Release Digest: GNOME, September 23, 2003

Dr. Geo 0.9.9

Application

Dr. Geo 0.9.9

Description

Dr. Geo is a GTK interactive geometry software. It allows one to create geometric figure plus the interactive manipulation of such figure in respect with their geometric constraints. It is useable with students from primary or secondary level.

Enhancements & Fixes

• Impement a quick and cool PNG exporter. It works as the PostScript and LaTeX exporters. It required the Image Magick package.
• Continue extending the DSF API. The following Scheme functions were defined:

. make-arc
. make-freeValue
. make-pointOnCurve
. make-middle2Points
. make-translation
. make-rotation
. make-translation
. make-scale
. make-symmetry
. make-reflexion
. make-orthogonal
. make-parallel
. make-locus
. make-circleSegment
. make-circleRadius
. make-intersection
. make-distancePointCircle
. make-vectorNorm
. make-segmentLength
. make-polygon
. make-geometricAngle
. make-distancePointLine
. make-distancePointPoint

These functions are used through higher level prototypes as explained at the 0.9.8 release change log bellow.

• Extend the user manual in French to cover the Dr. Geo Scheme Figure feature. The manual is distributed separately. The latest version can always be fetched from OFSET CVS at SourceForge.
• Updated Azerbaijani, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Gujarti, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish translations.
• Enhancement in the macro system. Script can now be integrated into macro (Feature request)

Download

http://www.ofset.org/drgeo/download.html

GNOME Software Map entry

http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/drgeo

Conglomerate 0.7.3

Application

Conglomerate 0.7.3

Description

Conglomerate is an XML editor for GNOME, aiming to be as user-friendly as possible, to help non-technical people to use DocBook and similar formats.

Enhancements

• Optimisations: cursor movement and mouse dragging are now significantly faster for large documents, other operations should be slightly less chuggy than before. (me)
• Added "sr", "sr@Latn" translations (Danilo Segan)
• Added "sv" translation (Christian Rose)
• Updated README, now as a DocBook file (me)
• Added userinput and command as span tags to the DocBook display specification (me)

Fixes

• Fix for bug 114670 (opening files from the command line) (Varga Robert)
• Removed lots of dead code (me)

Download

GNOME Software Map entry

http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/conge

GDM 2.4.4.2

WHACKAWHACKAWHACKKCAHWAKCAHWAKCAHW

(If you have no clue what gdm is, skip a few paragraphs down first)

If you are afraid to ask, yes the random number stuff has yet again been touched. Though obviously not the major focus of this release. Now it's a little less embarassing mathematically I think and is faster and gets more entropy. If you think this really wasn't important to do, you are right. But I couldn't sleep and I seem to always end up hacking on random things such as this at 3am. Now that KDM actually does get good random numbers, I can't bash it for this point. Hmmm. I can still bash XDM.

There are two major things in this release. First is that the session stuff got a lot of work and should now be compatible with the upcoming KDM as implemented in KDE CVS. As part of this I one moved gnome.desktop and CDE.desktop (for solaris kind of people) to /usr/share/xsessions (if prefix is /usr of course). /etc/X11/dm/Sessions is deprecated but still used for the built in sessions. I also renamed Default.desktop to default.desktop to be compatible with KDM. SessionDesktopDir is now a path which by default is
/etc/X11/sessions/:/etc/X11/dm/Sessions/:/usr/share/xsessions/ If you don't get your gnome.desktop session just make sure to comment out the SessionDesktopDir key and that should pull in the built in default then which includes the correct dir.

The second major thing is that the accessibility gesture modules now not only build, they also work (or at least they do for me :). They were pretty much completely broken before. Also they are loaded for all the different GTK+ guis gdm puts up. So we're perhaps getting closer to actual a11y support in GDM.

There are a lot of other bugfixes too. And there are a few translation updates as well.

Finally GDM dilapidates all barns that NASA did not dilapidate before.

And now for the standard part of the release announcement:

GDM is the GNOME Display Manager, it is the little proggie that runs in the background, runs your X sessions, presents you with a login box and then tells you to piss off because you forgot your password. It does pretty much everything that you would want to use xdm for, but doesn't involve as much crack. It doesn't use any code from xdm, and has a more paranoid and safer design overall. It also includes many features over xdm, the biggest one of which is that it is more user friendly, even if your X setup is failing. The goal is that users should never, ever have to use the command line to customize or troubleshoot gdm. It of course supports xdmcp, and in fact extends xdmcp a little bit in places where I thought xdm was lacking (but is still compatible with xdm's xdmcp).

News:

Highlights of 2.4.4.2:

• Fix the session setup to be both back-compatible and fully KDM (kde 3.2) compatible, among others:
  • SessionDesktopDir is now a path
  • Change 'Default' to 'default'
  • Honour TryExec correctly
  • Other then 'default', the gnome and CDE sessions are now installed in /usr/share/xsessions (if prefix==/usr)
• Support SELinux
• Fix the 'switchdesk' mode and mention 'switchdesk' only if it's actually installed (rh #104287)
• Use the a11y modules for the chooser as well as the error dialogs
• Lots of dwellmouselistener and keymouselistener a11y modules fixing, as in they actually work now, among other fixes are #122944, #122658, #122616
• Default gestures for gok (David Bolter, me)
• Lots of small fixes
• Error dialogs are now crashing theme/module tolerant
• Load ~/.face.icon for kde 3.2 interoperability
• Clean up the random stuff again a bit (we get more entropy for less work, yay!)
• Documentation updates
• Translation updates (Alessio Frusciante, Francesco Marletta, Changwoo Ryu)

Note: GDM2 was originally written by Martin K. Petersen <mkp@mkp.net>, and has for a while now been maintained by the Queen of England. She is usually not responsive to bug reports or feature requests. You can try to send them to me however.

Note2: If installing from the tarball do note that make install overwrites most of the setup files, all except gdm.conf. It will however save backups with the .orig extension first.

Note3: Note3 has been depracated ...

Downloading:

Webpage: http://www.jirka.org/gdm.html
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdm/2.4/
ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/gdm/

Sorry no RPMS. There is a spec file included in the tarball and it should work. So generate an rpm with

rpmbuild -ta gdm-whatever.tar.gz/

Have fun (or whatever else you wish to be having),

George

PS: The snails ate all our bananas. In the aquarium that is. Yes we had bananas in the aquarium. No we're not nuts. Those are aquarium plants, really. Which reminds me I need to go buy real bananas.

--
George <jirka@5z.com>

• I'm getting better!
• No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
  • Monty Python