Here's the first release after GUADEC. Istanbul. It was a great place.
And some people actually had time to visit the beautiful city. Or to
take a turkish bath. Sounds like a cool program, doesn't it? Of course,
it was not only about this -- there were tons of interesting
discussions, lots of sessions around various topics, etc. But you know
what? The GNOME contributors actually managed to continue hacking on
their modules. Amazing. Those people never stop. I guess it shows how
passionate they are! So they made changes that are now visible in this
latest version of GNOME. And if you look closely, you can feel some
turkish love in the air around this release! Cool stuff.

Suppose you have two workspaces, and a window on each one. You’re looking at window A, so clearly window B is offscreen. You click something on window A, and window A attempts to present window B to you. What does that mean?

Let’s have two concrete examples:

• 0×01: You’ve clicked a link in Pidgin’s buddy window, and it’s attempting to present the chat window to you.
• 0×02: You’ve clicked a link in Evolution, and it’s attempting to present Firefox to you.

In 0×01, you want to stop looking at the old workspace and look at the new one.  But you don’t want the windows to move off their workspaces.  You want everything to stay where it is.

This is the way upstream Metacity currently works throughout.  However, since Firefox is a tabbed browser,((I know Firefox has had tabs since 2002)) people have been asking whether this is the wisest course all the time.  In case 0×02 above, in the old days, the browser would just have launched a new window in your workspace.  People don’t like that now, because they want all their tabs in the same window.  But if the user gets shoved onto the workspace of the existing window and then we add a new tab, eventually they’ll close it and then wonder where their mail went. (At least, that’s how I understand their argument; perhaps I’m mistaken.)  As a compromise, downstream Metacity has now been patched in Ubuntu, Fedora, and possibly other places to make the window demand attention when this happens (i.e. go pulsy on the taskbar).

So we have multiple options when this happens:

• Bring the window to the user, always.
• Bring the user to the window, always.  (This is what we do now.)
• Make the window demand attention– in other words, apply the downstream patch.  This is not the path of least resistance, since judging by recent feedback it appears to really annoy anyone using, say, Pidgin.
• Tell the target application to deal with it.  This would mean that Firefox could open a new window if you were on a workspace where it had no windows open and open a new tab if you were on a workspace where it had one already.  It would mean finding some way of dealing with windows that didn’t co-operate.  It would also mean, alone among all these solutions, that we’d have to find a way of communicating with the target application.
• Ask the summoning application to give us a hint as to which of these it would like.  This is my (Thomas’s) favourite solution.  It will need a change to the EWMH.

Things which are not solutions:

• Allowing the user to pick one and then requiring them to stick with it.  As Havoc said, this is basically giving them a choice between “break Pidgin” and “break Firefox”.
• Window matching.  We do not do window matching.  We are not about to start for an issue as small as this.  That’s what devilspie is for.

Want to join in the argument fun?  Dive in at GNOME bug 482354.  The water’s lovely.

Photo credit: rofanator.

Clutter 0.8 suite of integration libraries is now available for download
at:

sources/clutter-cairo/0.8/
sources/clutter-gst/0.8/
sources/clutter-gtk/0.8/

MD5 Checksums:

  56b69645629293d5dcd93817fabe669a  clutter-cairo-0.8.1.tar.gz
  91262dd6ead7261a584dacf5dd1933f5  clutter-cairo-0.8.1.tar.bz2
  9ebf9bbe406757472952743ca01870f3  clutter-gst-0.8.0.tar.gz
  13d2a34ea76e4f010e66d20eba12e864  clutter-gst-0.8.0.tar.bz2
  1fea21affb3a74014fc0b4270b67ed2d  clutter-gtk-0.8.1.tar.gz
  0a93adeb69281dcd1d8455a53f746d9b  clutter-gtk-0.8.1.tar.bz2

The Clutter integration libraries suite is a series of open source libraries for integrating Clutter with other libraries:

• clutter-cairo, for integration with Cairo
• clutter-gst, for integration with GStreamer
• clutter-gtk, for integration with GTK+

This suite of libraries allows to use the Cairo drawing API into Clutter; or to use the GStreamer pipelines to render to a texture inside the Clutter scenegraph; or to embed a Clutter scenegraph into a GTK+ application.

Clutter-Cairo 0.8.1

List of changes since 0.6:

• Added clutter_cairo_surface_resize() and clutter_cairo_create_region()

Clutter-GStreamer 0.8.0

List of changes since 0.6:

• Add clutter_gst_audio_get_playbin() function
• Add support for 24-bit textures
• Add pixel-shader AYUV/YV12 support via ‘use-shaders’ property on ClutterGstVideoSink

Clutter-GTK+ 0.8.1

List of changes since 0.6:

• Support the Clutter win32 backend
• Support multiple GtkClutterEmbed widgets
• Add utility functions for integrating with GTK+ themes, GTK+ stock icons, icon themes and GdkPixbuf
• Do not open a second Display connection on X11

As usual, have fun with Clutter!

Getting closer to GIMP 2.6, the GIMP developers released another snapshot from the 2.5 development series. The NEWS file has a summary of the changes.

Thanks to Elijah Newren and Thomas Thurman for improvements in this version.

Contrary to rumour, this release does not add tabbing to everything.

• Display theme name in title bar of theme viewer (Thomas ) (GNOME bug 430198)
• Allow toggling of non-compositor effects (Thomas ) (GNOME bug 92867)
• Add some extra null checks (Thomas ) (GNOME bug 422242)
• Check for double-freeing at the time of workspace freeing (Elijah ) (GNOME bug 361804)
• Don’t generate log messages unless we’re logging (Thomas)
• Two windows which don’t belong to any application can’t be considered to belong to the same application (Thomas)
• Various tidyings (Thomas)

Translations
Yavor Doganov (bg), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Kjartan Maraas (nb), Matej Urbančič (sl), Daniel Nylander (sv), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th)

The Clutter team are extremely pleased to announce the new 0.8 stable release of Clutter core. This is probably our biggest and most exciting release yet.

You can download the 0.8.0 tarball from here.

So whats new? Quite alot;

• COGL, the underlying GL abstraction layer in Clutter, has been
  completely rewritten from the ground up. It is now a more mature,
  fully documented abstraction layer across OpenGL, OpenGL ES 1.1
  and OpenGL ES 2.0. COGL allows Clutter Applications the unique
  ability to run on both Desktop and Mobile hardware with no source
  level modifications. New features include;
  • Much improved and wider tested OpenGL ES 1.1 support.
  • OpenGL ES 2.0 Support.
  • Rich scalable texture support, supporting numerous pixel formats,
    transparent tiling, mipmapping, deformation etc.
  • Overhauled clipping functionality
  • Path based vector drawing functionality.
  • FBO & Shader support across OpenGL and OpenGL ES.
  • Image loading and image library wrapping.
  • Full API documentation
• Increased portability. Clutter now provides experimental native
  backend support for the Microsoft Windows(tm) platform and
  Apple(tm) iPhone and iPod Touch families of products as well
  improvements to existing OSX, GLX, SDL and EGL backends.
• The X11 based backends now feature support for Actors that wrap
  external X drawables (i.e the texture-from-pixmap extension and
  fallbacks). This primarily allows for the creation of desktop
  compositing type applications with Clutter.
• Clutter now seamlessly supports multiple stages (windows) on the
  backends that allow this feature. Stages are also now sub
  class-able.
• The custom Pango text renderer has been completely rewritten, now
  using the more modern PangoCairo (instead of FT2), and avoids
  nasty subclassing hacks; it supports smooth fast scaling of
  text, has many edge case issues fixed and it still is very
  efficient (using a texture glyph cache). It is even a little bit
  faster.
• Numerous ClutterTexture Improvements. Including;
  • Image loading from disk.
  • Easier subclassing with custom ‘deformed’ rendering.
  • Mipmap support.
  • ‘keep-aspect-ratio’ property.
  • Repeating tiling fixes.
• Multiple pointer device support. Clutter now features support for
  multiple simultaneous pointing devices including event processing
  and grabs. The feature is backend dependant and currently
  provided by X11 (with optional new XInput support) and Apple(tm)
  iPhone ‘fruity’ backends.
• Completely rewritten the size negotiation API and implementation,
  which allows the creation of fluid and dynamic layout management,
  using natural and minimum sizes, and different geometry management
  like height-for-width and width-for-height. Classic ‘fixed’ layout
  still available and not impeded.
• The ClutterContainer interface has been extended with a flexible
  infrastructure to store container specific per actor state.
• The timeline behaviour has been updated and made more consistent;
  ClutterEntry has been improved with regards to multi-byte text
  and cursor handling; the API documentation coverage has been
  extended; performance on OpenGL ES has been improved;
  ClutterScript improvements.

For further detailed information see the README and NEWS files. The List of bugs fixed since 0.7.6 are here. The full mailing list announcement is available here.

A very big thanks to all those that have contributed to this release:

Chris Lord, Neil Roberts, Robert Bragg, Haakon Sporsheim, Xan López, Jussi Kukkonen, Armin Burgmeier, Tommi Komulainen, Iain Holmes, Havoc Pennington, Lucas Rocha, Johan Bilien, Ivan Leben, Richard Purdie, Gwenole Beauchesne, David Stanczak, Peter Enzerink, Andy Wingo, Peter Csaszar, James Ketrenos.

Expect the various Clutter ‘add on’ library’s and bindings to be updated for 0.8 in coming days.

As always, have fun with Clutter!

This is the fifth development release leading up to GTK+ 2.14.

gtk+-2.13.4.tar.bz2
md5sum: deece1a4392c929968da5c89507fc5fb
gtk+-2.13.4.tar.gz
md5sum: 76961cfb01f7e7c2b5d82cdc83690234

Overview of Changes from GTK+ 2.13.3 to 2.13.4

• Merge the GSEAL branch (see http://live.gnome.org/GTK+/3.0/Tasks)
• GtkScaleButton has an orientation property

40 bugs fixed in this release!

This is the fourth development release leading up to GLib 2.18.

glib-2.17.3.tar.bz2
md5sum: 1683dcb0b5fc865833b01daad8026924

glib-2.17.3.tar.gz
md5sum: 8c5ac7d6c6f2cc21b742714e19638960

26 bugs fixed in this release!

Gtk2Hs version 0.9.13 is now available.

New features:

• bindings for Gnome VFS and GStreamer
• a new Gtk+ tutorial has been adapted by Hans van Thiel
• cairo image stride support
• many new demos
• compiles with GHC 6.8.3
• lots of bug fixes

This release has been tested on a variety of platforms with different versions of Gtk+ and GHC, so you should have no trouble compiling it if you’re using an older version of Gtk+.

Note that the binaries for Win32 for this release are only provided for GHC 6.8.3 and Gtk+ 2.12.  As with older releases, all the C libraries needed are included in the installer, so you don’t need to download anything else to get up an running.  I’ve also created zip files containing only the C libraries that can be used for redistribution.  The sources for these binaries are available here.

The GStreamer team is happy to provide new releases of GStreamer Core, GStreamer Base Plugins and GStreamer Python Bindings in the 0.10 GStreamer stable release series.

Check out release notes for gstreamer, gst-plugins-base and gst-python or download tarballs for gstreamer, gst-plugins-base and gst-python

Sound Juicer is a clean, mean, and lean CD ripper for GNOME 2.

It sports a clean interface and simple preferences, aiming to do The Right Thing and What You Mean all of the time. It requires GNOME and GStreamer.

Screenshots

• Main window
• Preferences dialog

Download

Latest download: sound-juicer-2.22.0.tar.bz2.

Bugs can be reported at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/. View the list of currently open bugs.

Love Sound Juicer? Want to help the developer save for the deposit on a house? You can help!

Hi,

I’m pretty busy with scouting and other stuff. Also vala seems not yet able to handle subnamespace and that break mixing C/GObject and vala (can’t call C/GObject code from Vala). This is pain.

All these issues leads me to idle GNOME Scan for this summer. I’m quite disappointed because i don’t have time but i’m actually willing to get GNOME Scan included. I’m leaving the university and thus i’m searching a job. Next year, i don’t want to move out of Paris, but i actually want to work on GNOME and especially GNOME Scan. I may do a call for a job later.

Regards,

Étienne.

Sound Juicer "Harder Now With Higher Speed" 2.23.0 has finally been released.. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Hot new features!

• Port to GIO (Michael Terry)
• Update URL handling for New GIO World Order (Bastien Nocera)
• Fix display problems with the cluebar (Pekka Vuorela)
• Add audio preview when overwriting (Luca Cavalli)
• Use GtkVolmeButton instead of BaconVolume (MT)
• Fix crash when no profile is selected (Matthew Martin)
• Add []
• to the special character list (MM)
• Make the year and disc entries a11y (Patrick Wade)
• Fix error handling in CD playback (Tim-Philipp Müller)
• Require intltool 0.40

I really need some heavy testing on the GIO rewrite, so please try and extract tracks to as many different targets as possible. Although I expect confirmation that using an unmounted remote location currently fails, it should be possible to use this to write to Samba, OBEX-FTP, and so on.

The GStreamer team is pleased to present new releases of the Ugly and FFmpeg Plugins modules in the 0.10 GStreamer stable release series.

Check out release notes for gst-plugins-ugly and gst-ffmpeg or download tarballs for gst-plugins-ugly and gst-ffmpeg

The GNOME SlackBuild GNOME 2.22.1 Desktop is now available for users of the latest Slackware 12.1 release! There have been a lot of improvements in this latest GSB release, including the move to PulseAudio, fewer package replacements, a GNOME-integrated Compiz-Fusion setup, the latest NetworkManager, Abiword 2.6, and OpenOffice2.4, a richer Mono C# suite, as well as all the great features of GNOME 2.22.

For those users new to GSB, head over to the Download page which has full instructions on how to download, install and configure GSB GNOME 2.22.1. For users who want to upgrade their current version of GSB, please check out the What's New page to find information on what needs to be done for a smooth upgrade, and information about what has changed in this release of GNOME SlackBuild.

Hi,

Next version of GNOME Scan will be 0.8, not 2.24. This show that GNOME Scan won’t be part of GNOME 2.24. A lot of you wonder why, and that’s a good question.

GNOME Scan still immature. 0.8 will see a lot of API breaks. GNOME Scan also depends on GEGL, a far from stable project which is actively developed by Øyvind Kolas and a lot of other people. SANE support is still incomplete. Some images data are misprocessed, sheetfed and cardreader are not supposed to work properly nor webcam.

Including GNOME Scan in GNOME plateform and flegita in GNOME desktop is not as simple as distributing it by default in your favorite distribution. This mean that we add GEGL as an external dependency, which i guess Øyvind would not like seems it imply supporting obsolete version. It also mean that GNOME Scan API must be stable enough accross version which i actually can’t assure yet.

However, not being included in GNOME doesn’t forbid your favorite distro to include it, neither your software to have a plugin using it.

All in one sentences : “Don’t include alpha project in GNOME desktop”.

Now, please tell me if i’m wrong

Regards,

Étienne.

Attention! Ceci n’est pas un poisson d’avril!

Over the last few months, the Epiphany development team has been discussing the future of the Gnome web browser. We feel that we haven’t been living up to the full potential of a well-integrated Gnome application, due to both internal and external constraints.

The Epiphany user interface is built on top of an abstraction layer above the web rendering engine, enabling us to support multiple back-ends. Currently Epiphany supports the Mozilla browser engine (Gecko), and the WebKit engine.

The Epiphany dependency on Gecko creates a number of problems for us. The Gecko release cycle is very long (e.g. Gecko 1.8 was released with Firefox 1.5 in 2005; 1.8.1 with Firefox 2.0 in 2006 and 1.9 will be released sometime this year with Firefox 3.0), prone to delays and not synchronised with the unvarying 6-month Gnome release cycle. Furthermore, it and the feature work on Gecko are mostly driven by the Firefox browser, our main competitor on the Gnome desktop. Also the embedding API of Gecko (GtkMozEmbed) has been unmaintained and stagnant for a long time. Finally, the current plans for “Mozilla 2.0″ bring much uncertainty to us, as well as much work to account for their proposed big API changes.

We are a small team, with only one maintainer and a hand-full of regular contributors. Maintaining the abstraction layer, and the Gecko back-end require lot of effort and time. Much time alone is spent on keeping up with Gecko API changes, and we have not had much contributions to the Gecko back-end in a long time.

Therefore we have decided to radically change the future of Epiphany in the upcoming 2.24 development cycle. We will drop the abstraction layer, making the code more maintainable, allowing faster development and enabling us to take advantage of the features of the back-end directly.

Furthermore, we will choose only one web engine back-end to support and concentrate our efforts on it instead of spreading our efforts to multiple back-ends and restricting us to the common features all back-ends support.

This single back-end will be WebKit.

We see several advantages in WebKit. These include:

• The WebKit APIs. The API has been designed from the ground up, and feels like any other GObject based API. A two-way GObject bindings to the web page’s DOM, and to JavaScript is in development; this will allow us and our Extensions to access the DOM directly, which hasn’t been possible before in Epiphany in either C or Python.
• WebKit uses Gnome technologies directly. Similarly to Gecko, it uses Cairo for graphics, and Pango for the rendering. On top of that, it uses libsoup for the network layer, and GStreamer for the <video> and <audio> tag support in HTML5.
• Starting in time for Gnome 2.24, WebKit/GTK+ will implement a 6-month release cycle synchronised with the Gnome release schedule.
• We feel that WebKit has the momentum, and can bring more developers to both Epiphany directly and the Gnome platform by extension. WebKit/GTK+ already has more people working on it than are working on either GtkMozEmbed or the Epiphany gecko back-end.
• WebKit is a better match for other uses in Gnome, e.g. as a HTML widget in Yelp, in Devhelp, and as an editor in Evolution replacing GtkHTML.

We will propose WebKit as an approved external dependency for Gnome.

In case that we are unable to complete this development in time for 2.24.0, we will delay the new Epiphany to 2.26. For this end, we will maintain the gnome-2-22 branch in a state that allows us to potentially make the 2.24.0 release off of that branch.

I’m trying to give MonoDevelop another chance so I’m in the process of re-doing the GUI in LAT. It’s going to be a slow process of re-creating the various widgets/dialogs, copying the old code in and then testing it.

You can follow the work in my git repository: git clone git://www.lbtechservices.com/lat.git

Jeff was so kind to add the newsfeed of this website to Planet GNOME News (which is for project-related blogs and news).

So, I'm using this post to finally annouce the official new website for Monkey Bubble. There are still some things to do with this page (reviewing the content copied from the old website - dropping some stuff), but most importantly, we need a hacker (people, that's your chance to enter the Free Software community) with these skills:

• average webdesigner (familiar with XHTML, CSS, etc.) -- no artistic skills necessary
• PHP developer -- you should be able to understand how to build a theme for Drupal

Your job? Provide a theme for Drupal 5.x to look like the old monkey bubble website. You can apply at the corresponding bug report.

Etienne Bersac of GNOME Scan fame jumped the gun a little on the announcement... et de progression incrémentale, GNOME sort ce mercredi en version 2.22."

"What GNOME 2.22 offers is an accumulation of small improvements... when the new version trickles down into...

Today we've opened the gates of the new website for monkey bubble. I proposed to set up our dedicated domain and quickly set up drupal (was really painless) on my vServer.

So, now that this has happened it's more likely that we'll post something about the happenings in monkey bubble in the future.

Long live the monkey.

This 2.22 release of Epiphany brings a few architectural changes as well as some user-visible ones. It blesses us with a migration from gnome-vfs to GIO. Also, thanks to a refactoring of Epiphany’s internals, cross engine support has improved a lot. If you’re feeling adventurous, feel free to try Epiphany with the WebKit backend– but be warned, several important features, such as cookies, are still missing.

Clearing privacy-sensitive data is now easier than ever. From a single dialog, you can clear your cookies, cache, history and saved passwords. Furthermore, the download manager will now show notification bubbles if the download window is hidden and a download completes. The address entry now filters history and bookmark duplicates, an image preview has been added to the filechooser, and finally, the history window can now display the date and time of the last visit.

Thanks to all contributors, and we wish to mention that, as a result of the hard labor of all translators, Epiphany has been localized into more than 70 languages!

The indispensible little companions to your web browsing experience, Epiphany-Extensions, have been updated to version 2.22 as well.

The list below covers all development releases from 2.21.90 up to and including 2.22.0.

Bug fixes

• Fix compilation error with gcc4.3. Bug #512027.
• HIG fixes for menu. Bug #483312
• Fix keyboard focus remaining in the location entry after entering the address. Bug #513345.
• Make middle clicking on Back/Forward toolbar buttons open again in a new tab, as it was in 2.20. Bug #513029.
• Popup the completion dropdown menu when we’re focusing the location bar with the cursor at the end of entry and we press down. Bug #340572.
• Fix back button looping through history. Bug #513803.
• Fix prompt service for xulrunner 1.9 wrt. DOM notifications. Bug #504445.
• Accept empty password to unlock a token; and allow empty new password if the requested password quality allows it. Bug #515096.

Changes

• WebKit: Implement back and forward history. Bug #506566.
• WebKit: Initial implementation of WebKit preferences.
• GConf option to disable messagebox about unsubmitted form data. Bug #516170.
• Add Undo/Redo commands to the location entry, both in the context menu and linked to the main window commands. Bug #171179.
• Make Go Up recognize HTML anchors. Bug #335631.
• Adapt to GIO API change

Contributors to this release:
Sebastien Bacher, Luca Ferretti, Cosimo Cecchi, Jan Alonzo, Xan Lopez, Thomas Wendt, Jens Granseuer, Carlos Garcia Campos, Christian Persch

Translations:
Kjartan Maraas, Artur Flinta, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, Chao-Hsiung Liao, Wadim Dziedzic, Djihed Afifi, Kenneth Nielsen, Priit Laes, Daniel Nylander, Hendrik Richter, Arangel Angov, Theppitak Karoonboonyanan,
Maxim Dziumanenko, Changwoo Ryu, Ankit Patel, Luca Ferretti, Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle, Petr Kovar, Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio, Ignacio Casal Quinteiro, Takeshi AIHANA, Wouter Bolsterlee, Gabor Kelemen, Claude Paroz, Duarte Loreto, Gil Forcada, Nikos Charonitakis, Ihar Hrachyshka, Philip Withnall, Jorge Gonzalez, Åsmund Skjæveland, Amitakhya Phukan, Žygimantas Beručka, Yair Hershkovitz, Baris Cicek, Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy, Pawan Chitrakar, Ilkka Tuohela, Reinout van Schouwen, Rahul Bhalerao, Yannig Marchegay

How to get it:
http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/Downloads

Ralph Glass has written a new game using Gtk2hs. Screenshots and downloads at http://xiangqiboard.blogspot.com/. Thanks Ralph!

Ian McIntosh interviews Amy de Groff, Head of IT for the Howard County Library, about their switch to GNU/Linux and implementation of Groovix, an Ubuntu-based distribution.

Davyd Madely reviews the book Foundations of GTK+ Development by Andrew Krause, and published by Apress.

Here’s a quick tour of some of the rocking sweet plugins available on blogo! To see the whole list, log in to your blog and navigate to the Plugin section. You can turn on any of the plugins by clicking Activate at the right of the list.

• Footnotes: The footnotes plugin was included to satisfy the alarming number of GNOME contributors who have a footnote fetish. Perhaps it’s some kind of bizarre tribute to our logo… whatever it is, blogo is ready!
• Content License: Blog for freedom with the official Creative Commons WpLicense plugin! You can choose from a range of Free and non-Free content licenses, and display a footer badge to show off your choice.
• Subscribe to Comments: Make it easy for your readers to join the conversation with the Subscribe to Comments plugin. All they need to do is check a box when commenting, and they’ll receive email updates when new comments arrive — just like you do! There’s even a management interface for both you and your readers to manage subscriptions.
• OpenID Delegation: If you have an OpenID provider, but you’d like to use your blog URL as your OpenID identifier (which is particularly useful when commenting on other blogs), just switch on the OpenID Delegation plugin and point it in the right direction. Now your blog really is you!
• Flickr Widget: Many GNOME contributors combine technical prowess with a keen eye for beauty — which is why Flickr has such a huge GNOME following! Show off your mad photography skillz with the Flickr Widget plugin.

  

• Twitter Widget: The ultimate interruption-oriented technology… and we all thought email was bad! Keep the world seriously up-to-date on your thoughts and movements with the Twitter widget plugin.

  

• Easy Gravatars: Your gravatar is a “globally unique avatar” based on an MD5 hash of your email address. They provide an easy way for any website to display your favourite avatar icon, without the need to configure it for every individual site. To show gravatar icons in your comments, switch on the Easy Gravatars plugin.

  

• Hidden Treasures: Finally, there are a bunch of cool plugins on blogo that you can enjoy without even switching them on:
  • Tango Smilies makes your emoticons rock!
  • Bug Links makes it easy to refer to bugs in GNOME related trackers without breaking a sweat. Just mention the bug number as you normally would: GNOME bug #number will appear as GNOME bug #496024 while Fedora bug #number will appear as Fedora bug #170856 — nice!
  • Bad Behavior protects your blog against many kinds of comment spam.
  • Custom CSS lets you define your own CSS styles for any theme (Presentation » Custom CSS).

Of course, if you’re using blogo and would like another cool plugin installed, let us know by filing a feature request!

1. Sign up for a blogs.gnome.org account if you haven’t already.

   It’s a very simple process, and all you need is a gtk.org, gimp.org or gnome.org email alias to get started. Sign up now!

2. Log in to your WordPress admin interface.

   Click Login or Site Admin in your “Meta” sidebar.

   

3. Navigate to the Advogato importer.

   Click through Manage > Import > Advogato.

   

4. Choose your user and blog entries.

   Enter your Advogato user name and choose which blog entries you wish to import. If you leave the last post field blank, it will import your entire history of posts. Click Import to begin the import process. The import results page will list every entry that is imported, so it can get pretty long. I’ve gimped the image below so you can see the end of a successful import run.

   

5. You’re done!

   Now you can browse through your blog, freshly imported into WordPress!

For the last few months I’ve been unable to do much in the way of developing LAT.

The first issue is MonoDevelop. In the 1.3 branch, I started to make more use of MonoDevelop features. I switched from building the interface in Glade to MonoDevelop’s Stetic UI builder.

This made development much easier and I was able to clean up a lot of interface issues. However, I found new MonoDevelop releases wouldn’t compile the project any more. I reported the bug and some things got fixed but overall it stopped development cold.

As of MonoDevelop 0.15 I can’t even open the project anymore. It just crashes try to load the solution file. Even with the stable 1.2 branch, I can open the project but it refuses to compile with some strange errors.

The second issue is Mono, specifically the Novell.Directory.Ldap assembly. It doesn’t support non-Latin characters as far as I can tell. TLS support is broken. There is no support for GSSAPI for Kerberos intergration.

I can’t implement the features I want with the way things currently are. I guess I could try and fix it myself but it took me months to get one SSL bugfix accepted and then I had to wait for the next two Mono releases before I could use it. The TLS bug I reported has been open for over a year now. It doesn’t inspire confidence.

I’m not really interested in re-doing all the UI work in Glade and then switching back to a Gedit/Terminal/Glade workflow. Overall LAT does what I need it for and my itch is basically scratched. So as it stands, I don’t think I will be doing any more releases of LAT past 1.2.3 which I just pushed out today. If someone is interested in taking over the project, let me know.

> release has a few important bug fixes.