Release Digest: GNOME, September 28, 2003

GDM 2.4.4.3

FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOF

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

Well today I'm unemployed again. Today was my last day with Red Hat, and tommorrow is school. Which is really the reason for this release. I've made a bunch of fixes over the last few days and just want to get them out as I won't have much time as school starts. Because of this, I'd expect that GDM won't change much again for a while now.

On a positive note, I have not touched the random number stuff this time around. I'm actually quite happy with it the way it is.

I've done yet another audit of some of the code and while I didn't find any real issues, I did find places where the code was not anal enough to my liking. And I found some minor bugs too. Now the code is truly very anal about user files and even avoids some more truly impossible races.

Also fixed is that the graphical greeter now finally wraps long text correctly. There are still some issues, but overall it kind of works. You can also now change the font of the username/password entry.

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 2.4.4.3:

2.4.4.3 stuff:

• The graphical greeter now wraps text correctly (and all text). Plus you can insert n in the welcome text now too (it worked for gdmlogin before) Fixes #123017
• The entry type in the graphical greeter listens to font and color from the normal state (it only has the normal state) (Anton Altaparmakov, me)
• Tweak fontsizes in the default themes to be smaller. For some reason they very suddenly very huge.
• Further memory savings in the graphical greeter (though it may be offset by the new wrapping code which is quite large :)
• Another security audit, but no new security holes found, on the other hand lots of code changed to being super-anal (which is never bad in something running as root)
• Lots of random fixes again

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: Did you notice that Red Hat doubled it's profits while I was employed there? Obviously that is my doing. I should put it in my resume.

--
George <jirka@5z.com>

Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans...

• John Lennon

Audio File Library 0.2.4

Application

Audio File Library 0.2.4

Description

The Audio File Library provides an elegant API for accessing a variety of audio file formats, such as AIFF/AIFF-C, WAVE, and NeXT/Sun .snd/.au in a manner independent of data and file formats.

Enhancements

• Added support for large files on Linux.
• Improved support for markers and miscellaneous data in WAVE files.

Fixes

• Fixed error in channel matrix initialization.

Download

ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/audiofile/download/audiofile-0.2.4.tar.gz

GNOME Software Map entry

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

gwget2 0.6

Application

gwget2 0.6

Description

Download manager for Gnome 2.

Enhancements

• wget error messages now it's displayed into the status column.
• Bulgarian translation added (Thanks to Filip Andonov).
• New Icon image.

Fixes

• About window now works property.
• Various typos fixed.

Download

http://gwget.sourceforge.net/download.html

GNOME Software Map entry

http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/gwget2

Jamboree 0.3

What?
  Jamboree is a music player for GNOME.

Features?
  Ogg Vorbis and MP3 support
  Normal playlists (just dnd songs)
  Smart playlists, like iTunes
  Browse mode

Requirements?
  recent version of gtk+/libglade/libgnomeui
  GStreamer 0.6 or higher with mad or ogg support
  libid3tag
  gdbm

How?
  Check out the screenshot at:
  http://www.gnome.org/~jdahlin/jamboree/jamboree.png

Where?
  http://www.gnome.org/~jdahlin/jamboree/jamboree-0.3.tar.gz

Who?
  Richard Hult <richard@imendio.com>
  Johan Dahlin <johan@gnome.org>
  Anders Carlsson <andersca@gnome.org>

--
Johan Dahlin <johan@gnome.org>

Monster Masher 1.2

What's new since 1.2:

• Improved the look of the power-ups
• Improved handling of freeze bonus and added special effect to frozen monsters
• Fixed the menus to don't require Alt + key (just 'key')
• Rendered an icon and made the various windows use it
• New and updated translations (by Abel Cheung, Miloslav Trmac, Duarte Loreto, Dafydd Harries, Danilo Segan, Christian Rose)

About Monster Masher:

In the old days, before man entered the world, the gnomes were abundant. Through centuries of hard labour, only slightly eased by the levitational powers provided to them by their god, they bored out shafts and caves in the mountains. Always seeking the precious stones and valuable ore...

Monster Masher is a GPL'ed mash'em-up action game for GNOME. Each level contains a number of blocks and monsters. You're a little gnome running around. By pushing the blocks you can mash the monsters one at a time. There are various power-ups and different kinds of monsters.

http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/monster-masher/ http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/monster-masher/screenshots.html

The requirements are Gnome 2.2 and the gtkmm and gnomemm-all libraries from www.gtkmm.org/.

--
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/

Silky 0.2.2

Application

Silky 0.2.2

Description

Silky is an easy-to-use graphical SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing) client. It contains all the necessary features of a SILC client while keeping the user interface as simple and user-friendly as possible.

Silky is written in C and is using GTK2.

Homepage of the project is located at http://silky.sourceforge.net/

Download

http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=86891

GNOME Software Map entry

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