Many things happened since my last diary entry.. Patrick
Mochel submitted his new Linux driver model, which was
much
more radical than my humble attempt at collecting device
data only, and it got into the 2.5 kernel. This made my
Device Registry patch pretty obsolete which isn't too bad
because I did not want to work on kernel stuff forever.
So I moved on to work on further items of my virtual TODO
list to make KDE/Linux a more enjoyable desktop.
By accident I
found x0rfbserver,
a VNC implementation that shares your X11 session instead
of creating a new one. Remote desktop administration was
on my TODO list, so I ported it to KDE and created KRfb. It was also a nice little thing to get
started with KDE development which I never did before. Two
weeks later (we're now around christmas) the port was
finished, but I did not want to
release it before I got some response from x0rfbserver's
author. So I started another small project: WebDAV support for
kio_http. I added all the new commands, header fields and
status code, but the biggest part, XML parsing of WebDAV
responses is still missing. On January 2nd I was fed up
waiting for x0rfbserver comments and released the first
version officially. I got more reactions than I thought,
especially from people who wanted TightVNC support and so
I decided to add it. While looking at the RFB protocol
implementation of x0rfbserver's rfblib I found many bugs
that I had to fix. I also found out that the
implementation of the codecs was quite bad (lower
compression rates than possible), so I started the porting
codecs from TightVNC's winvnc and replace the original
ones as well (yes, I am porting from the
Windows version, because it is in C++ and the Unix version
in C). So far Hextile and RRE are running, I will probably
skip CoRRE and start ZLib tomorrow. Then I only need
TightVNC and can release KRfb 0.6, maybe even this week,
and maybe I have time for the WebDAV stuff again.