The Most Interesting GSoC 2012 Projects

Google has published their list of accepted projects for this year's Google Summer of Code. Here's a list of some of the most interesting projects that the student developers will be attempting.

There were 1212 accepted student projects this year from a variety of open-source projects that Google allowed. The full list of accepted GSoC 2012 projects can be found on Google-Melange.com. Below is a list of just some of the accepted student projects I found most interesting. Of course, it's not guaranteed these projects will be successful, but nevertheless should be interesting to see their progress over the course of the next few months.

- The Blender 3D modelling software will hopefully get better OpenGL support, OpenGL ES compatibility, and an Android port of Blender (abstract). Separately, there's also work towards a Blender multi-touch framework (abstract).

- Bullet Physics Engine integration with Blender (abstract).

- Improved physics support in the Crystal Space Engine by integrating Bullet (abstract).

- Under the Debian project there is an effort to make for a smooth migration from sys-v-init to systemd using a tool to convert the scripts so that maintainers only need to maintain one file (abstract).

- Porting and packaging LLVM's libc++ as an alternative to libstdc++ for the standard C++ library on Debian so that users can switch between the two (abstract).

- EFI boot support for FreeBSD x86/amd64 (abstract).

- NTFS file-system support for FreeBSD (abstract).

- Continued work on generic optimizations and clean-ups for GCC (abstract).

- There's a few GIMP projects dealing with GEGL porting (abstract) for the GIMP core.

- Smarter searching in the GNOME Shell (abstract).

- An x86_64 port of Haiku (abstract).

- Facial recognition for KDE's DigiKam (abstract).

- OGRE engine improvements: improve the terrain system (abstract), volume rendering with LOD (abstract), off-screen particles and mass-spring models visualization (abstract), and completing the Microsoft DirectX 11 render system (abstract).

- A beautiful one-click install for openSUSE (abstract).

- An Android back-end for the Pidgin IM client (abstract).

- An on-demand Fedora Build Service (abstract).

- KMSCON: A DRM-based terminal emulator for the Linux Foundation (there's already been some work done that's been covered in other Phoronix stories) (abstract).

- Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) enhancements for LLVM (abstract).

- Extending LLVM's Polly with automatic GPGPU code generation (abstract).

- Implementing missing Microsoft Direct3D / DirectX 9.0 functionality in Wine (abstract).