upwards and onwards
by Matthias Clasen
F12 is almost done !
I think we have produced one of our best releases yet. Thanks to
everybody who has helped making it a great desktop. As always, there are
many exciting new things: Abrt, Bluetooth networking and sound, Dracut,
Empathy, IPv6, Thusnelda, etc. But we have also put a lot of effort into
making this work well and look sharp. And it shows !
There are certainly still bugs to be found and fixed, and we will spend
some time after the release mostly focused on handling incoming bugs,
probably until around the time that GNOME 2.28.2 is released (right
before Christmas).
Even so, there are some changes to the Desktop spin that I want to make
early in the F13 cycle, and that I want to outline here:
- Drop the CD size limitation and target a larger usb stick. We have
discussed this in the past. The main motivation for this is that we have
to fight every release cycle to make things fit on a CD, and we don't
have room to include our default office suite or example content.
- Include OpenOffice instead of abiword. OpenOffice is the premier open
source office suite, and abiword is on the current live CD purely for
size reasons.
- Use shotwell as the default photo management app instead of gthumb.
This may be a bit of a surprise for some. Shotwell is a relatively new
application, that is in Fedora only since F12. I have mentioned it on
this list before. The 0.3.0 release that has just come out is very close
to the feature set that we'd ideally expect to have in a default photo
management app. It also starts very fast.
- Remove remaining Bluecurve icons from fedora-gnome-theme. This will
probably leave some holes in the menus, and we'll need help from artists
to fill those.
- Include example content. We've wanted to do this for a long time, but
CD size limitations have always prohibited it. Now we can do it, but of
course, we still need to collect good material. If you have proposals
for suitably licensed documents, movies, music, etc that are
interesting, cool or just funny, let us know ! It might also be a good
idea to include some promotional material that could be of use for
Fedora ambassadors. If you have proposals in this direction, let us know
as well !
Beyond these organizational changes to the live image, I think a focus
of our feature work for F13 will be around software installation and
updates. Some of our thoughts for how installation and updates should
ideally behave can be found on the wiki:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/UpdateExperience
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/InstallExperience
For application installation, Martin Bacovsky has already started
working on an online application database that is tied to pkgdb:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-October/msg01083.html
Some of us will be at FUDCon in a few weeks, where we can hopefully
discuss these ideas in more depth.
Matthias
13 years
deja-dup Desktop Backup tool
by Rahul Sundaram
Hi,
Are there any plans to include a good backup tool for the desktop by
default? I have put up deja-dup for review if anyone is interested in
checking it out
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=540761
Frontend for duplicity (which uses rsync library and gpg keys for
encryption) written in Vala. It is a simple backup tool for GNOME and
integrates with Nautilus bookmarks etc.
Features:
• Support for local or remote backup locations, including Amazon S3
• Securely encrypts and compresses your data
• Incrementally backs up, letting you restore from any particular backup
• Schedules regular backups
• Integrates well into your GNOME desktop
Rahul
13 years
HAL removal Feature page
by Bastien Nocera
Heya,
I've created this page to track the removal of HAL (hopefully) for F13:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/HalRemoval
Could you please check your package and add them to the list if:
- they rely on HAL or libhal
- they rely on gnome-vfs2 (which still requires HAL, and is deprecated)
- they rely on libgnomeui (which requires gnome-vfs2)
We're only tracking Desktop spin applications, and applications you'd
expect to see installed on GNOME desktops.
Cheers
13 years, 2 months
Re: Focus Follows Mouse
by Rob Riggs
"Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> On 12/20/2009 11:09 PM, Rob Riggs wrote:
>>> But please make it easy to set my preferences. Please
>>> bring a little Christmas cheer to the Gnome world and make "Window
>>> Preferences" part of the default Gnome desktop installation again!
>
> Correction forgot to add Add/Remove Software there.. as in
>
> If it's not in the menu in F12 on you system you can either go System
> --> Administration --> Add/Remove Software type control-center-extra in
> the search field and hash it..
Yes -- that's the part I am asking the Fedora Desktop team to fix. It
should be put back into the default install (control-center) instead of
being relegated to the obscure control-center-extra package.
Rob
13 years, 2 months
Tracker 0.7.x?
by Debarshi Ray
Tracker 0.7.12 was released a few days back and upstream is planning
to start making stable releases after Christmas. Are there any plans
to update Tracker in Fedora (13 or 14) from the ancient 0.6.95 that we
have now?
Thanks,
Debarshi
--
One reason that life is complex is that it has a real part and an
imaginary part.
-- Andrew Koenig
13 years, 3 months
Focus Follows Mouse
by Rob Riggs
Hi all,
This is an editorial comment for the Fedora desktop developers.
I've just done my first Fedora install since 8 or 9 with Fedora 12. Why
is it now so difficult to set up "focus follows mouse" under Gnome?
Click to focus is just annoying. It sucked for me when "click to focus"
became the default, but I could live with finding the desktop preference
and setting it. But it makes this user really annoyed (Grrr!) that I
have to ask about it on some mailing list, install an obscure package,
and change the setting. I get the feeling the the desktop developers
think they know better than the user.
Look, I *can* work either way -- I live with "focus follows mouse" on
Windows. But this is one of the key reasons that Linux is my primary
desktop -- it sucks less and "focus follows mouse" is one of the big
reasons for that, especially when using multiple desktops. Point and
type -- not point, click, type. (Yes, I know it can be changed on
Windows.) It is especially annoying when not only does focus require a
click, but that click also raises the window. I want focus and raising
to be separate operations. There are plenty of operations that work
much better with the focus window not being on top of the window stack.
Forcing the window I want on top is a PITA that focus follows mouse avoids.
I don't care to impose my preferences on anyone. I am not asking for
"focus follows mouse" to be the default (though that would be my
preference). But please make it easy to set my preferences. Please
bring a little Christmas cheer to the Gnome world and make "Window
Preferences" part of the default Gnome desktop installation again!
Thanks,
Rob
13 years, 3 months
gnome-applets
by Bill Nottingham
Why is this a mandatory package at this stage of the desktop? Unless
I missed something, we don't ship any of these applets in the default
panel config, and it's not required by anything on a normal desktop
install.
Bill
13 years, 3 months
GObject-introspection enablement
by Bastien Nocera
Heya,
I've fixed gir-repository building, and am currently building
gnome-bluetooth with introspection support.
If you have a library or program that provides introspection, it would
be nice for you to enable it. If you run into any problems, feel free to
poke at people on the #fedora-desktop channel on GIMPNet, or drop a mail
here.
Cheers
13 years, 3 months
Fedora release criteria completely revised
by Adam Williamson
During FUDCon, we've been working on revising the Fedora release criteria.
John Poelstra had already fleshed out a structure and much of the final
content, and we've been revising and tweaking it in conjunction with QA
(myself, Will Woods and James Laska), release engineering (Jesse Keating),
anaconda team (especially Denise Dumas and Peter Jones) and desktop team
(Christopher Aillon and Matthias Clasen, who provided suggestions at an
earlier stage).
The new structure is based around a general page and specific pages for the
Fedora 13 Alpha, Beta and Final releases (which have been written
generically so they can easily be converted into pages for F14 and all
future releases just by copying and pasting). You can find the criteria
here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Criteria
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Alpha_Release_Criteria
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Beta_Release_Criteria
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_13_Final_Release_Criteria
they should contain everything you need to know. We based most of the
criteria around testing that was already being carried out but with no
formal policy basis, with additional suggestions from the anaconda and
desktop teams.
We will follow these criteria for the Fedora 13 release process. So if you
can see any problems or potential trouble with any of this, please do reply
and let us know!
Desktop team - can you please let us know of any additional things that you
would expect to be working at each point during the release cycle? Note
that only things that *must* be working at each point should be listed on
these pages, not nice-to-haves. You must be able to commit to the idea
that, if any criterion on the page is not met, we would slip the release in
question.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net
13 years, 3 months
