyone expresses this viewpoint with open-source software, but it's not very insightful. In fact, it's very trite. Not many of us are able to just get down and code something when we feel the need to have it.

Moreover, it's a perfectly valid point to say that the developers should finish their software before worrying about porting it. The desire for cross-platform compatibility is good, but meaningless if your software is incomplete because of it.

Re:E17?

[an.echte.trilingue]

The difference is that you are going to pay somebody to do those things. Enlightenment is done as a hobby, and it still manages to come up with some pretty cool stuff that works its way into somebody's code or maybe even a finished DE someday. However, complaining that unpaid hobbyists should abandon what they enjoy doing to in favor of pursuing your priorities is like asking the guy how lives next door who builds hotrods for fun to come and fix your toyota. If you want them to finish E17 that bad, either pay them to do it or do it yourself.

Oh, and before I get that troll who says that this is the problem with open source, I would like to point out that the "hobby" development is not typical of open source software; most people who work on OSS get paid to do it (for example, by redhat, novell, mysql, sun, ibm, trolltech [now owned by nokia] etc.)

Get GRUB2 production ready first...

[i_love_unix]

Personally, I would prefer it if somebody would get GRUB 2 "production ready" first, instead of making fancy GUI menus for it.

Maybe it's just me, but I'd really like the ability to boot from LVM and get proper EFI support (though not really an issue until EFI is in wide distribution for x86) without having to install an experimental package.

It's a bootloader, guys. Functional first, form later.

Record Speech as Tomboy Notes

[AmonEzhno]

1. Why the hell has it taken this long to get a Voice Recognition front end implemented?

2. Who decided that tomboy notes is a worthy front end?!?! Who uses tomboy notes? Couldn't we have something that would allow us to use speech to text in a way which is useful?

Re:Get GRUB2 production ready first...

[Z-MaxX]

Many GRUB developers are working diligently toward a production ready version of GRUB 2. I am a new contributor to the GRUB project and the reason I chose this feature to implement is because it meshes with my areas of expertise and interest. Also, I feel that making GRUB 2 usable by everyone (let's face it, right now that means it has to be supported by Ubuntu) is a very important goal. In order for Ubuntu to adopt GRUB 2, it will have to not only be functionally complete, but they will want it to look nice too, as the rest of the OS will.

No argument that it will be great to have GRUB 2 production ready. I am looking forward to it, and I hope I can contribute to other features after I complete the graphical menu system.

Colin

Re:Pidgin projects are cool

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

What would it take to add direct connection transfer support to Pidgin so I can actually send someone a file on MSN? Currently it maxes out around 4KB/s which is useless. I always wondered why this is not a priority.

I imagine support for all closed, legacy formats is a pretty low priority. Why prioritize reverse engineering and optimizing less used features of an intentionally obfuscated format championed by someone trying to prevent the type of interoperability that is Pidgin's goal? Isn't it better for them to optimize file transfer over XMMP or the video and voice capabilities? I mean, if you want to transfer files with other users, there are plenty of other protocols that do work and where the Pidgin team doesn't have to work so hard only to have it intentionally broken by Microsoft at a later date. It is an inefficient use of their resources compared to working on core features using open protocols where they don't have to put in all that extra effort to overcome MS's antics.

Re:definitely be making their way onto your machin

[Z-MaxX]

A nice UI may be more important for a Live CD install/rescue disk, for instance, where there are many choices, and you want it to simple to use and self-explanatory for any user booting the disk. Also, GRUB 2 uses dynamically loadable modules for virtually everything, so you can just not load the future 'gfxmenu' module if you like. Then it will consume no memory and will not be a possible source of problems.

Re:GoC is (s)lacking....

[kjamez]

I can't speak for Google on this, but I will say there is no bad about it. It is the job of the project to apply and coordinate all the happenings. I don't know if ReactOS even applied? If you are fond of ReactOS, I encourage you get involved, to contact the developers and to offer your time to apply for the SoC ... (I don't know if they did or not, just saying) ... Open Source really "works" when you actually get involved.

Re:7 slots for DragonFlyBSD

[idiotnot]

Thank you for pointing this out. TFA is fluff, and doesn't cover the real OS projects SoC really focuses on. The only things TFA lists that may affect me are the grub improvements, and maybe some of the file converters.

But, DFBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, GNU/Hurd, etc., all have SoC projects that go towards making the OS better. A good example would be the new tmpfs for NetBSD, which has now been ported to FreeBSD.