Since the last summary we have had new releases of both the stable 2.0 series and the new development 2.1 series. Lots of nice polish added to the 2.0 series and lots of nice new features added to the 2.1 series. One of my personal favourites in 2.1.3 for instance is ACME which is a nifty tool that allows you to configure all those extra keys that modern keyboards are equiped with, like multimedia keys. Check out the announcements on gnomedesktop.org to get the details on both releases.
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=782&mode=thread&order=0
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=786&mode=&order=0
Thanks to the help of our friends at Sun and IBM we have lately been able to get some really nice updates our documentation. First out was Sharon Snider of IBM who created the GNOME 2 Desktop Accessibility Guide. Next came the Sun GNOME Documentation Team who posted a new revision of the GNOME Desktop 2.0 User Guide. So you GNOME desktop is now better documented than ever. Thanks to IBM and Sun for these nice contributions in an area that often get neglected in free software.
http://www.gnome.org/learn/access-guide/2.0/
http://www.gnome.org/learn/users-guide/2.0/
Lauris Kaplinski has made a new release of everyones favourite vector drawing application. This one offers some very nice speed fixes to make Sodipodi much more responsive. Lauris has also merged the GNOME2 porting branch to head in CVS which means the GNOME 2 port is now under full development. Next release of Sodipodi will probably be GNOME 2 based.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-November/msg00095.html
http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/
Instant messaging applications have been a popular fixture of computing for some years now. GNOME has had some great clients available like Gaim, Gabber and GnomeICQ all of which are currently getting ported to GNOME2. There is a new Instant messaging application for GNOME2 available now called Gimli which looks nice, although still at an early stage. You find screenshots and download info at the Gimli homepage.
Last issue we mentioned the Bluetooth tools for GNOME being put togheter by Edd Dumbill. Well they have now had their first official development release and are available for testing. You find the GNOME bluetooth subsytem homepage and the nice phonemgr application at the links below. Be sure to check them out if you have bluetooth support for your computer.
http://usefulinc.com/software/gnome-bluetooth
http://usefulinc.com/software/phonemgr
In their effort to help their customers and partners migrate their systems to GNOME 2, in preparation for its inclusion as the official Sun Solaris Desktop, the Sun team has writen a short but useful article on how to integrate your applications into GNOME. This article could be usefull for anyone who wonders how practical issues like the GNOME menu etc. works.
http://soldc.sun.com/articles/integrating_gnome.html
Judging by a new story posted to the KDE newsite it seems the KDE developers are willing to work togheter with us to create a shared system for accessiblity support on Unix. This is really great news as it means GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla and Java will all use the same basic libraries for accessibility on Unix, which will make life much easier for those among us who need accessibility support to use their computer..
http://dot.kde.org/1038439306/
Our friends over in the Mozilla project released the 1.2 release of the Mozilla browser this week. Unfortunatly there turned out to be a dhtml bug in the release which caused them to pull it again. A 1.2.1 release is being rapidly put togheter which containts a fix for this. This release contains Christopher Blizzards xft support. The gtk2 support is not yet officially released, but it is commited to the head branch in Mozilla CVS.
Mark Finlay recently wrote and article which has gotten some widespread attention about avstracting the Linux Desktop from the File-System. An interesting read and it might even help you improve your own desktop usage.
http://evolvedoo.sourceforge.net/abstract/index.html
Efforts are underway to make burning of cdroms more easy. Alex Larsson has added a module to GNOME CVS called nautilus-cd-burner which aims to give you cdburning support from within Nautilus. No screenshots available yet, but we will keep you posted :)
http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&dir=nautilus-cd-burner
Salon ran an article about Abiword where developer Martin Sevior was featured. Martin is the person responsible for the table support in current development version of Abiword. He is also one of my favourite candiates in the GNOME Foundation election. If you haven't seen it already be sure to read the article in Salon.
http://salon.com/tech/col/leon/2002/11/15/abiword/index.html
Maintainer of Film-gimp Robin Rowe was inteviewed by desktop linux. It is a interesting interview where you can see a good example of free GTK software being widely used in Hollywood. Who knows maybe Film Gimp will help GNOME replace MacOS as the hollywood darling :)
http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT7096363910.html
Pango maintainer Owen Taylor managed to nail a long standing bug which has been a blemish on Arabic GNOME desktops. The bug caused rendering of Arabic menus to break if key accelerators was turned on so our Arabic translators had to turn it of. With this new patch Arabic menu rendering works well with accelerated keys so all Owen asks is that as many people as possible test the patch and report back so he can commit it CVS. You find a link to the bug below and a nice screenshot showing it in action from Hicham Amaoui.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83058
http://amaoui.free.fr/gnome2/images/accels.png
Jorn Baayen and the Rhythmbox team is currently redesigning the Rhythmbox GUI in order to make it work better with all the latest features added to Rhythmbox. Personally I think the new look is even cooler, but do see for yourself. Check out the link below for a screenshot and of course the Rhythmbox homepage.
http://people.nl.linux.org/~jorn/Files/oegadoega2.png
If you have ever played a guitar you probably know Ernie Ball Inc. What you probably didn't know is that they are running GNOME on their business desktops. Don't know about you, but reading about it was music to my ears. Check out link below for article at infoworld.com.
http://infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/11/27/021127hnerniball.xml?s=IDGNS
James Henstridge just put a neat little additon into GNOME CVS this weekend. It is a new module for gnome-vfs and Nautilus called fontilus which gives you a nice preview of fonts in Nautilus and an easy way to install them on your fontconfig based system. Check out screenshot below.
http://www.daa.com.au/~james/images/fontilus-thumb-jdub2.png
Thomas Vander Stichele has been working hard over the last few days to make sure the Nautilus media view components where ready for the GNOME 2.2 gui freeze date. Is effort has not gone by unrewarded and we can here bring you two screenshots showing where things are at. The first shows the new music view, the second the new media properties tab and the third shows the video thumbnailing (and also fontilus). The video play-on-hoover will not be ready for GNOME 2.2 and will have to wait for GNOME 2.4. In other GStreamer related news there are the sure sings of making it big, like even get patches to compile GStreamer on s390.
http://thomas.apestaart.org/download/screenshots/nautilus-media-view-7.png
http://thomas.apestaart.org/download/screenshots/nautilus-media-view-6.png
http://www.prettypeople.org/~iain/videos-fonts.png
A new year is soon upon us and with that many of our favourite conferences are once again coming around. Attending conferences is of course one of the best ways to get to know other members of the GNOME community for real, GUADEC of course being the most important one in this respect. But there are others conferences you probably do not want to miss especially if getting to GUADEC in Dublin this year will be troublesome for you.
First out is Linux.conf.au conference being held in Perth, Western Australia from January 22 to 25. Some of the core GNOME people attending this conference will be Jeff Waugh, Malcolm Tredinnick, Telsa and James Henstridge.
Another important conference is FOSDEM in Belgium. FOSDEM if happening on February 8 and 9. Core GNOME people attending this conference will be Bruno Coudion, Damien Sandras, Havoc Pennington, Hilaire Fernandes, Jacub Steiner, Michael Meeks, Owen Taylor, Thomas Vander Stichele and there are even rumours that I will be walking around there :)
We now have French, German, Hungarian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish - all the links below.
http://www.gynov.org/news/index.php4
http://www.gnome-de.org/projekte/listen/#news@gnome-de.org
http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/
http://developer.gnome.or.kr/news/
http://debian-br.cipsga.org.br/resumo-gnome/
http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/
Currently open: 7507 (In the last week: New: 608, Resolved: 600, Difference: +8)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
| Module | Open Bugs | New/Opened in last week | Resolved in last week | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nautilus: | 671 | 47 | 61 | -14 |
| gtk+: | 522 | 27 | 41 | -14 |
| galeon: | 389 | 57 | 45 | +12 |
| GIMP: | 286 | 13 | 7 | +6 |
| gnome-vfs: | 271 | 3 | 1 | +2 |
| gnome-applets: | 175 | 20 | 18 | +2 |
| gnome-panel: | 166 | 48 | 41 | +7 |
| control-center: | 112 | 22 | 20 | +2 |
| gnome-core: | 112 | 13 | 10 | +3 |
| medusa: | 92 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| sawfish: | 88 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| libzvt: | 88 | 1 | 2 | -1 |
| dia: | 87 | 7 | 13 | -6 |
| Gnumeric: | 85 | 15 | 6 | +9 |
| balsa: | 75 | 5 | 10 | -5 |
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
| Bug Hunter | Bugs Resolved/Closed |
|---|---|
| dkennedy@tinytoad.com: | 93 |
| newren@math.utah.edu: | 43 |
| paolo.bacch@tin.it: | 25 |
| otaylor@redhat.com: | 24 |
| yaneti@declera.com: | 21 |
| jfleck@inkstain.net: | 21 |
| aschwin.van.der.woude@creanor.com: | 20 |
| tester@videotron.ca: | 17 |
| andrew@sobala.net: | 15 |
| dsandras@seconix.com: | 15 |
| mark@skynet.ie: | 14 |
| lrclause@uiuc.edu: | 12 |
| hadess@hadess.net: | 11 |
| Uraeus@linuxrising.org: | 11 |
| kfv101@psu.edu: | 11 |
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
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Most active hackers:
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Sorry for the pause in summaries, but we got a lot of new orders at Oracle and I have been working very long days including weekends for the last weeks so the energy to do much except eat and sleep hasn't been there. Anyway seems things might at least calm down to something at least resembling a 8 hour workday, so now here is another summary from me. The news covers the whole period since the last summary, but the statistics are just for the most recent week.
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
gnome-summary@gnome.org