F12 is almost done ! I think we have produced one of our best releases yet. Thanks to everybody who has helped making it a great desktop. As always, there are many exciting new things: Abrt, Bluetooth networking and sound, Dracut, Empathy, IPv6, Thusnelda, etc. But we have also put a lot of effort into making this work well and look sharp. And it shows ! There are certainly still bugs to be found and fixed, and we will spend some time after the release mostly focused on handling incoming bugs, probably until around the time that GNOME 2.28.2 is released (right before Christmas). Even so, there are some changes to the Desktop spin that I want to make early in the F13 cycle, and that I want to outline here: - Drop the CD size limitation and target a larger usb stick. We have discussed this in the past. The main motivation for this is that we have to fight every release cycle to make things fit on a CD, and we don't have room to include our default office suite or example content. - Include OpenOffice instead of abiword. OpenOffice is the premier open source office suite, and abiword is on the current live CD purely for size reasons. - Use shotwell as the default photo management app instead of gthumb. This may be a bit of a surprise for some. Shotwell is a relatively new application, that is in Fedora only since F12. I have mentioned it on this list before. The 0.3.0 release that has just come out is very close to the feature set that we'd ideally expect to have in a default photo management app. It also starts very fast. - Remove remaining Bluecurve icons from fedora-gnome-theme. This will probably leave some holes in the menus, and we'll need help from artists to fill those. - Include example content. We've wanted to do this for a long time, but CD size limitations have always prohibited it. Now we can do it, but of course, we still need to collect good material. If you have proposals for suitably licensed documents, movies, music, etc that are interesting, cool or just funny, let us know ! It might also be a good idea to include some promotional material that could be of use for Fedora ambassadors. If you have proposals in this direction, let us know as well ! Beyond these organizational changes to the live image, I think a focus of our feature work for F13 will be around software installation and updates. Some of our thoughts for how installation and updates should ideally behave can be found on the wiki: http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/UpdateExperience http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/InstallExperience For application installation, Martin Bacovsky has already started working on an online application database that is tied to pkgdb: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-October/msg01083.html Some of us will be at FUDCon in a few weeks, where we can hopefully discuss these ideas in more depth. Matthias -- Fedora-desktop-list mailing list Fedora-desktop-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-desktop-list
