Future of Foresight Linux – Xfce Edition
There haven't been much updates on Xfce Edition for a while, becauseI was busy with re{decorating,novating} my apartment, planning my upcoming wedding, my job and so on.
Here are some News, I have changed Plans for Xfce Edition a little bit. So read on.
When I had a look at the plans for Xfce 4.6, I realized, that Xfce 4.6 might be closer than I thought (there will probably be delay, as it is software (think of gnu/hurd or dnf)). Anyways here is the new plan. It's pretty simple: "Concentrate on 4.6. Go with the Milestones and have a final shortly after Xfce 4.6 is released".
Some development will take place on xfce.rpath.org, to not break all the Xfce 4.4 things wie already have on foresight.rpath.org. There is a mailinglist too. Helping hands are welcome.
Xfce Edition alpha1
We eventually put out the long promised alpha1 of Foresight Xfce Edition.It's not perfect (that's why we call it alpha1), but works for me since a long time.
We're still missing some applications, and xfce goodies.
Openoffice is replaced by abiword and gnumeric. And there is no compiz in the default install (that's a feature).
Get it here
Feedback and Comments (and helping hands) are welcome.
whaawmp 0.2.10
Jeff just released a bugfix release for whaawmp. It doesn't lockup anymore, if xvideo isn't available and it works with other imagesinks too now.I hope to put out an alpha of Foresight Linux Xfce Edition this week eventually.
We will see. Get latest whaawmp while waiting :-)
whaawmp 0.2.8
Today Jeff, released whaawmp 0.2.8.Check it out here.
There is a release for Python 2.4 too.
On to Xfce Edition. I still hope to get an iso out this week.
I'm thinking about replacing OO.o with abiword/gnumeric on default installation, if it reduces the iso size enough to fit on one CD.
But there are still things missing, so I will probably end up with a bigger image anyway.
Let's get it out for testing...
It’s getting there…
Fosdem is over. I heard some talkes, investigated some booths, but the fun thing was meeting Michael, Ken, Antonio, and some other guys there.I guess there are better organized events and meetings out there, but it was worth going there (at least if it's only a 2,5h ride). Unfortunatly I didn't run into any Xfce developer, but a few of them have been there. Hope next time they will have a booths or a devroom (even if they would have to share with Gnome).
I did some improvments to Xfce Edition, added a lot of "unimportant" packages I just forgot (network-manager-applet, gimp, inkscape, evince, brasero).
So biggest issue now is to make gdm start Xfce as default, for new users.
Whaawmp is now working with python 2.4, I added a svn snapshot to Xfce Edition.
Unfortunatly due to gst dvdnav bugginess, it doesn't support dvd menus. C'est la vi.
So long...
whaawmp
Searching for a Totem replacement, I ran into whaawmp.It's meant to be a Totem replacement, written in python, using pygtk and gstreamer.
Unfortunatly it's written using Python 2.5 (we don't have it in foresight, yet), so I just joined the development team, working on a Python 2.4 branch. Hopefully there will be a partial working version later today.
Isn’t it green?
I did some work on Xfce Edition again and it looks green.
Pulseaudio and Packagekit are working now.
Still a lot of work to get a stable, full featured release.
But it's slowly getting there.
migration and midori
Well, I tried to migrate to group-xfce-dist on fl:2 but I had some problems with python-sqlite and conary will remove a couple of packages, find details here.
Thanks to ken, who has built Webkit for 'GNOME Developers Kit', I was able to build and run midori on Foresight Linux (using my "do thinks that can break anything here"-qemu/win2k box).
Roadmap
Recently pcuttler gave me proper rights to add Releases to Xfce Edition on jira. So Xfce Edition has some blocking tasks that need to be done before getting an alpha release.Check them out at foresights issuetracker
Thunar patches, claws and everything
Now that there is xfce4 in fl:2-devel, I'll go to add some patches to thunar that didn't make it into 0.9. We need a mailclient too, so i will cook claws-mail, because it's a nice gtk+ client (for me, evolution or thunderbird, just don't feel right as default for Xfce Edition).Later i have to start hacking on group-desktop-platform, to check what we need. I think it will turn out as a slightly modified Gnome Edition just with Xfce instead of Gnome and will step by step change things where needed/wanted. After all it's Xfce not Gnome.