This is quite a long post. The executive summary is that freedesktop.org now hosts an instance of GitLab, which is generally available and now our preferred platform for hosting going forward. We think it offers a vastly better service, and we needed to do it in order to offer the projects we host the modern workflows they have been asking for. In parallel, we’re working on making our governance, including policies, processes and decision making, much more transparent. [Read More]

The pl111 driver might be the most satisfying driver submission yet. Not because I’m desperate to see it in tree; I don’t actually have that hardware. Not because it’s bringing really exciting new capabilities. But, from Eric’s v5 submission: v2: Nearly complete rewrite by anholt, cutting 2⁄3 of the code thanks to DRM core’s excellent new helpers. and a follow-up review: I must say the driver is really slim and readable with all the new helpers from DRM, good job all who refactored the DRM support for simple framebuffer systems. [Read More]

On Friday, after consulting with the other freedesktop.org admins, I pushed a change to the freedesktop.org wiki, adding a Code of Conduct, based on the widely-used Contributor Covenant. In doing this, we join pretty much every other large open source project on the planet, with the exception of the Linux kernel, a magnificent anti-pattern. From this point on, all projects hosted on freedesktop.org are subject to this CoC. why so broad? [Read More]

Everyone’s favourite Australasian open source conference, linux.conf.au, is unsurprisingly back for 2014. This time, it’s in Perth, where it’s relentlessly hot and sunny all year; I’m told the beaches are nice too. A nice break from Europe and north America in January, then. Or wherever you happen to be from the 6th—11th January. But you can’t make a great conference without great talks, which is where you come in. The Call for Papers is closing this Saturday, the 6th of July. [Read More]

One of the platforms we’ve been working on for a while at Collabora is the Raspberry Pi. Obviously the $25 pricepoint makes it hugely appealing to a lot of people — including free software developers who up until now have managed to avoid the agonyjoy we experience on a daily basis working on embedded and mobile platforms — but there are a couple of aspects which speak specifically to us as a company. [Read More]

So, in my earlier post, I mentioned that I’d been working on a library called xkbcommon. Since it’s got a massively misleading name (and renaming hasn’t been totally ruled out yet …), it’s probably worth an introductory post. tl;dr: It loads XKB keymaps and can manage tricky things like modifier state for you. tell me more! At its core, xkbcommon is nothing to do, as you might think, with X11. [Read More]

hi Yeesh, it really has been a while, hasn’t it. Last time we spoke, I was working on X11, and my blog was being served off a FreeBSD 4.3 machine (obviously named ‘amnesiac’), from the datacentre of an ISP who had long since forgotten which ex-employee’s Pentium II was sitting in that rack. Unfortunately I didn’t back it up, and no longer even have a copy of the RSS feed to import. [Read More]