Planting Season

Well, at least in some parts of the world. But not here, it's still below freezing (although not by much).

Yesterday, I was testing the two programs in Ports which use GObject Introspection at runtime (lightsoff and swell-foop), I found that those programs were completely nonfunctional. Not only that, I found that it wasn't just me. But as I dug deeper, I found that everything went wrong at once:

• Pango's typelibs were broken due to improperly shipped GIRs;
• The gtk_clutter_init* functions needed some introspection annotations;
• Seed module loading broke in 2.31;
• The games should have been using GtkClutter.init() instead of init_with_args();
• The games were trying to use a Glib function which was no longer exported;
• The games were not specifying which versions of its dependencies were needed, causing the wrong versions to be loaded if gtk3 libraries are present.

The good news is, four packages and six patches later, the games are working again, and will be shipped in the next upload (hopefully next week).

Across and Back Again

As you may be aware, last summer I added cross-compiling support to cygport, resulting in a new 0.10 series. The results so far have been quite promising, with cygwin-based cross-toolchains now available for the following targets:

• MinGW (i686-pc-mingw32), with the basic packages available here pending an ITA, and many more in Ports
• MinGW-w64 (i686-w64-mingw32 and x86_64-w64-mingw32), already in the distro
• Linux x86 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) and x64 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
• Solaris 10 x86 (i386-pc-solaris2.10) and SPARC (sparc-sun-solaris2.10)
• Solaris 11 x86 (i386-pc-solaris2.11)
  
• AVR microcontrollers (avr)

With this improvement to cygport, cross-compiling from Cygwin comes with the ease you would expect from a Linux distribution.

This week, I decided it was time to turn things around and make it easier to cross-compile to Cygwin as well. To that end, I have created a minimal Linux-to-Cygwin cross-compiler toolchain for Fedora Linux. Under my "fedora-cygwin" (sub)project, I have posted .spec files and patches to SourceForge git and RPMs for both ix86 and x86_64 to the File Release area. For now it is necessary to manually download and install the RPMs until I have the chance to figure out how to setup a yum repository.

While these packages are mostly based on the work of the fedora-mingw project, there are important differences. I'll admit that these are my first RPM spec files, so I'll gladly take constructive suggestions for improvement, or better yet, git patches. Furthermore, these have yet to be tested beyond building themselves. If you do find these useful, or discover any problems, please let me know through the Cygwin Ports mailing list for now.

A Time to Introspect

GObject Introspection looks to be the future of GNOME language bindings, and the good news is, you need not wait until 3.0 to use it. I have just finished adding all the components currently available to Ports SVN, together with Seed, a WebKit-based JavaScript interpreter which automatically includes "bindings" to any of 30+ libraries which ship with Introspection data.

Here is a screenshot of several Seed examples using the GTK+, Clutter, VTE, and WebKit libraries through GObject Introspection. The LightsOff game shown there will be part of GNOME Games 2.28, but I've made a preview of the latest beta release available. All this will be part of the next upload, which I hope will be this week or next.

Google Gadgets for Linux

I just added a screenshot of Xfce 4.6.1 with Google Gadgets for Linux (which I just finished building today) and Konqueror 4.2.4 running on my new computer. Unfortunately, XWin multiwindow mode doesn't have the compositing support to make GGL look right, but it works fine on a desktop.

The Path of Evolution

GNOME Evolution, that is. This is one of those packages that has been bugging me for years; it would build but not run. But in the process of buildings Contacts, Dates, and Tasks, which also use Evolution-Data-Server but have very simple interfaces, I discovered that NSS still wasn't working, causing E-D-S to not initialize. So I rebuilt E-D-S and Evolution without NSS, and voila, it runs like a charm.

So Evolution will be part of the next upload, albeit without SSL support, together with the rest of GNOME 2.26.2. As for SSL support, as much as I would like to have it, I'll admit trying to fix NSPR/NSS again isn't my highest priority right now. (Why can't they use something more normal, like GnuTLS, instead?) As always, PTC.

New website

While SunSite.dk has been an accommodating host of an ever-growing Ports repository, recent issues with downtime, responsiveness, and storage limits (albeit generous) have held up progress over the last few months. While I am grateful for all their help, the time has come to find another home.

Thanks to the graciousness of a sourceware.org admin, Cygwin Ports has found a new home for the website and package repository. This will allow for easier updating and continued expansion of Ports' offerings. The sunsite.dk package repository has been removed, and all website links now point to our new home.

I invite all Ports users to visit the new website, and follow the directions there to update their packages. As always, questions/comments/issues/testimonials/thanks/etc. go to the cygwin-ports-general list.

Netscape plugins

What does Netscape have to do with Cygwin, you ask? Didn't I just say that anything Mozilla-related doesn't work yet on Cygwin?

Fortunately we still have one working browser on Cygwin: Konqueror. The nsplugins package allows Konqueror to load and use Netscape-compatible plugins. At the next upload, there will be two such working plugins: DjView3 and Xine. I tried, but failed, to get swfdec-mozilla 0.5 working as well; another try with 0.6 will have to wait for GNOME 2.22.

Yes, swfdec itself and the swfdec-gnome player are working, but I had to disable sound support. Enabling the OSS sound support would lock up video playback while the audio was playing. In the meantime, at least it works for games.

If you're looking to play YouTube videos within Cygwin, a recent Linux.com article lists several downloaders. FFmpeg support allows the following applications to play the FLV videos: ffplay (ffmpeg), gxine, kaffeine, kmplayer, kplayer, mplayer, totem, vlc, xine (xine-ui).