In preparation for the upcoming GNOME 2.0 Desktop, Havoc Pennington put up a small paper outlining what new features will be most easily visible to users.Lots of things to look forward to, and with the first desktop alpha release out you can even test it yourself :).
http://www106.pair.com/rhp/gnome-2-new.html
The Abiword hackers are busy tracking down bugs in preparation for their 1.0 release. The first release in their beta cycle 0.99.1 is already out and more are to folow soon. Planning is already underway for the post 1.0 releases which will add such things as table support, making bidirectional text support part of the default build and adding support for bonobo under Unix and dcom under windows. Discussion is also being done about wether to adopt the Open Office XML format for post 1.0 releases as the default Abiword fileformat. Of course file interchange would already be easy if the Open Office hackers actually had read the rich text format specification instead of fabricating their own weird version of the format. Two new weekly newsletters have also come out recently. Jesper Skov also announced that Red Hat is now sponsoring his writing of the Abiword Weekly News which means he are allowed to do them during workhours. Big thanks to Red Hat for continuing to be such a cool company.
http://www.abisource.com/information/news/2001/awn75.phtml
http://www.abisource.com/information/news/2001/awn76.phtml
After some delays caused by some administrative hurdles the GNOME webteam is once again pushing the new GNOME website forward. Steve Hall has put up these nice looking prototypes for viewing. The final technical setup for the new website is not completly set in stone yet, but the layout of the pages is going to be at least very similar to what you see here.
http://www.mindspring.com/~digitect/gnome/v2/ia-2-0-2-user.html
http://www.mindspring.com/~digitect/gnome/v2/ia-2-0-3-search02.html
http://www.mindspring.com/~digitect/gnome/v2/ia-2-0-2-foundation.html
http://www.mindspring.com/~digitect/gnome/v2/ia-2-0-2-developer.html
The GNOME 2.0 release team announced the first desktop alpha this week and the race towards having GNOME 2.0 ready for mass consumption is on. Jeff Waugh posted some release notes on Gnotices which you find at the top link below, there is also a link to the GNOME 2.0 desktop alpha packages. Jeff also pointed us to some nice statistics on the desktop alpha. It seems we have had over 65 thousand downloads of the desktop alpha components and over 58 gigabytes of tarballs transferred from ftp.gnome.org via rsync, ftp and http. That is a rather nice number I think, especially considering that it is an alpha release and that a lot of people got it from one of the mirrors or directly from CVS. Click on the third link for more statistics.
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/1011293794/index_html
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/pre-gnome2/releases/gnome-2.0-desktop-alpha/
http://www.acc.umu.se/technical/statistics/ftp/gnome.html.en.
Robert Laing has made a really nice tutorial on how to write GNOME applications using Glade and Python. Python is considered a very good language for rapidly developing applications and also a very good language to start out with. So get with the Python groove.
http://www.icon.co.za/~zapr/Project1.html
Owen Taylor announced that he had updated the gtk-engines package to work with the GNOME 2.0 Desktop. The pixbuf engine should even be mostly compatible with gtk1.2 pixbuf themes so the number of themes available should be rather big from the outset. Seth Nickell have on his side updated the popular Crux theme to GTK+ 2.0. Below you find Owen's announcement of the gtk-engines port. A link to a screenshot of Procman, the new process viewer using a pixbuf theme, and last but not least a link to Seth's screenshots of his GNOME 2.0 Crux desktop. On this desktop you also see the new background image setting capplet. You probably notice the lack of ok/apply buttons on this which due to the new GNOME 2.0 UI guidelines which states that instant apply windows shouldn't have such. A small sign that the look and feel of GNOME 2 will probably end up being quite different and more coherent that GNOME 1.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-January/msg00399.html
http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/gtk/lots-of-alpha.png
http://www.stanford.edu/~snickell/crux-gtk2.png
Wanted to talk about GNOME in your own language or wanting to discuss running GNOME on your particular system? Well, there are actually quite a lot of mailing lists on gnome.org which targets specific languages or systems. For instance we have the gnome-de,gnome-no and gnome-turk which are for discussing issues related to GNOME in German, Norwegian and Turkish. Or we have mailing-lists like gnome-redhat-list and gnome-freebsd which discuss using GNOME on those particular systems. Or we have a list like gnome-cyr which discusses issues related to running GNOME and using the Cyrrilic alphabet. If you are interested in these or other mailinglists you should take a look at the link below. You can also probably find mailinglists for your language on your national GNOME website.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/
Want to do a presentation during GUADEC 3? Well you better start moving since the deadline for submitting the first abstract is the 25th of January. And remember that this is not high-school so you can turn in your paper before the last minute (except the GStreamer abstract that I am doing cause that is much harder to write than the other abstracts people are doing).
As always we have translations of the GNOME summaries available. So linked below are French translation, Spanish translation and Hungarian translation. If there are other translations available please let us know.
http://www.gynov.org/news/index.php4
http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/
http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
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Slightly delayed summary this week due to me and my choosen journaling filesystem becoming mortal enemies, but I am now back on top with a freshly installed ext2 filesystem and 2 months of mail lost to oblivion. As always don't hesitate to send us submissions for things you want mentioned in the summaries as long as it doesn't include journaling filesystems.
Christian
gnome-summary@gnome.org