Josselin Mouette is one the leaders of the pkg-gnome team, he takes sound technical decisions and doesn’t fear writing code to work-around upstream issues. He deserves kudos for the work he has put into packaging GNOME over the years.

Another milestone for the Debian ecosystem and the Gnome 3.x desktop this weekend as the Debian unstable distribution (“sid”) completed it’s transition to Gnome 3.2.1, with the migration of remaining Gnome 3.2 packages to Debian “sid” including gnome-shell 3.2.1-8.

I never really considered myself a GNOME user. Though I am. I’ve used Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm2, LXDE, even JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) in Puppy and FLTK in TinyCore. But most of the time I stick with the default desktop environment offered by a given distribution.

The Debian GNOME team started uploading a mix of GNOME 3.0 and 3.2 packages to Debian unstable because the release team is ready to take care of this transition. This means that as soon as the packages are ready in Debian unstable, the release team will ensure that they also reach wheezy (aka the current [...]

Mind you, on this same hardware I was able to run Unity in Ubuntu 11.04. Not that I’m going to throw over GNOME 2.30 (or Degbian Squeeze) for Unity and Ubuntu, because I am not an early adopter.

GNOME Shell present the list of launchable applications to us as a large, non-hierarchical, immediately searchable list. We can hit the logo key and start typing a few letters and immediately find what we’re looking for. KDE has it. Windows Vista and 7 have it. OS X has it (via Spotlight). And now we have [...]

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Debian 6 “Squeeze” will be released soon. Why? I’m testing the new Debian live images which were first released a week ago (and are daily builds — this one is the 2010 October 3 build); before that, the most recent live image available was [...]

Surprisingly, the Squeeze CD I downloaded today had GNOME on it. Thinking I’ll be able to remove it, I installed it. It was useless, except the fact that it fixed my framebuffer , so I tried removing it.

Do you like Debian? Do you like GNOME? Are you free on February 27-28? If so, please reserve your week-end, because you are going to help us do a massive cleanup in the insane amount of bugs submitted against GNOME packages.

Since today for kfreebsd-amd64, and probably tomorrow for kfreebsd-i386 too, the gnome metapackage is installable on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

The author of debtree, a program that illustrates dependencies between .deb packages, has posted a brief rant about the size of Gnome desktop installations in recent Debian releases. Specifically, he notes that a default Gnome install in Etch (4.0) was 1,360MB – but in the upcoming 6.0 release it’ll be over 3,000MB.

From time to time, installing VMware Tools on a Linux guest will cause you some grief. While there are lots of howto’s, usually they’re for VMware Workstation. Here’s one that works in Debian/Lenny 5.0.2 on ESX Server 3.5 Update 4.

Hi, although for various reasons (mostly ongoing transitions) we are quite late in packaging GNOME 2.26 in Debian, we should also look at the future. GTK+ 3.0 is planned around march 2010, and GNOME 3.0 a little while later. With them comes the final deprecation of many GNOME 2.X interfaces.