The future is scaleable vector graphics and GNOME has long been on the forefront in adopting the w3c SVG specification for desktop use with our support for SVG icons in Nautilus and the scaleable Gorilla SVG icon theme. Last week I reported that Dominic Lachowicz made a SVG plugin for Abiword. Well Dom is not resting on his laurels. He is now co-maintainer of the librsvg SVG rendering library and have been greatly improving its capabilities of the last weeks. He has also checked in the code for a SVG gtk-engine. This works much like the pixmap gtk-engine that so many themes for Gtk+ already, but it takes SVG files for input instead. The opportunities that this will offer theme creators are mind bogling and Steve Jobs and Apple should start trembling as MacOS X days as the prettiest desktop are numbered. There SVG theme is already working even if there are a few features still missing that Dom is working on. We can already feature this little screenshot from Dom showing his selfmade in 3 minutes SVG theme :). Hopefully a graphics artist will take pity and make something that truly shows this new theme engine off.
http://www.abisource.com/~dom/svg_theme.png
While many users hails the Metacity windowmanager for its ease of use, many power users find its capabilities to limiting after getting spoilt with the extreme configurability of Sawfish. Unfortunatly Sawfish seemed to be mostly unmaintained for a long time. Well those times seems to now be over. Sawfish creator and maintainer John Harper is back in action and is cleaning out bugs like a white tornado. This week he went straight to the top of the Bugzilla statistics with 85 bugs closed. So all Sawfish fans out there, get ready for a sparkling release of Sawfish soon.
http://sawfish.sourceforge.net
Gnomedesktop.org relayed the news of a new release of Workrave for GNOME 2. Workrave is a program that assists in the recovery and prevention of repetitive strain injury (RSI). I know that some of the GNOME hackers have had problems with this in the past, so if you think you could be in the risk zone for RSI, be sure to download and run Workrave, link below.
http://workrave.sourceforge.net
The GStreamer-Player. A media-player using the GStreamer framework had is first release as a standalone application last week. Tons of bugfixes and new features including improved fullscreen support, a nautilus view, better error handling and more. Check out the release notes for the full story.
http://www.gstreamer.net/releases/gst-player/0.4.1/
The GNOME FTP site has a new directory layout, which has been planned for and under discussion for some time. It's much more scalable than the previous layout, with a central location for all tarballs, and simplified release directories. Many thanks to Tomas Ogren for his assistance with the migration, and his ongoing support with ftp.gnome.org, which is hosted in Sweden. We have three links below, the first is for maintainers who will be interested in the simplified install-module, the second is a news item for user users who will be interested in the new RSS feed, which shows the ten most recently updated modules on the ftp site. And last but not least everyone should see the README file to understand the basics of the new structure.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers-readonly/2002-September/msg00213.html
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/LATEST.xml
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/README
Is it a angel? Is it a smurf under the lawnmover? No, it is art.gnome.org! The most anticipated website in the history of the GNOME project is now publicly available. So if you want to learn how to make your GNOME desktop look so incredibly cool that your friends using lesser desktops, from Redmond or worse, runs home crying with a nosebleed, well now you can. Thanks to Alex Duggan, Steve Fox ,Thomas Wood and especially mr. Art himeself, Roman Beigelbeck for this wonderfull site.
James Willcox, who you remember from last week for his cool recent-files patch to the GNOME menu (it is now approved and will be commited to CVS in the nearest future), seem to like it in the spotlight as he is back this week with another cool piece of code. The emblems feature of Nautilus has always been popular, and now accessing and applying emblems will be even easier. James have made a patch which adds a emblem bonbob-component to your sidebar. So check out the announcement mail and screenshot, and remember to give James Willcox (aka Snorp on IRC) a pat on the back when you see him online.
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwillcox/files/screenshots/nautilus-emblem-sidebar.png
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2002-September/msg00207.html
Seems Linux Mandrake is the first of the big distributions to ship with GNOME 2. Mandrake 9 is out featuring the fastest, the most accessible, the most useable and the coolest desktop ever seen, GNOME 2. Thanks to all the Mandrake hackers for their great work, especially thanks to Frédéric Crozat for his non-relenting effort to make sure Mandrake user have the best GNOME experience possible. Also thanks to Gaël Duval for making GNOME a priority at Mandrake.
http://pst.mandrakesoft.com/products/90/
Bastien Nocera released a new version of ACME this week. ACME for those of you who hasn't tried it yet is a nice little daemon and GNOME 2 capplet that lets you easily configure those special keys on your keyboard. This include keys for adjusting sound volume, or application buttins like email, finance, seeking etc. More improvements are underway and the plan is make sure applications such as Rhythmbox, Totem and Gstreamer-Player are able to be controled by your multimedia keyboard keys.
http://www.hadess.net/misc-code.php3
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-September/msg00060.html
New translation this week as German joins the family of translated GNOME Summaries. So if German is your favourite language be sure to subscribe to the mailing list they set up to send out the weekly GNOME summary in German. We now have French, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Korean and Portuguese - all the links below.
http://www.gynov.org/news/index.php4
http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/
http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/
http://developer.gnome.or.kr/news/
http://debian-br.cipsga.org.br/resumo-gnome/
http://www.gnome-de.org/projekte/listen/#news@gnome-de.org
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
|
Most active hackers:
|
Currently open: 7704 (In the last week: New: 641, Resolved: 626, Difference: +15)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
| Module | Open Bugs | New/Opened in last week | Resolved in last week | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nautilus: | 818 | 35 | 23 | +12 |
| gtk+: | 582 | 33 | 72 | -39 |
| galeon: | 326 | 110 | 89 | +21 |
| gnome-vfs: | 295 | 1 | 4 | -3 |
| GIMP: | 280 | 11 | 3 | +8 |
| gnome-applets: | 226 | 31 | 10 | +21 |
| gnome-core: | 159 | 28 | 0 | +28 |
| gnome-panel: | 155 | 56 | 44 | +12 |
| control-center: | 149 | 25 | 6 | +19 |
| sawfish: | 112 | 3 | 84 | -81 |
| gnome-pilot: | 105 | 8 | 0 | +8 |
| balsa: | 96 | 13 | 24 | -11 |
| medusa: | 94 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| glib: | 84 | 0 | 3 | -3 |
| GnuCash: | 84 | 11 | 4 | +7 |
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
| Bug Hunter | Bugs Resolved/Closed |
|---|---|
| jsh@pixelslut.com: | 85 |
| hp@redhat.com: | 78 |
| yaneti@declera.com: | 75 |
| otaylor@redhat.com: | 48 |
| chbm@chbm.nu: | 36 |
| mark@skynet.ie: | 35 |
| daniel@veillard.com: | 33 |
| shane.oconnor@ireland.sun.com: | 14 |
| ashok.venkiteswaran@wipro.com: | 13 |
| tvv@sparc.spb.su: | 13 |
| kmaraas@gnome.org: | 13 |
| jody@gnome.org: | 12 |
| cyrille@chepelov.org: | 12 |
| anand.subra@wipro.com: | 9 |
| bordoley@msu.edu: | 9 |
Seems I had forgotten to update the date field on the last 3-4 GNOME Weekly news so they all showed to be from august. If you missed some of them due to that be sure to check them out in the Summary archive at developer.gnome.org
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
gnome-summary@gnome.org