Two and a half months from the amazing 2.66 release, comes 2.67 with many new tools that expand the abilities and possibilities of Blender greatly.

2.67 Main new features

• Freestyle

The most amazing new thing that you will find in version 2.67 is Freestyle. Freestyle is an edge- and line-based non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering engine. It relies on mesh data and z-depth information to draw lines on selected edge types. Various line styles can be added to produce artistic (“hand drawn”, “painted”, etc.) or technical (hard line) looks as shown in the below two examples:

Freestyle rendering engine started as a stand-alone program developed in an academic research project, but is now completely integrated in the latest version of Blender.

• 3D Printing Toolbox

Blender should focus on bringing some kind of initial support for the rising technology of 3D printing and is finally delivering on this version that brings a relevant add-on bundled with the main application (but not enabled by default).

The toolbox includes functions like the ruler tool and the mesh-analysis that displays attributes such as thickness, sharp-areas and distortion. The toolbox provides convenient methods of checking the model for errors, statistics (volume, area etc) and a convenient one-click export option for common formats used with 3d printers (including VRML2).

• Refactored Paint System

The paint system in blender has been refactored to better unify the paint systems stroke management. Due to this, there are some new features for all paint modes, and some implemented specifically for texture painting.

Stencil mapping is a new texture mapping mode that works by displaying an overlay which users can place on the viewport and paint in a stencil-like way on their mesh

• Cycles Render

A Subsurface Scattering shader is now available, to create materials such as Wax, Marble or Skin. This is achieved by the different behavior of the light, that in this case penetrates the surface and bounces around internally before getting absorbed or leaving the surface at a nearby point, rather than light being reflect directly off the surface.

Other goodies

Among the many other small or big improvements (depending on what you do with Blender) are the following:

• Border for compositor viewer node, which restricts what is to be composited for faster previews saving you precious and in most cases huge amounts of time.
• Node Groups editing is less cluttered and more consistent with other nodes. Multiple node editor windows can be used independently. Nesting node groups is fully supported.
• The API now supports custom node types. Nodes can be defined and registered in python scripts like other UI classes. This allows the creation of entire new node systems for addons, external render engines and the like.
• New mesh modeling tools: Individual Face Inset, Poke Face and Knife Project. Faster image display in the image and movie clip editors. Better support for UTF-8 text in the text and console editors, and various improvements to other editors.
• Camera and object motion solver motion are much more accurate and faster because the Ceres library is used now for the bundle adjustment step. In addition the tripod solver is finally fixed and has become usable for longer footage.
• In addition to the new features, over 260 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.

Install

To get the latest 2.67 version of Blender, you will need to visit the download webpage and choose to get the 32 or 64 bit Linux package. No need to install anything, as binaries are included and found inside the folder that will be created after you unzip the downloaded file. Be sure to have glibc 2.11, Python 3.3 and FFmpeg installed in your system.

  Blender Website

Certain Gnome goals have been around for quite some time now like the port to Gstreamer, the migration from gnome-keyring to libsecret, the notification filtering and use of an app menu. Rhythmbox has finally harmonized with the set specifications delivering a release that brought serious work towards the greater coherence with our favorite desktop environment and the rest of its tools and applications.

Changes:

• Menu bar replaced with app menu or menu button
• GStreamer 1.0
• Uses libsecret instead of gnome-keyring
• Supports GNOME notification filtering
• Small improvements to podcast browsing and updating
• Play button now turns into a pause or stop button while playing
• Buffering progress now appears in the song position slider rather than an unlabelled progress indicator in the status bar
• Media player sync works better with transcoded files

Apart from the above changes, version 2.99 and 2.99.1 brought 45 bug fixes in almost every sector and aspect of the application (core app, lyrics and last.fm plugins functionality fixes, memory leak fixes and code cleanup, startup freezes and some ui changes/improvements)

Bugs Fixed:

• (697526) – Click Help menu -> Document Not Found in yelp
• (697527) – Click F1 key in rhythmbox -> No popup yelp
• (697534) – Add Alt+E keyboard shortcut for Edit menu
• (697915) – XI_BadDevice errors
• (376372) – if a podcast feed adds more than one podcast not all will be downloaded.
• (381196) – rhythmbox-client has no option to toggle shuffle/repeat
• (399012) – Rhythmbox wakes up too much
• (454239) – Rhythmbox should have an option to copy files to the default folder when importing
• (592455) – turning volume with ctrl+up/down arrow also skip the song
• (663440) – CD does not resume playing after pausing
• (672306) – Lyric plugin: buttons don’t use mnemonics
• (673533) – No way in Rhythmbox 2.96 to see a *full* list of podcast subscriptions
• (674178) – fetch korean lyrics from jetlyrics.com
• (678032) – The interface freezes at launch
• (679880) – should use keywords in its .desktop entry
• (679982) – Can’t delete libraries from last.fm
• (683375) – add shuffle toggle command line interface
• (684301) – artsearch: don’t warn for GErrors enumerating files
• (685004) – Last.fm profile page’s toolbar is shown when not logged in
• (685565) – error in dbus object path formatting
• (685820) – rhythmbox context plugin: unable to display Links tab
• (685821) – rhythmbox lyrics plugin: unable to set lyrics folder in preferences
• (685822) – rhythmbox lyrics plugin: DarkLyrics IndexError: list index out of range
• (685893) – rhythmbox lyrics plugin: some service no longer work
• (685910) – Make sure to ref objects when using them in an idle call
• (685945) – Disable the context pane plugin when webkit isn’t available
• (686320) – Crashes when enabling visualiser plugin
• (686470) – eggwrapbox: Fix getting orientation as a property
• (687109) – help: port to new documentation infrastructure
• (688432) - Disable building of two static libraries by default
• (688515) – Bottom panel for plugin widgets is not shown
• (688638) – crash parsing musicbrainz audiocd search results
• (689413) – Crash on drag’n'drop of album cover
• (689883) – port visualizer plugin to gstreamer 1.0
• (689899) – Deadlock using the xfade backend
• (690235) – crashes when audio sink cannot be created
• (690993) – segfault in rb_track_transfer_batch_check_profiles()
• (692158) – Rhythmbox crashes when changing internet radio station genre
• (694293) – Plug some small leaks
• (696517) – fix linking lastfm plugin
• (697267) – Crash in rb-podcast-add-dialog.c

Rhythmbox is taking a very much needed step towards optical and technical coherence, while at the same time shapes a solid base for 3.0 to be based on.

You probably have already upgraded to the latest Rhythmbox, but you can always use the below button to download the source and build it manually.

Get Rhythmbox 2.99

Although Away stays in the design trodden of Adwaita, it does differentiate itself where people may need it, like the top panel color being a bit more grayish and thus more suitable for use with darker wallpapers, or more stylish with lighter. Also, the boundaries are not outlined in the dock and the workspace chooser and the frames are darker with the correct dose of transparency.

Other small differences are the more elegant and transparent window overview close button frames, the white background search that is more sufficiently individualized and the more stylish opaque “frequent” and “all” buttons on the bottom of the application overview screen.

Sometimes you don’t have to change everything to offer something that is truly different. This theme manages to satisfy the need for something slightly different without taking all the good things that Adwaita offers away.

My extensive testing didn’t reserve any lags, bugs, hangs, ugly fangs or hardware bangs :)
 
  Away GS Theme    How to theme GNOME 3

The place is Seoul, South Korea and the date is 24 and 25 of May. Developers from around the world, contributors, Gnome lovers, users from Asia and volunteers will have a unique chance to meet each other and discuss the present technologies and future development of their favorite desktop environment.

Nuritkum Square Business Tower will be the place that will hold the lectures

Seoul’s great public transportation and solid international flight connections, as well as the many touristic attractions and great technology interest by university communities in South Korea are hopefully going to work in favor of participation this year.

The schedule, although not yet fixed (you can submit your presentation till March 8th), already looks very promising…

  Asia Summit Website

So, what have the developers of Stellarium been up to since the amazing 12.0 release that brought a new rendering engine among other things? Here is a list of the most important fixes and additions!

New things:

• Added Caldwell catalog
• New skyculture: Tongan
• New feature for Oculars plugin: support Barlow/Shapley lenses
• Control brightness of the milky way returned (LP: #1106755)
• Satellites plugin: New Galileo satellites (LP: #1169252)
• Control brightness of the landscapes at startup (LP: #1149882, #603376)

Changes:

• Repacked default star catalogs (LP: #1124221)
• Repacked locations catalog (LP: #1131036)
• Refactored GUI
• Update textures for some Deep Sky Objects (LP: #1126959)
• Improved accuracy for Near Earth Objects (LP: #1100766, #1080154)

Fixes:

Version 12.1 fixes over 30 bugs in the core application and plugins that concern search problems, some preferences and settings not working correctly, color correction, satellite event times dissent, more precise timing, planet display problems and window boxes behavior.

The new Barlow lens feature fills a hole for the Ocular plugin. You could use another eyepiece to get the same result at the past, but now you can do things correctly with the true field of view.

The new Polynesian Tonga skyculture offers some interesting names for stars and constellations, as well as some special characteristics that derive from the various star paths used in nautical navigation, that may result in a star having many names!

Galilean Satellites and MilkyWay brightness setting are now present!

Stellarium took a small step forward with this bugfixing release that also brought some new things to play with. A truly magnificent tool for every amateur astronomer out there. Update now and benefit from all the latest goodies. Ubuntu users can add the corresponding repository in their system by typing the following commands on a terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:stellarium/stellarium-releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install stellarium

  Stellarium Homepage

This 2.0 release is notable because it includes the new WebKit2 GTK+ API. This API provides a multi-process architecture that renders web content with better robustness, responsiveness and security. Epiphany has already been ported to this new API in GNOME 3.8.

Highlights of this release are:

• Flash and other plugins that still use the old GTK+ 2 library are now supported and run in an independent process.
• The Web Inspector, which allows easy debugging of web applications, works automatically in both docked and undocked states without requiring any API call.
• Accelerated compositing is now enabled, using the GPU to speed up web page rendering and scrolling.
• There is a new embedded HTTP authentication dialog attached to each tab browser. Previously the HTTP dialog was common to the whole application.

The default implementation of the HTTP authentication embeds a dialog in the WebView instead of using a real GtkDialog. It’s also integrated with the keyring by default using libsecret.

Plugins also run in a different process that is built with GTK+ 2 to support the most popular plugins like flash that still use GTK+ 2.

Remote inspector support on Web Inspector

Development

As long as developers and contributors are concerned, the new version of WebKitGTK+ includes both WebKit1 and WebKit2 APIs with the second being considered stable and thus made the default. Backwards compatibility will be ensured, but everyone is recommended to port their apps to the latest version as nothing more than bug fixing will take place for the 1 branch.

The new API is more simple and thus easier to use, more consistent with the names of the functions, signals and properties, while also being more flexible allowing developers to use their own implementation of some parts when possible.

The next step will be the 2.2 version release that must line up with Gnome 3.10 release. Some of the highlights of 2.2 will hopefully be Multi-web processes, Wayland support, Web notifications and Sandboxing.

  WebKitGTK+ Homepage

This is just huge! The No1 issue of GNOME *was* how to test it. Well, not anymore. build.gnome.org is up and running on a 50GB RAM 32 Cores server and prepares boot-able qemu images based on OS TREE. Currently you can’t build an image on demand but there are nightly builds that you can directly try!

Build.G.O will come soon with some new nice features. Not time for a detailed post how to use it / how it works but I l try to make it later.

For now..

• http://build.gnome.org/ | Build.g.o
• https://live.gnome.org/OSTree/GnomeOSTree | About GNOME OSTree
• http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Qcow2  | what Qcow2 is
• https://build.gnome.org/work/images/ | Get the GNOME OS Images

Enjoy ;)

https://cloud.gnome.org/
OwnCloud is the first open-source cloud-files service which made its debut in GNOME 3.8 through GOA (GNOME Online Accounts).  At this point, it isn’t about the quality of the service, but for openness. Sure, you can find more quality solutions like Ubuntu One but.. It’s a matter of taste and coolness, if you want to use as much Open Source as possible, without sacrificing lots.

whats

An OwnCloud instance for GNOME Contributors is accessible at:

• https://cloud.gnome.org/

This isn’t currently* open for everyone.

The GNOME Infrastructure hosts an Owncloud istance at cloud.gnome.org, which is currently available to all the GNOME Teams and developers requesting access to it for downloading and sharing files and folders inherent to their contributions within the GNOME Project. Please get in touch with AndreaVeri for having your account created.

*At this point -at least for OwnCloud (OC)- there isn’t a plan for GNOME to release such service for public, but in my opinion communities like GNOME should and will focus on cloud services for their users, as long as this become financial feasible -demand exists.

You can check more at:

• https://live.gnome.org/Sysadmin/Owncloud

whats next

This is the entry in open source clouding for GNOME, but nerveless isn’t the end. One more similar thing is coming for 3.10, and is the Git integration in the developer experience, which it can be reused and integrated in the future Gnome IDE.

• https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointNine/Features/Gitg
• https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/IDE

how to use it

First thing you need is actually the OwnCloud instance. If you are a GNOME contributor you need to ask from GNOME to open you an account. If you aren’t a contributor you can get your 2GB for free from Red Hat’s OpenShift with one click OwnCloud deploy. Okay, I’am not advertising the more than one billion dollars company here, but these guys do everything for free (as speech), so I just prefer them.

not real sync

After having your OC ready, a small catch you need to know is that OC doesn’t sync your local files with Cloud -although you can do that.  What it basically does, is to mount your online storage to a folder in your local PC. This is the optimal way in cloud computing, as long as we have super fast connections -which we haven’t. It will work real good for small files but not for big ones like movies collections.

OC and GOA

On a previous post I have said about a no-integration of OC with GOA. Well, that was actually my mistake. The reason that GOA was ignoring my OC Account was a missing dependency from Fedora 19. GVfs needs to be built with GOA support and so we need the gvfs-goa package.

In Fedora:

$ sudo yum install gvfs-goa

Then we need to add our OC account in GOA

In GNOME 3.8 open Settings->Online Accounts->Add->OwnCloud  and add your credentials. Next time you will open Nautilus you will see your OC Mount Point in the sidebar under the networks. 

My Networks  is a bit messy. The reason is that OC instance in Cloud.GNOME doesn’t work correctly with GOA at the moment (but it will be soon fixed), and I was testing it, therefore the many accounts. However the OpenShift instance does work okay.

The DAV folder I am showing in the above figure is my manual mount. Of course you can manually mount OC, either if

• you add the WebDAV endpoint (eg., davs://user@cloud.gnome.org/remote.php/webdav) directly in Nautilus then you are directly using the DAV backend in GVfs, without any intereference from GOA.
• you mount it through a terminal with davfs mount

$ cd

$ mkdir DAV

$ sudo mount -t davfs  https://cloud.gnome.org/remote.php/webdav DAV

To use mount.davfs you need davfs2 package. In Fedora:

$ sudo yum install davfs2

Sources

OwnCloud

• https://owncloud.com/blog/latest-gnome-ships-with-owncloud-support
• http://owncloud.org/sync-clients/
• http://doc.owncloud.org/server/5.0/user_manual/files/files.html

Red Hat

• https://www.openshift.com/quickstarts/owncloud

GNOME

• https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointSeven/Features/Owncloud
• https://live.gnome.org/Sysadmin/Owncloud
• http://debarshiray.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/gnome-owncloud/

The reasons behind this are mainly performance improvements as you’d expect. According to benchmarks that the leader of the project Fabio Erculiani performed, systemd is faster than openrc, and with systemd being also more feature rich, the decision to start supporting it was easy.

To test systemd on your Sabayon 11 installation you need to use eselect-sysvinit and eselect-settingsd and switch between systemd and openrc at runtime. The less brave should wait for systemd to mature in Sabayon and get it in the near future through the usual rolling release updating.

The aim of the game is to create the “smartest” robot that will be in a position to kill any kind of enemy before it gets destroyed. Characteristically, the motto of the game is “build the best, destroy the rest”

What you see in the above screenshot are some sample robots with different behavior pattern, fighting each other in a ten-round game of virtual destruction. Our job here is to determine how “MyFirstRobot” could change behavior in order to become better against all the other robots, taking into account all the different fighting characteristics that our enemies exhibit.

Creating a new robot on Robocode is a piece of cake, but creating the ultimate fighting machine may take some constructive and logically imaginative time :)

This is how a new robot sample looks like. You can keep tweaking movement and gun rotating values, load the other included robots to see how to implement new abilities or use other commands for your bot, or just go ahead and dig in the API to find all you’ll ever need. Compiling your newly created robot is done in-game, by the included Robocode java compiler.

There are also many physics factors to take into account when programming a robo-tank on Robocode like the bullet velocity and its power, or the turning speed and forward speed and how all these values are connected mathematically to create precisely what you want.

Other more advanced abilities include guessing technics for robots.

An illustration of GuessFactors, in this case using precise-predicted max escape angles

You will find yourself spending hours of “coding” your robot and after you created the best killing machine you may want to create its nemesis etc. It’s a never ending story of limitless imagination and creation joy.

The only thing that I found to be missing really from Robocode is the ability to go multi-player. It would be fantastic if I had the ability to connect to the internet and fight other people’s robots, but the ability to compile, package and upload your robot somewhat mitigates the misfortune of the multi-player absence.

Other than that, Robocode is a simple and straight forward way to start developing basic AI and one of the best ways for children to learn basic programming and how words and numbers reflect into real motion and behavior changing.

  Robocode Homepage

GNOME Software is the upcoming new PackageKit-based  application for discovering, installing, removing and updating/upgrading software under GNOME. Main author is Richard Hughes the guy behind PackageKit.

• https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-software/
• http://www.packagekit.org/
• http://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/ (Richard’s blog)

No need to talk about the impossible way for discovering applications under GNOME, considering you ain’t using Ubuntu’s Software Center. Anyway, I am talking about Fedora because there are some other distros that have their own good package managers.

This is the current state of Software. Most of functionality here is prototyping (dummy).

Home, that shows the most popular Apps.

That is the new one. Going inside an app you can see description, reviews and rating.

Not sure if Software will land for 3.10, but it will if someone can help. How? As always by forking it! Software is on early stages so code is clean enough even if you are beginners in C -Yeap, Software is written in C!.

Since GNOME Software will have dependencies on unstable libraries is a good idea to get it with JHBuild.

See how..

• https://live.gnome.org/Jhbuild

Currently there isn’t a Bugzilla for it, so you might need to contact Richard or Design Team if you have patches.

You will find more in Software Design page.

• https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Software

Happy Hacking!

It was a time when the first letter of many programs in Linux was “g” or “k”, to declare if something was made for GNOME or KDE.  Back then, KDE programs (made of Qt) was looking awful under GNOME (made of GTK) and vice versa.

Nowadays with the very improved theming you can hardly understand if an application is written in Qt or GTK or even in another toolkit like Java. I remember when Mark Shuttleworth had talked 3-4 years ago for the development of a common environment in Ubuntu that could genuine run GTK or QT Apps, toolkit-invisible to users.

Today we are almost there and most people even if they run GNOME they don’t actually care if a program is written in Qt or whatever else. What they really care about is to use the best free software available for doing their job, or their hobby.

One such job involves File Management. There is nothing exciting about handling files and the only thing you can do is copy/move them to another location or rename/delete them. Most important thing is actually discovering/searching files, which isn’t exactly exclusively job of the File Manager.  In 3.6 GNOME’s File Manager lost many of its features like the Second Pane, Compact View and Tree View.

That raised many complains from users to GNOME Design Team and ..Okay, you guys probably were a liiiitle biiiit right on this ..actually Tree View is already back in 3.8 which means that someone recognized the mistake of this removal.  However just because GNOME provides something that doesn’t necessary means that we have to use it. There are alternatives.

While the default set of applications of GNOME is trying to fulfill the requirements of the majority of computer-users (but not of *its* users), GNOME users seems to have more demands.  Well, you aren’t happy with Blender? Try Maya (not open!). You aren’t happy with Banshee? Try Tomahawk. You aren’t happy with a core tool like Files? Try Dolphin!

Dolphin

Dolphin is the default file manager of KDE and I’am trying version 2.2 which is for KDE 4.10.2 (the latest KDE available), that Fedora ships in their Rawhide channel.

The first thing to notice is the Folder Icons which seems to be just made for GNOME Wallpaper! The second thing to notice is that Dolphin’s UI seems quite poor with a few buttons available, similar to GNOME Files. But..

As you can see we can do quite many things with Dolphin, like opening two panels and even an integrated terminal! But this is just the very basics…

There is no reason to show the unlimited configuration options of Dolphin. Just look at the above screenshot. Around 80 options only for customizing our toolbars !?!?

The question is if the default File Manager should be like KDE’s Dolphin or GNOME’s Files. Whatever your answer is, the solution exist. One thing I really like in Dolphin is the way that Zooms on Folders/Files. Simply awesome! If GNOME-rs want to copy something from them, this is the first thing. Maybe also the duel pane. Maybe some more two three things ;)

That wasn’t like a Dolphin review or something, Dolphin is really awesome File Manager and you can check more here:

• http://dolphin.kde.org/features.html

That was a reminder that there are more applications, even out of GNOME Ecosystem, that you can still use under GNOME. However don’t look for any integration of Dolphin with the rest GNOME. You will specially miss the integrated and recursive search of Files. But hey, is just a File Manager after all!

To get it in Fedora:

$ sudo yum install dolphin konsole

That will obviously install some more KDE dependencies and I am saying it cause I know some people just don’t like to install “alien” things on their box. I am not one of those!

From Will Stephenson KDE Developer

I’d also like to point out that you can use Dolphin with the KDE widget style “GTK+ Style”, which uses GTK to draw the UI, so it looks native, except if you’re a pixel peeper. We’re also working on reducing its runtime dependencies so it won’t pull it all the KDE plumbing it can make use of.

Photo: Guillaume Paumier  / Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-3.0

Andre Klapper announced the first draft schedule for GNOME 3.10 in MLs

• https://mail.gnome.org/archives/devel-announce-list/2013-April/msg00001.html

Hi,

I’ve published a draft for the GNOME 3.9/3.10 schedule to

https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointNine#Schedule

In case of no feedback this will become the final schedule in a few days.

GNOME 3.10 is coming out in 25th of September, but all the new features will be available for early adopters from August 21, which is the beta version. This is still a draft and dates might slightly change, but we will definitely get the new GNOME after our summer holidays -at least who  ever has summer holidays!

Some of the new (under discussion) features can be viewed at:

• https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointNine/Features

and include:

• Automatic Extension Updates
• Integrate Flickr in Photos
• Focus-caret tracking in GNOME Shell
• Git integration in the developer experience
• Maps application
• Colour Tinting in GNOME Shell
• Videos application implementation
• Integrate Zimbra in GNOME

But obviously everyone will focus on:

• Port GNOME to Wayland

Which is planned as testing for 3.10 and full working at the version after 3.10. Actually there is a Draft Announcement for Wayland from Olav Vitters. This is personal opinion (at the moment) and it doesn’t reflect GNOME schedule but you still can check it here:

• https://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2013-April/msg00006.html

From Andre Klapper

Note that feature freeze for May 29th only refers to system-wide, mostly cross-module features. Every module itself can receive new features until “the freeze” comes in late August.

Cinnarch stands for Cinnamon and Arch, so basically is a Cinnamon Desktop based on Archlinux from Spain, that does fairly okay; not very popular, not completely unknown.

Alexandre Filgueira explains the reasons for the transition from Cinnamon to GNOME Desktop:

• http://www.cinnarch.com/important-notice-the-future-of-cinnarch/

Today (April, 10), we’ve made the difficult decision to change the direction of our distro.

 

While Cinnamon is a great user interface and we’ve had a lot of fun implementing it, it’s become too much a burden to maintain/update going forward. We’d like to remain faithful and compatible to our parent distro, Arch Linux, and further support of Cinnamon would strain that by causing incompatibilities/hacks in the entirety of the Gnome packageset. It is almost impossible to maintain software developed by Linux Mint in a rolling release as we are. They’re 1 year behind with upstream code. Arch Linux is going to have soon Gnome 3.8 and Cinnamon is not compatible with it. The Cinnamon team still have to migrate some of their tools to fully work with Gnome 3.6.

 

That said, we’ve decided that in order to deliver the most stable, best out-of-the-box user experience possible, that we’ll now be using Gnome as our default desktop environment going forward. We know this decision may upset some of our loyal users, but truly feel it is the best path forward for long term support/maintainability.

 

In light of this decision, keeping the name Cinnarch could seem misleading. So, we are asking the community what do you think about changing our name. Should we change it or keep Cinnarch?

 

You can answer our poll in our forum post, here

 

We still have the same great team behind us, so are confident that we can work through this to create a truly great, easy to use Gnome based distro!

 

We’d like to thank everyone for their support so far, and like to promise you an exciting new Gnome release coming up soon. We are also hoping to hear your favorite gnome extensions, configuration options, etc. for consideration of being preconfigured for you in our next release.

 

Also, thinking about the future, we’re gonna give the user the choice of selecting his favourite Desktop Environment while installing.

 

Please, if you have any productive comments, suggestions, or feedback regarding our transition, please contact us at info@cinnarch.com or post in our forums.

Yesterday was the last day that Cinnarch released with that name. They are now looking for a new name that will identify their new GNOME Desktop.

• http://www.cinnarch.com/cinnarch-gnome-2013-04-11-last-release-under-the-cinnarch-name/

There is also a recent interview (Jan 20) of Alexandre  in Linux Updates.

• http://linux-updates.org/interview-with-alexandre-filgueira-cinnarch-developer/

Good luck to them!

Linux makes the perfect client for downloading movies, books, music, comics and whatever else from torrent networks without worrying about getting a virus. There are plenty of torrent programs for Linux and GNOME, and I personally  have Transmission and Deluge.

Normally I’m using kat to download files, but today I found something I was looking for in Pirate Bay. The problem was that I could only use the magnetic link (no torrent download), and my Chrome was opening Transmission when I wanted to download it with Deluge.

In Firefox you can set the mimetypes from the Preferences->Applications, something you can’t do in Chromium. So I had to change the mimetypes in GNOME which is easy anyway, but if you don’t know how to do it, this is an example for magnetic links.

First we need to find out where our mime files are (per user).

$ gedit ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list

Notice the “.desktop” files. Since I want to use Deluge I need to find out Deluge.desktop

$ cd /usr/share/applications

and

$ ls deluge*
deluge.desktop

If we investigate on this

$ less deluge.desktop

We will find

MimeType=application/x-bittorrent;x-scheme-handler/magnet;

So we now basically know the handler we should use for setting our mimetype. When we open Magnetic with Chrome we see this “xgd-open”

What I want now is to set it to open my torrents with Deluge and not with Transmission which is the default option in my installation.

$ xdg-mime default deluge.desktop x-scheme-handler/magnet

That basically will add in your “/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list” just a line. So you can manually doit without run the above command

$ gedit ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list

and add

[Default Applications]
...
x-scheme-handler/magnet=deluge.desktop
...

That was a small hint in mimetypes.

GNOME could use some more options here -I guess :)

Are you still trying to discover the perfect GNOME distro? You are just loosing your time! There is no such thing.. However what seems to make a difference is Arch Linux. Huge super active community, pure rolling release, native GNOME experience, unlimited packages, the very best documentation.

Arch is excellent choice for enthusiasts, excellent choice for veterans but not really good for people that they just want a free box to serf on Internet. Believe it or not, Fedora 19 comes to close that gap, despite some issues with installing proprietary software, which is *necessary* evil.

My personal  backflash in Fedora releases with GNOME 3.

Fedora 15

The first release of Fedora with GNOME 3. I switched to that from Ubuntu, when they adopted Unity as their primary (and only) desktop. It proved to be crap, and I switched back to Ubuntu almost immediately with GNOME 3 PPAs Release: 2011-05-24 GNOME: 3.0 Features: wiki/Releases/15/FeatureList

Fedora 16

One of the same. Used it a bit and I again forced to switch to Ubuntu with PPAs due to bugs I couldn’t solve or work with. Release: 2011-11-08 GNOME: 3.2 Features: wiki/Releases/16/FeatureList

Fedora 17

Fedora 17 was an amazing improvement over their previous version. Sadly 3-4 months after the initial release problems came up. It was like an abandoned distro, with obvious bugs that were taking too long to close. I got that feeling that Fedora Team was focus in the upcoming 18 release, and they just had forgotten 17. Again I switched to Ubuntu. Release: 2012-05-29 GNOME: 3.4 Features: wiki/Releases/17/FeatureList

Fedora 18

Wow! Hard to believe that the same guys that did all the previous versions came with that one! F18 was a huge huge improvement over 17, and overall a very good distro. It was the first time I installed something but Ubuntu to my friend’s machines.Also Fedora 18 was quite stable (with Anaconda exception) from their Alpha. Release: 2013-01-15 GNOME: 3.6 Features: wiki/Releases/18/FeatureList

Fedora 19

Double Wow! Yes I’m in Rawhide (the development version, Fedora 20) and when things should brake everyday, nothing bad happens. Boosted with GNOME 3.8, it just made me to switch to it as my main desktop even if there are a few crashes, but nothing really annoying -it’s pre-alpha anyway. Alpha Release: 2013-04-16 Beta Release: 2013-05-21 Final Release: 2013-06-25 GNOME: 3.8 Features: wiki/Releases/19/FeatureList

That was my personal experience but not exactly my personal opinion about Fedora. I know that many people have troubles with it, but everything run smooth on me. Personally experience? Fantastic! Personal opinion, good enough!. My biggest complain in Fedora always was their distro upgrading method. I never ever made that work. Fedorians have now a new upgrade tool (FedUp), which promises to put my complains away.

What’s really important is that Fedora seems to becoming a serious mainstream solution and an alternative option to the very popular Ubuntu’s. Fedora right now is nowhere near to the Arch community, they haven’t the momentum of Ubuntu, but is definitely one of the fastest improving distros! Also they run a nice infrastructure with Koji building system, which is very very helpful if you get any package dependencies issues.

In Fedora 19 release we also get the GNOME Initial Experience with new first boot and of course GNOME’s Initial Setup. Yes, Fedora is the one release that is very tight with GNOME development.

If for any reason you’re looking to change distro, don’t miss to try Fedora 19. However if you are happy with your current one, just stick to it ;)

Don’t want to wait for alpha release? You can get a nightly build!

• http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/

Alpha is coming in 6 days, so is better to wait and check for potential block bugs on their release notes.

What pagination will bring for the users is the ability to order their applications in pages. The benefit of the pagination over continuous scrolling would be spatial memory of where launchers are and better working with the new folders. I am personally very much pleased to see that the pagination is already confirmed on this year’s GSoC as it was in 2012 but never happened.

Other things that will (hopefully) come with it in the applications menu sector are the transition animations and maybe a way to edit folders from the overview.

Gnome will once again take part on this year’s Google Summer of Code in an attempt to benefit from the work of young and inspired developers that will get paid from Google to accelerate and generally help the growth of our favorite desktop environment through the summer, while also becoming members of the wonderful Gnome community and maybe continue contributing to the project!

Many ideas are already confirmed while many others are still under discussion as the students that want to participate have 13 days left to apply for their project of interest. If you are interested in participating you should take a look here.

Among the many other interesting ideas that are already confirmed are the port of color management to Wayland, Tweak Tool UI refresh, huge improvement plans for Gnome Boxes, better workflow in multi-monitor scenarios, implementation of Caret and Focus Tracking for GNOME Shell that has been bumping version goals for some time now and the design of a new 3.10 application that will be Gnome Music. A more detailed article about everything regarding Gnome on 2013 GSoC will come as soon as students, mentors and projects selection is over.

According to Dominique -Dimstar- Leuenberger, a GNOME Core team member of OpenSUSE, GNOME 3.8 is estimated to get into openSUSE 12.3 by the end of this week!

Hi all!

 

First the good news: GNOME 3.8 for openSUSE 12.3 is shaping up rather well, despite the heavily overloaded OBS, we have a first ‘draft’ repository working.

 

The bad news: no, it is not just ready yet for ‘prime’ use. There are a few ‘easy upgrade’ issues to be sorted out… currently, zypper/YaST ask some ugly questions about no outdated packages to be removed.

 

Are you brave and curios? Feel free to add the home:dimstar:broken repository to your system (mind it: it DOES say broken in the name!). Ok, our tests showed it’s not completely broken if one answers all the yast questions smartly and ‘truthful’.

 

We believe though, having checked in fixes for all of the issues encountered and OBS is busy building again… about 30% already done. Once the builds are published in my ‘test project’ again, we will do some more checkups and if everything goes well, will release it into the wild.

 

ETA: approx end of this week.

 

Happy hacking all!

•  http://dominique.leuenberger.net/blog/2013/04/gnome-3-8-0-for-opensuse-12-3/

Viva looks fresher, leaner, cooler more elegant and more modern that the default Adwaita that was the basis for its creation and although it seems to never get completely finished, it does work like a charm since 3.6.

Since this is a work in progress, it is recommended that you use the latest version found on the corresponding git repository. It is also recommended that you use this theme with Raleway and Open Sans fonts.

  Viva GS Theme    How to theme GNOME 3

Rui Matos released a couple of hours ago the very popular tweaking application for GNOME 3.8. G-T-T had only two iterations in this release cycle, 3.7.4 (around 3 months ago) and the final 3.8 today.

Commit: f3af7c0810662b5c8905dae6a493ade3c7127623

The complete changelogs include.

So for those who already have GNOME 3.8 through some alpha distro, what major Tweak Tool 3.8 brings is:

An option to delete extensions.

As long as these are installed on our “home” and not globally in “usr”. As a general rule, extensions that we install from extensions.gnome.org are single user installations, while extensions we install via our system packager are wide system installations.

An option to “raise-on-click”

This is basically the “org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences.raise-on-click” key in gsettings.

What this is?

Setting this option to false can lead to buggy behavior, so users are strongly discouraged from changing it from the default of true. Many actions (e.g. clicking in the client area, moving or resizing the window) normally raise the window as a side-effect. Setting this option to false, which is strongly discouraged, will decouple raising from other user actions, and ignore raise requests generated by applications.

See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445447#c6.

Even when this option is false, windows can still be raised by an alt-left-click anywhere on the window, a normal click on the window decorations, or by special messages from pagers, such as activation requests from tasklist applets. This option is currently disabled in click-to-focus mode. Note that the list of ways to raise windows when raise-on-click is false does not include programmatic requests from applications to raise windows; such requests will be ignored regardless of the reason for the request.

If you are an application developer and have a user complaining that your application does not work with this setting disabled, tell them it is -their- fault for breaking their window manager and that they need to change this option back to true or live with the “bug” they requested.

In Dconf-Editor

My favorite reminder. DConf-Editor makes gsettings a playground. Here is how to change “raise-on-click” without Tweak Tool.

Get it, and discover all hidden (advanced) options  of GNOME 3.8!