Gloss 0.1!

I know I’ve been promising to do another screencast, specifically showing the music player in Gloss, but I’m afraid it isn’t done. What is done however is Gloss 0.1, including a new screencast showing all its features!

Whilst being very much a developer / testing release, it is moderately stable and works ‘out of the box’ on multiple different systems I’ve been testing on. It is available for download at http://gloss-mc.googlecode.com/files/gloss_0.1.tar.gz or if you’re on a debian / ubuntu based system, an apt package is available in my launchpad PPA: https://launchpad.net/~gloss-development/+archive. If you want to check it out before downloading, a screencast is below (Quality warning: Where is the killer linux screencast app?):

YouTube Preview Image

So what’s actually been done? A LOT of work getting what was in there already to a stable, portable state. That’s not to say it won’t crash, some areas are still quite fragile, but everything that’s there will work given the right setup. The new Gloxygen theme has been included also. This initially started life based around the KDE Oxygen iconset, but has evolved a little bit since then. It has the advantage of being fully open licensed, unlike the Pear theme which is of questionable origin (For this reason it is not included in the apt package above).

The plan going forward is to get as much testing as possible done ASAP with the hope of having a 0.1.1 and maybe a 0.1.2 release out the door quickly. When Clutter 0.8 is released, SVN will temporarily break as the API is updated accordingly, meaning that the ubuntu Hardy package will also break given that there is no Clutter 0.8 available for it.

That’s probably about all for now. I urge you to have a play with the release above if you have a chance and log any problems you find (And you will find them) in the bug tracker!

12 thoughts on “Gloss 0.1!”

  • I love the idea of having multiple options for the frontends. Last time I read your blog I was worried that you were discouraged by some comments, so I’m very happy to see you still making progress.

    Filip

  • Don’t let people dissuade you from doing what you like. If you see the need, and have the desire, fill it. That said, I’d love to see an Elisa plugin. But, since I haven’t tried to do it myself, how can I possibly demand that you do it? Keep up the good work – it looks great, and is definitely a visual improvement over the archaic mythfrontend.

  • Hi,
    I’m trying to run gloss 0.1 on an archlinux system.
    I have all deps installed but I get

    ./gloss: line 47: 26365 Segmentation fault python $install_dir/gloss.py $arg_string

  • This looks fantastic! As a mythtv user (~2yrs) I’ve always been looking for something like this. Ideally it would be touchscreen enabled too, but this is better than the standard frontend. Trying it soon! Keep it up. This could really take off…

  • Similar to kknull above, I got a segfault is syslog when trying to run gloss:

    Sep 20 16:16:19 tomato kernel: python[15450]: segfault at ffffffff ip 00283d2e sp b7af38d0 error 4 in libgnomebreakpad.so[27c000+e000]

    Gloss just exits, giving no info about what happened. Whatever is wrong, I am clueless. I’m pretty much at a deadend for the moment. Ideas?

  • Hi.

    Gloss-mc looks great.
    I haven’t tried it myself yet as I really need EPG functionality.

    Any chance on getting our hands on 0.2?

    Keep up the great work.

    Cheers,
    Karl

  • Hey,

    Pulling this one out of the bin!!!

    Just wanted to see if you are going to work on this any time soon again, or if it’s a dead project. If last, do you mind if i “use” your implementation in a project?
    I will ofcourse honor the open source license and leave your name all over the files :). It will stay open source and hopefully be implemented in another (also open source) media center. If you or anybody else is interested, it’s called linuxmce. I’m looking at a replacement for the GUI that is currently in place and would like to try and implement your gloss.

    I tried to run gloss and ran into problems as follows, probably because clutter has evolved and some of the modules are included (like clutter-cairo into clutter e.g.)

    This is the error i’m getting. If you can give me a pointer on where to start looking for “repairing” this, please let me know.

    ** Message: pygobject_register_sinkfunc is deprecated (ClutterActor)
    ** Message: pygobject_register_sinkfunc is deprecated (ClutterAlpha)
    ** Message: pygobject_register_sinkfunc is deprecated (ClutterPath)
    ** Message: pygobject_register_sinkfunc is deprecated (ClutterInterval)
    python: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/clutter/_clutter.so: undeet_type

    Thanks,

    Richard

    • Hey Richard,

      Unfortunately this project is pretty much dead these days, I haven’t worked on it in quite some time. Almost certainly the problems you’re having are due to changes within newer releases of Clutter. Gloss 0.1 targeted Clutter 0.8 and in svn there is a test version that used the Clutter 1.0 API, but certainly anything newer than this will have serious problems.

      Honestly, having not looked at the newer Clutter APIs, I’m not sure what functions replaced those that are listed as deprecated, or what state the python bindings are currently in. Your best bet might be to go through the Clutter release notes since 1.0 and see what they suggest for upgrading to newer APIs.
      What version of clutter are you using?

  • Hey, thank you for the answer, i’ve been going through the code trying to get it to run. had a little setback when i crashed the vm i’m working in and lost several weeks of work of and on, but it’s easy to get it back.

    I’m using clutter 1.0, basically the one that install from apt in Kubuntu 10.04 Lucid

    I’ll look through the release notes and see what they recommend.

    I would like to use the gloss-mc google-code page, if you can make me a contributor/committer? Or do you rather me making a new one?

    Again, this is open source and will stay open source, i’m just trying to put this together as hopefully a new “orbiter” for LinuxMCE, it might not get chosen, but at least i tried and learned a lot of clutter on the way.

    I’ll be lurking on the irc channel while working on this, so maybe we can pm the information needed to add me to the project or what else.

    Thanks you for starting this project, it looks great

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