Robert Marcano's blog

NetworkManager-openvpn

robert — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 15:14:30 -0400

The NetworkManager OpenVPN plugin is really good, that means no more configuration file editing and no more sudo.

Epiphany in GNOME 2.14 - the power of Opensource

robert — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 19:46:19 -0500

Before being a Firefox user, I used Epiphany, the Mozilla based default GNOME browser, that is better integrated to that platform than Firefox. A few years ago I implemented a patch to add certificate management capabilities to it, since that time I moved to Firefox because its extensibility, but I still think that Epiphany is the best browser a regular user can use inside GNOME.

Well, GNOME 2.14 will include my certificate manager thanks to the updates and fixes made by Crispin Flowerday. In an opensource project, no matter if you drop some code, someone interested will take and enhance it.

GNOME

robert — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:24:50 -0400

I find the definition of GNOME in the Uncyclopedia very funny, false, but funny. Now the real thing as explained in Wikipedia.

Preview of new GNOME 2.12 features

robert — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 11:58:55 -0400

Take a look at some of the new features in the upcoming GNOME 2.12 release

Java Desktop Search

robert — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 21:42:11 -0400

I am in the process of learning Java-GNOME and to do that I am building a desktop search tool. I have currently working the basic UI and basic file indexing.

Why am I doing this? before anyone start asking why I do not use Beagle, these are my reasons

I want to learn.
I believe that GCJ/Classpath are a more open solution than Mono, remember that this is my personal decission and you are free to use what you preffer.
I think that still are many gaps on the amount of GNOME and POSIX APIs available to Java programmers, so I intend with a popular type of application to detect what can be enhanced, for example, bindings to FAM/gamin, inotify and others.

Here is an very early screenshot of what is being developed, there will not be any release until something more useful is ready (stay tuned :-) ):

Java-GNOME

robert — Sun, 03 Jul 2005 18:30:04 -0400

Now that many Linux distributions are packaging updated versions of GCJ, Eclipse and Java-GNOME, never has been so easy to develop GNOME applications using Java. I am using Fedora Core 4 and for this little tutorial you must have installed:

eclipse-jdt
libgtk-java
libgnome-java
libgconf-java
libglade-java

You can use yum to install them:

yum install eclipse-jdt libgnome-java libgconf-java libglade-java libgtk-java

Start Eclipse and create a Java project. Edit the build path of your new project adding the following external jars

/usr/share/java/gtk2.6.jar
/usr/share/java/gconf2.10.jar
/usr/share/java/glade2.10.jar
/usr/share/java/gnome2.10.jar

Now you can try with this example:

public static void main(String[] args) {
	// intializing GTK
	Gtk.init(args);

	// creating the widget tree
	Window window = new Window(WindowType.TOPLEVEL);
	window.setTitle("Testing GTK");
	window.add(new Button("Test..."));

	// adding a listener to detect when the window is closed to end the
	// event dispatch main cycle and exit the application
	window.addListener(new LifeCycleListener() {
		public void lifeCycleEvent(LifeCycleEvent evnt) {
			if (evnt.getType() == LifeCycleEvent.Type.UNREALIZE)
				Gtk.mainQuit();
		}

		public boolean lifeCycleQuery(LifeCycleEvent evnt) {
			return false;
		}
	});
	// showing the window
	window.showAll();

	// starting the event dispatch cycle
	Gtk.main();
}

Test the application and you will get something like this:

Extended documentation can be found on the Java-GNOME documentation page and the original GNOME documentation (C based APIs)

GNOME blog client

robert — Mon, 31 May 2004 22:58:58 -0400

I have found a nice GNOME utility to create basic post to any XMLRPC compatible blog software, it is GNOME Blog

The feature that I like the most of this tool is that the generated HTML uses paragraph tags (p) instead of using line breaks (br). As you may know br is removed from the current XHTML 2.0 working draft and is replaced by the line tag (l). There are people trying to include it again, but I hope to never see it again ;-)

GNOME Certificate Database Library proposal

robert — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 14:17:27 -0500

I have written a small document explaining what can be implemented to integrate the PKI certificates management on GNOME based applications, It is called GNOME Certificate Database Library proposal

Update 04/06/2004: The library proposal was fractioned on two parts, in order to allow the sharing of the certificates backends with other desktop platforms