Ettore

This must be an intense time for Ximian. I hope they are helped a little by the strong relationships everyone has built within the community.

Nautilus

alex implemented the “shift means close the current window” feature, making the GNOME 2.5 spatial nautilus feel a lot like a classic Mac. Shift-double-click to open-and-close-the-current-one, to keep your screen uncluttered as you explore. And use shift-alt-down when using the arrow-key navigation. This makes Nautilus incredibly satisfying for me, and should make Mac users feel at home. You have to disable the current alt-shift-arrow keybindings in the “keyboard shortcuts” control panel, but I will try to persuade hp to change the defaults.

I noticed an easily reproducable samba-browsing crash in my Red Hat 9 GNOME 2.2. I thought I’d debug it in 2.5, but the crash is already gone. I had to install the Samba 3 rpm, from samba.org, and build gnome-vfs-extras. Nautilus now remembers your password, using the new keyring thingy, so you no don’t need to type your password repeatedly. This will be another major item in the GNOME 2.6 release notes. Those Nautilus hackers are doing fantastic work.

System Tools

I tried out the GNOME System Tools again, for the the first time in a while, on Red Hat 9, and Debian. The UI has become a lot more GNOME like, and everything seems to work well. There’s a few “More Options” buttons that I’m not too happy with, but I’m not sure how to deal with it better. I guess in future this stuff will just work without any configuration anway.

I think we’d be fools not to get the Time and Network control panels in to GNOME 2.6. I could live with the Services one too, if we need it for Time.

Platform Bindings

I’m signed up to lots of strange new lists, for C#, python, perl, and Java so far.

The java-gnome bindings are trying to get some stuff on to the schedule, and I think they will. The python people seem to want in, but it looks like jamesh is away, and I don’t think the decision can be made without him. Everybody seems to be discussing the API stability issues seriously, and I think this is the first sign of our success.

December 22nd is the deadline for submitting the tarballs that will be on the schedule.