Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first issue of UDN, the Ubuntu Desktop News. UDN will be randomly issued once in a while, but if everything goes well, there should be a new issue every two weeks.
Please note that there is no definitive format for UDN and that *you* can change it and make it better. Like the Ubuntu Desktop. In this issue: * GConf should be faster than ever * Simplified menu for the user * How to install a .deb file? Double-click on it! * All your translations are belong to us * New logout dialog * What's new in the Dapper desktop? * Light on... rhythmbox * Interview with a desktop hero * Love tasks for Desktop lovers * Desktop Team meetings * Hug days * About the Desktop Team GConf should be faster than ever ================================ In an amazing development, Sébastien uploaded a new GConf with merged directories [1]. We could explain what it is, what this changes, why it is great and why you always wanted it, but no, technical details would be boring, wouldn't they? Okay, there would also be some errors in what we would say since we didn't have time to look at it in details ;-) But what is important is that this should improve performance quite a bit, especially login time. Don't you see how the Desktop Team loves you? :-) [1] http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2005-November/000020.html Simplified menu for the user ============================ Following the Ubuntu Below Zero conference, decisions were made to try to make the menus even more easier to use for the users. Martin, Michael et Sébastien worked on hiding the administration tools for users who can not use them (and also hiding update-notifier for these users) [2]. Moreover Sébastien and other packagers identified all the menu items that are most often not used from the menus and hide them by default [3]. Those items can of course be shown with the menu editor. [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HideAdminToolsToUsers [3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenusRevisited How to install a .deb file? Double-click on it! =============================================== You just downloaded a .deb file from the net and you wish to install it. How do you do this? Just double-click on it! With gdebi [4], you can do it without thinking about all the dependencies: everything will just works, as shown in this screenshot [5]. After 4 minutes of thinking, its author, Michael, told us "gdebi will change the way your computer work". [4] http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/admin/gdebi [5] http://people.ubuntu.com/~mvo/gdebi/gdebi-3.png All your translations are belong to us ====================================== Martin and Zygmunt have made the changes required to have the translations of .desktop files (the files used to describe the menus items) in the language packs [6]. This change enables the translators to update the translations of those files in Rosetta, and it will make update of the translations easier. [6] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LangpacksDesktopfiles New logout dialog ================= Manu has started working on a new logout dialog [7]. This dialog will be prettier than anything that exists in the universe. Okay, maybe not that pretty, but you get the idea. It will enable the user to log out, switch user, restart/sleep/hibernate/shut down the computer with a single click. A "wow, it looks so cool" screenshot is available [8]. [7] http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2005-December/000056.html [8] http://www.manucornet.net/GNOME/logout_dialog/Capture.png What's new in the Dapper desktop? ================================= With the GNOME 2.13.3 upload, a lot of cool new stuff has landed in Dapper. Maybe one of the most promising feature is the search integration in nautilus: just hit Ctrl+F in a nautilus window and feel the love of the nautilus maintainers. You can learn more about this in a blog entry from Alex Larsson [9]. Some other cool features from GNOME 2.13.3 include: a new Gedit codebase that enables you to easily edit remote files, some tab reordering love in gnome-terminal (for all the terminal freaks ;-)) and a lot of performance work (look at the new version of pango!) which should make your desktop feel lighter! GStreamer 0.10 was released at the beginning of December [10] and we couldn't resist: it's already available in Dapper [11], so you can already start to play with it. More and more applications will use it in the near future! A great new packages is nautilus-actions [12]: it makes it possible to easily launch programs on selected files in nautilus. Try it and you'll love it. And if you felt that it was difficult to send files with bluetooth, just try the latest version of nautilus-sendto [13] which now features bluetooth file transfer. [9] http://blogs.gnome.org/view/alexl/2005/12/07/0 [10] http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/gstreamer010.html [11] http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/source/gstreamer0.10 [12] http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/gnome/nautilus-actions [13] http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/gnome/nautilus-sendto Light on... rhythmbox ===================== Rhythmbox is a music player for GNOME. It enables you to organize and listen to all your music with a nice and easy-to-use interface. The development is very active again, and in the latest releases, we can find some interesting features: * podcast support * audio cd support * ipod support * DAAP support (unavailable for now in Dapper, but it will be soon!): this enables you to share your music on the network * support to burn CD * tag editing for some formats * and of course, a lot of bug fixes You can test it by installing the rhythmbox package [14]. [14] http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/gnome/rhythmbox Interview with a desktop hero ============================= Sébastien Bacher is probably best known in Ubuntu as the crazy guy who can package all the GNOME modules faster than you can read this sentence. He helped (and still helps) package GNOME for Debian before joining Ubuntu and doing some heroic facts that are still frightening children, like packaging GNOME 2.8.0 in less than two days for the first public preview of Ubuntu. Let's talk a bit with this french guy. UDN: When we look at your work, we sometimes wonder how you can do all this. What do you eat every morning? Sébastien Bacher: Depending of the day, but some coffee to wake up for sure! Usually bread/butter/jam or some biscuits when I'm lazy :) UDN: More seriously, can you sum up a bit your Ubuntu activities? SB: Some people call me "sebuild", I'm kind of a "serial updater" :). Joke aside my main job is to update GNOME packages every time upstream roll a new tarball and to handle bugs we get about the GNOME packages (most of the desktop stuff). Daniel (dholbach) is working on this with me now for some months. I also do some bug fixing and coding when I'm uptodate with my packages and not lagging too much on bugzilla. UDN: Some of us know that you're a supporter of the FC Metz (a french football team). Why such non-sense? I mean, why do you support a team that can't win? :-) SB: What kind of statement is that? They did win a match 2-0 this year :p UDN: You're still working on Debian. Does it need much organization to do Ubuntu and Debian work? Or is it some synchronization work most of the time? SB: The issue is not really the organization but to work on 2 differents things when you can run only one at time. I tend to try pushing the fixes upstream rather because that's where it makes sense, the work between distro is mainly synchronization right. UDN: You didn't take a standard flight to go to Ubuntu Below Zero: you took Canonical One. What was it like to fly in Mark's jet? SB: It was really a great experience! You should give it a try if you have the opportunity one day ;) UDN: How do you think the Ubuntu community *should* be? Are there things that you'd like to see improved? Or things that you'd like to stay the same? SB: I'm probably not the best person to ask that, I tend to be quite busy and I don't really look at users chans/forums/list. I've read a lot of good comments about it though, and I'm quite impressed by how active Ubuntu-fr people are (list, forum, website, wiki, translations on rosetta, events, associations, ...) and the number of people visiting the site, subscribed to the list or the translation team. The user community is great but I would not be against having some new contributors for the distributions tasks (out of the translations), the desktop team by example. Having a strong group of people to do advertising, marketing stuff etc for events would be nice too. UDN: Is brown your favourite color? SB: No. (I use the standard clearlooks and not the ubuntu theme) UDN: What do you plan to do in the near future in the Ubuntu Desktop? SB: You can read the plans for dapper on the wiki, especially DapperDesktopPlan. Basically some polish on the current desktop, not revolutionary changes since dapper aims be rocking stable :) UDN: Tell us a bit about the Moselle, where you live. SB: What to say. To start, no it's not in Germany even if that seems to be a popular joke in you area :) The weather is classic continental, you can argue it that's nice or not but I like it ... and we have a great football team around with the FcMetz, you can't have everything, can you? :) UDN: Thanks a lot, Sébastien. Keep up the good work! Love tasks for Desktop lovers ============================= Love tasks are some things that we'd like to see in the Ubuntu Desktop. Some of the tasks might be hard to implement, other might be easy. Try to complete them and if you have some difficulties, just ask: everyone in the Desktop Team will be happy to help you. For this first issue, we selected one code task and two packaging tasks to implement. This is a good first step to join the Desktop Team! If you're interested in completing them, just send a mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1. gtk fileselector should default to "Documents" => The behaviour has change with GTK 2.8.7, 001_fs_documents.patch needs to be updated. 2. package GShow TV => http://staff.akumiitti.fi/~pvakevai/gshowtv/ 3. package Gnomolicious => http://www.nongnu.org/gnomolicious/ Desktop Team meetings ===================== The first Desktop Team meeting took place on November 25th. Daniel sent some notes about it [15]. The main conclusion was that the team needed more organisation, more publicity and more information on what we do and how it is done. Guess what? One of the goal of UDN is to help with this :-) The next meeting will be held on Friday December 16th at 16:00 UTC, in #ubuntu-meeting. [15] http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2005-November/000025.html Hug days ======== Every day is a hug day. But there are special hug days that are also bug days. Some people also say that every day is a bug day. And then, logically, every day is a hug day and a bug day. Well. That's true. But there are some special days. Okay, maybe this wasn't clear? :-) Let's start again with a real introduction. Hug days are the Ubuntu bug days [16]. We're not sure yet if people outside the Desktop Team refer to them as hug days too. Anyway, if you have some free time, you can make a difference by triaging some bugs. It's not hard and everyone with a browser can do it. And guess what: you'll be able to meet a lot of Desktop Team people there. It's really a good way to contribute. The next hug day will happen on Wednesday December 21st, in #ubuntu-bugs. [16] http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay About the Desktop Team ====================== For more information about the Desktop Team, see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam Everyone is of course welcome to join the team: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/GettingStarted If you want to send some great news for the next issue of UDN, please send a mail to the ubuntu-desktop mailing list: http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop