Release 2.21.5 for gnome-control-center and gnome-settings-daemon are now ready for your testing pleasure. This is the first release of gnome-control-center depending on the standalone gnome-settings-daemon (which was previously part of gnome-control-center), which is also used by the new GDM.
Testing is largely needed, so please report bugs/suggestions/patches to either the gnomecc-list or Bugzilla.
In the last few days, we have been working on packaging PulseAudio for openSUSE Factory (what will be openSUSE 11.0), and here are the first results. This page contains instructions on how to run and test it, and Cyberorg‘s blog contains more information and screenshots.
This starts to mark the end of our beloved esound, although GNOME still needs some work, which is one of our next steps, helping upstream GNOME in fixing all the issues.
With the summit almost finished, here’s a quick summary of what we came up about control-center development for 2.22 and beyond.
Related to the discussion, and seeing all the icons that are in the systray, it would probably a good idea, now that there’s a discussion about a new panel, to have, in the new panel, separate systrays, each of which would be for specific categories (hardware, normal applications, temporary status, etc).
If anyone’s interested in participating in the discussion, please join the control-center mailing list and help us make it better.
Thanks to hack week, I’m being able to work on projects I’ve had for a long time on my TODO list. So, here’s what I’ve been doing:
And that’s all so far, nothing more to say apart from mentioning the little help I’ve been getting from the boys 
Photos on what they did last night to come later, I first have to clean the mess.
The Grupo de Programadores y Usuarios de Linux, based in the University of A Coruña, is organizing, from 23rd to 25th March 2007, the first joint GNOME/KDE meeting: GUADEMY, intended to bring together developers and users of both desktops and try to come with more and more collaboration ideas.
It is initially oriented to Spanish users and developers, but everyone is welcome.
The new control center shell (from Novell’s SLAB) is now on for GNOME 2.17.
As you can see in the dialog, it looks a bit ugly, not only because of the missing icons (my setup’s fault), but because there is only one category (“Preferences”). So, next step, categorize the capplets.
BTW, I couldn’t get CVSROOT/modules from GNOME CVS, so until I fix it, you’ll have to download by hand slab/libslab and put that libslab directory into gnome-control-center source tree.
With all the talk about the GNOME desktop integration lib, one of the things I had wrote down is the inclusion of notifications (proposed for Freedesktop.org) in GTK. This is something lots of desktop applications might take advantage of.
So, what do people think about it? There’s even a bug about it.
I have been doing a bad job on getting people interested in Atomato, mainly because of my lack of time for working on it. But now this is going to end, with the creation, yesterday, of the Atomato mailing list. If interested in the project, please subscribe, and if you sent me some mail in the last months about it, it would be great if you could resend it to the list once subscribed (if not, I’ll forward those mails to the list myself in a few days, once all interested people are subscribed).
Update: the web interface seems to not work at all, not even the admin interface, so the only way to subscribe to the list is to send a mail with the subject ‘subscribe’ to this address.
We have been discussing about the best way to reduce the overcrowded preferences menu, that is, the number of control center applets. The ideal solution, which we are discussing on the Control Center mailing list, is to have a new control center shell. More news on that soon.
The other things we discussed was about merging some of the applets, since some seem redundant. A good example is the keyboard capplets, which are 3!:
So this looked like the best candidate for the first merge, so after some discussion, two of them have been merged in the mockups below:
The a11y bits were not merged, mainly because the a11y guys seem to think it is better to keep it separated. And merging it with the already crowded keyboard preferences dialog seems a bad idea, given the a11y capplet has its own tabs, which would be inside the keyboard prefs capplet tab.
Any comments, suggestions, etc, please send it to the Control Center mailing list.
Being last week in Boston, for a Novell desktop team meeting, I met some people from SuSE, including Duncan MacVicar from Chile (hard to know he is from Chile with that name . Very nice guy, and while being KDE people, with lots of ideas and plans that mostly matched mine. Mainly, Duncan and I agreed in that KDE and GNOME should be seen as different frontends to the Linux Desktop, and this Linux Desktop should be a complete set of specifications, interfaces and shared storage data for both frontends. We talked about some things that could be shared, like addressbook and calendar data (and concurrent access to it) and Will Stephenson, another of the SuSE guys I met last week, told us about his plans to add an evolution-data-server backend for KDE, for live data sharing.
Things like Freedesktop.org should have more influence on both GNOME and KDE, so we should try to push for more specifications there. Once we have a shared infrastructure, 3rd party developers would choose one or the other based on the same reasons people choose Visual Studio/Java/Borland/.NET/etc to develop Windows applications now, and users would choose one or the other for whatever reason they feel like.
