GNOME Summary for 2002-01-13 – 2002-01-19

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Table of Contents
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1. What new user visible changes are in the GNOME 2.0 desktop?
2. Abiword nearing its 1.0 release
3. New GNOME website moving forward again
4. GNOME 2.0 Desktop Alpha: 'Rolig Liten Hattgubbe'
5. Writing GNOME Applications using Glade and Python
6. Theme engines ported to GNOME 2
7. A mailing list for you?
8. Deadline for submitting talks to GUADEC 3 getting close
9. Translated GNOME summaries
10. Hacker Activity
11. New and Updated Software

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1. What new user visible changes are in the GNOME 2.0 desktop?
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In preparation for the upcoming GNOME 2.0 Desktop, Havoc Pennington put
up a small paper outlining what new features will be most easily visible
to users.Lots of things to look forward to, and with the first desktop
alpha release out you can even test it yourself :).  

        http://www106.pair.com/rhp/gnome-2-new.html

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2. Abiword nearing its 1.0 release
--------------------------------------------------------------

The Abiword hackers are busy tracking down bugs in preparation for their
1.0 release. The first release in their beta cycle 0.99.1 is already out
and more are to folow soon. Planning is already underway for the post
1.0 releases which will add such things as table support, making
bidirectional text support part of the default build and adding support
for bonobo under Unix and dcom under windows. Discussion is also being
done about wether to adopt the Open Office XML format for post 1.0
releases as the default Abiword fileformat. Of course 
file interchange would already be easy if the Open Office hackers
actually had read the rich text format specification instead of
fabricating their own weird version of the format.  Two new weekly
newsletters have also come out recently. Jesper Skov also announced that
Red Hat is now sponsoring his writing of the Abiword Weekly News which
means he are allowed to do them during workhours. Big 
thanks to Red Hat for continuing to be such a cool company.

        http://www.abisource.com/information/news/2001/awn75.phtml
        http://www.abisource.com/information/news/2001/awn76.phtml

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3. New GNOME website moving forward again
--------------------------------------------------------------

After some delays caused by some administrative hurdles the GNOME
webteam is once again pushing the new GNOME website forward. Steve Hall
has put up these nice looking prototypes for viewing. The final
technical setup for the new website is not completly set in stone yet,
but the layout of the pages is going to be at least very similar to what
you see here.

        http://www.mindspring.com/~digitect/gnome/v2/ia-2-0-2-user.html
       
http://www.mindspring.com/~digitect/gnome/v2/ia-2-0-3-search02.html
       
http://www.mindspring.com/~digitect/gnome/v2/ia-2-0-2-foundation.html
       
http://www.mindspring.com/~digitect/gnome/v2/ia-2-0-2-developer.html

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4. GNOME 2.0 Desktop Alpha: 'Rolig Liten Hattgubbe'
--------------------------------------------------------------

The GNOME 2.0 release team announced the first desktop alpha this week
and the race towards having GNOME 2.0 ready for mass consumption is on. 
Jeff Waugh posted some release notes on Gnotices which you find at the
top link below, there is also a link to the GNOME 2.0 desktop alpha
packages. Jeff also pointed us to some nice statistics on the desktop
alpha. It seems we have had over 65 thousand downloads of the desktop
alpha components and over 58 gigabytes of tarballs transferred from
ftp.gnome.org via rsync, ftp and http. That is a rather nice number I
think, especially considering that it is an alpha release 
and that a lot of people got it from one of the mirrors or directly from
CVS. Click on the third link for more statistics.

        http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/1011293794/index_html
        
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/pre-gnome2/releases/gnome-2.0-desktop-alpha/
        http://www.acc.umu.se/technical/statistics/ftp/gnome.html.en.

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5. Writing GNOME Applications using Glade and Python
--------------------------------------------------------------

Robert Laing has made a really nice tutorial on how to write GNOME
applications using Glade and Python. Python is considered a very good
language for rapidly developing applications and also a very good
language to start out with. So get with the Python groove.

        http://www.icon.co.za/~zapr/Project1.html

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6. Theme engines ported to GNOME 2
--------------------------------------------------------------

Owen Taylor announced that he had updated the gtk-engines package to
work with the GNOME 2.0 Desktop.
The pixbuf engine should even be mostly compatible with gtk1.2 pixbuf
themes so the number of themes available should be rather big from the
outset. Seth Nickell have on his side updated the popular Crux theme to
GTK+ 2.0. Below you find Owen's announcement of the gtk-engines port. A
link to a screenshot of Procman, the new process viewer using a pixbuf
theme, and last but not least a link to Seth's screenshots of his GNOME
2.0 Crux desktop. On this desktop you also see the new background image
setting capplet. You probably notice the lack of ok/apply buttons on
this which due to the new GNOME 2.0 UI guidelines which 
states that instant apply windows shouldn't have such. A small sign that
the look and feel of GNOME 2 will probably end up being quite different
and more coherent that GNOME 1.
        
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-January/msg00399.html
        http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/gtk/lots-of-alpha.png
        http://www.stanford.edu/~snickell/crux-gtk2.png

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7. A mailing list for you?
--------------------------------------------------------------

Wanted to talk about GNOME in your own language or wanting to discuss
running GNOME on your particular system? Well, there are actually quite
a lot of mailing lists on gnome.org which targets specific languages or
systems. For instance we have the gnome-de,gnome-no and gnome-turk which
are for discussing issues related to GNOME in German, Norwegian and
Turkish. Or we have mailing-lists like gnome-redhat-list and
gnome-freebsd which discuss using GNOME on those particular systems. Or
we have a list like gnome-cyr which discusses issues related to running
GNOME and using the Cyrrilic alphabet. If you are interested in these or
other mailinglists you should take a look at the link below. You can
also probably find mailinglists for your language on your 
national GNOME website.

        http://mail.gnome.org/archives/

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8. Deadline for submitting talks to GUADEC 3 getting close
--------------------------------------------------------------

Want to do a presentation during GUADEC 3? Well you better start moving
since the deadline for submitting the first abstract is the 25th of
January. And remember that this is not high-school so you can turn in
your paper before the last minute (except the GStreamer abstract that I
am doing cause that is much harder to write than the other abstracts
people are doing).

        http://www.guadec.org

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9. Translated GNOME summaries
--------------------------------------------------------------

As always we have translations of the GNOME summaries available. So
linked below are French translation, Spanish translation and Hungarian
translation. If there are other translations available please let us
know.

        http://www.gynov.org/news/index.php4
        http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/
        http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/

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

Most active modules:
 91 galeon
 60 gnome-applets
 55 gtk+
 54 gnumeric
 52 libgda
 52 evolution
 48 gnome-core
 46 web-devel-2
 40 gnome-control-center
 39 SashXB
 36 nautilus
 32 gnome-db
 28 gnomeicu
 27 gnome-python
 26 guppi3
 25 pan
 24 gtkmm-root
 20 control-center-plus
 20 gedit
 19 yelp
[136 active modules omitted]

Most active hackers:
 57 rodrigo
 52 menthos
 45 darin
 43 seth
 39 sebol
 37 zilch
 35 owen
 33 peterisk
 32 jody
 32 jbaayen
 31 gman
 31 hovinen
 30 ajshankar
 30 gonzalo
 28 veillard
 28 fejj
 27 michael
 25 kmaraas
 23 hp
 22 alexl
[144 active hackers omitted]


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11. New and Updated Software
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PhotoGroup  - For organising collections of images.
gcompris  - Simple education game.
X-Chat  - IRC client with DCC, Perl+Python scripting and a plugin
interface.
Gnome News Applet  - Applet displaying headlines
Gnumeric  - Spreadsheet aiming to be a drop in relacement for
proporietary 
products.
gnome-crystal  - Light model visualizer and Bonobo server for crystal 
structures.
BEAST/BSE  - Graphical front-end to BSE
Gnome Download Manager  - Download Manager
Pan  - Newsreader, loosely based on Agent and Gravity.
Rubrica  - Addressbook
gael  - EDA -Electronic Design Automation
gLabels  - Creating labels and business cards
Firestarter  - Complete firewall tool
GSwitchIt  - Xkb state indicator
The Sushi Project  - Play a pen-and-paper game across the Internet.
Mahogany  - Mahogany is a cross-platform e-mail application.
gpaint  - Aims to be a simple and easy-to-use paint program
gxsm  - Graphical interface for any kind of 2D data aquisitation method
Guikachu  - For graphical editing of resource files for PalmOS-based
computers
gnomeradio  - Radio tuner
GIrDA  - IR monitor.
xmldb  - 3-tier application server

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

Slightly delayed summary this week due to me and my choosen journaling 
filesystem becoming mortal enemies, but I am now back on top with a
freshly installed ext2 filesystem and 2 months of mail lost to oblivion.
As always don't hesitate to send us submissions for things you want
mentioned in the summaries as long as it doesn't include journaling
filesystems.
Christian
gnome-summary@gnome.org