This week I thought I gave the new shiny GObject-Introspection in Python a chance by porting the UI of GNOME DVB Daemon. First and foremost, I want to mention that I haven't got too far in the sense of porting the code to PyGI. Why am I writing this post then you may ask? Because it already took me some effort to get the proper build environment running correctly, and that's what this post is about. I'm running Ubuntu Maverick, so things might work slightly different on other distros.

It's already three releases after my last post about GNOME DVB Daemon. Since then I tuned the UI to make it more HIG compliant and hide device group combo boxes if there's only a single group. In addition, you can now edit the start time duration of an existing timer. Needless to say, I fixed some crashers, too.

After I released version 0.1.13 earlier this week and the Debian package got updated accordingly, I took the time to port the package to Ubuntu Karmic. I created a PPA containing the packages for Karmic. Add the PPA to your system and install gnome-dvb-client, gnome-dvb-daemon and totem-plugins-dvb-daemon.

One month after the last release, I released version 0.1.13 of GNOME DVB Daemon today. It's mainly a bug fix release which fixes a couple of problems with recordings, especially if watching and recording took place at the same time. There are only two new features: You can now sort channels either by name or by group in Totem. Channels can be grouped in gnome-control-center under Edit -> Channel lists.

I'm currently in release mode and just released GNOME DVB Daemon 0.1.12, the third release in three weeks. Those three releases include an improved DBus API, a way to assign channels to any number of groups and a lot of bug fixes. You can configure the channel groups in gnome-dvb-control from the "Edit -> Channel Lists" menu. Unfortunately, the groups are not yet displayed in Totem (coming in the next release).

Nelson Creek grave by Canterbury Heritage. License:

I spent last weekend hacking on Coherence, a DLNA/UPnP MediaServer, in the beautiful city of Barcelona. KDE sponsored a couple of hackers to get together at the second Coherence sprint.

Today I moved all the stuff (bzr branch, bugs and downloads) of DVB Daemon over to Launchpad. Therefore, please make sure you pull changes from the new Launchpad repository. Although, the repository at bzr-playground.gnome.org still exists I won't push there anymore.

It hasn't been that long since the last release and I try to continue releasing more often in the future. Version 0.1.9 is mainly bug fix release. It fixes are critical bug that caused the channel list file to be corrupted (especially with DVB-S). In addition, the EPG scanner and channel scanner use their own main loop now. That should make the daemon more responsive and fixes a couple of crashes.