Showing headlines posted by wogue

The point for having an upstream GNOME installation built from sources is if you are going to build an extension, a theme or a GTK App and take advantage of all the new features of next GNOME. However it is also useful if you want to help GNOME to get better by submitting bugs ..or it could be useful if you are just curious to see what’s coming next :)

The tool for building GNOME is nothing else than JHBuild.

What was known is that Gnome 3.8 will support a Gnome2-ish environment through some extensions. What wasn’t clear is if that option would be included in Gnome Control Center (similar to Fallback) or in Gnome Tweak Tool.

Neither will happen. Gnome “Classic” will start up a separate session, and that means we can choose if from Gnome Display Manager before we login in Gnome. In other words, Gnomers will pay lot of attention to it.

Gnome Disks (aka gnome-disk-utility) hasn’t even bump to version 3.7 but it has an impressive development and all credits go to David Zeuthen (on the left) which he is also senior maintainer at udisks.

There are already many new features like multiple-selections, the re-designed RAID creation and others, but it also very buggy at the moment.

Fedora 18 is a major upgrade from 17 and a pleasant surprise for its users. This is definitely the best Fedora release so far -even if beta-, it has a good and pure Gnome3 implementation, a new installer based in Gnome OS installer designs ..and is extremely fast! However Fedora is still not ready to get into a broader user base, mostly because it lacks a serious Software Center, it has bad support from 3rd party Apps, and proprietary software (mostly drivers) is hard to be installed.

I was very optimistic about the potential of Gnome3 since the beginning ..but I couldn’t never imagine all these things that are happening in 3.8. Gnome 3.8 is above any expectation and that has mostly to do with the refreshed Shell and Gnome Control Center we will get. If Gnome Shell 3.6 was a good release, Gnome Shell 3.8 will be more than amazing!

Gnome Shell 3.7.2 (and whole Gnome) released a few hours ago ..and what a release was this! It brings more than 20 visual enchantments -and more are ready to land- several annoying bug fixes, it gets more responsive and we also get the first major new feature, support remote search provider settings. This is taking place inside G-C-C and patches haven’t arrived yet in master branch, but I cheated a bit and applied them cause are awesome!

Mutter and Gnome Shell 3.8 will be port to use latest input X.org extensions XI2! Porting Mutter to XI2 is the prerequisite for enabling multitouch and gesture support in gnome-shell. It is also needed for triggering the message tray by downwards pressure, as it was designed to do.

It is uncertain if multitouch and gesture support will arrive in this cycle but the first step is done!

Wayland is the next big thing in Linux Desktop since ..the beginning? It is meant to work aside with the problematic X (with the tremendous amount of functionality) and eventually (in many years!) is gonna replace it. Few days ago Wayland released a 1.0 stable API and while GTK and Clutter have also been updated to support these changes, we have long way ahead of us to see a full Gnome support for Wayland.

very Detail Matters Round 2 is now open and aims to make Gnome 3.8 the most polished version yet. Don’t get fooled by “details”, this isn’t about details at all! This project is a really good opportunity to make a contribution to Gnome and as Allan Day says “If you fix just one bug, you can make a real difference to Gnome 3?. So, pick a bug, and get hacking!

Gnome Shell 3.7.1 release signifies the beginning of Gnome 3.8, scheduled for March, 27. Gnome 3.8 will be as much exciting as 3.6, with new Apps, better Notification Mechanics, better Cloud Support, a more solid GTK (sync/framing with Mutter) and all the typical improvements to the whole of Gnome software stack.

Gnome University is an effort from Christian Hergert to help people to learn C, involve with Gnome Programming and push the project further. I had referred how nice this project is, some time ago at its initial starting. So I will skip this. There are some cool updates I think is worth to mention, plus for those guys that missed the older post it would be a shame if they want to be part of it but they’re ignoring its existence.

Yesterday marked the release of Ubuntu 12.10, the latest version of the most popular Linux distribution. What’s interesting now is that GNOME and Ubuntu are back together after 18 months. The new Ubuntu GNOME remix version was released a few hours after the Unity version and we’ve got a full review of the distribution.

The YellowDog (Yum) package manager for Fedora will soon have an successor marked as the next Generation Yum using hawkey/libsolv (maintain by SUSE) for backend. DNF a Yum fork, promises better performance, easier bindings to other languages other than Python (Yum) and a clear package manager API. This will benefit PackageKit and therefore Gnome Software, at least in a Fedora installation.

Another cool feature seems that will soon land in Gnome. This time Gnome makes “RAID Creation” easy, a work of Red Hatter David Zeuthen. David (G+, blog) mostly hacks gnome-disk-utility and together with the UX team is responsible for the new options and design in Gnome Disks.

Gnome Files 3.6 is far from completed and is more like an experimental version of what is coming next, in 3.8. Overall, I think it is an improvement over 3.4 but this has to do in what way you’re using it.

Some things are done faster in new Files and some things are done slower. For common tasks? It is lot lot faster!

The 1.4 branch of KDE’s music player Amarok is admittedly the best music player that ever existed :) Unfortunately, the Amarok developers decided that it was too good to be true and they destroyed it with version 2.0, but Clementine did the trick by forking 1.4 and evolving into an even greater music player. Clementine uses Qt though, and we don’t prefer this toolkit in our system…so what about an Amarok 1.4 “clone” that uses GTK?

Recently a discussion in Gnome Mailing Lists took place about sync Files with OwnCloud. That might isn’t interesting to the most of us -besides who will abandon Google Drive, Ubuntu One, DropBox for a personal cloud storage service?

As I have set up lots of OwnCloud instances for companies that I work for, the answer is simple. Companies are way too interested for this, because OwnCloud offers the ultimate Open Source solution for storing and managing files.

As Fedora is one of the “pure Gnome” distributions, it is very possible that it concerns a large part of our readers so here are some good gaming news for you! Mumble RPMs can help you with the popular Humble Indie Bundle game collections that don’t include an rpm package, thus not integrating well under your distribution (not taking care of dependencies, not offering easy install/uninstall option etc).

Inkscape is a magnificent open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. It is used for many purposes like designing icons, textures, cartoons, graphics etc, but did you know that you can now print what you draw in Inkscape on 3D? Thanks to TinkerCAD you can!

Nowadays virtualization is for anyone and virtual machines run smoothly in every new hardware. However people seem to avoid it and there is an explanation. The “complicated” interfaces and the ignorance of the use-cases of virtualization. The possibilities of virtualization are endless and just one of them is to backup our files, databases and whatever else.