---

Release Digest: GNOME, March 4, 2004

GDM 2.5.90.2

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

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

It has come to my attention, that we need a constitutional
amendment to protect poking oneself in the nose. Recently there has
a been a string of incidents in which gay people were poking
themselves in the nose and obviously this makes a mockery out of
the institution of nose poking. Nose poking is an institution
between a man (non-gay) and his finger, and anything other then
this is obviously a crime against nature and humanity and should
deserve the harshest of punishments. If we allow gay men to poke
themselves in the nose, next thing you know, women will be wanting
to poke themselves in the nose as well, and that is a road to
destruction of family values as we know it.

With that out of the way, there’s a new unstable gdm release
out. Not all that much new as I’m busy with school, so I have to
fill up the announcement with random silliness. The coolest new
thing is the gtk theme support in the standard greeter I
suppose.

If you wonder what happened to the 2.5.90.1 announcement, it
didn’t make it. It was poking itself in the nose and was
beheaded.

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 2.5.90.2 and 2.5.90.1:

2.5.90.2 stuff:

  • Support for GTK+ theming (accessibility) and ability to change
    current theme in the standard login, fixes #125070 (Muktha,
    me)
  • Hindi was written wrong in the language menu fixes #134372
    (Guntupalli Karunakar)
  • When restarting a server by whacking it and starting it again,
    wait for 1 sec to allow things to “settle”, plus be a lot milder on
    X server’s lock files / sockets to avoid whacking ones currently in
    use
  • Make language dialog in the graphical greeter come up quicker
    and init the languages lazily
  • Fix #135232 by using code@mod for the translation matrix (me),
    and added Serbian variants there (Danilo Segan)
  • Fix #135053 by adding canadian english (Adam Weinberger, Danilo
    Segan)
  • Fix sourcing of environment on AIX, #135401 (Vincent
    Berger)
  • Fix displaying of ~/.xsession-errors file
  • Attempt to handle out of user diskspace more gracefully by
    whacking old .xsession-errors in case we fail.
  • Translation updates (Nikos Charonitakis, Jordi Mallach, Funda
    Wang, Tommi Vainikainen, Kostas Papadimas, Kjartan Maraas, Miloslav
    Trmac, Laurent Dhima, Zygimantas Berucka, Christian Rose, Changwoo
    Ryu, Yukihiro Nakai, Duarte Loreto, Christophe Merlet, Francisco
    Javier F. Serrador, Artur Flinta, Alastair McKinstry, Guntupalli
    Karunakar, Takeshi AIHANA, Paisa Seeluangsawat, Surichat Sumrit,
    Supranee Thirawatthanasuk, Chanchai Junlouchai, Adam Weinberger,
    Christian Neumair, Hasbullah Bin Pit, Pauli Virtanen, Ole Laursen,
    Asmund Skjaeveland, Metin Amiroff, Vincent van Adrighem, Tino
    Meinen, GNOME PL Team)

2.5.90.1 stuff:

  • Login field was not clearned when x server / slave crashed
    (#131389)
  • Change the 12 hour format to be less confusing (#133189)
  • Re-fix the aix ADMCHG bug #123766 (Vincent Berger)
  • keymouselistener fixes (Brian Cameron)
  • Compilation fixes #131042, #130963
  • Build fixes (Tomasz Kloczko)
  • Other fixes and cleanups (among others #133181 by Mariano
    Suarez-Alvarez)
  • Translation update (Andras Timar, Francisco Javier F. Serrador,
    Lucas Vieites, Maxim Dziumanenko, Robert Sedak, Metin Amiroff,
    Laurent Dhima, Changwoo Ryu, Kjartan Maraas, Miloslav Trmac, Asmund
    Skjaeveland, Sanlig Badral, Zygimantas Berucka, Kostas Papadimas,
    Christian Neumair, Artur Flinta, GNOME PL Team, Gustavo Maciel Dias
    Vieira, Joao Emanuel, Danilo Segan, Vincent van Adrighem, Tino
    Meinen, Fernando Herrera, Arafat Medini)

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.

#ifndef GDM_DISABLE_DEPRECATED
Note3: Note3 has been depracated …
#endif /* GDM_DISABLE_DEPRECATED */

Downloading:

Webpage: http://www.jirka.org/gdm.html

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdm/2.5/

ftp://ftp.5z.com/pub/gdm/

I built an RPM this time around BTW. Have fun. A spec file is
included so you can also try:

rpmbuild -ta gdm-whatever.tar.gz

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

George

PS: I didn’t actually realize until a very serious discussion
about licensing and beheadings on the foundation list, that there
has been no Queen of England since 1707. I have decided this not to
be a problem for the maintainership and copyright assignment of gdm
code. This is because assigning the code to the Queen of England is
already very silly and thus the fact that I’m assigning it to a
person that’s been dead for almost 300 years does not raise the
silliness level all that much further and is thus lost in the
statistical noise. On a positive note, anyone found infringing on
gdm2 code shall be beheaded and his barn shall be dilapidated. The
queen told me so yesterday while I was poking myself in the
nose.


George <jirka@5z.com>

Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses,
not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

  • Dennis (the bloody peasant)

ooo-build-1.1.51

OpenOffice.org build:

This package contains the Gnome integration work for
OpenOffice.org, and a much simplified build wrapper, making an OO.o
build / install possible for the common man. It is a staging ground
for up-streaming patches to OO.o.

Changes in this release:

  • bug fixes
    • calc (Michael)
      • complex number fixes
      • multinomial fix
      • excel I/O error mapping
      • singleton / implicit intersection fix
      • cursor movement fix (Amit)
    • font speedup / fixes (Michael)
    • gtk theming color issues (Dan)
    • default font / fontconfig sync fix (Dan)
    • recent files
      • NFS / flock lockup (Dan)
      • missing .recently-used case (Anil)
    • flash compile breakage (Michael, Rafel Roszak)
    • misc. build fixes (Chris, Rene)
  • features
    • 1.1.1 support (Rene)
      • large number of updated patches
      • build more langs: hebrew, hindi, thai
    • –enable-symbols switch (Dan)
    • new name-account mappings (Utomo, Michael)
    • improved parallel build support (Dan)
    • debug helper (Michael)
    • updated user faq (Carlos Alberto)
    • more / improved icons (Jimmac)

Package available from:

http://ooo.ximian.com/packages/OOO_1_1_0/ooo-build-1.1.51.tar.gz

To find out more and/or get involved in OOo hacking see http://ooo.ximian.com/ and/or
subscribe to our OO.o development mailing list at:

http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/openoffice.

michael@ximian.com
<><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Developer Insider for top news, trends, & analysis