The gnome foundation is there to further the goals of GNOME by organising the project, determinining what gnome is and much more. It's an overall leadership role which the Board of Directors bring into focus. Membership of the foundation is made up of those who've contributed to GNOME; this can be any number of fashions. There are currently 410 members who elect the Directors once a year. Voting will be from November 20th - 27th. The purpose of elections is to test the candidates so put your questions forward.
http://foundation.gnome.org/organization.html
http://foundation.gnome.org/ballot_summary.html
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2001-November/thread.html
The ever resourceful Dom Lachowicz has made a gdict plugin for Abiword. This means that you can now access your favourite dictionary tool from within Abiword. Hopefully this plugin will soon be joined by many others as developers discovers the new plugin support in Abiword. Thanks also goes to Jesper Skov for once again putting together an Abiword weekly newsletter for us.
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/November/0107.html
http://www.abisource.com/information/news/2001/awn69.phtml
Maciej announced the API freeze for the 2.0 release. This isn't a hard release, more slushy if you will, where any alterations have to be approved by the release team. Lots of discussion has ensued with the central problem that always afflicts hackers arising: the desire to get it Right, versus the need to release often. Probably the largest casualty of the API freeze are language bindings that are unlikely to be shippable in time with the release.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/2001-November/msg00113.html
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/schedule/
The two premier integrated development environment efforts of GNOME, namely Anjuta and gIDE announced that they are merging. The new joined effort will be called Anjuta2. This will probably lead to a quicker development on the GNOME IDE front giving us a top knotch full featured system much faster. Thanks goes to the Anjuta and gIDE developers for showing such spirit of cooperation. The full announcement posted by Naba Kumar can be found below.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devtools/2001-November/msg00009.html
Jeff Waugh announced the second alpha of the developer platform. This release includes all the libraries and support packages necessary for developers who want to port to GNOME 2.0. While there is sure to various bits of breakage through the development period this is a great way for application developers to start early. Importantly this release can be installed along with an existing stable 1.4 release with no side-effects.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/2001-November/msg00029.html
The GTK+ bindings for C# has gotten their own homepage thanks to the effort of GTK+ sharp lead developer Mike Kestner. Mike also did a GTK-Sharp status report recently which you find in the second link below. If C# takes of I guess there will be no place like GNOME ;)
http://gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net/
http://mail.ximian.com/archives/public/gtk-sharp-list/2001-November/000013.html
One of the big aims for GNOME 2.0 is to include an accessibility framework. The hackers working on this project, predominantly working for SUN, have put a lot of effort into the framework. It looks as if these efforts are starting to flower in some applications. Bill Haneman announced two projects respectively called GOK and Gnopernicus. GOK, GNOME Online Keyboard is a visible keyboard that can provide a variety of input. Gnopernicus is a full screen magnifier and reader - which incidently continues the prjects outlandish naming scheme, how many gn* words can be left!
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/news.html
As the GNOME2 development platform has entered an API freeze the GNOME 2 desktop is emerging. First to post a Nautilus2 screenshot is Michael Meeks who gave us this little preview of Nautilus reborn as on GNOME 2.0. A lot of work is currently being done on getting the GNOME panel up and running under GNOME 2 and Sawfish has been reported to also compile using GTK+2.0 now so hopefully we can soon be able to run the first alpha release of the GNOME 2.0 desktop soon.
http://primates.ximian.com/~michael/nautilus2.png
Erdi Gergo has released the first 1.0 beta of Guikachu labeled 0.99.1. Guikachu is a tool for creating user interfaces for Palm Pilot applications. Guikachu GUI is modeled after Glade so if you are familiar with Glade you should feel at home in Guikachu. Gergo wants to make a 1.0 release of Guikachu as soon as possible so all user feedback on this release is highly appreciated. Not limiting himself to one application he also released a new version of RadioActive which is a Video4Linux-compatible radio tuner application. It also has a text interface so that the application can detect whether it is being called from within GNOME and give you the correct interface. Even if you don't have a radio card it's worth checking out the project pages for one of the cutest Linux penguins you are likely to see!
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2001-November/msg00029.html
http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/radioactive/
The eagerly awaited release of GNOME-print which includes support for printing TrueType fonts is now available. Chema Celorio and Lauris Kaplinski wants feedback from people using this in order to make sure that everything works well before it gets packaged by distributions etc. So please give it a spin and report your results to the GNOME print mailing-list listed below.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2001-November/msg00020.html
http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/gnome-print
One of those Linux refrains is 'Use the source Luke', but how can you if you can't get the darn thing to compile! GNOME isn't easy to build yourself as it is a complicated pyramid of capability and libraries. Karsten Reincke's GNOME Installation Guide is a great place to start. In addition, Chema Celorio, announced an FAQ he's been working which also has some great material
http://www.gnome.org/~chema/gnome-love/compiling_faq.html
Jody Goldberg put out a challenge for anyone to try and find a bug starting from 0.75 which some people already have taken advantage of. He bravely says: 'If you find a crash between now and the 1.0 release I'll buy you a beverage of your choice.' So now you know what you need to do to get a free drink! The team hopes to freeze the look of the application soon
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/gnumeric-0.76
Dirk-Jan Binnema announced the release of a paper he recently gave to the Dutch Unix User Group. It's a good introduction to the purpose of Bonobo, it's architecture and some potential future developments. Partnered with his other papers 'On Writing a Bonobo Control' and 'Writing Bonobo Components: the easy way' the topic area is nicely covered.
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/1005389385/index_html
http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/projecten/bonobo_controls/
http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/projecten/bonobo-gwizard/
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
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Most active hackers:
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Appologise for the lack of summaries for the last weeks but time has not been cooperative. As always we hope and work towards the goal of a steady schedule from here on.
If you have news that you think should be in the next GNOME Summary please send it across. Christian and I are always happy to receive news, comments or suggestions just email us at gnome-summary@gnome.org.
Until next time,
Christian and Steve