Google Summer of Code 2008

The various Google Summer of Code slots have been awarded to the participating projects. As most of you will know, the Summer of Code is all about enticing programmers to contribute to open source projects. Students submit their ideas to mentor organisations (these mentors are approved by Google first), and after selecting the ideas the mentors like the most, the programmers work to complete their task. If they succeed, Google will grant them a stipend. Google selected 174 mentor organisations for this year’s Summer of Code. Read on for a selection of interesting applications that have been approved.

• DragonFlyBSD: LiveCD with a DragonFly-specific X desktop, integrated into nrelease build, by Lousia Luciani. “In this project I will integrate more functionality into the nrelease build system. The build will generate a persistent liveCD with Dragonfly specific features. It will be customized for recovery, demonstration and testing and include a good default installation of packages.”
• Enlightenment: Improvement of Enlightenment 0.17 file manager, by Fedor Gusev. “As Enlightenment is standing to be a desktop shell, it has to have a nice file manager. Since E developers understand that, they already have started the work. But there is still a lot to do – a fifth of Enlightenment TODO is related to the file manager. It is necessary to finish it.”
• Enlightenment: Enlightenment win32 port, by Dzmitry Mazouka. “Currently, the Enlightenment project is ported to a large number of platforms, but support of win32 is still not completed. This hinders Enlightenment from being used by a large amount of Windows users. The aim of the porting project is to make Ewl and Etk Enlightenment toolkits work on win32 platform.”
• ES operating system: A Pure Component Kernel Design and Development, by Santosh G. Vattam. “I wish to take up the design and development of the pure component kernel for ES Operating System as a project for the Google Summer of Code initiative for the year 2008. The aims of the project are as follows: Improving the quality of the existing kernel code and bring it to production level; providing x64 support to the OS along with x86 support, using the Newlib which already has 64-bit support; adding a new virtual memory management system for x64.”
• Haiku: Application for Implementing paging (swap file) support, by Zhao Shuai. “Implement a module that writes dirty pages back to its backing store. Support more than 1 swap files. Do necessary changes in other modules to interact with the new features.”
• The X.Org Foundation: GUI tool for assisted editing of the XKB configuration database, by Symeon Xenitellis. “One of the missing free and open-source applications is a GUI tool that helps create keyboard layouts. Currently, a user has to edit the layout file by hand using a text editor, which is both cumbersome and error-prone. The GUI tool will be able to create a new or import existing keyboard layouts and export a formatted new version. The user will be presented with a keyboard and auxiliary windows covering Unicode blocks, and will be able to drag and drop characters on individual keys.”

This is just a selection of projects that I personally find noteworthy. The list is endless, however, so there’s bound to be something in there that tickles your fancy.