Slashdot Mirror

battery841 writes: "Evolution 1.0 Beta 1 has been released. An announcement has been released. The RPMs and tarballs can be downloaded from Ximian. This is the first beta release, and a major step to the much awaited 1.0 release." The last time I tried Evolution it was very buggy, but that was a long time ago - time to give it another try.

Slashback tonight with just a few small items: an update on the AOL vs. Gaim brouhaha (good news), a slight return to the NSA's recommendations on securing that legacy Windows box, and oh, by the way, the official launch of the Free Software antidote to paying fealty forever to Redmond.

Sometimes it's nice to catch a disease. A few days ago, michael posted that Ximian was about to release its Free Software answer to Microsoft's .NET. Now it's official. Miguel de Icaza adds some detail: "Hello guys, As of today, we launched Mono, a project to implement a GPL-ed Common Language Runtime, class libraries and C# compiler to be compatible with Microsoft's .NET Framework. You can look at the press release that we put out. We also have a FAQ that covers various points and tries to explain how this is not .NET."

Newsforge is carrying a piece which ties together a bit more as well to explain how the promised benefits of .NET, as amorphous as they are, can be addressed with these and other software. Miguel has seemingly been busy on the phone today.

Hornsby points as well to "a very interesting article on the implications of Microsoft's .NET technology on open source development. The article heavily quotes Miguel, who "believes that .NET is going to be the dominant development environment for the next 20 years."

They oughtta know how to secure a box. Jhereg42 writes: "The NSA has posted their W2k security guides on a new (Slash proof :-) web site. Also included are Cisco security guides and a 'Supporting Documents' section containing docs on "Defense in Depth" and I-Planet Web Server configuration."

This is what lawyers are for. Rolan writes: "Mark Spencer has sent out an update on AOL v GAIM. It seems that the request for assistance was met well beyond the goal of US$500, at US$1700! The letter and attached response. The response was converted from an attached rtf file into an html file by StarOffice 5.2."

Thanks to all who sent along a few bucks, and good luck to the Gaim folks in the Surreal Themepark World of Contested Trademarks.

Slashback tonight with just a few small items: an update on the AOL vs. Gaim brouhaha (good news), a slight return to the NSA's recommendations on securing that legacy Windows box, and oh, by the way, the official launch of the Free Software antidote to paying fealty forever to Redmond.

Sometimes it's nice to catch a disease. A few days ago, michael posted that Ximian was about to release its Free Software answer to Microsoft's .NET. Now it's official. Miguel de Icaza adds some detail: "Hello guys, As of today, we launched Mono, a project to implement a GPL-ed Common Language Runtime, class libraries and C# compiler to be compatible with Microsoft's .NET Framework. You can look at the press release that we put out. We also have a FAQ that covers various points and tries to explain how this is not .NET."

Newsforge is carrying a piece which ties together a bit more as well to explain how the promised benefits of .NET, as amorphous as they are, can be addressed with these and other software. Miguel has seemingly been busy on the phone today.

Hornsby points as well to "a very interesting article on the implications of Microsoft's .NET technology on open source development. The article heavily quotes Miguel, who "believes that .NET is going to be the dominant development environment for the next 20 years."

They oughtta know how to secure a box. Jhereg42 writes: "The NSA has posted their W2k security guides on a new (Slash proof :-) web site. Also included are Cisco security guides and a 'Supporting Documents' section containing docs on "Defense in Depth" and I-Planet Web Server configuration."

This is what lawyers are for. Rolan writes: "Mark Spencer has sent out an update on AOL v GAIM. It seems that the request for assistance was met well beyond the goal of US$500, at US$1700! The letter and attached response. The response was converted from an attached rtf file into an html file by StarOffice 5.2."

Thanks to all who sent along a few bucks, and good luck to the Gaim folks in the Surreal Themepark World of Contested Trademarks.

Slashback tonight with just a few small items: an update on the AOL vs. Gaim brouhaha (good news), a slight return to the NSA's recommendations on securing that legacy Windows box, and oh, by the way, the official launch of the Free Software antidote to paying fealty forever to Redmond.

Sometimes it's nice to catch a disease. A few days ago, michael posted that Ximian was about to release its Free Software answer to Microsoft's .NET. Now it's official. Miguel de Icaza adds some detail: "Hello guys, As of today, we launched Mono, a project to implement a GPL-ed Common Language Runtime, class libraries and C# compiler to be compatible with Microsoft's .NET Framework. You can look at the press release that we put out. We also have a FAQ that covers various points and tries to explain how this is not .NET."

Newsforge is carrying a piece which ties together a bit more as well to explain how the promised benefits of .NET, as amorphous as they are, can be addressed with these and other software. Miguel has seemingly been busy on the phone today.

Hornsby points as well to "a very interesting article on the implications of Microsoft's .NET technology on open source development. The article heavily quotes Miguel, who "believes that .NET is going to be the dominant development environment for the next 20 years."

They oughtta know how to secure a box. Jhereg42 writes: "The NSA has posted their W2k security guides on a new (Slash proof :-) web site. Also included are Cisco security guides and a 'Supporting Documents' section containing docs on "Defense in Depth" and I-Planet Web Server configuration."

This is what lawyers are for. Rolan writes: "Mark Spencer has sent out an update on AOL v GAIM. It seems that the request for assistance was met well beyond the goal of US$500, at US$1700! The letter and attached response. The response was converted from an attached rtf file into an html file by StarOffice 5.2."

Thanks to all who sent along a few bucks, and good luck to the Gaim folks in the Surreal Themepark World of Contested Trademarks.

jeffy124 writes: "ZDNet is reporting a story in which Ximian will announce on Monday a project dubbed "Mono" that will produce an open-source product to challenge Microsoft's .NET initiative."

miguel writes "OpenCola has just released SwarmCast which is a very interesting mechanism for distributing software. At Ximian we are looking into integrating this into Red Carpet to accelerate software downloads by using their sharing software. The demo of their product is pretty amazing." Very clever: essentially it creates a peered network so larger files can be shuttled around faster. Each client can serve a small piece of data to other clients so that a massive centralized data center isn't necessary. Now the cola on the other hand...

miguel writes "OpenCola has just released SwarmCast which is a very interesting mechanism for distributing software. At Ximian we are looking into integrating this into Red Carpet to accelerate software downloads by using their sharing software. The demo of their product is pretty amazing." Very clever: essentially it creates a peered network so larger files can be shuttled around faster. Each client can serve a small piece of data to other clients so that a massive centralized data center isn't necessary. Now the cola on the other hand...

miguel writes "Today we announced that David Patrick has joined Ximian as our CEO. Nat which we all love has stepped down from this role and will now be in charge of our products (he insists that people call him `VP of Product Management' although to me he will always be Commander Nat "Fleebety Jeebits" Friedman). David is a great guy, his experience in the field will Ximian and GNOME tremendously." He's got old timer creds (Wordstar? Geezus).

Maciej Stachowiak writes: "The GNOME 1.4 Release Team is proud to announce GNOME 1.4 Beta 2 "Hit Me Baby, One More Time". This is only a beta and there may be problems with compiling and running. However, if you are adventurous and would like to help with testing, get it from your favorite GNOME mirror site in /pub/gnome/stable/betas/gnome-1.4beta2. We would also like to announce the GNOME Fifth Toe 1.4 Beta 2 release, a collection of additional packages that are not part of the core desktop but designed to work well with GNOME. This should also be available on gnome mirrors in /pub/gnome/stable/betas/gnome-fifth-toe-1.4beta2. Bug reports for most packages should go in one of the following, depending on the module: GNOME Bugzilla, Eazel Bugzilla or Ximian Bugzilla."

assbarn writes "Ximian has announced that they have released Red Carpet, their new updater application and software management tool. This marks a huge improvement over their old updater service, with full dependencies (a la apt) for both RPM and dpkg systems, and a channel system that can provide any kind of software to your Linux system." I've included their release below - check it out for more information.

Red Carpet Release Info, from Ximian You have waited frothingly in anticipation. You have endured a perpetual release date of "two more weeks." You may have, in a senseless act of anxiety over this amazing work of art, even whispered the "V"-word[1] under your breath. You have tormented the developers on IRC. You have begun the chanting. You have burned towns. You have seized ships and blockaded ports.

Red Carpet is here.

Red Carpet is the next generation Ximian updater and software management application. Based around the concept of "channels," or content groupings, Red Carpet will be able to present you with a virtually endless array of software for your GNU/Linux and Unix systems. In addition to just updating packages already installed on your system, Red Carpet allows you to install new software and remove existing software. Red Carpet operates seamlessly with your existing packaging tools on both RPM and dpkg-based systems, giving you a consistent interface for managing your software on any Linux distribution. And, with DepTricketyTrackTrackTronixTron 9000, our amazing dependency and conflict resolution system, the nightmare of dependencies all but vanish from your life. Rejoice.

We will now move into the question and answer section of our release announcement:

Q. Is this a beta? 0.9? What's going on here? Where am I? Why am I wearing a clown wig?
A. With our best efforts we have tried to find every bug, duplicate every dependency situation, become one with both RPM and dpkg, and click on everything rapidly and repeatedly. However, we are most ashamed to admit that we did not discover every possible bug, could not duplicate all of the horrors that are your packaging database, failed to achieve spiritual enlightenment, and simply cannot click as fast as you can. As a result, we present this application to you in beta form. Frankly, we want you to do thangs to it. You find bugs, we'll fix em.

Q. How do I get it?
A. Binary packages for Red Hat 6, Red Hat 7, and Debian GNU/Linux systems are available now through the Red Carpet mirror in the Ximian GNOME Updater. For Debian users, add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list: deb ftp://spidermonkey.ximian.com/pub/red-carpet/binary/debian-22-i386/ ./ You can also get them, as well as the source tarball, from ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/red-carpet. Because we're in the process of moving our office and we overwork our build people, binary RPMs for the remainder of our supported Linux distributions will be available a little later. Sorry.

Q. Okay, I've got it. Now what?
A. Give it a whirl. You can find Red Carpet from the Programs->System menu on the foot launcher or on the top menu bar. After it downloads all of the channel bar, you should probably verify that your system's dependencies are fulfilled by choosing "Verify Installed Packages" from the File menu. After that, go buck wild. Subscribe to channels, install new software, check out our totally l33t About page, whatever you want.

Q. "I found a bug" or "Red Carpet sucks! How do I tell you how bad you suck?"
A. In the unlikely event that you find a bug, please submit them to the Ximian bugzilla at http://bugzilla.ximian.com. We've created a public mailing list, red-carpet@ximian.com, for you to tell us exactly how much we suck. Or rule. We're ready for it. We can take it. You can subscribe to it at http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/red-carpet. By the way, help control the pet population: have your pets spayed or neutered.

Q. Tell me more about channels.
A. That's not really a question, but I would be happy to. With channels we are able to provide you with a much wider variety of software and in a much cleaner way than what was possible with our old updater technology. Channels can be subscribed to selectively, meaning that you only ever receive information on updates of software that interest you.

Q. So, uh, does that mean it'll update my distribution, too?
A. Oh yeah. Red Carpet detects what distribution you are running and presents a channel of it, with all of the updates issed from the vendor. Red Carpet can install any software on your system, as long as there's a channel for it. In essence, Red Carpet becomes the central point for installing, updating, and managing software on your computer. Q. What about package signing and verification? A. You'll want to install GnuPG to verify package signatures. We have included the public keys for Ximian, Red Hat, Caldera, TurboLinux, Mandrake, and SuSE. Most distros provide them these days. If you don't have it, Red Carpet will still run fine.

Q. Does this replace the Ximian GNOME Updater?
A. Because this is a beta, we don't want to prevent people from updating their system in the event that it breaks. As Red Carpet is an infinite improvement over the old updater that we introduced in March 2000 in every way, it will replace the Ximian GNOME Updater at some point in the future. In the meantime, however, they should both work.

Q. You broke my Evolution snapshots. What the hell? A. Sorry bout that. It was necessary to eliminate a pointless dependency on Red Carpet. Your Evolution will be broken until you install new snapshots (which should be built tonight). Look on the bright side, though, you'll be able to install those snapshots with Red Carpet! Sweet!

Q. Who worked on Red Carpet?
A. Red Carpet is the result of months of work by the following people:

DEVELOPERS:
Ian Peters
Joe Shaw
Vladimir Vukicevic

CONTRIBUTORS:
Jacob Berkman

USER INTERFACE DESIGN:
Anna Dirks

ARTWORK:
Tuomas Kousmannen
Jakub Steiner

In addition, many thanks go out to Larry Ewing and Radek Doulik for their work on GtkHTML, on which Red Carpet heavily relies. They've had to deal with our constant pestering in addition to those of the pesky Evolution developers. All too often our conversations went like this:

"Dude, there is a bug in GtkHTML."
"That isn't a GtkHTML bug."
"Yeah dude, it is.
"Dude, no it isn't."
"Dude, it is."
"No, dude, it isn't."
Pause.
"Hmm. You're right, it isn't. Sorry, dude."
Thanks, guys. We're dorks.

Lastly, special thanks go out to Matt Wilson, who, aside from his help, plain and simply totally rules.

Q. How many inside jokes are in this release announcement?
A. I quit counting around eight. Joe Shaw, however, will give one hundred AMERICAN dollars to the first person to identify all of them and their origins.

[1] Vapo(u)rware.

assbarn writes "Ximian has announced that they have released Red Carpet, their new updater application and software management tool. This marks a huge improvement over their old updater service, with full dependencies (a la apt) for both RPM and dpkg systems, and a channel system that can provide any kind of software to your Linux system." I've included their release below - check it out for more information.

Red Carpet Release Info, from Ximian You have waited frothingly in anticipation. You have endured a perpetual release date of "two more weeks." You may have, in a senseless act of anxiety over this amazing work of art, even whispered the "V"-word[1] under your breath. You have tormented the developers on IRC. You have begun the chanting. You have burned towns. You have seized ships and blockaded ports.

Red Carpet is here.

Red Carpet is the next generation Ximian updater and software management application. Based around the concept of "channels," or content groupings, Red Carpet will be able to present you with a virtually endless array of software for your GNU/Linux and Unix systems. In addition to just updating packages already installed on your system, Red Carpet allows you to install new software and remove existing software. Red Carpet operates seamlessly with your existing packaging tools on both RPM and dpkg-based systems, giving you a consistent interface for managing your software on any Linux distribution. And, with DepTricketyTrackTrackTronixTron 9000, our amazing dependency and conflict resolution system, the nightmare of dependencies all but vanish from your life. Rejoice.

We will now move into the question and answer section of our release announcement:

Q. Is this a beta? 0.9? What's going on here? Where am I? Why am I wearing a clown wig?
A. With our best efforts we have tried to find every bug, duplicate every dependency situation, become one with both RPM and dpkg, and click on everything rapidly and repeatedly. However, we are most ashamed to admit that we did not discover every possible bug, could not duplicate all of the horrors that are your packaging database, failed to achieve spiritual enlightenment, and simply cannot click as fast as you can. As a result, we present this application to you in beta form. Frankly, we want you to do thangs to it. You find bugs, we'll fix em.

Q. How do I get it?
A. Binary packages for Red Hat 6, Red Hat 7, and Debian GNU/Linux systems are available now through the Red Carpet mirror in the Ximian GNOME Updater. For Debian users, add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list: deb ftp://spidermonkey.ximian.com/pub/red-carpet/binary/debian-22-i386/ ./ You can also get them, as well as the source tarball, from ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/red-carpet. Because we're in the process of moving our office and we overwork our build people, binary RPMs for the remainder of our supported Linux distributions will be available a little later. Sorry.

Q. Okay, I've got it. Now what?
A. Give it a whirl. You can find Red Carpet from the Programs->System menu on the foot launcher or on the top menu bar. After it downloads all of the channel bar, you should probably verify that your system's dependencies are fulfilled by choosing "Verify Installed Packages" from the File menu. After that, go buck wild. Subscribe to channels, install new software, check out our totally l33t About page, whatever you want.

Q. "I found a bug" or "Red Carpet sucks! How do I tell you how bad you suck?"
A. In the unlikely event that you find a bug, please submit them to the Ximian bugzilla at http://bugzilla.ximian.com. We've created a public mailing list, red-carpet@ximian.com, for you to tell us exactly how much we suck. Or rule. We're ready for it. We can take it. You can subscribe to it at http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/red-carpet. By the way, help control the pet population: have your pets spayed or neutered.

Q. Tell me more about channels.
A. That's not really a question, but I would be happy to. With channels we are able to provide you with a much wider variety of software and in a much cleaner way than what was possible with our old updater technology. Channels can be subscribed to selectively, meaning that you only ever receive information on updates of software that interest you.

Q. So, uh, does that mean it'll update my distribution, too?
A. Oh yeah. Red Carpet detects what distribution you are running and presents a channel of it, with all of the updates issed from the vendor. Red Carpet can install any software on your system, as long as there's a channel for it. In essence, Red Carpet becomes the central point for installing, updating, and managing software on your computer. Q. What about package signing and verification? A. You'll want to install GnuPG to verify package signatures. We have included the public keys for Ximian, Red Hat, Caldera, TurboLinux, Mandrake, and SuSE. Most distros provide them these days. If you don't have it, Red Carpet will still run fine.

Q. Does this replace the Ximian GNOME Updater?
A. Because this is a beta, we don't want to prevent people from updating their system in the event that it breaks. As Red Carpet is an infinite improvement over the old updater that we introduced in March 2000 in every way, it will replace the Ximian GNOME Updater at some point in the future. In the meantime, however, they should both work.

Q. You broke my Evolution snapshots. What the hell? A. Sorry bout that. It was necessary to eliminate a pointless dependency on Red Carpet. Your Evolution will be broken until you install new snapshots (which should be built tonight). Look on the bright side, though, you'll be able to install those snapshots with Red Carpet! Sweet!

Q. Who worked on Red Carpet?
A. Red Carpet is the result of months of work by the following people:

DEVELOPERS:
Ian Peters
Joe Shaw
Vladimir Vukicevic

CONTRIBUTORS:
Jacob Berkman

USER INTERFACE DESIGN:
Anna Dirks

ARTWORK:
Tuomas Kousmannen
Jakub Steiner

In addition, many thanks go out to Larry Ewing and Radek Doulik for their work on GtkHTML, on which Red Carpet heavily relies. They've had to deal with our constant pestering in addition to those of the pesky Evolution developers. All too often our conversations went like this:

"Dude, there is a bug in GtkHTML."
"That isn't a GtkHTML bug."
"Yeah dude, it is.
"Dude, no it isn't."
"Dude, it is."
"No, dude, it isn't."
Pause.
"Hmm. You're right, it isn't. Sorry, dude."
Thanks, guys. We're dorks.

Lastly, special thanks go out to Matt Wilson, who, aside from his help, plain and simply totally rules.

Q. How many inside jokes are in this release announcement?
A. I quit counting around eight. Joe Shaw, however, will give one hundred AMERICAN dollars to the first person to identify all of them and their origins.

[1] Vapo(u)rware.

assbarn writes "Ximian has announced that they have released Red Carpet, their new updater application and software management tool. This marks a huge improvement over their old updater service, with full dependencies (a la apt) for both RPM and dpkg systems, and a channel system that can provide any kind of software to your Linux system." I've included their release below - check it out for more information.

Red Carpet Release Info, from Ximian You have waited frothingly in anticipation. You have endured a perpetual release date of "two more weeks." You may have, in a senseless act of anxiety over this amazing work of art, even whispered the "V"-word[1] under your breath. You have tormented the developers on IRC. You have begun the chanting. You have burned towns. You have seized ships and blockaded ports.

Red Carpet is here.

Red Carpet is the next generation Ximian updater and software management application. Based around the concept of "channels," or content groupings, Red Carpet will be able to present you with a virtually endless array of software for your GNU/Linux and Unix systems. In addition to just updating packages already installed on your system, Red Carpet allows you to install new software and remove existing software. Red Carpet operates seamlessly with your existing packaging tools on both RPM and dpkg-based systems, giving you a consistent interface for managing your software on any Linux distribution. And, with DepTricketyTrackTrackTronixTron 9000, our amazing dependency and conflict resolution system, the nightmare of dependencies all but vanish from your life. Rejoice.

We will now move into the question and answer section of our release announcement:

Q. Is this a beta? 0.9? What's going on here? Where am I? Why am I wearing a clown wig?
A. With our best efforts we have tried to find every bug, duplicate every dependency situation, become one with both RPM and dpkg, and click on everything rapidly and repeatedly. However, we are most ashamed to admit that we did not discover every possible bug, could not duplicate all of the horrors that are your packaging database, failed to achieve spiritual enlightenment, and simply cannot click as fast as you can. As a result, we present this application to you in beta form. Frankly, we want you to do thangs to it. You find bugs, we'll fix em.

Q. How do I get it?
A. Binary packages for Red Hat 6, Red Hat 7, and Debian GNU/Linux systems are available now through the Red Carpet mirror in the Ximian GNOME Updater. For Debian users, add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list: deb ftp://spidermonkey.ximian.com/pub/red-carpet/binary/debian-22-i386/ ./ You can also get them, as well as the source tarball, from ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/red-carpet. Because we're in the process of moving our office and we overwork our build people, binary RPMs for the remainder of our supported Linux distributions will be available a little later. Sorry.

Q. Okay, I've got it. Now what?
A. Give it a whirl. You can find Red Carpet from the Programs->System menu on the foot launcher or on the top menu bar. After it downloads all of the channel bar, you should probably verify that your system's dependencies are fulfilled by choosing "Verify Installed Packages" from the File menu. After that, go buck wild. Subscribe to channels, install new software, check out our totally l33t About page, whatever you want.

Q. "I found a bug" or "Red Carpet sucks! How do I tell you how bad you suck?"
A. In the unlikely event that you find a bug, please submit them to the Ximian bugzilla at http://bugzilla.ximian.com. We've created a public mailing list, red-carpet@ximian.com, for you to tell us exactly how much we suck. Or rule. We're ready for it. We can take it. You can subscribe to it at http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/red-carpet. By the way, help control the pet population: have your pets spayed or neutered.

Q. Tell me more about channels.
A. That's not really a question, but I would be happy to. With channels we are able to provide you with a much wider variety of software and in a much cleaner way than what was possible with our old updater technology. Channels can be subscribed to selectively, meaning that you only ever receive information on updates of software that interest you.

Q. So, uh, does that mean it'll update my distribution, too?
A. Oh yeah. Red Carpet detects what distribution you are running and presents a channel of it, with all of the updates issed from the vendor. Red Carpet can install any software on your system, as long as there's a channel for it. In essence, Red Carpet becomes the central point for installing, updating, and managing software on your computer. Q. What about package signing and verification? A. You'll want to install GnuPG to verify package signatures. We have included the public keys for Ximian, Red Hat, Caldera, TurboLinux, Mandrake, and SuSE. Most distros provide them these days. If you don't have it, Red Carpet will still run fine.

Q. Does this replace the Ximian GNOME Updater?
A. Because this is a beta, we don't want to prevent people from updating their system in the event that it breaks. As Red Carpet is an infinite improvement over the old updater that we introduced in March 2000 in every way, it will replace the Ximian GNOME Updater at some point in the future. In the meantime, however, they should both work.

Q. You broke my Evolution snapshots. What the hell? A. Sorry bout that. It was necessary to eliminate a pointless dependency on Red Carpet. Your Evolution will be broken until you install new snapshots (which should be built tonight). Look on the bright side, though, you'll be able to install those snapshots with Red Carpet! Sweet!

Q. Who worked on Red Carpet?
A. Red Carpet is the result of months of work by the following people:

DEVELOPERS:
Ian Peters
Joe Shaw
Vladimir Vukicevic

CONTRIBUTORS:
Jacob Berkman

USER INTERFACE DESIGN:
Anna Dirks

ARTWORK:
Tuomas Kousmannen
Jakub Steiner

In addition, many thanks go out to Larry Ewing and Radek Doulik for their work on GtkHTML, on which Red Carpet heavily relies. They've had to deal with our constant pestering in addition to those of the pesky Evolution developers. All too often our conversations went like this:

"Dude, there is a bug in GtkHTML."
"That isn't a GtkHTML bug."
"Yeah dude, it is.
"Dude, no it isn't."
"Dude, it is."
"No, dude, it isn't."
Pause.
"Hmm. You're right, it isn't. Sorry, dude."
Thanks, guys. We're dorks.

Lastly, special thanks go out to Matt Wilson, who, aside from his help, plain and simply totally rules.

Q. How many inside jokes are in this release announcement?
A. I quit counting around eight. Joe Shaw, however, will give one hundred AMERICAN dollars to the first person to identify all of them and their origins.

[1] Vapo(u)rware.

assbarn writes "Ximian has announced that they have released Red Carpet, their new updater application and software management tool. This marks a huge improvement over their old updater service, with full dependencies (a la apt) for both RPM and dpkg systems, and a channel system that can provide any kind of software to your Linux system." I've included their release below - check it out for more information.

Red Carpet Release Info, from Ximian You have waited frothingly in anticipation. You have endured a perpetual release date of "two more weeks." You may have, in a senseless act of anxiety over this amazing work of art, even whispered the "V"-word[1] under your breath. You have tormented the developers on IRC. You have begun the chanting. You have burned towns. You have seized ships and blockaded ports.

Red Carpet is here.

Red Carpet is the next generation Ximian updater and software management application. Based around the concept of "channels," or content groupings, Red Carpet will be able to present you with a virtually endless array of software for your GNU/Linux and Unix systems. In addition to just updating packages already installed on your system, Red Carpet allows you to install new software and remove existing software. Red Carpet operates seamlessly with your existing packaging tools on both RPM and dpkg-based systems, giving you a consistent interface for managing your software on any Linux distribution. And, with DepTricketyTrackTrackTronixTron 9000, our amazing dependency and conflict resolution system, the nightmare of dependencies all but vanish from your life. Rejoice.

We will now move into the question and answer section of our release announcement:

Q. Is this a beta? 0.9? What's going on here? Where am I? Why am I wearing a clown wig?
A. With our best efforts we have tried to find every bug, duplicate every dependency situation, become one with both RPM and dpkg, and click on everything rapidly and repeatedly. However, we are most ashamed to admit that we did not discover every possible bug, could not duplicate all of the horrors that are your packaging database, failed to achieve spiritual enlightenment, and simply cannot click as fast as you can. As a result, we present this application to you in beta form. Frankly, we want you to do thangs to it. You find bugs, we'll fix em.

Q. How do I get it?
A. Binary packages for Red Hat 6, Red Hat 7, and Debian GNU/Linux systems are available now through the Red Carpet mirror in the Ximian GNOME Updater. For Debian users, add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list: deb ftp://spidermonkey.ximian.com/pub/red-carpet/binary/debian-22-i386/ ./ You can also get them, as well as the source tarball, from ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/red-carpet. Because we're in the process of moving our office and we overwork our build people, binary RPMs for the remainder of our supported Linux distributions will be available a little later. Sorry.

Q. Okay, I've got it. Now what?
A. Give it a whirl. You can find Red Carpet from the Programs->System menu on the foot launcher or on the top menu bar. After it downloads all of the channel bar, you should probably verify that your system's dependencies are fulfilled by choosing "Verify Installed Packages" from the File menu. After that, go buck wild. Subscribe to channels, install new software, check out our totally l33t About page, whatever you want.

Q. "I found a bug" or "Red Carpet sucks! How do I tell you how bad you suck?"
A. In the unlikely event that you find a bug, please submit them to the Ximian bugzilla at http://bugzilla.ximian.com. We've created a public mailing list, red-carpet@ximian.com, for you to tell us exactly how much we suck. Or rule. We're ready for it. We can take it. You can subscribe to it at http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/red-carpet. By the way, help control the pet population: have your pets spayed or neutered.

Q. Tell me more about channels.
A. That's not really a question, but I would be happy to. With channels we are able to provide you with a much wider variety of software and in a much cleaner way than what was possible with our old updater technology. Channels can be subscribed to selectively, meaning that you only ever receive information on updates of software that interest you.

Q. So, uh, does that mean it'll update my distribution, too?
A. Oh yeah. Red Carpet detects what distribution you are running and presents a channel of it, with all of the updates issed from the vendor. Red Carpet can install any software on your system, as long as there's a channel for it. In essence, Red Carpet becomes the central point for installing, updating, and managing software on your computer. Q. What about package signing and verification? A. You'll want to install GnuPG to verify package signatures. We have included the public keys for Ximian, Red Hat, Caldera, TurboLinux, Mandrake, and SuSE. Most distros provide them these days. If you don't have it, Red Carpet will still run fine.

Q. Does this replace the Ximian GNOME Updater?
A. Because this is a beta, we don't want to prevent people from updating their system in the event that it breaks. As Red Carpet is an infinite improvement over the old updater that we introduced in March 2000 in every way, it will replace the Ximian GNOME Updater at some point in the future. In the meantime, however, they should both work.

Q. You broke my Evolution snapshots. What the hell? A. Sorry bout that. It was necessary to eliminate a pointless dependency on Red Carpet. Your Evolution will be broken until you install new snapshots (which should be built tonight). Look on the bright side, though, you'll be able to install those snapshots with Red Carpet! Sweet!

Q. Who worked on Red Carpet?
A. Red Carpet is the result of months of work by the following people:

DEVELOPERS:
Ian Peters
Joe Shaw
Vladimir Vukicevic

CONTRIBUTORS:
Jacob Berkman

USER INTERFACE DESIGN:
Anna Dirks

ARTWORK:
Tuomas Kousmannen
Jakub Steiner

In addition, many thanks go out to Larry Ewing and Radek Doulik for their work on GtkHTML, on which Red Carpet heavily relies. They've had to deal with our constant pestering in addition to those of the pesky Evolution developers. All too often our conversations went like this:

"Dude, there is a bug in GtkHTML."
"That isn't a GtkHTML bug."
"Yeah dude, it is.
"Dude, no it isn't."
"Dude, it is."
"No, dude, it isn't."
Pause.
"Hmm. You're right, it isn't. Sorry, dude."
Thanks, guys. We're dorks.

Lastly, special thanks go out to Matt Wilson, who, aside from his help, plain and simply totally rules.

Q. How many inside jokes are in this release announcement?
A. I quit counting around eight. Joe Shaw, however, will give one hundred AMERICAN dollars to the first person to identify all of them and their origins.

[1] Vapo(u)rware.

The folks at GNOME have released GNOME 1.4 beta 1, code name "oops, we did it again". You can find the packages at your favorite mirror. If you're testing, then please fill the bug reports in the "right place" (either Eazel's bugzilla or Ximian Bugzilla). Good work, guys.

Dan93 writes: "Here is an article on what is planned for GNOME 2.0. Pretty interesting stuff such as GNOME VFS, and the cleanup work that is supposed to fix every known architectural problem in GNOME." Also, I heard at LWCE as well from the Eazel folks that by this point in the evolution (ha ha) of GNOME, the nearly-ready-for-prime-time Eazel desktop will be included as well.

OldBen writes: "This arose out of a thread that bounced between the OpenOffice and Evolution mailing lists. Looks like the folks that brought us phpGroupWare are looking to establish an open standard for communication between groupware components. A site has been established at http://www.ogsproject.org. Right now it looks like it's nothing more than a mailing list, but this is a critical step in the development of products that can once and for all replace Exchange/Outlook/Project, and therefore MS Office." Maybe I'm boring and have accountant-style glasses, but OpenOffice and phpGroupWare are two of my favorite projects, because I can taunt the very nice IT guy at the Microsoft-heavy office I used to work in with some tempting, flexible answers to the "what about Outlook?" question.

Ur@eus writes "Want to see how nice your GNOME desktop and Mozilla browser will look anti-aliased? We have just posted screenshots and a non-stable patch on Gnotices" Here's evolution and mozilla displaying slashdot. Neither are perfect, but its still exciting to see progress.

Ur@eus writes "Want to see how nice your GNOME desktop and Mozilla browser will look anti-aliased? We have just posted screenshots and a non-stable patch on Gnotices" Here's evolution and mozilla displaying slashdot. Neither are perfect, but its still exciting to see progress.

vukicevic writes "Hewlett-Packard and Ximian have partnered to make Ximian GNOME the default desktop on all HP-UX workstations later this year. HP will also be offering Ximian GNOME on its Linux workstations. The press release has more information."

vukicevic writes "Hewlett-Packard and Ximian have partnered to make Ximian GNOME the default desktop on all HP-UX workstations later this year. HP will also be offering Ximian GNOME on its Linux workstations. The press release has more information."

vukicevic writes "Hewlett-Packard and Ximian have partnered to make Ximian GNOME the default desktop on all HP-UX workstations later this year. HP will also be offering Ximian GNOME on its Linux workstations. The press release has more information."

StupiDiot writes: "Aethra is a open source mail client which follows in the steps of LookOut, and is being developed by the Kompany. In case you haven't been following, Aethera is theKompany's fork of the greatly hyped/anticipated Magellan project. Beta 1 of Aethera sports POP3, SMTP, HTML, DnD, a contacts interface, sticky notes, and more. IMAP, Calendar support, etc., are promised for the next beta. There is no mention of the license although source is available from the Web site -- most of the source files seem to be under the BSD license. " So, I downloaded it and tried playing with is last night - it's a very cool, very slick program - the competition between this and the Gnome-equivalent Evolution will be interesting, as always. Regardless of which wins, the race to produce an Outlook-killer is on.

Ambrosius27 was one of a number of people who has sent the word that Helix Gnome is nada mas. It's now....Ximian - they've even got a name-change FAQ and everything.

Ambrosius27 was one of a number of people who has sent the word that Helix Gnome is nada mas. It's now....Ximian - they've even got a name-change FAQ and everything.