Jim Gettys, creator of the X Window System and GNOME Foundation board member has managed to secure a deal with the cool people at Bitstream to release a family of fonts under a free license. The deal will make it possible for all distributions to ship with a set of good fonts out of the box. A big thanks to Bitstream for this highly needed contribution. Press release below and image of the fonts below.
http://www.bitstream.com/categories/news/press/2003_bitstream/012203_gnome.htm
http://www.bitstream.com/categories/products/fonts/vera/index.html
Jim Lynch of ExtremeTech has done a nice collection of interviews at this years Linux World conference. Interviews with gnomes such as Dan Winship, David Logan, Luis Villa and Tim Ney. Other interesting news in this article is Suse's Holger Dyroff saing Suse will provide a fairer, more balanced approach to supporting both leading Linux desktops.
http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,3998,a=36078,00.asp
One of the groups that don't nearly get as much credit and spotlight as they deserve are our translators. So it is with great pleasure to give some credit to our new Mongolian translation team who has within a month taken GNOME from 0% to 100% percent translated into Mongolian. Link below to Christian Rose email with the news (it says 95% there, but the last 5% is in since :).
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-January/msg00541.html
In an earlier summary I mentioned the the new GTK+ 2 SVG stock icon theme, but I gave the wrong name for the CVS module. The CVS module containing this theme is called gnome-themes-extras. Also for those wondering if the SVG theme is slower than other themes, no it is not, in fact librsvg loads and renders SVG images faster than libpng load and renders png images. Screenshots below showing the Gorilla metatheme in action and the second shows parts of the BlueSphere svg icon theme.
http://www.linuxrising.com/files/gorilla.png
http://www.linuxrising.com/files/BlueSphere.png
Seems Suse aren't the only one beefing up their GNOME support. Patrick Volkerding and the Slackware team has updated the official GNOME 2 packages in Slackware to include the latest GNOME 2.2 snapshots and will of course include the official GNOME 2.2 packages when they are out later this week.
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=888&mode=&order=0&thold=1
This years LinuxWorld Expo was a good one for GNOME. Evolution won the Best Front Office Solution and the Mono Project won the award for Best Open Source Project. Congratulations to Ximian and everyone else involved.
http://www.ximian.com/about_us/press_center/press_releases/index.html?pr=lwe_2003_awards
It seems the adoption of GNOME technologies as the premier way of bringing properietary software to Linux continues. Ximian and Sun Microsystems announced Sun ONE Connector for Ximian Evolution, which connects Evolution the groupware functionality in the Sun One plattform. The connector will be free software, but the server software is not.
http://www.ximian.com/about_us/press_center/press_releases/index.html?pr=sun_one
Lost Marble announced a linux port using GTK+ of their Moho program. Moho creates professional-grade 2D vector-based cartoon animations and can export them to a number of formats (including video or Flash).
http://www.lostmarble.com/moho/
The GStreamer team announced version 0.5.2 of the GStreamer media framework this week. 0.5.2 is to be considered a release candidate in preparation for the 0.6.0 release which will be a long term supported stable release series of GStreamer. Most GStreamer based applications like nautilus-media, gnome-media and rhythmbox is already updated in CVS to support running under both 0.6.x and the new development series, 0.7.x.
Rodney Dawes is on a crusade to make the xchat2 gui integrate better with GNOME. To accomplish this is he working on a patch (to be submitted to xchat maintainers) to get xchat to start using more standard widgets like proper stock icon arrows. The end result is a much more smooth looking xchat2 experience. Check out links to screenshot and patch.
http://primates.ximian.com/~dobey/xchat2-pretty-arrows-no-channel-button.png
http://elysium-project.sourceforge.net/xchat-1.9.8-fixes.patch
The Sun documentation team have updated a whole bunch of Help manuals and user guides for the GNOME 2.2 desktop. See the following mail for a full list ot the impressive contributions from this small but hard-working team.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2003-January/msg00122.html
Edd Dumbill, our own GNOME Bluetooth integrator, is chairing the Applications Track at this years O'Reilly Open Source Convention. If you are working on a application for GNOME and Unix and are willing to give a presentation about it contact Edd and he can probably help you out. See the page Edd put togheter for details.
http://usefulinc.com/oscon/2003/
Shiman Associates announced the first release of the MAS mediaserver this week. MAS is meant to the the sound and video companion to X Windows offering network transparent media support. For GNOME MAS is especially interesting as a potential replacement for the aging ESD soundserver. The MAS team has already made many nice GTK+ 2.0 applications to demonstrate the capabilities of MAS.
http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net/
http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net/mas_screenshot.html
Damien Sandras and the rest of the GNOME Meeting hackers have released version 0.96 of the premies Unix video conferencing application. Many improvements including support for a soon to be released PC-to-Phone calling service. Links below to GNOME Meeting homepage and screenshots section.
http://www.gnomemeeting.org/index.php?rub=4&pos=0
PHP is one of the most popular technologies out there for creating dynamic webpages. A new project has been started to ease the effort of webdevelopers when using this powerfull language, gphpedit. The project is already well underway and have made the first development release available. Check out the gphpedit homepage for more info.
We now have French, German, Hungarian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish - all the links below.
http://www.gynov.org/gnome-summary/gnome_summary.php4
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/
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
| Most active modules: | Most active hackers:
|
Currently open: 7875 (In the last week: New: 631, Resolved: 560, Difference: +71)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
| Module | Open Bugs | New/Opened in last week | Resolved in last week | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nautilus: | 728 | 79 | 71 | +8 |
| gtk+: | 490 | 24 | 46 | -22 |
| galeon: | 431 | 52 | 30 | +22 |
| gnome-vfs: | 256 | 2 | 8 | -6 |
| GIMP: | 230 | 14 | 14 | 0 |
| gnome-applets: | 207 | 19 | 23 | -4 |
| gnome-panel: | 163 | 45 | 38 | +7 |
| control-center: | 129 | 27 | 14 | +13 |
| gnome-core: | 109 | 11 | 9 | +2 |
| sawfish: | 105 | 2 | 1 | +1 |
| metacity: | 104 | 9 | 3 | +6 |
| libzvt: | 94 | 3 | 1 | +2 |
| medusa: | 92 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| balsa: | 86 | 11 | 4 | +7 |
| libgnomeui: | 75 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
| Bug Hunter | Bugs Resolved/Closed |
|---|---|
| newren@math.utah.edu: | 93 |
| aldug@astrolinux.com: | 51 |
| otaylor@redhat.com: | 32 |
| yaneti@declera.com: | 27 |
| andrew@sobala.net: | 21 |
| bordoley@msu.edu: | 16 |
| jdahlin@async.com.br: | 14 |
| dennis_cranston@yahoo.com: | 14 |
| rodrigo@gnome-db.org: | 12 |
| alexl@redhat.com: | 11 |
| tester@videotron.ca: | 10 |
| arvind.samptur@wipro.com: | 10 |
| dsandras@seconix.com: | 9 |
| hp@redhat.com: | 9 |
| hadess@hadess.net: | 9 |
For the first time on a long time did I mention some non-free software this time. Tried marking it clearly however so I hope everyone is content.
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
gnome-summary@gnome.org
Join the Friends of GNOME! http://www.gnome.org/friends