GUADEC III was officially announced to the world this week. GUADEC is an annual event for users and developers of GNOME to get together and discuss what is happening with the desktop. This year it is being held in Seville Spain between April 4th and Apil 6th - that is just over 2 months away. My experience of GUADEC has been that it is always great fun, you get to meet lots of hackers you didn't know and it's the fastest way to really understand what is going on - not to be missed! For more information see this announcement that was sent out.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-January/msg00055.html
Just when you thought all attention was on the GNOME 2.0 plattform, we keep coming back to suprise you. The GNOME 1.4.1 RC1 is the latest version of the stable series of the desktop. Kjartan Maraas has put some fine work into this release making sure that all the latest bugfixes and optimisations are included - including the famous transluscent panel. The really important effect of this release is that GNOME 2.0 and this release can be installed in parallel. Finally rumour has it that Evolution will also be included in the new Fifth Toe packages.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-February/msg00008.html
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-February/msg00008.html
Jeff Waugh announced the latest alpha and there's lots of traffic across the lists as hackers hunt those bugs. Lots of work seems to be going into porting applications across with plenty still to be done but progress seems to be quite fast. For those on Solaris Peter Lazlo announced that he has made packages available for the recent Alpha 1 release. Igor Popik emailed into the desktop devel list to tell of slackware packages for the GNOME 2.0 Alpha 2 release. So nows the time to try them all out!
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-January/msg00061.html
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-February/msg00070.html
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002-January/msg00305.html
Jeff Waugh in a fit of hyperactiveness also released his build of GNOME Alpha 2. This distribution is based on the GAR build system which will build from source the entire GNOME setup. If you'd like to have a go with the new desktop and want the most optimised build possible without the hassle of CVS then this could be just the thing for you.
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/garnome/
There has been rumours flying in the GNOME community lately about a game that will change the way you think of your desktop forever. Up to this point this game has been considered just another Urban Legend by the summary editors, but no more. We recieved the following screenshot showing this game called GEGL invaders in action from an anonymous source. Beware, just seeing the screenshot can have lasting effects on your psyche.
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/images/iain-desktop.png
This recent interview by Miguel has generated some hysteria. I was planning to write a little something here in the summary to calm those who wonder if GNOME will switch from C to C# tommorow or similar nonsense, but I think this quote from veteran GNOME hacker Elliot Lee, as he reponds to a question what the GNOME developers thinks of the interview sums it up in a nice way:
It really isn't any more relevant what the GNOME developers think than what Miguel thinks - when the stuff is finished, people will make their individual choices to use or not to use it. Until then, all this speculation and dirt digging just turns the open source development process into a soap opera...
So with those words of wisdom in mind here is the link to the now famed interview and also a link to a statement from Havoc Pennington that clarifies some of the issues being fabled about.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23919.html
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/2002-February/msg00028.html
As you might have seen this week some biologists thinks we have reached the end stop of Evolution. Well the Evolution Groupware team made a new release this week to prove them wrong. This was mainly a bugfix release, so even if no more bugs are fixed in humanity the same is not true for our favourite mailer at least.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-February/msg00002.html
In the never ending series called 'we love Galeon' LinuxOrbit this week chimes in with their take.on the worlds most loved browser. I think we can call the browser wars over and declare Pax Galeon.
When Wim Taymans of GStreamer heard that there would be no mention of GStreamer in this weeks Summary he almost panicked. To calm him down I said that if he did something really cool I would reconsider and mention GStreamer. So in order to make sure GStreamer got 15 minutes of fame this week too Wim Taymans added plugins for Ogg Tarkin encoding and decoding to GStreamer. This means that GStreamer can now be used to create and view videos using this new and experimental video format from the people who brought us Ogg Vorbis. Fantastic work as always Wim.
With the classic theme in Mozilla, native widgets are now available. This means that if you where unhappy with the mozilla look scrollbars in Galeon those days are now over. Anders Carlson provided us with this beatiful screenshot of Mozilla using a outstanding GTK+ theme.
http://hadjaha.gimp.org/~andersca/pics/mozilla.png
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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Here we are again with a weekly GNOME summary. We missed last week but what is a week compared to the age of the universe anyway. For those who wonder the CVS statistics are for the period of 26th of January to 2nd of February. As always please send us stories for the summaries (this especially includes the Gnome-db and Gnucash teams :)
Christian and Steve
gnome-summary@gnome.org