A few desktop projects have just been released, so as to reflect the recent API update of libDesktop:

• libDesktop 0.0.10 [1]
• Browser 0.4.12 [2]
• Panel 0.2.18 [3]
• Phone 0.3.12 [4]
• Player 0.1.6 [5]

The Keyboard project [6] also had to be modified in this regard, but there were no other significant changes in the meantime so it will be up to package maintainers to address this.

These releases will hopefully make it in time for the next pkgsrc freeze, pkgsrc-2013Q2 [7].

[1] http://www.defora.org/os/project/3298/libDesktop
[2] http://www.defora.org/os/project/230/Browser
[3] http://www.defora.org/os/project/3262/Panel
[4] http://www.defora.org/os/project/3343/Phone
[5] http://www.defora.org/os/project/336/Player
[6] http://www.defora.org/os/project/3374/Keyboard
[7] http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2013/06/08/msg011525.html

A lot of work is being put into porting NetBSD to the Nokia N900 smartphone hardware, with the ultimate goal to be running the DeforaOS embedded desktop environment there. The current status of this effort was reported during "Call your NetBSD" [1], a talk given at the BSDCan 2013 conference in Ottawa, Canada [2]. Keyboard and Xorg support is confirmed, while the touchscreen driver is in progress.

[1] http://people.defora.org/~khorben/papers/bsdcan2013/
[2] http://www.bsdcan.org/2013/schedule/events/381.en.html

Much like for EuroBSDCon 2012 [1], the DeforaOS/NetBSD tablet project [2] was presented at the annual French NetBSD hackathon [3] (although in French this time). While at it, the slides have just been pushed online [4].

For what matters now, two projects were released and packaged for the updated presentation:

• Browser 0.4.9 [5]
• Phone 0.3.11 [6]

The first brings a new plug-in (Git integration) and improved icons, while the second can handle notifications within the DeforaOS Panel, through an additional plug-in (special thanks to whygee [7] for the idea).

[1] http://2012.eurobsdcon.org/
[2] http://www.defora.org/os/news/3712/Touch-your-DeforaOS-(on-NetBSD)
[3] http://www.netbsdfr.org/?p=2617 (French)
[4] http://people.defora.org/~khorben/papers/netbsdfr-hackathon-2012/Touch%20your%20NetBSD.pdf (French)
[5] http://www.defora.org/os/download/download/3720/Browser-0.4.9.tar.gz
[6] http://www.defora.org/os/download/download/3721/Phone-0.3.11.tar.gz
[7] http://yasep.org/ (be sure to enable Javascript)

On unexpected news, development of the DeforaOS Project is currently migrating from CVS to Git. This decision (and its almost immediate application) was motivated by discussions with potential contributors to the project, who were (understandably) not feeling very comfortable bootstrapping the whole project just to be working on a single sub-project [1]. In any case, this is very good news for the project.

These individual sub-projects are designed to be useful and functional on as many systems as possible, and the current repository was consequently broken down to about forty separate repositories. They were uploaded to Github already [2].

The plan for upstream, issue tracking and mailing-lists is still to run all of them on the current infrastructure. It is however absolutely fine to use the equivalent facilities available on Github, where it is definitely more convenient to benefit from more distributed development. It makes even more sense during this migration period, which is far from being over: a lot of code, procedures and maintenance tasks have to be taught about the updated development infrastructure.

[1] http://www.defora.org/os/project/list
[2] https://github.com/DeforaOS

As just mentioned [1], the DeforaOS user interface [2] was presented at EuroBSDCon 2012 [3], while running on a tablet device (the WeTab [4]) together with NetBSD [5]. The presentation was recorded, and while waiting for the rushes to be cut and pushed online the slides can be found on khorben's homepage already [6].

[1] http://www.defora.org/os/news/3711/Eleven-releases-for-the-desktop
[2] http://www.defora.org/os/wiki/3426/Graphical-environment
[3] http://2012.eurobsdcon.org/
[4] http://www.wetab.mobi/
[5] http://www.netbsd.org/
[6] http://people.defora.org/~khorben/papers/eurobsdcon2012/Touch%20your%20NetBSD.pdf

While preparing for the EuroBSDCon conference in Warsaw last week-end [1], eleven projects part of the desktop environment [2] were released with updated versions:

• libDesktop 0.0.8
• Browser 0.4.8
• Editor 0.2.1
• Keyboard 0.2.1
• Locker 0.2.1
• Mailer 0.1.5
• Mixer 0.1.1
• Panel 0.2.15
• Phone 0.3.10
• Player 0.1.4
• Surfer 0.2.6

All of them were packaged for pkgsrc [3] (in the wip repository [4]) shortly after release.

[1] http://2012.eurobsdcon.org/
[2] http://www.defora.org/os/wiki/3426/Graphical-environment
[3] http://www.pkgsrc.org/
[4] http://pkgsrc-wip.sf.net/

The most mature applications of the project had manual pages written progressively over the past few months. They are being pushed online automatically [1], and can also be found gathered within a single document [2].

Of more interest for developers, the project is now using gtk-doc [3] to provide documentation for the various APIs available [4]. This works within devhelp [5] too, where it is very interesting to find documentation for the libc [6] for instance.

For web developers in particular, DaPortal [7] (powering this website) is documented more extensively, with an installation procedure [8] and implementation details [9].

[1] http://www.defora.org/doc/html/
[2] http://www.defora.org/doc/manual/
[3] http://www.gtk.org/gtk-doc/
[4] http://www.defora.org/doc/gtk-doc/html/
[5] http://live.gnome.org/devhelp
[6] http://www.defora.org/os/project/14/libc
[7] http://www.defora.org/os/project/12/DaPortal
[8] http://www.defora.org/doc/html/DaPortal/install.html
[9] http://www.defora.org/doc/html/DaPortal/internals.html

A few new archives were released in the past few days:

• libDesktop 0.0.7 [1]
• Browser 0.4.7 [2]
• PDFViewer 0.0.1 [3]

As usual, the first two were announced on Freecode [4] and packaged in pkgsrc [5], while the latter should follow soon. A few more projects are release worthy and will also be ready soon; they will be announced here of course [6].

[1] http://www.defora.org/os/download/3682/libDesktop-0.0.7.tar.gz
[2] http://www.defora.org/os/download/3684/Browser-0.4.7.tar.gz
[3] http://www.defora.org/os/download/3686/PDFViewer-0.0.1.tar.gz
[4] http://freecode.com/users/khorben
[5] http://pkgsrc.org/
[6] http://www.defora.org/os/news

Since yesterday, it is possible to access the public source code repository for DeforaOS more securely, via CVS over the SSH protocol. This procedure is documented in the DeforaOS project page [1].

Note that the password is simply "anoncvs", while the fingerprint for the server's RSA public key is the following:
2f:0f:d7:cb:88:be:24:a1:3d:02:23:dc:42:db:cd:50

[1] http://www.defora.org/os/project/download/11/DeforaOS

If you are visiting this website [1] regularly, you may have noticed the new stylesheet. If you wonder, it was largely inspired by the user interface found on the Nokia N9 smartphone [2]; I hope you will like it.

But really, the most important change on the website is not about how it looks: the entire code base has been rewritten, more or less from scratch; as before, its source code is also hosted here, as the DaPortal project [3]. Unfortunately, the rewrite was conducted using the PHP programming language again [4], for lack of time learning a new language in the process. It is therefore not expected to be the last rewrite of DaPortal unfortunately.

On the positive side, the code base is much cleaner than before; its different rendering engines will be worth a separate article later. It was a significant effort nonetheless, with a lot of code to port or rewrite: it took three months to pin a satisfying architecture, three more for a functional prototype, and a total of nine months of after-hour work to complete the migration.

This partly explains the lack of news published here in the meantime - so there will be lots coming now!

[1] http://www.defora.org/
[2] http://swipe.nokia.com/
[3] http://www.defora.org/os/project/12/DaPortal
[4] http://www.php.net/