Election Coverage 8.04

The primaries are over! The candidates have been been chosen. A little over two weeks ago, the final modules for Gnome were chosen and the pages for it were udated about a week ago. The good folks over at Ubuntu had their IRC meeting about what to really include in the default install for 8.04LTS. We know the results.

What's up with Gnome?

Obviously, Gnome 2.22 will see improvements of its own. An alphabetical listing of these changes follows:

• The Deskbar applet will add full Evolution address book searching, downloadable plugins with an easy interface, and perfomance improvements.
• The Dictionary will be able to use local files and Wikipedia.
  
• Ekiga phone will supposedly add audio/video codec plugin and presence support, though these were also slated for Gnome 2.20, so I'm not too confident.
• Evince, the PDF and more viewer, will get annotation support and have page transisitions for presentations.
• Evolution will support tagging of messages and using Google calendars.
• Metacity will be able to full screen over several screens and to support multiple pointers (multi-touch).
  
• Screenshot will be able to choose an area of the desktop.
• Seahorse completely deprecates Gnome-keyring-manager.
  
• Tomboy will add automatic sync, tasks, and tagging.
  
• Totem will have a MythTV plugin.

All the apps are gradually moving to gio/gvfs (which sports a fancy new multi-progress meter) and GTKPrint.

There are several new applications in Gnome:

• Anjuta, a programmer's IDE, which won't be on the Ubuntu 8.04LTS CD.
• Cheese, a webcam application, which will be on there.
• Vinagre is a VNC client which supports tabs and remembers your popoular connections.
• GtkGLExt adds OpenGL support into GTK.

How does this play out for Ubuntu 8.04LTS?

Remove GThumb from future releases, though upgraders won't see any difference. F-Spot will take its place, with Eye of Gnome being the default viewer.

Most of the IRC discussion revolved around Serpentine vs. Nautilus CD Creator vs. Brasero. It was noted that Nautilus CD Creator does just about everything a normal user needs and works on a file-based method, but that new users will probably expect a Nero-type interface. Brasero was chosen to be included by default, though Nautilus will still handle the simpler CD-writing tasks. Serpentine is out.

The Transmission Bittorrent client will become the default client for 8.04

Change Vinagre for VNC remote desktop