Release Digest: GNOME, July 20, 2004

Inkscape 0.39

We are pleased to announce the Inkscape 0.39 release. The most
important change in this release is the switch to the Pango library
for font handling and Unicode support; a lot of work also went into
new SVG features, export/import, UI, and usability. Here are the
highlights:

• Pango: smoother text display, auto kerning, better i18n
  (automatic font substitution, right-to-left text, bi-directional
  text), less platform dependence
• New SVG features: markers (aka arrowheads), clones (svg:use),
  pattern tiles, RDF metadata; many SVG compliance bugfixes
• New dialogs: Preferences, Find, Metadata
• New and improved import/export file formats: PS, EPS, AI, PNG,
  JPEG, TIFF, BMP, Sketch, Dia, and more
• Pure convenience: usable dropper, scale switches, Commands bar,
  more tool controls (including rounded stars), more import formats,
  more paper sizes, Revert command, edit inside group, better
  selection cues, spell checking, window layout configurable,
  streamlined Fill & Stroke, snapping improvements, better
  rounded corners in rects, path reversing, persistent rotation
  crosshair, per-object export hints, and much more
• Internals: speedups, more C++ification, garbage collection,
  SigC++ signals, wider use of new data structures, extensive
  cleanup
• Plus: new documentation, new translations, lots of assorted
  bugfixes (the infamous “freeze when dragging outside of window” bug
  on Windows is gone!)

The team has placed a great deal of scrutiny into fixing bugs,
and while this was not a primary focus as it had been for 0.38.1,
we expect this release will be at least as stable as the last. Many
thanks go out to all of the users that took the time to write bug
reports, you make Inkscape better.

For tons more details, see the Release Notes for 0.39:

http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ReleaseNotes039

Screenshots:

http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/

Download your packages (Linux, Windows, Mac OSX):

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3D93438

GTK+ 2.5.0

GTK+-2.5.0 is now available for download at:

ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.5/

gtk+-2.5.0.tar.gz md5sum: 23330af6df089703b877fb865396fb87
gtk+-2.5.0.tar.bz2 md5sum: 8ff1c22ab56e645a4b657e654132ed7c

This is the first development release loading up to GTK+-2.6.
This release contains several new widgets and capabilities,
including a new icon view widget, an about dialog, simple rotation
support for GdkPixbufs, new cell renderers for combo boxes and
progress bars, new stock icons, performance improvments, and
bugfixes.

Notes:

• This is unstable development release. There are certainly
  plenty of bugs remaining to be found. This release should not be
  used in production.
• Installing this version will overwrite your existing copy of
  GTK+-2.4. If you have problems, you’ll need to reinstall
  GTK+-2.4.4.
• GTK+-2.6 will be source and binary compatible with the
  GTK+-2.4.x series; however, the new API additions in GTK+-2.5.0 are
  not yet finalized, so there are likely incompatibities between this
  release and the final 2.6 release.
• Remaining API issues for GTK+-2.6 can be found with following
  bugzilla query:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=gtk%2b&target_milestone=2.6+API+Freeze&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED

• Bugs should be reported to http://bugzilla.gnome.org.

What is GTK+

GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user
interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable
for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete
application suites.

GTK+ has been designed from the ground up to support a range of
languages, not only C/C++. Using GTK+ from languages such as Perl
and Python (especially in combination with the Glade GUI builder)
provides an effective method of rapid application development.

GTK+ is free software and part of the GNU Project. However, the
licensing terms for GTK+, the GNU LGPL, allow it to be used by all
developers, including those developing proprietary software,
without any license fees or royalties.

Where to get more information about
GTK+

Information about GTK+ including links to documentation can be
found at:

http://www.gtk.org/

An installation guide for GTK+-2.4 is found at:

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.4/gtk/gtk-building.html

Common questions:

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.4/gtk/gtk-question-index.html

http://www.gtk.org/faq/

Overview of Changes from GTK+ 2.4.1 to
GTK+ 2.5.0

• New widgets:
  • GtkIconView [Anders Carlsson]
  • GtkAboutDialog [Matthias Clasen]
  • GtkCellView [Matthias]
• GtkFileChooser
  • change to newly-created folders [Federico Mena Quintero]
  • always show icons [Federico]
  • bug fixes [Federico, Christian Neumair, Alex Roitman]
• GtkComboBox, GtkComboBoxEntry
  • add missing getters and some more convience API [Matthias,
    Christian Neumeir, Oliver Andrieu]
  • improve placement and sizing of popups [Matthias]
  • support insensitive items [Matthias]
  • support separators [Matthias]
  • handle empty or unset models better [Mariano
    Suarez-Alvarez]
  • bug fixes [Matthias, Jonathan Blandford, Oliver Andrieu, Paul
    Pongonyshev, Christian Persch]
• GtkEntryCompletion
  • ignore enter events when the window pops up under the pointer
    [Anders]
  • bug fixes [Matthias]
  • support inline autocompletion [Matthias]
• GtkUIManager
  • fix signal registration [Michael Natterer]
  • make generated XML parseable [Sven Neumann]
  • fix get_widget to return menus [Matthias]
• GtkTreeView
  • hover-selection mode [Matthias]
  • support insensitive cells [Matthias]
  • support separators [Matthias]
  • make entry context menu work in editable text cells [Owen
    Taylor, Kristian Rietveld]
  • make DND work with treeviews in modal dialogs [Federico]
  • make empty treeviews focusable [Federico]
  • new GtkCellRendererProgress [Matthias, Tommi Komulainen,
    Christian Persch]
  • new GtkCellRendererCombo [Matthias]
  • bug fixes [Matthias, Federico]
• GtkNotebook
  • allow to change tabs with the mouse wheel [Gabriel de
    Perthuis]
• GtkWindow
  • support named themed window icons [Matthias, Calum Benson]
• New stock icons: file, directory, about, edit, connect,
  disconnect, and media player icons for forward, next, pause, play,
  previous, record, rewind and stop
• GDK
  • support do-not-focus-on-map hint [Elijah Newren]
  • fix RGBA cursors [Michael Natterer]
• gdk-pixbuf
  • reorganize headers [Matthias, Jeff Franks, Havoc
    Pennington]
  • flag to mark loaded images as scalable [Dom Lachowicz]
  • license information for loaders [Matthias]
  • simple
    multiple-of-90ð
    rotation support [Matthias]
  • allow to disable loaders [Matthias]
  • bug fixes [Kouichirou Hiratsuka, Sven, Brian Cameron, Manish
    Singh, Morten Welinder]
• X11 selections
  • make incremental transfer of MULTIPLE work [Matthias]
  • don’t do incremental transfer in 4k chunks [Matthias]
  • add selection ownership change notification [Matthias]
  • support text/plain targets [Matthias]
• Win32
  • bug fixes [Hans Breuer, John Ehresman, Tor Lillqvist, Robert
    A., B. Carpentier, J. Ali Harlow, Laurent Sansonetti]
• Performance improvements
  • predict exposes for override-redirect windows [Saren
    Sandmann]
  • unset the background when mapping or unmapping windows
    [Saren]
  • support the update counter spec for smoother resizing
    [Saren]
• Misc bug fixes [Matthias, Owen, Saren, Anders, Padraig
  O’Briain, Crispin Flowerday, Michal Pasternak, Scott Tsai, Morten,
  Michael Natterer, Dmd Ljungmark, Sven, Billy Biggs, Mark
  McLoughlin, Sam Stephenson, John Finlay, David Hawthorne, Kent
  Sandvik, Davyd Madeley, Alexander Winston, Jean-François
  Wauthy, Jeff Franks, Philip Kendall, Baris Cicek Yevgen Muntyan,
  Bastien Nocera, Tim Janik, John Ehresman, Theppitak
  Karoonboonyanan, Nickolay V. Shmyrev, William Jon McCann, Paolo
  Maggi, Lorenzo Gil Sanchez, Jan-Marek Glogowski, Pawel Salek,
  Felipe Heidrich, Dmitry M. Shatrov, Alex Larsson, Michael
  Hallendal, Scott Bronson, Kjartan Maraas, Damien Carbery, Elke
  Meier]
• Doc improvements [Matthias, Federico, Owen, Steve Chaplin,
  Tommi Komulainen, Bastien Nocera, Billy Biggs, Sampo Nurmentaus,
  Steffen R., Doug Quale, Oliver Andrieu]
• Updated translations (bg,lt,ne,tk,wa,en_GB)

20 July 2004

GLib 2.5.0

GLib-2.5.0 is now available for download at:

ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.5/

glib-2.5.0.tar.bz2 md5sum: 98fbd81bef9e05978bbe68d7378a872a
glib-2.5.0.tar.gz md5sum: 46ab6dc32630b120fdf0a73998e59e55

This is the first development release loading up to GLib-2.6.
This release contains new g_debug() macros and a number of bug and
portability fixes.

Notes:

• This is unstable development release. While it has had fairly
  extensive testing, there are certainly plenty of bugs remaining to
  be found. This release should not be used in production.
• Installing this version will overwrite your existing copy of
  GLib-2.4. If you have problems, you’ll need to reinstall
  GLib-2.4.4.
• GLib-2.6 will be source and binary compatible with the
  GLib-2.4.x series; however, the new API additions in GLib-2.5.0 are
  not yet finalized, so there may be incompatibities between this
  release and the final 2.6 release.
• Remaining API issues for GLib-2.6 can be found with following
  bugzilla query:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=glib&target_milestone=2.6+API+Freeze&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED

• Bugs should be reported to http://bugzilla.gnome.org.

About GLib

GLib is the low-level core library that forms the basis for
projects such as GTK+ and GNOME. It provides data structure
handling for C, portability wrappers, and interfaces for such
runtime functionality as an event loop, threads, dynamic loading,
and an object system.

More information about GLib is available at:

http://www.gtk.org/

An installation guide for the GTK+ libraries, including GLib,
can be found at:

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/gtk-building.html

Overview of Changes from GLib 2.4.1 to
GLib 2.5.0

• New functions g_debug [Sven Herzberg]
• Use higher precision for mathematical constants [Morten
  Welinder]
• Don’t convert to/from UTF-8 in g_filename_{to,from}_uri
  [Federico Mena Quintero]
• Win32
  • Handle empty digit string in printf() functions correctly [Tor
    Lillqvist]
  • Support ll as format modifier for long long [Tor]
  • Be more careful about HOME [Tor, Ivan Wong]
  • Bug fixes [John Ehresman]
• Miscellaneous bug and portability fixes [Danilo Segan, Owen
  Taylor, Nikolai Weibull, B. Carpentier, Morten Welinder, Manish
  Singh, Sven Neumann, Julio M. Merino Vidal, Kaz Sasayama, Murray
  Cumming, Federico, Mariano Suarez-Alvarez]
• Documentation updates [Matthias Clasen, Chrispin Flowerday,
  Tommi Komulainen, Federico Mena Quintero, Ed Griffiths]
• New and updated translations (ja,ne,no,wa)

20 July 2004

Pango-1.5.1

Pango-1.5.1 is now available for download at:

ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.5/

pango-1.5.1.tar.bz2 md5sum: c11cf17c6af0b8f756627516fedb567c
pango-1.5.1.tar.gz md5sum: 5c9611257cbc01c87e0477f8ef6531b6

This is a development release leading up to Pango-1.6.0, which
will be released together with GNOME-2.8.

New features in the 1.5.x branch of Pango include

• Support for ellipsization in PangoLayout; that is, for
  truncating lines by replacing text at the start middle or end of
  the line with an ellipsis (…)
• Support for custom font decoders; applications can specify how
  characters are converted to glyphs for particular fonts
• Support for setting a transformation matrix on a PangoContext
  and transformed rendering support for the FT2 backend

Notes:

• This is unstable development release. While it has had fairly
  extensive testing, there are likely bugs remaining to be found.
  This release should not be used in production.
• Installing this version will overwrite your existing copy of
  Pango-1.4. If you have problems, you’ll need to reinstall
  Pango-1.4.0.
• Bugs should be reported to http://bugzilla.gnome.org.

About Pango

Pango is a library for layout and rendering of text, with an
emphasis on internationalization. Pango can be used anywhere that
text layout is needed, though most usage so far as been in the
context of the GTK+ widget toolkit. Pango forms the core of text
and font handling for GTK+ 2.

Pango is designed to be modular; the core Pango layout can be
used with four different font backends:

• Core X windowing system fonts
• Client-side fonts on X using the Xft2 library
• Direct rendering of scalable fonts using the FreeType
  library
• Native fonts on Microsoft platforms

Dynamically loaded modules then handle text layout for
particular combinations of script and font backend. Pango-1.2 ships
with a wide selection of modules, including modules for Hebrew,
Arabic, Hangul, Thai, and a number of Indic scripts. Virtually all
of the world’s major scripts are supported.

As well as the low level layout rendering routines, Pango
includes PangoLayout, a high level driver for laying out entire
blocks of text, and routines to assist in editing internationalized
text.

More information about Pango is available from http://www.pango.org/.

Pango depends on version 2.2.0 or newer of the GLib library;
more information about GLib can be found at http://www.gtk.org/.

Overview of changes between 1.5.0 and 1.5.1

* Add ellipsization support to PangoLayout
* Add pango_contextgetfont_map().
* Fix metrics for the Xft backend when a transform is in effect
* Separate out backend-independent parts of pangoft2topgm for
future rendering testbeds.
* Code cleanups (use G_DEFINE_TYPE, make PangoMatrix parameters
const)
* Add a GType for PangoMatrix [Torsten Schoenfeld]
* Misc bug fixes [Morten Welinder]

Overview of changes between 1.4.x and 1.5.0

* Allow applications to provide custom font decoders [Chris
Blizzard]
* Add support for setting a transformation matrix on a
PangoContext
* Add support for rotated rendering to the FT2 backend
* Add metrics for underline and strikethrough position and
thickness.
* Add letter-spacing attribute and implement in PangoLayout
* OpenType support in Thai Module [Theppitak Karoonboonyanan]
* Add Add PANGO_TYPE_LAYOUT_ITER [Johan Dahlin]

Owen Taylor
19 July 2004

GNOME System Tools 0.90.0

The GNOME System Tools version 0.90.0 “Untitled” have been
released.

The GNOME System Tools are a set of cross-platform configuration
utilities for Linux and other Unix systems. Internally they are
divided in frontends and backends. The frontend knows nothing about
the underlying system and provides the same user interface across
the different types of systems. The backend knows how to read and
write the configuration information. The GNOME System Tools do not
impose a new database on the system: they work with the default
configuration files so that configuration can still be done by hand
or by other tools.

Right now the GNOME System Tools fully support various
distros/OS such as: Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE, Fedora, Debian, Gentoo,
Slackware, FreeBSD, OpenNA and PLD.

Changes since last release

General

• Added help docs for all tools (me)
• Removed tools complexity thingy and “apply” button, somewhat
  improved UI (me)
• Check that the backends output is really UTF-8, this will
  require perl >= 5.8 and perl-locale-gettext package, it also
  improves a lot backends i18n (me)
• Added support for Fedora Core 2 (me)
• Added support for Slackware 10.0 (me)
• Removed warning dialog (me)

Network

• Added support for Black Panther Linux 4.0 (Karoly Barcza?)
• Improved IP addresses parsing (me)
• compilation fixes when -fno-common is active (Heikki
  Tauriainen)

Boot

• Avoid duplicates in the devices list (me)

… plus other lots of bugfixing

Thanks to Evandro (aka hk) for testing Slackware 10.0
support

Thanks to everybody I’ve forgot to thank

Translations

• bg (Vladimir Petkov)
• da (Ole Laursen)
• ja (Takeshi AIHANA)
• sq (Laurent Dhima)

Downloading

You can get it from : ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnomesystem
-tools/0.90/

GStreamer 0.8.4

Release notes attached.

Enjoy !

Dave/Dina : future TV today ! – http://www.davedina.org/
<-*- thomas (dot) apestaart (dot) org -*->
de laatste tijd
heb ik gedacht
het is niet meer
zoals het was
<-*- thomas (at) apestaart (dot) org -*->
URGent, best radio on the net – 24/7 ! – http://urgent.fm/

GStreamer: Release notes for GStreamer 0.8.4 “Paella”

The GStreamer team is happy to announce a new release in the
0.8.x stable series of the GStreamer streaming-media framework.

The 0.8.x series is a stable series aimed at end users. It is
not API or ABI compatible with the stable 0.6.x series. It is,
however, parallel installable with the 0.6.x series.

This module only contains core functionality. For actual media
playback, you will need other modules. GStreamer Plugins contains a
huge set of additional plugins. GStreamer FFmpeg contains a plugin
based on the popular FFmpeg decoding library. These modules need
not have the same source version as the core, as long as they are
in the 0.8.x series.

Features of this release

• Parallel installability with 0.6.x series
• Internationalization
• New Translation: Czech (cs), Miloslav Trmac
• New Translation: Catalan (ca), Jordi Mallach
• Translations: af, az, cs, en_GB, fr, nl, sr, sv, tr, uk
• gst_init () now behaves like gtk_init ()
• queue fixes
• ongoing win32 build integration
• bytestream now has GstFilePad
• gst-register is now i18n-ized
• GstCaps XML-ization works again
• Fixed enum GValue
• Added GstFraction GValue

Known issues

• Some applications may print warnings on the console saying
  something like: GStreamer-WARNING **: pad xvimagesink0:sink
  returned caps that are not a real subset of its template caps.

It is safe to ignore this warning. It will be fixed in the next
release of the GStreamer Plugins.

Bugs fixed in this release

• 109831 : clocks aren’t refcounted properly
• 123774 : state change on bin should set same state change on
  all c…
• 134663 : failed assertion at end of movie in totem
• 137863 : CPU/Memory leak when using spider decoder
• 140219 : no man page for gst-xmlinspect
• 141378 : gstreamer crashes during initialization due to a
  recent c…
• 141692 : gst_init() type function that ignores arguments it
  doesn’…
• 142418 : Win32 Debug build should not be the same as the
  Release one
• 142422 : Win32 Build documentation missing
• 142795 : [PATCH] Memory leak in queue element
• 142813 : [PATCH] Deadlock in optimal scheduler
• 142850 : GST-Register didn’t find any plugins
• 142903 : [PATCH] fdsrc element never resets buffer offset to
  zero
• 143741 : cross compiling issue
• 143777 : [opt] problem after removing some elemnts and putting
  the…
• 143953 : Crash cause by gst_data_is_writable +
  audioconvert
• 144185 : Double-free memory
• 145137 : patch to make GstCaps XML functions actually do
  something
• 145338 : [PATCH] Fix a bus error in the optimal scheduler
• 145391 : gstvalue.c: ref klasses instead of peek
• 145520 : registry rebuilds too easily
• 147707 : FreeBSD dosn’t have strndup
• 147713 : opt scheduler resorts the chain incorrectly
• 147819 : [PATCH] Add some checks in the opt scheduler
• 147894 : opt scheduler decoupled elements mismanagement
• 147929 : [PATCH] running gst-register in non-utf8 locale can
  cause…

Download

You can find source releases of gstreamer in the download
directory: http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/src/gstreamer/

GStreamer Homepage

More details can be found on the project’s website: http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/

Support and Bugs

We use GNOME’s bugzilla for bug reports and feature requests:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GStreamer

Developers

CVS is hosted on cvs.freedesktop.org/.
All code is in CVS and can be checked out from there. Interested
developers of the core library, plug-ins, and applications should
subscribe to the gstreamer-devel list. If there is sufficient
interest we will create more lists as necessary.

Applications

Applications already ported to use GStreamer 0.8.x include the
GNOME desktop components like gnome-media and nautilus-media, as
well as other GNOME applications including sound-juicer, totem and
RhythmBox.

Contributors to this release

• Andy Wingo
• Benjamin Otte
• Daniel Gazard
• David Moore
• David Schleef
• Jan Schmidt
• Joe Marcus Clarke
• Johan Dahlin
• Miloslav Trmac
• Ronald Bultje
• Sebastien Cote
• Steve Lhomme
• Thomas Vander Stichele
• Wim Taymans
• Zaheer Abbas Merali

gnome-games 2.7.5

Be warned that the networking code is very poorly tested. Aside
from that, enjoy. You can find it at the usual place:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-games/2.7/

• Callum

gnome-games 2.7.5

This is the last release before the feature freeze, therefore it
is full of new features. Klotski has been put back into the
distribution. The network code for iagno has been factored out and
there is a new connection dialog. The game server for iagno is now
available for local use, it can be found in the libgames-support
directory. Finally, gnometris has sounds !

All card games:

• Hybrid SVG/PNG replacement theme for Dondorf. (Richard
  Hoelscher)

Blackjack:

• SVG chip and slot images. Gnometris:
• Drag and drop support for solid-color backgrounds (callum)
• Sound effects ! (callum, Richard Hoelscher)
• Configurable keyboard controls (Paolo Borelli)

Iagno:

• Factored out the network code (Andreas Rosdal)
• New network dialog (Andreas Rosdal)

Klotski:

• It’s back !

Robots:

• Use the new keyboard control widget (callum)

Stones:

• The sound files have been removed due to being too close to
  (and possibly recorded from) the C64 Boulder Dash game. Besides the
  theme tune really annoyed me (callum)

Tali:

• New, SVG, die graphics (Ryan Stutsman)