“I bet there’s a malady common to all Debian users, courtesy of
the addictive simplicity of apt-get: it involves running apt-get
update ten times a day looking to see if any of the archives have
changed, heralding the arrival of something good, like a nagging
bug that’s been fixed, or the latest release of a closely watched
program. It’s a sickness, but when you have a sources.list that
includes everything from Galeon’s latest builds to Evolution to the
ever-evolving KDE2 archives maintained by Ivan Moore, there’s
always a chance something’s changed.”
“This last week has been a great one for GNOME watchers, and it
provided plenty of opportunities for a lot of apt-getting. Last
Saturday, GNOME 1.4’s first beta release came out. Ximian had it
packaged and ready to go in remarkably short time. A few days
later, Ximian was at it again,rolling out Red Carpet 0.9, which
we’ll look at further along in this column.”
“GNOME 1.4 Beta One provided a lot of people with their first
look at the upcoming 1.4 release, including the first chance a lot
of people just following along have had to see Eazel’s Nautilus
running on their machine. There’s a lot of interesting stuff to see
in the release, but it’s a good one to stay away from for the
moment unless you’re genuinely interested in helping the developers
find bugs. I emphasize that last because this is a case where
they’re making a widespread release to get the word out, get some
eyeballs trained on potential problems, and prime Bugzilla with
some fodder. They aren’t releasing a new stable version you can get
work done with, so people approaching it should take stock of
whether they want to download it out of a desire to help or a need
to have the latest and greatest because it’s there.”