London LinuxWorld 2005

Many thanks to everyone who helped out this year at the GNOME stand at LinuxWorld London. It was great to see so many new people getting involved in promoting and demonstrating GNOME.

It was also great to see some of the other guys involved with GNOME come and say hello.
The OpenedHand guys were there. Matthew Allum was showing me the new Nokia 770, which looks very smart, as well as some other devices running GTK+ and other GNOME software. Ross Burton (Sound Juicer, Devil’s Pie) and Jorn Baayen (Muine, Rhythm Box) and the whole OpenedHand crew were there.

Daniel Viellard kindly donated a stack of Fedora CDs to the stand, as did the Ubuntu gang (with Ubuntu CDs), and some Novell guys even found some NLD evaluation CDs.

As for the GNOME LiveCDs we had printed, they were all gone before the end of the first day! (Many thanks to OpenAdvantage for those, plus the extra demo PC).

Alan Cox also came over to say hello, although I was chatting to a someone about GNOME at the time. I heard Michael Meeks was also there on the first day although I didn’t see him around.

This was also the first outing of the new GNOME event box, which was very successful. And to let anyone know who was standing around at the end of the expo, trying to figure out how it should get back to Reading, it was two taxis, one train journey, some general lugging about, and a couple of pints later that it was safely back home! Tomorrow it’s off to France, so I ought to say au revoir et bon voyage.

We have some GNOME t-shirts left over from the expo (unfortunately they only arrived on the second day), so if anyone in the UK wants to buy one of the official GNOME t-shirts, drop me an e-mail. They’re £10 each and I have one small left, and several medium, large and X-Large.

Also, if anyone is interested in getting involved with GNOME events in the UK, take a look at the website where there is information about the mailing, wiki and IRC channel.

2.12.1 & LinuxWorld

Just made a release of gnome-backgrounds-2.12.1, but it’s nothing exciting – just a few new and updated translations.

Calum made the release of gnome-themes-2.12.1, which includes one or two bug fixes I managed to get in, plus quite a few more translations too.

And if you’re going to be at LinuxWorld 2005 in London, be sure to come past the GNOME stand and say hello! We should have all sorts of things to show off, and we’ll have copies of the GNOME 2.12 Live CD to hand out. It’ll also be the first outing of the new GNOME Event Box!

gnome-uk mailing list is down

Just to let everyone on the gnome-uk mailing list, that the server that hosted the list died recently so the mailing list is not working at present. I have been informed that work is under way to get it going again as soon as possible.

I’ll take this opportunity to invite any other GNOME users in the UK to come and visit (and if possible, help out!) at the GNOME stand at LinuxWorld 2005 in London. If you’re going to be there, let us know on the wiki!

As for the mailing list, if you’re not already subscribed and would like to, then watch this space, as I’ll let everyone know once it is back up an running again.

Busy day

So busy yesterday, I didn’t even get time to write a blog entry as planned, so here it is, a day late.

Made a release of gtk-engines, now at version 2.6.5. There are about half a dozen or so bug fixes since the last release. On a related note, Cairo version of Clearlooks has started to emerge in CVS head (although this won’t be ready for any releases in time for GNOME 2.12).

I made the one and only development release of gnome-backgrounds before 2.12. The only major change being some SVG replacements for the translucent backgrounds. Many thanks to Andreas Nilsson for those. We’re also going to work on getting some new SVG tile backgrounds in for 2.14, hopefully integrated with the Nautilus backgrounds option too.

We also managed to make a final development release of gnome-themes before 2.12, which includes several bug fixes I managed to rush in. Well, only three, but I must have sorted out at least a dozen bugs from the gnome-themes bugzilla as well! 🙂

And to top it all off, I announced the new splash screen contest at art.gnome.org!

gtk-engines 2.6.4

Just released gtk-engines 2.6.4 at the usual place.
The release includes quite a number of bug fixes, including several crash fixes. One important point to note with this release is that the Clearlooks engine will now be maintained within gtk-engines.

Overview of Changes in 2.6.4 (since 2.6.3)

  • Fixed bugs:
    #305374 – Smooth makes d4x crash
    #161960 – Panel on 2nd screen crashes when using crux
    #303112 – [lighthouseblue] Radio buttons appear all checked in GtkTreeView
    #308551 – uninitialized variables in the smooth engine
    #305432 – smooth theme queries GtkButton style properties for all kind of widgets
    #170824 – Industrial labels are purple
    #300530 – clearlooks engine is installed in a different directory than the other engines

  • Updated clearlooks engine

And in related news, with the inclusion of Cairo in GTK+ 2.7, we’re going to be branching gtk-engines development soon to take advantage of the new features Cairo brings. There has already been some experimental work done with the Clearlooks engine in using Cairo, and we hope to start updating other engines to use cairo soon. Watch this space for screenshots!

art.gnome.org improvements

After a few glitches, there are some new features at art.gnome.org. So, straight from the ChangeLog, the main improvements are:

  • Revised login system (no need for the “login sucessful” message anymore)
  • Background resolution filter
  • Page numbers at top and bottom of listings
  • Listing preferences saved in session
  • Links in body text use underline (fixes bug 309136)
  • Option for “icons” style rss feed (for gnomedesktop.org)

Not to mention I have started on my campaign to try and clean up some of the code behind art.gnome.org. I’ve also had a look into uploading files via python scripts, so art.gnome.org may yet have an upload option for submissions.

As ever, if you want to get involved there’s the mailing list and of course the irc channel

art.gnome.org updates

Just made the first in a series of updates to art.gnome.org, including…

  • Improved front page

  • Clearer listings

  • Nicer looking comments

  • and pretty stars for ratings
    </ul>
    Going to be working on improving the searching and filtering interfaces next.