Unfounded rumors, accusations, and half-truths ...

News from Jan-Mar 1999

Wed Apr 14 18:57:29 EST 1999

(DrMike) Its been an exciting week - with the release we made of GNOME 1.0 RPMS we're on quite a high. GNOME has never looked better. Of course we're not ever satisfied, so we're still knocking out bugs and adding new features.

We've had beautiful weather here so the Labs guys all went out to to see the sun and throw frisbee out behind the Red Hat building. Turns out as we weren't too rusty, though Federico seemed a bit peeved the number of times he had to retrieve the frisbee from the road. Much discussion about different techniques for throwing.

Everyone here is running Rawhide on their boxes and its looking very good. The 2.2 kernel has some nice new features, like my TV card works out of the box. Of course GNOME is nicely integrated into Rawhide, and we like that!

(Jonathan) I cut off all my hair this past weekend.

(Federico) Today I am working on finishing the CORBA and session management support for the Midnight Commander. I've spent a good part of the week reading about CORBA and all its endless terminology. Next week I want to work on fixing all the stupid behavior issues in MC's list and tree views. Polish, polish, polish...

(Jonathan) Hmmm. It's been a while since I've added a real entry. I have been hard at work trying to get bugs out of gmc and the control-center. It's a lot of little things, but they take a fair amount of time to do. Right now, GNOME is looking very good and stable on my box, and I'm really excited about it. I also started collecting images to put in a backgrounds package.

(Dr Mike) Still here working hard on GNOME enhancements. We have added many new features and bug fixes that went into the Starbuck release last week. This week I've been fixing problems here and there with control center capplets and gdm. Plus doing alot of package testing. Things are looking extremely good - we just have some enlightenment and gnome session fixes to work on and it will be damn solid.

(Everyone) Well GNOME 1.0 might have been released, but the action is just starting here at the Labs. We're working on updates and enhancements to GNOME 1.0 to make it even better. Rasterman seems to be feverishly working on something in the corner that he won't tell us about. His crazed laughter is worrying us a little...

For everyone at LinuxWorld who came by the booth - thanks for taking the time to come check out the latest and greatest GNOME.

(Raster) Well It's cleaning up code time - fixing last bugs in E - I've gotten a long way and it's pretty rock-solid and working now. Most of the last little annoyances are gone and it's getting pretty solid. I'm getting all geared up to go to California for LinuxWorldExpo next week preparing some themes and stuff... this should be exiting.....

(Dave) I have gotten some really good help with the GNOME User's Guide from David Wheeler. He has added two new sections aimed at newbies that are really quite good. Thanks David! The translation work is moving on and I will continue to put updates about it on The GNOME User's Guide Project Page. When I have nailed down a User's Guide that resembles 1.0 I am going to start work on the GTK Reference Docs... time to switch writing modes.

(Federico) It is amazing how many stupid little details there are in the user interface for a file manager. The feel has to be just *right*, otherwise people will complain immediately. GMC has been getting a lot of polish, an a lot of bug fixes as well. There are some important things left to do: menus on the desktop and the blank areas of panels (I'm working on it), making the VFSs work with the tree view, and a trash can.

(Dr Mike) Just got back from a surprise Valentine's Day getaway my wife planned. I think she figured it was the only way to keep me from working on GNOME all weekend (sad but true). But the hard work is paying off, as the latest 0.99.8 stuff is looking awesome. We have a few things here and there to look at, but overall its becoming rock solid.

Shameless plug - see me open my big mouth at Feed Magazine. I think having my picture on the internet is a bad thing...

(Dave) I have posted a proposal for including GNOME application documentation into the GNOME Users Guide. Comments are being accepted. The new building is great.. my chair wheel no longer rolls into a hole in the floor... ah luxury.

(Owen) We announced the GTK+ Reference Documentation Project yesterday. Hopefully, we'll have lots of good documenation for GTK+ RSN. Otherwise, I've mostly been bug-fixing in GTK+ and GNOME.

(Raster) After a lot of cleaning up GNOME is looking much better. E has had many nits and bugs ironed aout and is looking quite sexy right now... It's almost ready for a release I'd say. Getting on with that. Otherwise enjoying thr new office and surroundings. Work work work ...

(Dr Mike) Red Hat and the Labs are all located in the same nice big building now. The move was reasonably painless. The Labs area needs some work on its environment though, it looks horribly corporate right now.

(Dr Mike) Reworked news pages so they aren't so huge, did lots of paperwork. Being a manager is fun, yeah.

Seriously, GNOME is just making amazing progress. GMC is starting to look very nice. Enlightenment is actually usable now is has a control center capplet. I looked on freshmeat the other day and there were at least 6 or 7 gtk+ apps in a row in the listing. Once the final releases are made, there is going to be a huge swell of gtk+/GNOME apps!

(Owen) Here a (fixed) bug, there a (fixed) bug, everywhere a (fixed) bug. GTK+-1.2 is getting closer. It is pretty solid on Linux now. Still some miscellaneous problems on miscellaneous platforms. I've been helping Federico fine-tune drag-and-drop in gmc recently, and doing so has made me look again at the DND API a bit. I'm quite happy with how it turned out - the easy stuff is easy and the hard stuff is possible.

(Raster) Well after a weekend away up north in Philadelphia and NYC and Central Pennsylvania, I managed to clear out my mailbox - what a feat! I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Now back to code...

(DrMike) I've been going through the latest set of GNOME tarballs and making new packages, should release them this week. Its all coming together nicely, just need to add a bit of polish to how GNOME starts up and I'm feeling really good about it.

(Federico) I rewrote the event handling code for GMC's desktop icons, and now they work beautifully. Now I'm on to finish fixing the event code in the GnomeIconList widget. GMC is becoming pretty. And today we went to the new Red Hat building. It should be fun to work there; the floor is so big we could use rollerblades to move around.

(Jonathan) My few weeks on GMC seems to have stretched out to over a month. I have ended up redoing a lot of the superficial layout of GMC code, which it desperately needed. We also went over the new Red Hat building today. It is pretty cool, and has a lot more space then our current place.

(Owen) After a bit of relaxation over the holidays, it's back to finishing up GTK+-1.2. In my plentiful spare time I've been fooling around with a neat little memory profiling tool I wrote to see where all the memory is going. I may release that at some point - it probably is somewhat behind other tools in power, but the power to lines of code ratio is pretty nice.

(Federico) The holidays were great, and it was good to back to Mexico for some days. After that, it was a lot of mail reading and cvs updating and re-synchronizing with people and whatnot.

I'm working on gmc, and it is shaping up nicely. Right now I am re-organizing the file operation context code that will allow for correct background operations and cleaner code as well. Raph has integrated his insanely cool libart stuff into the Gnome canvas, so I may start tying up the loose ends this weekend.

(Raster) Back from holidays.. somehow I just cant manage to keep up wiht email AND work AND code... and email is what gives in this game of tug-of-war. I have moved my personaly pages to somewhere more sensible like http://www.rasterman.com/raster/ because.. well that's my site.. with my name.. makes more sense. I tend to keep my page there semi-up-to-date with news etc.

Now back to E, and my gui gtk E config program... ooh boy is it looking sexy :) This should let anyone configure E without any knowledge. the only thing to finish for the moment is the background editor. Selection of backgroudns works as does almost everything...

Wed Jan 6 17:26:32 EST 1999

(Dave) I have been furiously documenting more for the 1.0 release. I have been working mostly on GMC but I have also started some of the applets. The redesign of the GNOME website has been put on hold to accomodate the 1.0 release.

As a side note I find strange stuff fascinating as well.

Wed Jan 6 15:12:20 EST 1999

(DrMike) Wow a month since we had any updates - thats just too long. Alot has happened in the mean time:
• GNOME feature freeze went into effect
• GNOME is now in the Red Hat Rawhide releases
• everyone at the Labs is in bug-hunt-and-kill mode

Talked to a couple of reporters today about GNOME and the Labs. People seem to find the strangest stuff fascinating :)