2008 Google Summer of Code Highlights

andrewmin writes "SoC 2008 has begun, and with 175 organizations and 1125 students it looks better than ever before. Here's a quick run-down of a few programs that, if they are finished, will definitely be making their way onto your machine."

Comments

stop hating on mplayer

[RiotingPacifist]

Since VLCs firefox plugin is incompatible with noscript, I've started using mplayer, and as its modular (unlike VLC) I can also throw almost anything at it (actually I can throw more at it as it handles realmedia too). As for interfaces well i personally think Kmplayer beats VLC hands down as a media player too.

I also dont understand the need for a frontend to aptitude, apt + front end is just as powerful, its only dependency resolution that hasn't been well implemented in other front ends.

Pidgin projects are cool

[i.of.the.storm]

My personal favorites are the project to add Voice and Video to pidgin and the Pidgin theming project. http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/VoiceAndVideo and http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/ThemeImprovements . People always ask for these things and the developers don't have time to do things that they don't use, so they never get done. Hopefully these actually get done by the end of this summer.

Re:Pidgin projects are cool

[SD-Arcadia]

From the pidgin FAQ: "Why are file transfers so slow? MSN file transfer support is limited to the proxied version of file transfer support in the protocol. This means that the files are sent to MSN's servers, then the server sends the data to the other user. We don't know if or when we will ever support any of the peer-to-peer file transfer methods available in the MSN protocol." What would it take to add direct connection transfer support to Pidgin so I can actually send someone a file on MSN? Currently it maxes out around 4KB/s which is useless. I always wondered why this is not a priority.

Re:GRUB GUI?

[Z-MaxX]

The "Legacy" version of GRUB (latest release is 0.97), currently used by most Linux distributions, has been patched by various distros to support background images in a graphical console mode. However, there is no support in GRUB 2, where all GRUB development is currently taking place. I am going to add a basic GUI to GRUB that will surpass the patches for GRUB 0.9x in portability and flexibility. Once the graphical menu support is added (my GSoC'08 project), adding mouse support will be relatively straightforward... ;-) From http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-soc.html under "Fancy menu interface":

This feature is really important for GRUB 2, because GRUB Legacy has been patched by third parties frequently, as the official version never support a graphical interface, but such an interface attracts more casual users. Support for a fancy menu - even better than an unofficial patch for GRUB Legacy - would attract more people to GRUB 2, thus this is critical in a long term to accelerate the development.

I plan to make the code portable to non-x86 architectures (though at first VESA VBE 2.0 on PC architecture will be the only supported video driver). More details at: http://gibibit.com/grub-gsoc/proposal.html