Category: General

“The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the Beta Release of Ubuntu 6.10 – codenamed “Edgy Eft”, you can read the details on the announce mail.

Don’t hesitate to open a bug on launchpad if you face any issue with it, your feedback is welcome. We had a good bug day wednesday with active people on launchpad and #ubuntu-bugs, thanks to everybody who participated! If you want to give a hand to make edgy rocking don’t hesitate to join, we will likely have bug days every week and most of the distribution team will focus on bug triage and fixing until edgy

Thanks to the incredible work done by Martin Pitt and to Adam Conrad (who did the buildd changes required), Ubuntu edgy is now getting debug symbols for all the packages. You can read the announce for details on the topic.

Easy steps to try it:

add “deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~pitti/ddebs edgy main universe” to your /etc/apt/sources.list

run “sudo apt-get update” (or update your packages index with your preferred tool)

profit! (install <package>-dbgsym for whatever package you want.)

The tools are running since yesterday only so not a lot of packages are available from it right now but it’s only a matter to rebuild packages, the GNOME stack should be mostly rebuilt with GNOME 2.16.1 by example

Happy bug triage to everybody and don’t forget to hug Martin and Adam for their work 😉

Congrats to everybody who worked on the new GNOME 2.16!

If you are an Ubuntu user the new version is already available to edgy, just update and let we know how it works for you. Feel free to report your issues on launchpad (or on the GNOME bugzilla if you are confident you face an upstream bug). If you are not an Ubuntu user that might be a good occasion to give a try to it and to the new GNOME too 😉

Speaking about bugs and desktop, people wanting to give a hand (to triage and forward bugs by example), or simply discuss about the desktop, are welcome to join the Ubuntu Desktop Team!

Some news of GNOME to Ubuntu:

* After the previous blog discussion about Ubuntu not using the GTK icon cache, dholbach pinged me saying he wrote the small build changes required to automatically update the cache for most of the GNOME packages on Ubuntu. The issue was the number of rebuilds rather than the lack of tools, but since he started on it we decided to go with the rebuild way just before GNOME 2.14.1. Daniel uploaded his changes and made a list of packages to build on the wik., and since we rebuilt most of GNOME for the new version, now Ubuntu does use the GTK icon cache too!

* GNOME 2.14.1 has been uploaded to dapper this week and will be the version used for the dapper beta CD next week. The Ubuntu Desktop Team still gets load of bugs, thank you for the bugsquad people who work with us to keep up with them, the dapper desktop will rock! The beta CD that will be rolled next week is probably a good occasion for you to play with dapper if you had planned to do so. There is still some bugs that would be nice to fix before dapper, so if you want to participate feel free to send patches or join the discussions on IRC or on the desktop-list by example

* A new rhythmbox tarball (0.9.4) has been rolled today. We have no plan to ship it with dapper for the moment but I’ve uploaded a package (source and i386) on http://people.ubuntu.com/~seb128/deb (works as an apt source too) for those who want to play with the new version (there are also some gaim 2.0beta3 packages at the same place)

According to BenM, Ubuntu not using the GTK icon cache is a packaging bug. That is just wrong. The icon cache is used for the different themes, “just” not for “gnome” nor “hicolor”. Why not using it for them? Because the Debian GNOME maintainers consider the cache implementation as bugged at the moment. That has been discussed upstream and marked as NOTABUG.

The issue is that if your package doesn’t “touch theme_dir” the cache just “masks the icon”. According to the comment from dholbach, Ubuntu Dapper has 346 packages that would require to be updated for that. Knowing that some applications don’t like to have their icons “not installed” and just crash, that can quickly start beeing annoying for an user (you can discuss that the app should not have an issue with that, the fact is many of them do)

So from the moment you generate the icon cache from one package, you “break” the 345 other distribution packages until they are updated, and probably other packages distributed upstream, etc. If an user install any of those packages not updated or not shipped by the distribution itself he’s likely to face a stability issue.

The Debian GNOME maintainers have decided it would be better to make that cache robust before using it. I think it would be reasonable to retry without the cache when the icon is not found from the cache (it would only mean being slower for non-updated packages or applications instead of facing bugs because the application expects to be correctly installed)

BenM, you ask what you can make sure than every distro take advantage of the performance work? Maybe upstream listening to them, when they say they will not use the current implementation, instead of rejection the discussion as NOTABUG would be a first step. Making the icon cache robust would be better for sure

According to the wiki page updates, the GNOME Goal #1 fixed by Vincent is working nicely. One small issue though is the use of the g_option_context_new() description.
The description of parameter_string has been updated for that

At the moment people use different variants: “- Description”, “Description”, “[arg]”,”App Name”, “” … some coherence would be nice.

What about using “- Comment from .desktop” by example? Maybe using g_strdup_printf(“- %s”, …) to use the existant translations for the comment?

I decided that I should blog about Ubuntu/GNOME cools changes, so for this week:

Some packages update:

– glib/pango

– metacity (constraints changes, with edge resistance)

– gtk-engines (clearlooks using cairo, with nice animations)

– xchat-gnome (sets away status when gnome-screensaver runs, uses libnotify)

– packaged nautilus-actions

The menus have been reworked (simplification, MenusRevisited)

A GConf transition, following the Debian changes:

– a package split to fix the circular Depends issue.

– merge of the gconf directory trees for better performance,

– a new framework to easily set up defaults in Debian packages

An Ubuntu Desktop Team meeting

New cool stuff, the Ubuntu desktop team has been announced, thanks to Daniel for pushing on that and writting the announcement.

As described by the mail, some of the goals of the team:

* we will triage and fix bugs on both http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com and http://launchpad.net/malone/

* we will list new shiny desktop stuff we should have (no promise we’ll get any of them in for Breezy)

* stress-test our favourite desktop environment

* discuss and fix issues and bring some good hackers in, knowing how different parts of the desktop work and able to reply to some specific questions

* create a technical place/list with people having good knowledge about specific desktop parts

Feel free to join #ubuntu-desktop (freenode) if you have any question, are interested to do some work, want to chat about the cool stuff coming, …

A new cairo has been uploaded to Debian this week which means than the new GTK 2.7/pango 1.9 can be built now. I’ve uploaded packages of the current version to Debian experimental.

Note than firefox has some issues because gecko assumes than gtk uses pangoxft which is not true with cairo, you can workaround it by editing /usr/bin/firefox and not exporting MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO.

(you can use “deb http://people.ubuntu.com/~seb128/gtk ./” for Ubuntu packages)

Following GNOME 2.10.2, the new unstable version of GNOME (2.11.4) is here with a bunch of new and cool features:

* sound-juicer is a player too now

* gnome-vfs2′ hal code has been updated, now it’s possible to configure the kind of volume to put on your desktop with nautilus

* libwnck implements the “urgent” flag now, useful for gaim by example which can use it when a message arrive

* gnome-control-center ships a new “about-me” capplet

* nautilus uses the GTK bookmarks now (for both spatial and browser mode), which makes its place menu coherent with the panel. The list mode has been changed to a tree. The font issue with some zoom level has been fixed. It has also a new bookmarks’ sidebar similar to the GTK fileselector side panel.

* a lot of other changes, bug fixes, translations updates, …