As you all know Ximian announced the Mono project not long ago. The goal of the Mono project is to create a full free C# development environment for Linux and Unix operating systems, including a compiler. Cool thing is that it has spawned a nice synergy for the GNOME project as it seems to be interest among some of the Mono developers to also create support for vb.net not just C#. The basis for this will be GNOME basic, the VB compatible Basic implementation, developed in order to enable support for reading Excel VBA macros in Gnumeric. Hopefully this effort will also improve the featureset of GNOME Basic in regard to improved VB scripting for GNOME office applications.Best of luck to Ravi Pratap and the rest on this task. Links below to the Mono homepage,the GNOME Basic homepage and an interview by Joe Barr.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gb
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2001-07/lw-07-mono.html
The Abiword hackers are not resting on their laurels. This week they put out the 0.9.0 release which is the first feature freeze release in preparation for the 1.0 release. They plan on making rapid 0.9.x releases for a while now in order to iron out all bugs and major useability issues. Below are links to the 0.9.0 release notes, the Abiword Weekly News #55 and the Abiword download area on Sourceforge.
http://www.abisource.com/release-notes/0.9.0-1.html
http://www.abisource.com/dev/news/2001/awn55.phtml
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=15518_release&id=45623
The Evolution team are hard at work ironing out bugs in order to get Evolution 1.0 out the door. Beta 2 was released this week and the Evolutin team is hosting bug days on irc.gnome.org #evolution each Thursday. If you want to be sure that any bugs that have been bugging you are squashed before the offical 1.0 release be sure to join the Evolution team next thursday to help them find and eliminate your bug. Full beta 2 announcent at link below.
http://www.ximian.com/release_notes/evolution/1.0_beta_2.php3
The Mozilla team was happy to announce a new release this week, 0.9.3, which kills of even more cras bugs and add even more polish. GNOME users should hold of a little while though since a 0.9.3 compatible releases of Nautilus and Galeon isn't ready yet, but don't despair. Galeon already has a new Mozilla 0.9.3 compatible pre-release out, and the Nautilus hackers are already looking into seeing what needs to be done on their side.
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla0.9.3/
Lots of applications these days creates thumbnails of images on your disk. Of course if you have many different applications doing this then these thumbnails will start to take up a lot of disk space eventually. Jens Finke is working on changing this and has made a draft for a new Thumbnail Managing Standard which will allow all your applications to share the same thumbnail images. The 0.2 version of the draft is now avaialable and he is requesting feedback. Below you find a link to the current draft and contact information for Jens. The specification can also be discussed on the freedesktop.org mailing-list.
http://www.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~pearl/thumbnail-spec/index.html
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xdg-list
The GNOME printing library has made it easy to add good printing support to GNOME applications, but finding information on GNOME print has not always been that easy. GNOME print has now gotten its own homepage hosted on gnome.org. So if you want to learn more about GNOME print or just gaze at a beutifully designed page now is your chance. Link to the new GNOME-print homepage below.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnome-print
Seth Nickell has become the lead developer on the GNOME useability project which plans to get as many of the useability improvements that the Sun useability study uncovered into GNOME as possible. Seth plans to hold regular meetings togheter with the Sun usebility engineers on IRC to plan and work on such issues. Interested hackers should join the useability list in order to join the discussions and get information on when the next meeting are. Below is a link to the mailing-list and to the Useability meeting prepartion notes. The first online meeting was a great success with over 30 people participating.
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/meeting.html
The run-up to the GNOME 2.0 release is underway with the libraries going into API freeze this week. Libraries such as bonobo-activation (formerly known as OAF), libbonobo and bonoboui, libgnome and libgnomeui, gnome-vfs, gconf, libart_lgpl and more have all had a feature freeze release. Hopefully a full GNOME 2.0 platform preview release is ready to be released soon.
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/pre-gnome2/latest/sources/
Kjartan Maraas is preparing the first GNOME 1.4.1 beta release which will be out very soon. This is a bugfix release for the GNOME 1.4 release containing bugfixes and improvements made since the 1.4.0 release. For an almost complete list of what packages which will be in GNOME 1.4.1 take a look at Kjartan's beta1 list linked below.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2001-July/msg00267.html
Oskar Liljeblad released version 0.15.0 of the GNOME-GCJ Java bindings this week. GNOME-GCJ are Java bindings for GNOME and GTK+ which can be compiled into native bytecode with the GCJ compiler which is part of GCC. Oskar is also looking for more developers to help out since he has extensive plans for GNOME-GCJ.Link to the relase announcement and the GNOME GCJ homepage below.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2001-August/msg00000.html
http://gnome-gcj.sourceforge.net
The GNOME summary is being translated into Spanish and Hungarian. Translations are usually available shortly after the release of the summary in english.
http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/
http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
|
Most active hackers:
|