Linux

del.icio.us Tags: ubuntu , linux

(Citing from ArsTechnica.com)

“Artists and developers participated in a desktop theming specification meeting at the Ubuntu Developer Summit earlier this week. During the meeting, participants made plans for the visual refresh of Hardy Heron, the next major release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.”

I agree it’s time for a change, or a least a refresh, in order to prevent the current artwork from becoming stale and uninteresting. Maybe it’s time to step away from the Clearlooks engine, too?

“The Ubuntu development community will likely select an existing theme engine on which to base Hardy’s visual style. The two options that were discussed during the meeting were Clearlooks and Murrine.

The Murrine theme engine is much more sophisticated and offers a wide range of nice features, such as glassy gradients and striped scrollbars. The meeting participants also discussed the potential for creating a GTK theme that leverages compositing capabilities.”

(murrine.netsons.org) Murrine is an Italian word meaning the glass artworks done by Venicians glass blowers. Murrine Engine is a Gtk2 engine that will make your desktop look like a beautiful Murrina (which is the italian singular of Murrine).

According to Murrine’s homepage the engine provides anti-aliased widgets, the Murrine Configurator, good speed of rendering and animated controls (progressbar, radiobuttons & checkbuttons).

“Hardy Heron will be moving away from Ubuntu’s signature brown look in favor of black and orange.

The name of the theme will also probably be changed to reflect the significant deviation from the previous look and feel. The default Ubuntu theme has been called Human for a long time. “Superhuman” is one of the names that was proposed for the new theme.”

Superhuman? Hmz.

Other artwork, like the bootscreen, the login, the icons and other details will also be redone to comply with the new look and feel and color scheme. I’m curious to find out what it’ll look like.

The past few releases of Ubuntu had become quite uninteresting, so this breath of fresh air is especially welcome. The standardization of the 3D desktop is a good thing because it’ll allow more exposure. If the plug-and-play functionality works as advertised, it could convince more people to try Linux, since the biggest barrier (aside from software incompatibility) is hardware malevolence. I’m behind Canonical on this.

clipped from www.news.com Some of the Gutsy Gibbon work involved introducing new features Canonical hopes to stabilize for Hardy Heron Take, for example, the “tickless” kernel, which is designed to reduce power consumption and improve server virtualization performance by letting the processor enter a somnolent state more often. Among other Gutsy Gibbon developments are snazzy 3D graphics for the desktop version, desktop search called Tracker and the first incarnation of a Ubuntu Mobile version for portable gadgets. “Ultimately we took the decision to take the risk and enable this functionality by default.” Among other Gutsy Gibbon desktop features are plug-and-play function to more easily install proprietary or missing software to play audio and video files; easy support for multiple monitors; the ability to read and write from hard drive partitions using Microsoft Windows’ NTFS file system using the Fuse software. Canonical plans to release “Gutsy Gibbon,” the Ubuntu Linux version 7.10