Gnome Archive

Get out your popcorn, boys and girls, this is geek soap opera at its finest. "Jeff Waugh is a psychotic failure, obstructive and destructive. He is poisonous people." GNOME's Murray Cumming blogging on Jeff Waugh, all in relation to the board elections. Cumming first detailed what he deemed good candidates, he then went on to lambast the only bad candidate (according to Cumming): Waugh. "His behavior is far beyond the acceptable and displays contempt for the people in GNOME who actually do work. We've tolerated it too long, lost several high-level contributors because of it, slowed down the work of other contributors, and made their work unpleasant. That cost is too high, and we receive almost nothing in return. Jeff Waugh's only aim is self-publicity and any responsibilities in GNOME are just a way to achieve that. As long as his abysmal destructive misuse of those responsibilities is tolerated then he will happily continue clinging to symbolic authority regardless of the effects on GNOME. He seems driven by paranoia that people seek his downfall, but he is not driven by any need to do the job. Inevitably, people soon do want him to get out of the way." The story continues on Planet GNOME, with people supporting Cumming, but also a lot of people demanding a retraction. Don't kill the messenger. Update: Waugh's response. "There's a layer of truth to some of what Murray has said, but his shockingly exaggerated, hateful message is not intended to resolve or heal. Murray does not accept or credit my commitment or contributions to the project, and he has sought to denigrate, disenfranchise and discredit me consistently over the years... Though this is obviously the loudest and most hurtful attempt."

"The GNOME Foundation has issued a statement in response to recent accusations that it has been supporting the acceptance of Microsoft's Office Open XML format as an ECMA standard at the expense of the Open Document Format, the open standard used by OpenOffice.org, KOffice and other free software office applications. However, whether the statement's attempt at logical rebuttal will do anything to reduce the emotions or altruism behind the criticisms is anybody's guess."

"A FOSSCamp session led by Red Hat developers presented the GNOME Online Desktop project, the nexus of GNOME's efforts to integrate support for modern web services into the open source desktop environment. As social networking web sites and other Web 2.0 technologies become more pervasive, some believe that desktop computers will increasingly be seen primarily as vehicles for accessing content that resides in the cloud. This shift away from conventional desktop applications will give open source software a bit of an advantage, since web applications are largely platform-neutral. Providing improved web services integration in the desktop environment could theoretically make GNOME a more appealing choice for a growing number of users who depend primarily on web applications."

GNOME 2.20.1 has been released. "This is the first update to GNOME 2.20.0. The update fixes all known and unknown crashers, even for those modules which haven't released a new version (gnome-terminal)."

GNOME 2.20 has been released. "The improvements in GNOME 2.20 include: Improved support for right-to-left languages; desktop search integrated into the file chooser dialog; convenient new features in the Evolution email and calendar client; enhanced browsing of image collections; simplified system preferences; efficient power management and incredibly accurate laptop battery monitoring. Developers receive more help with application development thanks to a new version of the GTK+ toolkit, improved tools, and a great new documentation web site."

GNOME and GARNOME 2.20.0 Release Candidate are now available for download. "This is our ninth development release and first release candidate for GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released later this month. This release is the last before hard code freeze starts on september 10th."

"It seems like just yesterday that the GNOME Project got its start, but actually it was a decade ago that Miguel de Icaza got the ball rolling. While de Icaza has largely focused his time on Mono recently, the GNOME community has kept making progress. To get some perspective on GNOME's history, I spoke to de Icaza and longtime GNOME contributor and GNOME Foundation board member Jeff Waugh."

Both GNOME and GARNOME 2.19.20 have been released. "This is our seventh development release on our road towards GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007. New features are still arriving, so your mission is simple : Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it."

"About half a year ago I was looking around me and seeing stagnation in the GNOME community. I was concerned that GNOME had lost its momentum and that we were just making boring incremental releases that added very little new functionality. I think I was very wrong. I'd like to take this time to list some things that are happening right now in the GNOME community that have me very excited. These are the projects that are actively improving the future of the GNOME desktop." Let's hope a punctuation checker will be part of GNOME too. One Aaron is enough.

A free Gnome-based Linux distribution for mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs has achieved a major release. OpenedHand's Poky Linux 3.0 ("Blinky") is based on X11, GTK+, and the Matchbox window manager, much like the Nokia-sponsored Maemo.org project. However, in place of the proprietary Hildon GUI layer, it includes a new "Sato 0.1" plain GTK+ component.

"During this years GUADEC Red Hat developer Havoc Pennington proposed his idea of an 'Online Desktop' to the developers of the GNOME project. Through deep integration with web services and 'zero-maintenance' the Open Source client aims to get the 'perfect window to the Internet'. During GUADEC Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to talk to Pennington about advantages and possible problems of the Online Desktop concept, the necessity of Windows-support and about Red Hats 'return to the desktop'."

"If you're a GNOME user I expect you're more than familiar with the panels that come as standard with your desktop; if you use openSUSE you're probably also familiar with the slab menu that Novell have developed. There are, however, several other applications out there that can extend and beautify your Gnome panels."

Both the stable and unstable GNOME branches have been updated today; both GNOME 2.18.3 ("This is the final release in a series of point releases for the stable 2.18 branch.") as well as GNOME 2.19.4 ("This is our fourth development release on our road towards GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007.") have been released.

"To put things short, Gconf is a system built in GNOME 2 which stores applications' preferable configuration data as well as graphical environment variables in its own files. I'd like you to get familiar with the Gconf tool's functions, engineering, and usage with this article."