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."

stop hating on mplayer

[RiotingPacifist]

Since VLCs firefox plugin is incompatible with noscript, I've started using mplayer, and as its modular (unlike VLC) I can also throw almost anything at it (actually I can throw more at it as it handles realmedia too). As for interfaces well i personally think Kmplayer beats VLC hands down as a media player too.

I also dont understand the need for a frontend to aptitude, apt + front end is just as powerful, its only dependency resolution that hasn't been well implemented in other front ends.

Pidgin projects are cool

[i.of.the.storm]

My personal favorites are the project to add Voice and Video to pidgin and the Pidgin theming project. http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/VoiceAndVideo [pidgin.im] and http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/ThemeImprovements [pidgin.im] . People always ask for these things and the developers don't have time to do things that they don't use, so they never get done. Hopefully these actually get done by the end of this summer.

Re:definitely be making their way onto your machin

[Vectronic]

Agreed, the only thing that sparked any interest from that list was GRUB2, which isn't really even on the list, just some crappy fancy nonsense theme thing for it...

Me and GRUB have never gotten along, but maybe me and GRUB2 will...

Aside from that, that list is just a bunch of Gadgets/Widget/Nonsense... im not sure why the Editor/Poster just didnt do a write-up and link to http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ [google.com] or something a little more diverse and interesting.

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[account_deleted]

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Cross-Platform?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I, for one, don't care if KDE is available for Windows or Mac OS X. These OS already have their own GUI, why would we want to install something else?

The "choice is good" mantra doesn't apply. Windows should look and act like Windows, and Mac OS X should look and act like Mac OS X.

Next thing you know, we have idiots coding things without the OS built-in GUI and we end up with crappy programs that look out of place and behave completely different to the whole OS and all other programs.

Re:Pidgin projects are cool

[Yogiz]

After the developers pissed a lot of people off, Pidgin was forked and among other things Funpidgin [sourceforge.net] promises voice and video support as well. I think they'll pull it off before the Google guys.

Re:Pidgin projects are cool

[SD-Arcadia]

From the pidgin FAQ: "Why are file transfers so slow? MSN file transfer support is limited to the proxied version of file transfer support in the protocol. This means that the files are sent to MSN's servers, then the server sends the data to the other user. We don't know if or when we will ever support any of the peer-to-peer file transfer methods available in the MSN protocol." 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.

Multithreading way more important.

[etymxris]

These optimizations are nice, but leave out the most obvious and important improvement to the codecs that have yet to be made. Most processors sold nowadays are 2 or more cores. And smooth single-threaded processing of 1080p x264 is impossible on all but the absolute highest end processors. So the most important step is obvious multi-threading. There's a summer of code project for that too. [google.com] I'm surprised the author of the article missed it.

What a waste

[vux984]

the grub gui, if its actually any good will eventually get installed on my desktop linux machines...

The rest of the crud the article mentioned? Wow... what a completely uninspiring and underwhelming list.

Oooh ... another rss solution? ooxml for abiword? bragging rights for game I've never heard of? Theming support for Pidgin? VLC for Windows CE? I can gaurantee you that I'm not going to EVER go out of my way to install ANY of that crud.

Not that I have a problem with people working on its... its their time. But none of this is remotely 'must have' software.

Re:GRUB GUI?

[Z-MaxX]

The "Legacy" version of GRUB (latest release is 0.97), currently used by most Linux distributions, has been patched by various distros to support background images in a graphical console mode. However, there is no support in GRUB 2, where all GRUB development is currently taking place. I am going to add a basic GUI to GRUB that will surpass the patches for GRUB 0.9x in portability and flexibility. Once the graphical menu support is added (my GSoC'08 project), adding mouse support will be relatively straightforward... ;-) From http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-soc.html [gnu.org] under "Fancy menu interface":

This feature is really important for GRUB 2, because GRUB Legacy has been patched by third parties frequently, as the official version never support a graphical interface, but such an interface attracts more casual users. Support for a fancy menu - even better than an unofficial patch for GRUB Legacy - would attract more people to GRUB 2, thus this is critical in a long term to accelerate the development.

I plan to make the code portable to non-x86 architectures (though at first VESA VBE 2.0 on PC architecture will be the only supported video driver). More details at: http://gibibit.com/grub-gsoc/proposal.html [gibibit.com]

Re:E17?

[dkf]

Sometimes I wonder whether open-source software should also recieve public funds, though I have to admit I can't think of any good way that could possibly be arranged...

It happens already with some open-source software packages. Typically, when this is happening, it is because that software is also serving other purposes than being open-source (e.g. providing some key piece of software infrastructure that a government needs and which commercial providers don't offer yet). On the other hand, I'd hate for taxes to be the only way that OSS gets funded; if there's something I want doing a lot, I should be allowed to pay for it to be written. A mixed funding ecology (what we have now to a first approximation) is probably best.

Re:Record Speech as Tomboy Notes

[Daengbo]

I blogged about this project last month, so I've had time to think about the "why"s of it. My conclusions were:
1. Whether it's a Tomboy project or not is really irrelevant because the speech-to-text part will probably be a library, anyway.
2. Putting the functionality in a note-taking application is probably a good choice because the software doesn't need to do real-time conversion. You record the note, close it, allow the software to convert to speech while you're working on stuff, and when you come back two days later to look at the idea you rattled off, the text is magically there. If the software is written correctly, it would even take your changes to the text as training forthe engine.

Re:Cross-Platform?

[aliquis]

KDE are way better than the UI in Windows and may be better than OS X ones aswell thought. I run OS X but could see myself use KDE. Especially with Amarok and Kopete.