GNOME Summary: November 31-December 14, 2002

This is the GNOME Summary for 2002-11-31 - 2002-12-14
    
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Table of Contents
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1. GNOME Network Ressurected
2. GTK2 VIM
3. LPT Desktop for Red Hat
4. Vitamin-D for the Web
5. SashXB lends mini-RAD to Linux
6. Programming in Basic for GTK and Mono
7. Easier access to CD drives
8. GNOME 2 browsers
9. Beachheading in the Windows world
10. GNOME Meeting in Linux Journal
11. GStreamer 0.5.0
12. Business 2.0 on Miguel and Mono
13. Ximian makes corporate inroads with Red Carpet Enterprise
14. GNOME 2 Sysadmin Guide
15. New Configurator for GNOME
16. The Luminace desktop
17. Translated GNOME summaries
18. Hacker Activity
19. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
20. New and Updated Software

==============================================================
1. GNOME Network Ressurected
--------------------------------------------------------------

Rodrigo Moya mailed the desktop devel list to say that he is
ressurecting the gnome-network package. gnome-network was a gnome module
which contained some networking tools in early GNOME releases, but ended
up in obscurity for various reasons. Anyway Rodrigo has now blown life
back to it and have been porting some of the old code to GNOME2,
dropping some cruft and adding some nice new additons. Rodrigo is not
alone on this effort either, German Poo-Caaman~o has joined him and
together they are making gnome-network sizzle. See below for 
original announcement and for some screenshots of gnome-netinfo one of
many components in the gnome-network package. Hope to bring you
screenshots of more components in future summaries. 

        
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00192.html
        http://cronos.dci.ubiobio.cl/~gpoo/shots/gnome-netinfo/

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2. GTK2 VIM
--------------------------------------------------------------

For some time I thought vi was short for visually impaired, but no
longer. Jason Hildebrand has been working on a set patches to make vim
use gtk2. It still needs some better button icons, but hopefully Jason
will have it using the GTK2 stock icons soon. Check out the link below
for patch information and a screenshot. 

        http://www.opensky.ca/gnome-vim/
        http://www.opensky.ca/gnome-vim/gvim-gtk2.0.png

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3. LPT Desktop for Red Hat
--------------------------------------------------------------

Red Hat is togheter with Debian the clear leader among Linux developers,
and thanks Joel Barrios we now have a nice repository of updated RPMS of
GNOME 2 for our favourite distribution. Check out the story on
gnomedesktop for the details. 

        http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=795&mode=&order=0

==============================================================
4. Vitamin-D for the Web
--------------------------------------------------------------

Olivier Sessink announced the first GTK2 based release of Bluefish this
week. Bluefish is for those who haven't been able to use it the premier
web editing tool for Unix, and having tried it I must say that the GTK2
version is much nicer than the old GTK1 version. Bluefish supports PHP,
HTML, XML and more. And the new version even tried to comply with the
GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. Goed spul, Olivier! 

        http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/download.php
        
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2002-December/msg00040.html

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5. SashXB lends mini-RAD to Linux
--------------------------------------------------------------

There is a nice article on IBM DeveloperWorks about SashXB the cross
plattform development environment for use on Windows and GNOME. If you
are among those who have always been curios about SashXB this is a good
chance to learn more. Thanks to IBM for the continued support of GNOME. 
        
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sashxb/?t=gr,lnxw02=sashXB

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6. Programming in Basic for GTK and Mono
--------------------------------------------------------------

The Mono team is still charging ahead and could this week announce that 
programing towards Mono with Basic is starting to work. A nice
screensthoot of a GTK# Hello World made in Basic is shown in screenshot
below. Another interesting development is the start of a GNOME C#
programming tutorial by Martin Willemoes. The Mono revolution is coming
soon to a place near you. 

        http://www.go-mono.org/images/gtk-vb.png
        http://go-mono.com/gnometutorial/

==============================================================
7. Easier access to CD drives
--------------------------------------------------------------

Bastien Nocera, the hacker known to be the best thing that has moved
from France to United Kingdom since William the Conqueror, has made us
another nice little gift. He mailed the GNOME-multimedia this week with
his code to implement a nice CD-device selection. The code was well
recieved and has been put into nautilus-cdburner, Totem and Marlin
already. Due to the current feature freeze for GNOME 2.2 it will not be
added to the tools in the GNOME Media and GNOME Applets packages before
after the GNOME 2.2 release. Links below to Bastiens announcement, a
screenshot of Totem using the device chooser and a screenshot of Marlin
using the device chooser 

        
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-multimedia/2002-December/msg00005.html
        http://www.hadess.net/files/shots/07-12-2002.1.png
        http://marlin.sourceforge.net/marlin-doing-stuff.png

==============================================================
8. GNOME 2 browsers
--------------------------------------------------------------

There has been some shuffling going on in the world of GNOME2 web
browsers over the last month. The dust is now settling and it seems
things are moving ahead again. Philip Langdale, new maintainer of
Galeon, announced a sizling hot 1.3.1 release of Galeon. With Philip at
the helm Galeon2 will more resemble Galeon1 in terms of width of
functionality and configurability, something I know many 
Galeon fans will appreciate. Marco Pesenti Gritti has moved on and
started the Epiphany browser project on mozdev.org, which will proceed
with the goal of making a browser which is as easy to use as possible,
without any options and settings that are not considered critical. 
        
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1400008&forum_id=6200
        http://epiphany.mozdev.org/

==============================================================
9. Beachheading in the Windows world
--------------------------------------------------------------

Trying to establish a linux presence on the desktop in a workplace
dominated by Windows clients can be hard. Luckily more and more tools to
make that transition easier are becoming available. A really nice
addition to our toolset this week came from Erick Wood who made a new
release of tsclient a Window Terminal Server client for GNOME. I
recommend everyone to take a look at this tool and the nice screenshots
on the tsclient homepage. 

        http://www.gnomepro.com/tsclient/

==============================================================
10. GNOME Meeting in Linux Journal
--------------------------------------------------------------

Damien Sandras continues to draw wide acclaim for gnomemeeting. This
time it is Linux Journal who posts an article about everyones favourite
video conferencing application. Be sure to check out what they have to
say, and also make sure to check out the gnomemeeting homepage to see
what is happening. 

        http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6376
        http://www.gnomemeeting.org

==============================================================
11. GStreamer 0.5.0
--------------------------------------------------------------

The GStreamer team released their 0.5.0 release this week. This release 
contains many important fixes, especially in the portability
compartment. This release was also changed to make parallel installs
possible to allow us to deliver an API stable 0.6.0 release series for
GNOME 2.2.x, yet continue developing towards GStreamer 1.0 in parallel. 

As many of you know we have struggled with threading issues in
GStreamer. Well GStreamer has a new scheduler now that does not use
cothreads, called opt, created by Wim Taymans. This scheduler is a
little more complex as it has to schedule elements recursively and
element errors are harder to handle. Plugins probably have to be updated
to handle the new error recovery mecahnisms imposed 
by this scheduler. The new scheduler theoretically has higher latency
for some pipelines, but for most pipelines it's much faster, in fact
scheduling overhead is (when optimally tuned) twice as low as the
current best scheduler. At the time of writing this complex pipeline
manipulations at runtime are not very well tested yet with this new
scheduler, but for simple things like gst-player and Rhythmbox it should
be able to function well. 

Work will continue however to both give us a well working cothread
scheduler and also give us gthread based scheduler as different
scenarios have different needs.
 
Ronald Bultje and Thomas Vander Stichele is also hard at work making
sure the next release of GStreamer will have a very nice plugin based on
ffmpeg, making all ffmpeg supported media formats and codecs available
for GStreamer applications. This is done by including a copy of the
ffmpeg code inside GStreamer which means we will be ablet to support a
wide range of new formats which fewer dependencies. 

        http://www.gstreamer.net

Alp Toker also got around to updating our information about the
GStreamer .net bindings (yes, I said .net and not C# as 
the bindings also cover vb.net now.). Also are information about his two
nice applications made with these MMP and Phonic. 

        http://www.gstreamer.net/bindings/csharp/

And finally the GStreamer team is commited to trying to help out in a
wide range of scenarios. So to make sure things keep on streaming in
your home and ensure that small applets (with inheritance) appear nine
months after Christmas, the GStringer got developed. 

        http://www.cafeshops.com/cp/prod.aspx?p=gstreamer.4177706

==============================================================
12. Business 2.0 on Miguel and Mono
--------------------------------------------------------------

Mono continues to build mindshare this week with Miguel de Icaza and
Mono being profile in Buisiness 2.0. Always nice to get some maintstream
focus on our people and what we do. Keep up the fantastic work Miguel. 

        http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,45454,FF.html

==============================================================
13. Ximian makes corporate inroads with Red Carpet Enterprise
--------------------------------------------------------------

Linux and Main has a nice interview with John Perr, vice president of
marketing at Ximian, Inc. Topics discussed include how Ximian is
managing to leverage their nice Red Carpet tool to get those corporate
accounts we want. Interesting article with someone who looks at things
from another point of view than a hacker. 
       
http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=295

==============================================================
14. GNOME 2 Sysadmin Guide
--------------------------------------------------------------

Implementing large scale deployments of software is always a challenge.
To make life easier for sysadmins the GNOME documenation team has begun
writing a GNOME2 sysadmin Guide. The document currently contain 2
chapters one detailing GNOME 2 wonderfull GConf architecture from a
sysadmin viewpoint and the second contains information about our menu
system. Interesting read even for developers I would think. 

        http://www.gnome.org/learn/admin-guide/2.0/

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15. New Configurator for GNOME
--------------------------------------------------------------

There was a new release of the Configurator for GNOME this week. It has
gotten a lot nicer with the latest release which uses gconf and tries to
work more like a normal capplet. The only thing people need to do now is
mail Mads Villadsen and request that a option for their favourite
missing configurability is added to Configurator for GNOME :). 

        http://www.daimi.au.dk/~maxx/maxximum-linux.html
        http://art.gnome.org/images/screenshots/COG-Shot.png

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16. The Luminace desktop
--------------------------------------------------------------

I came across the Luminance desktop a few days ago. It is an alternative
desktop based on GNOME 2 development libraries. It is aimed especially
at the K-12 educational environment, but other might find it to their
liking to. Togheter with base GNOME and XFCE4 I guess this gives us
three desktop alternatives in the GTK2 world, so hopefully we should now
have a flavour for everyones liking. 

        http://luminance.sourceforge.net/index.php

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17. Translated GNOME summaries
--------------------------------------------------------------

We now have French, German, Hungarian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish -
all the links below. 

        http://www.gynov.org/gnome-summary/gnome_summary.php4
        http://www.gnome-de.org/projekte/listen/#news@gnome-de.org
        http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/
        http://developer.gnome.or.kr/news/
        http://debian-br.cipsga.org.br/resumo-gnome/
        http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/

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19. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
--------------------------------------------------------------

This information is from http://bugzilla.gnome.org, which hosts bug and
feature reports for most of the Gnome modules. If you would like to join
the bug hunt, subscribe to the gnome-bugsquad mailing list.

Currently open: 7468 (In the last week: New: 600, Resolved: 745,
Difference: 
-145)

Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests): 

  nautilus: 685 (In the last week: New: 36, Resolved: 33, Difference:
+3)
  gtk+: 502 (In the last week: New: 23, Resolved: 49, Difference: -26)
  galeon: 399 (In the last week: New: 69, Resolved: 141, Difference:
-72)
  gnome-vfs: 273 (In the last week: New: 8, Resolved: 8, Difference: 0)
  GIMP: 258 (In the last week: New: 10, Resolved: 29, Difference: -19)
  gnome-applets: 175 (In the last week: New: 18, Resolved: 12,
Difference: +6)
  gnome-panel: 167 (In the last week: New: 43, Resolved: 32, Difference:
+11)
  control-center: 128 (In the last week: New: 24, Resolved: 12,
Difference: +12)
  gnome-core: 100 (In the last week: New: 6, Resolved: 17, Difference:
-11)
  libzvt: 93 (In the last week: New: 0, Resolved: 0, Difference: 0)
  medusa: 92 (In the last week: New: 0, Resolved: 0, Difference: 0)
  sawfish: 87 (In the last week: New: 5, Resolved: 6, Difference: -1)
  Gnumeric: 80 (In the last week: New: 7, Resolved: 4, Difference: +3)
  dia: 80 (In the last week: New: 7, Resolved: 17, Difference: -10)
  metacity: 75 (In the last week: New: 8, Resolved: 9, Difference: -1)
  
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs: 
  
  yaneti@declera.com: 127 bugs closed.
  dkennedy@tinytoad.com: 68 bugs closed.
  newren@math.utah.edu: 53 bugs closed.
  aldug@astrolinux.com: 49 bugs closed.
  otaylor@redhat.com: 45 bugs closed.
  sven@gimp.org: 22 bugs closed.
  louie@ximian.com: 17 bugs closed.
  charles@rebelbase.com: 15 bugs closed.
  thomas@urgent.rug.ac.be: 15 bugs closed.
  kmaraas@gnome.org: 15 bugs closed.
  padraig.obriain@sun.com: 15 bugs closed.
  oleevye@wanadoo.fr: 15 bugs closed.
  chris@rebelbase.com: 14 bugs closed.
  maggi@athena.polito.it: 14 bugs closed.
  hans@breuer.org: 10 bugs closed.
  
==============================================================
18. Hacker Activity
--------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.

Most active modules:
 111 gnucash
 85 mc
 77 gtk+
 65 sun-patches
 57 evolution
 56 gnumeric
 53 rhythmbox
 47 gnome-network
 45 glib
 32 gimp
 28 pan
 27 gnome-panel
 26 libgda
 25 gnome-games
 25 libmrproject
 25 mrproject
 25 galeon
 24 gok
 22 nautilus
 21 gnome-applets
[148 active modules omitted]

Most active hackers:
 89 yacob
 79 proskin
 61 owen
 54 redfox
 46 peterisk
 46 rodrigo
 44 cwalters
 35 rhult
 35 chema
 32 cstim (gnucash)
 31 fejj
 30 alexl
 30 calum
 29 cneumair
 29 hampton (gnucash)
 27 matthiasc
 26 menthos
 24 dtb
 23 murrayc
 23 joeshaw
[151 active hackers omitted]


==============================================================
20. New and Updated Software
--------------------------------------------------------------

GnomeDAP - Nomad / D.A.P Jukebox Manager  - Nomad / DAP Jukebox Manager
Totem  - Movie player based on the xine libraries
Meld  - Meld: a diff and merge tool.
Dr. Genius  - Geometry Sofware
screem  - Web Site / HTML Editor
GtkGLExt  - OpenGL Extension to GTK
gnomeradio  - FM-Radio Tuner App
Terminal Server Client  - a frontend for rdesktop
Coaster  - Coaster - The Gnome Cd Burner
Bluefish HTML Editor  - HTML editor
COnfigurator for Gnome  - Edit advanced Gnome settings
Rhythmbox  - music player
rubrica  - address book, pim
gnome-db  - Database access for Gnome applications
GNOME ALSA Mixer  - GNOME ALSA Mixer
gedit  - Lightweight UTF-8 text editor
GNOME Accessibility Themes  - Accessibility Themes
gsoftpad  - Portable Application Description PAD
Crosswords  - Crossword generator
gnome-pkgview  - gnome desktop component version tool.
Gnome Souls  - Desktop Assistand - with Homer
Totem  - Movie player based on the xine libraries
GChemPaint  - 2D chemical structures editor
gFTP  - multithreaded FTP client
Gringotts  - An electronic strongbox for data
GTK-Lsof  - GTK 2 GUI for Lsof
screem  - Web Site / HTML Editor
cost of the internet connection (PPP)  - calculate cost of the internet
GnuCash  - A personal finance manager
XML Security Library  - Implementation of XML Security specs
camorama  - webcam application
gramps  - GNOME based genealogy program
Inti  - Integrated Foundation Classes
Gnome Chemistry Utils  - chemical widgets for gnome-2
Gnome Crontab Editor  - A crontab administration tool
GChemPaint  - 2D chemical structures editor
gFTP  - gFTP is a multithreaded FTP client

For more information on these packages visit the GNOME Software map: 
http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/latest.php

Another two weeks filled with lots of nice action. The GNOME2
application portfolio is really starting to fill out as more and more
application developers either have released or are releasing GNOME 2
versions of their applications. Be back in 7 or 14 :) 

Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller 
gnome-summary@gnome.org