Rodrigo Moya mailed the desktop devel list to say that he is ressurecting the gnome-network package. gnome-network was a gnome module which contained some networking tools in early GNOME releases, but ended up in obscurity for various reasons. Anyway Rodrigo has now blown life back to it and have been porting some of the old code to GNOME2, dropping some cruft and adding some nice new additons. Rodrigo is not alone on this effort either, German Poo-Caaman~o has joined him and together they are making gnome-network sizzle. See below for original announcement and for some screenshots of gnome-netinfo one of many components in the gnome-network package. Hope to bring you screenshots of more components in future summaries.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00192.html
http://cronos.dci.ubiobio.cl/~gpoo/shots/gnome-netinfo/
For some time I thought vi was short for visually impaired, but no longer. Jason Hildebrand has been working on a set patches to make vim use gtk2. It still needs some better button icons, but hopefully Jason will have it using the GTK2 stock icons soon. Check out the link below for patch information and a screenshot.
http://www.opensky.ca/gnome-vim/
http://www.opensky.ca/gnome-vim/gvim-gtk2.0.png
Red Hat is togheter with Debian the clear leader among Linux developers, and thanks Joel Barrios we now have a nice repository of updated RPMS of GNOME 2 for our favourite distribution. Check out the story on gnomedesktop for the details.
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=795&mode=&order=0
Olivier Sessink announced the first GTK2 based release of Bluefish this week. Bluefish is for those who haven't been able to use it the premier web editing tool for Unix, and having tried it I must say that the GTK2 version is much nicer than the old GTK1 version. Bluefish supports PHP, HTML, XML and more. And the new version even tried to comply with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. Goed spul, Olivier!
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/download.php
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-December/msg00040.html
There is a nice article on IBM DeveloperWorks about SashXB the cross plattform development environment for use on Windows and GNOME. If you are among those who have always been curios about SashXB this is a good chance to learn more. Thanks to IBM for the continued support of GNOME.
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sashxb/?t=gr,lnxw02=sashXB
The Mono team is still charging ahead and could this week announce that programing towards Mono with Basic is starting to work. A nice screensthoot of a GTK# Hello World made in Basic is shown in screenshot below. Another interesting development is the start of a GNOME C# programming tutorial by Martin Willemoes. The Mono revolution is coming soon to a place near you.
http://www.go-mono.org/images/gtk-vb.png
http://go-mono.com/gnometutorial/
Bastien Nocera, the hacker known to be the best thing that has moved from France to United Kingdom since William the Conqueror, has made us another nice little gift. He mailed the GNOME-multimedia this week with his code to implement a nice CD-device selection. The code was well recieved and has been put into nautilus-cdburner, Totem and Marlin already. Due to the current feature freeze for GNOME 2.2 it will not be added to the tools in the GNOME Media and GNOME Applets packages before after the GNOME 2.2 release. Links below to Bastiens announcement, a screenshot of Totem using the device chooser and a screenshot of Marlin using the device chooser
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-multimedia/2002-December/msg00005.html
http://www.hadess.net/files/shots/07-12-2002.1.png
http://marlin.sourceforge.net/marlin-doing-stuff.png
There has been some shuffling going on in the world of GNOME2 web browsers over the last month. The dust is now settling and it seems things are moving ahead again. Philip Langdale, new maintainer of Galeon, announced a sizling hot 1.3.1 release of Galeon. With Philip at the helm Galeon2 will more resemble Galeon1 in terms of width of functionality and configurability, something I know many Galeon fans will appreciate. Marco Pesenti Gritti has moved on and started the Epiphany browser project on mozdev.org, which will proceed with the goal of making a browser which is as easy to use as possible, without any options and settings that are not considered critical.
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1400008&forum_id=6200
Trying to establish a linux presence on the desktop in a workplace dominated by Windows clients can be hard. Luckily more and more tools to make that transition easier are becoming available. A really nice addition to our toolset this week came from Erick Woods who made a new release of tsclient a Window Terminal Server client for GNOME. I recommend everyone to take a look at this tool and the nice screenshots on the tsclient homepage.
http://www.gnomepro.com/tsclient/
Damien Sandras continues to draw wide acclaim for gnomemeeting. This time it is Linux Journal who posts an article about everyones favourite video conferencing application. Be sure to check out what they have to say, and also make sure to check out the gnomemeeting homepage to see what is happening.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6376
The GStreamer team released their 0.5.0 release this week. This release contains many important fixes, especially in the portability compartment. This release was also changed to make parallel installs possible to allow us to deliver an API stable 0.6.0 release series for GNOME 2.2.x, yet continue developing towards GStreamer 1.0 in parallel.
As many of you know we have struggled with threading issues in GStreamer. Well GStreamer has a new scheduler now that does not use cothreads, called opt, created by Wim Taymans. This scheduler is a little more complex as it has to schedule elements recursively and element errors are harder to handle. Plugins probably have to be updated to handle the new error recovery mecahnisms imposed by this scheduler. The new scheduler theoretically has higher latency for some pipelines, but for most pipelines it's much faster, in fact scheduling overhead is (when optimally tuned) twice as low as the current best scheduler. At the time of writing this complex pipeline manipulations at runtime are not very well tested yet with this new scheduler, but for simple things like gst-player and Rhythmbox it should be able to function well.
Work will continue however to both give us a well working cothread scheduler and also give us gthread based scheduler as different scenarios have different needs.
Ronald Bultje and Thomas Vander Stichele is also hard at work making sure the next release of GStreamer will have a very nice plugin based on ffmpeg, making all ffmpeg supported media formats and codecs available for GStreamer applications. This is done by including a copy of the ffmpeg code inside GStreamer which means we will be ablet to support a wide range of new formats which fewer dependencies.
Alp Toker also got around to updating our information about the GStreamer .net bindings (yes, I said .net and not C# as the bindings also cover vb.net now.). Also are information about his two nice applications made with these MMP and Phonic.
http://www.gstreamer.net/bindings/csharp/
And finally the GStreamer team is commited to trying to help out in a wide range of scenarios. So to make sure things keep on streaming in your home and ensure that small applets (with inheritance) appear nine months after Christmas, the GStringer got developed.
http://www.cafeshops.com/cp/prod.aspx?p=gstreamer.4177706
Mono continues to build mindshare this week with Miguel de Icaza and Mono being profile in Buisiness 2.0. Always nice to get some maintstream focus on our people and what we do. Keep up the fantastic work Miguel.
http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,45454,FF.html
Linux and Main has a nice interview with John Perr, vice president of marketing at Ximian, Inc. Topics discussed include how Ximian is managing to leverage their nice Red Carpet tool to get those corporate accounts we want. Interesting article with someone who looks at things from another point of view than a hacker.
http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=295
Implementing large scale deployments of software is always a challenge. To make life easier for sysadmins the GNOME documenation team has begun writing a GNOME2 sysadmin Guide. The document currently contain 2 chapters one detailing GNOME 2 wonderfull GConf architecture from a sysadmin viewpoint and the second contains information about our menu system. Interesting read even for developers I would think.
http://www.gnome.org/learn/admin-guide/2.0/
There was a new release of the Configurator for GNOME this week. It has gotten a lot nicer with the latest release which uses gconf and tries to work more like a normal capplet. The only thing people need to do now is mail Mads Villadsen and request that a option for their favourite missing configurability is added to Configurator for GNOME :).
http://www.daimi.au.dk/~maxx/maxximum-linux.html
http://art.gnome.org/images/screenshots/COG-Shot.png
I came across the Luminance desktop a few days ago. It is an alternative desktop based on GNOME 2 development libraries. It is aimed especially at the K-12 educational environment, but other might find it to their liking to. Togheter with base GNOME and XFCE4 I guess this gives us three desktop alternatives in the GTK2 world, so hopefully we should now have a flavour for everyones liking.
http://luminance.sourceforge.net/index.php
We now have French, German, Hungarian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish - all the links below.
http://www.gynov.org/gnome-summary/gnome_summary.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: 7468 (In the last week: New: 600, Resolved: 745, Difference: -145)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
| Module | Open Bugs | New/Opened in last week | Resolved in last week | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nautilus: | 685 | 36 | 33 | +3 |
| gtk+: | 502 | 23 | 49 | -26 |
| galeon: | 399 | 69 | 141 | -72 |
| gnome-vfs: | 273 | 8 | 8 | 0 |
| GIMP: | 258 | 10 | 29 | -19 |
| gnome-applets: | 175 | 18 | 12 | +6 |
| gnome-panel: | 167 | 43 | 32 | +11 |
| control-center: | 128 | 24 | 12 | +12 |
| gnome-core: | 100 | 6 | 17 | -11 |
| libzvt: | 93 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| medusa: | 92 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| sawfish: | 87 | 5 | 6 | -1 |
| Gnumeric: | 80 | 7 | 4 | +3 |
| dia: | 80 | 7 | 17 | -10 |
| metacity: | 75 | 8 | 9 | -1 |
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
| Bug Hunter | Bugs Resolved/Closed |
|---|---|
| yaneti@declera.com: | 127 |
| dkennedy@tinytoad.com: | 68 |
| newren@math.utah.edu: | 53 |
| aldug@astrolinux.com: | 49 |
| otaylor@redhat.com: | 45 |
| sven@gimp.org: | 22 |
| louie@ximian.com: | 17 |
| charles@rebelbase.com: | 15 |
| thomas@urgent.rug.ac.be: | 15 |
| kmaraas@gnome.org: | 15 |
| padraig.obriain@sun.com: | 15 |
| oleevye@wanadoo.fr: | 15 |
| chris@rebelbase.com: | 14 |
| maggi@athena.polito.it: | 14 |
| hans@breuer.org: | 10 |
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
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Most active hackers:
|
Another two weeks filled with lots of nice action. The GNOME2 application portfolio is really starting to fill out as more and more application developers either have released or are releasing GNOME 2 versions of their applications. Be back in 7 or 14 :)
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
gnome-summary@gnome.org