Thomas Wood

So maybe tarball due reminders arriving the day after the tarballs where due isn’t all that usefull?

Subject: TARBALLS DUE: GNOME 2.13.5 Development Release
Delivery-date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 10:01:06 +0000

(They where due on the 16th)

For entirely seperate reasons however, the gtk-engines and gnome-backgrounds tarballs I had planned for 2.13.5 were not out in time. There weren’t too many fixes in gtk-engines so it doesn’t harm too much. I was going to update gnome-backgrounds with this selection of backgrounds:

Comments welcome, but it seems it’s already getting late for 2.14 unless this goes in now. (And I assume this wouldn’t break the feature freeze…)

I posted to the gnome-uk list asking if there was any interest in holding GUADEC 2007 in the UK. It would also be nice to hold a mini GUADEC in the UK in 2006. If you would be interested (or be willing to help out) in either of these ideas, please join the mailing list and show your support.

After 399 days and 11 hours of continuous service, a power cut finally took out my little server, orion. Orion hosts my web pages and e-mail, as well as several other people’s e-mail and web pages. It also functions as my development server for art.gnome.org.

Almost 400 days of uptime – I think that just goes to show how stable Linux is. I suppose I ought to finally get round to cleaning it down a bit!
<hr/>

On a slightly different note, for some unknown reason I’ve had sound events enabled in GNOME recently. Today I had to restart X on several occasions, and was subjected to the current GNOME login sound. Please, can anyone with some decent musical skills create a replacement? I don’t know the history of the current sound, but it sounds like something out of the 80s…

New unstable release of gtk-engines last night. Lots of bug fixes to the clearlooks engine with this release, so please upgrade if you are using a previous development version.

Overview of Changes in 2.7.2 (since 2.7.1)

• Numerous Clearlooks bug fixes (including #315562, #323218, #323218, #325168)
• Patches and fixes for bug 321140 to hc, industrial, mist, redmond, smooth and thinice engines (cleanups for compiler warnings and removal of unneeded code)

Sources

• gtk-engines-2.7.2.tar.bz2
• gtk-engines-2.7.2.tar.gz

gicmo: Unless I’m very much mistaken, I think you are talking about the Xcomposite extension, which has very little to do with cairo.

However, the nice rounded corners in your screenshot look like they might well have been generated by cairo.

There seems to be a lot of confusion amongst the populace about what cairo actually is. Let me start by explaining what cairo is not.

<b>CAIRO IS NOT:</b>

• A new GTK+ theme engine

• A vector image file format

• Animation in themes

• Magical eye candy

• Unique individual widgets
  </ul>

  <b>CAIRO IS:</b>

  • A new, feature rich, set of resolution independent drawing functions, capable of working on top of a number of different technologies.
    </ul>

    That is all. The reason this is exciting for themes is that it supports anti-aliasing, and has programming functions similar to those you would find in any other vector graphics drawing package. This includes multi-stop gradients and paths. It is also exciting because it can make use of different technologies if they exist – such as Open GL and render acceleration. In fact, without any render acceleration it is currently considerably slower than the existing drawing functions.

    HOWEVER – Nothing will use cairo unless it is programmed specifically to do so. cairo is an alternative drawing API (Application Programming Interface), but it has not replaced (yet) the existing drawing api in GTK+, which is still GDK.

    Find out more about the cairo project here: http://www.cairographics.org

gtk-engines 2.7.1 released last night – a true 11th hour effort by myself and Richard. This release includes several important fixes for Clearlooks for anyone using 2.7.0.

Tarballs in the usual place:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gtk-engines/2.7

I am still looking for developers to adopt-an-engine. No cairo work has started on the following theme engines:

• hc (high contrast)
• Industrial
• lighthouseblue
• metal
• smooth
• thinice

This means these themes will have no cairo goodness for GNOME 2.14 unless someone else helps out – there just isn’t enough time for me to convert them all myself! If you’re a developer with an interest in themeing then please do contact me.

Introducing ….. GNOME SCIENCE!!

Continuing my effort to make GNOME more fun for users, here is a preview of the first theme in the GNOME Plus! Pack (still looking for a better name if anyone has any ideas…)

Many thanks to radel for his efforts on the science theme, and everyone else who is helping out. If you’d like to get involved, drop me an e-mail, attach something to the wiki page, or just chat on gnome-art

I released gtk-engines 2.6.6 last night. Lots of code cleanups in this release. No official release e-mail as yet as I am still waiting for a replacement router at home.

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gtk-engines/2.6/

Many thanks to Vincent for doing the gnome-backgrounds 2.12.2 release. It was tricky enough to get the gtk-engines release done without a reliable internet connection, so I was glad he was able to step in to do this release. Not much news however, just one translation updated (Kirghiz).

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-backgrounds/2.12/

Comments on the future of gnome-backgrounds would be appreciated. Is it time for a new set of backgrounds? What would people like to see included in the set?

Just made the first development release in the 2.7.x development cycle of gtk-engines, which will eventually result in the 2.8 release. Lots of work has been going on to convert the engines to using cairo. See the links below for where you can grab your copy for testing purposes only! Please please report bugs and problems to bugzilla. Without your help, we will not be able to get this done and tested well enough in time for GNOME 2.14.

gtk-engines is in need of extra helpers as there is still lots of work to do in converting the engines to use cairo. If you would like to help in the development of gtk-engines, please contact me.

Sources

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gtk-engines/2.7/

gtk-engines-2.7.0.tar.bz2 md5sum: 9f8d71891771e4583dd0985556784934
gtk-engines-2.7.0.tar.gz md5sum: 60f525210134f1c015b17ddec883a8a4

Overview of Changes in 2.7.0 (since 2.6.3)

• Clearlooks and Mist engine now uses cairo to do drawing
• Redmond and Crux engine convertions to cairo started
• Various cleanups and fixes
• Animation code for checkboxes and radiobuttons in clearlooks (off by default)