James, You have clearly "raised the bar" with all of your good work here on ULB Gnome and the Rubber Turnip apps. If you feel that SuSE's Gnome setup in 9.1 now meets your high standards, well, that just speaks volumes for the progress that SuSE has made on the Gnome front. As an active lurker and sometimes poster, most of the posts I see regarding your work are about problems people are having. I don't think we collectively thank you enough for all of your contributions. Certainly I have benefitted from your work, so at least from me, please accept my sincere appreciation! And of course, whatever you can do in future to keep "raising the bar" for Novell/Ximian/SuSE will be at least as enthusiastically appreciated (and encouraged!) as your contributions to date. With best regards, Mark On Wed, 2004-05-05 at 08:14, James Ogley wrote:

Everyone,

Just thought I'd give a quick heads up about my thoughts as my receipt of a copy of 9.1 approaches (it's on order, waiting for Amazon UK to ship it...). I'll be replicating this in my blog, so Planet SuSE readers can see it too.

Obviously my intention is to produce packages of the various apps that I provide for 9.1. In addition to them, I'm also planning to provide Evolution 1.5 packages for anyone who wants to get their hands dirty and test the code that will become Evolution 2.0. This will be parallel installable with 1.4.x.

Also, expect GTK+ to be updated to 2.4.x, with the new official file selector. Packages built against 2.2.x will continue to work, but an increasing number of apps are starting to require 2.4, so it makes sense going forward to have working packages. (Apps that require GTK+ 2.4 at the moment, off the top of my head, are Totem, the next release of Galeon, the next development tree of Gnumeric, there are probably more). I'll also try to get packages of various language bindings for GTK+ 2.4, such as Perl, Python, C++, Java...

I've been working recently on SuSE support for GNOME System Tools, now, I'll be honest and say that my local copies don't all work quite as I want (segv-tastic), but I'm ironing out issues as and when I have time, so packages of GST may make an appearance.

So, what of ULB GNOME? Well, readers of blog will know that back in March I was musing about the Ximian input in 9.1 rendering ULB GNOME obsolete. This may well be the case, certainly the small amount of time I was able to put in on the 9.1 betas suggested the default GNOME install is a lot niftier in 9.1 than before, but I shall wait till I've had a chance to use it "in anger" before making that decision. Certainly, ulb-themes will continue to be available as a package, along with gnome-themes-extras, and the other themes on the site.

Finally, cos I know a lot of people are going to ask, am I going to do GNOME 2.6 packages? Honest answer is I don't know, but I doubt it, I almost certainly don't have the time to do the sort of testing I'd like, but I guess you never know...

James -- James Ogley, Webmaster, Rubber Turnip james@rubberturnip.org.uk http://www.rubberturnip.org.uk Jabber: riggwelter@myjabber.net Using Free Software since 1994, running GNU/Linux (SuSE 9.0) GNOME updates for SuSE: http://www.usr-local-bin.org --

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