Neil, Molly, and Rosanna went to OSCON, in Portland, OR. While there, we met with people from other free software projects and companies developing open source, or with open source programs offices. Following OSCON, there was the West Coast Hackfest, during which the Documentation, GTK, and Engagement teams met and got a bunch of work done. There are some photos you can check out on our Twitter account.

Molly attended FrOSCon, giving a keynote entitled “Open Source Citizenship for Everyone!” On September 17th, Molly will be at GitLab Commit in Brooklyn, NY.

Federico Mena will be at CCOSS in Guadalajara, México, September 14 – 15th. There he will run a workshop on GNOME and deliver a keynote presentation.

Not only did GNOME Boxes automatically detect that the ISO contained Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it offered me an Express Install option (provided I had a working internet connection). The app automatically pulled my username into the account field, and asked that I do nothing more than enter a password to proceed.

And that was truly all that it required, unless I needed to customize the amount of RAM and disk space allocated to the VM.

After hitting the Continue button, GNOME Boxes ran an unattended installation. It pulled regional and language settings from my host machine, handled the partitioning dialogue, and everything else. The installation screens zoomed by, components and updates were downloaded, and within less than 5 minutes I had a perfectly working Ubuntu 18.04 to play with.

Hi developers,

GNOME 3.33.91 is now available. This is the second beta version towards 3.34.

If you want to compile GNOME 3.33.3, you can use the official
BuildStream project snapshot:

https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/3.33.91/gnome-3.33.91.tar.xz

The list of updated modules and changes is available here:

https://download.gnome.org/core/3.33/3.33.91/NEWS

The source packages are available here:

https://download.gnome.org/core/3.33/3.33.91/sources/

WARNING!
--------
This release is a snapshot of development code. Although it is
buildable and usable, it is primarily intended for testing and hacking
purposes. GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development
status.

For more information about 3.33, and the full schedule, please see our
3.33 wiki page:

https://www.gnome.org/start/unstable

Cheers,

Abderrahim Kitouni
GNOME Release Team

Also: GNOME 3.34 Beta 2 Brings Last Minute Improvements To GNOME Shell, Mutter & Friends

• Musings on the Microsoft Component Firmware Update (CFU) Protocol

  CFU has a bazaar pre-download phase before sending the firmware to the microcontroller so the uC can check if the firmware is required and compatible. CFU also requires devices to be able to transfer the entire new transfer mode in runtime mode. The pre-download “offer” allows the uC to check any sub-components attached (e.g. other devices attached to the SoC) and forces it to do dep resolution in case sub-components have to be updated in a specific order.

  Pushing the dep resolution down to the uC means the uC has to do all the version comparisons and also know all the logic with regard to protocol incompatibilities. You could be in a position where the uC firmware needs to be updated so that it “knows” about the new protocol restrictions, which are needed to update the uC and the things attached in the right order in a subsequent update. If we always update the uC to the latest, the probably-factory-default running version doesn’t know about the new restrictions.

  The other issue with this is that the peripheral is unaware of the other devices in the system, so for instance couldn’t only install a new firmware version for only new builds of Windows for example. Something that we support in fwupd is being able to restrict the peripheral device firmware to a specific SMBIOS CHID or a system firmware vendor, which lets vendors solve the “same hardware in different chassis, with custom firmware” problem. I don’t see how that could be possible using CFU unless I misunderstand the new .inf features. All the dependency resolution should be in the metadata layer (e.g. in the .inf file) rather than being pushed down to the hardware running the old firmware.

• Emmanuele Bassi: Another layer

  Five years (and change) ago I was looking at the data types and API that were needed to write a 3D-capable scene graph API; I was also learning about SIMD instructions and compiler builtins on IA and ARM, as well as a bunch of math I didn’t really study in my brush offs with formal higher education. The result was a small library called Graphene.

  Over the years I added more API, moved the build system from Autotools over to Meson, and wrote a whole separate library for its test suite.

  In the meantime, GStreamer started using Graphene in its GL element; GTK 3.9x is very much using Graphene internally and exposing it as public API; Mutter developers are working on reimplementing the various math types in their copies of Cogl and Clutter using Graphene; and Alex wrote an entire 3D engine using it.