GNOME Summary

The GNOME Summary covering July 29 through August 4 is now available. Read all about GNOME Basic and Mono, a new home for GNOME Print, the release of GNOME 1.4.1, and Jens Finke’s work on creating a thumbnail managing standard.

This is the GNOME Summary for 2001-07-29 - 2001-08-04
    
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Table of Contents
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1. GNOME Basic and Mono
2. Abiword prepares for the big 1.0
3. Evolution close to producing first 1.0 release
4. Mozilla charges ahead towards 1.0 release
5. Jens Finke working on creating Thumbnail Managing Standard
6. GNOME Print gets a home
7. GNOME Useability project gets some muscle
8. GNOME 2.0 Library freeze in progress
9. GNOME 1.4.1 release underway
10. New release of GNOME-GCJ Java-bindings available
11. GNOME summary translations
12. Hacker Activity
13. New and Updated Software

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1. GNOME Basic and Mono
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As you all know Ximian announced the Mono project not long ago. The goal
of the Mono project is to create a full free C# development environment
for Linux and Unix operating systems, including a compiler. Cool thing
is that it has spawned a nice synergy for the GNOME project as it seems
to be interest among some of the Mono developers to also create support
for vb.net not just C#. The basis for this will be GNOME basic, the VB
compatible Basic implementation, developed in order to enable support
for reading Excel VBA macros in Gnumeric. Hopefully this effort will
also improve the featureset of GNOME Basic in regard to improved VB
scripting for GNOME office applications.Best of luck to Ravi Pratap and
the rest on this task. Links below to the Mono homepage,the GNOME Basic
homepage and an interview by Joe Barr. 

        http://www.go-mono.orghttp://www.gnome.org/projects/gbhttp://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2001-07/lw-07-mono.html

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2. Abiword prepares for the big 1.0
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The Abiword hackers are not resting on their laurels. This week they put
out the 0.9.0 release which is the first feature freeze release in
preparation for the 1.0 release. They plan on making rapid 0.9.x
releases for a while now in order to iron out all bugs and major
useability issues. Below are links to the 0.9.0 release notes, the
Abiword Weekly News #55 and the Abiword download area 
on Sourceforge. 

        http://www.abisource.com/release-notes/0.9.0-1.htmlhttp://www.abisource.com/dev/news/2001/awn55.phtmlhttp://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=15518_release&id=45623


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3. Evolution close to producing first 1.0 release
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The Evolution team are hard at work ironing out bugs in order to get
Evolution 1.0 out the door. Beta 2 was released this week and the
Evolutin team is 
hosting bug days on irc.gnome.org/ #evolution each Thursday. If you want
to be sure that any bugs that have been bugging you are squashed before
the offical 1.0 release be sure to join the Evolution team next thursday
to help them find and eliminate your bug. Full beta 2 announcent at link
below. 

        http://www.ximian.com/release_notes/evolution/1.0_beta_2.php3

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4. Mozilla charges ahead towards 1.0 release
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The Mozilla team was happy to announce a new release this week, 0.9.3,
which kills of even more cras bugs and add even more polish. GNOME users
should hold of a little while though since a 0.9.3 compatible releases
of Nautilus and Galeon isn't ready yet, but don't despair. Galeon
already has a new Mozilla 0.9.3 compatible pre-release out, and the
Nautilus hackers are already looking into seeing what needs to be done
on their side. 

        http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla0.9.3/

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5. Jens Finke working on creating Thumbnail Managing Standard
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Lots of applications these days creates thumbnails of images on your
disk. Of course if you have many different applications doing this then
these thumbnails will start to take up a lot of disk space eventually.
Jens Finke is working on changing this and has made a draft for a new
Thumbnail Managing Standard which will allow all your applications to
share the same thumbnail images. The 0.2 version of the draft is now
avaialable and he is requesting feedback. Below you find a link to the
current draft and contact information for Jens. The specification can
also be discussed on the freedesktop.org mailing-list. 

        http://www.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~pearl/thumbnail-spec/index.htmlhttps://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xdg-list

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6. GNOME Print gets a home
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The GNOME printing library has made it easy to add good printing support
to GNOME applications, but finding information on GNOME print has not
always been that easy. GNOME print has now gotten its own homepage
hosted on gnome.org. So if you want to learn more about GNOME print or
just gaze at a beutifully designed page now is your chance. Link to the
new GNOME-print homepage below. 

        http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnome-print

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7. GNOME Useability project gets some muscle
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Seth Nickell has become the lead developer on the GNOME useability
project which plans to get as many of the useability improvements that
the Sun useability study uncovered into GNOME as possible. Seth plans to
hold regular meetings togheter with the Sun usebility engineers on IRC
to plan and work on such issues. Interested hackers should join the
useability list in order to join the discussions and get information on
when the next meeting are. Below is a link to the mailing-list and to
the Useability meeting prepartion notes. The first online meeting was a
great success with over 30 people participating. 

        http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usabilityhttp://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/meeting.html

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8. GNOME 2.0 Library freeze in progress
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The run-up to the GNOME 2.0 release is underway with the libraries going
into API freeze this week. Libraries such as bonobo-activation (formerly
known as OAF), libbonobo and bonoboui, libgnome and libgnomeui,
gnome-vfs, gconf, libart_lgpl and more have all had a feature freeze
release. Hopefully a full GNOME 2.0 platform preview release is ready to
be released soon. 

        ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/pre-gnome2/latest/sources/

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9. GNOME 1.4.1 release underway
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Kjartan Maraas is preparing the first GNOME 1.4.1 beta release which
will be out very soon. This is a bugfix release for the GNOME 1.4
release containing bugfixes and improvements made since the 1.4.0
release. For an almost complete list of what packages which will be in
GNOME 1.4.1 take a look at Kjartan's beta1 list linked below. 

        http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2001-July/msg00267.html

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10. New release of GNOME-GCJ Java-bindings available
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Oskar Liljeblad released version 0.15.0 of the GNOME-GCJ Java bindings
this week. GNOME-GCJ are Java bindings for GNOME and GTK+ which can be
compiled into native bytecode with the GCJ compiler which is part of
GCC. Oskar is also looking for more developers to help out since he has
extensive plans for GNOME-GCJ.Link to the relase announcement and the
GNOME GCJ homepage below. 

        
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2001-August/msg00000.htmlhttp://gnome-gcj.sourceforge.net

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11. GNOME summary translations
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The GNOME summary is being translated into Spanish and Hungarian.
Translations are usually available shortly after the release of the
summary in english. 

        http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/

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12. Hacker Activity
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Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.

Most active modules:
 148 evolution
 102 SashWDE
 84 gnome-applets
 78 SashMo
 65 galeon
 64 web-devel-2
 53 gail
 51 mc
 37 anjuta
 37 libbonobo
 37 gtkhtml
 33 libgnome
 32 gimp
 29 gtkvts
 26 gnumeric
 25 gnome-vfs
 25 gnome-core
 24 ximian-setup-tools
 22 gnomeweb-wml
 22 gal
[101 active modules omitted]

Most active hackers:
 68 martin
 67 michael
 62 barreiro
 57 kmaraas
 54 tyeler
 36 baddog
 35 clahey
 33 rodrigo
 32 proskin
 32 mpeseng
 32 seth
 29 chatham
 28 kabalak
 26 jody
 25 jleach
 25 hovinen
 23 bcameron
 23 dkc
 22 darin
 22 billh
[125 active hackers omitted]


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13. New and Updated Software
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Gnome Predict  - A satellite tracking program for Gnome.
gtktalog  - App to easily browse a CDROM database.
gmrun  - Run utility, providing bash-like TAB completion and history
linphone  - A web-phone application
gnome-pilot  - Pilot synchronization for GNOME
Metacity  - A window manager based on GTK+ 2.0
rubrica  - Addressbook application
Pan  - Multithreaded Usenet newsreader for GTK and GNOME
devhelp  - Browse and search GNOME API and GNU Manuals.
gchch  - Chinese Checkers board game.
Tenes Empanadas Graciela  - A pseudo-clone of Risk

For more information on these packages visit the GNOME Software map: 
http://www.gnome.org/applist/listrecent.php3

Sincerely,
Christian