LWN.net Linux Timeline 2003

Ridgelift writes "Linux Weekly News have released Linux Timeline 2003, their annual year in review of the top stories around Linux and the Open Source Community. Their list has been available to subscribers for the last two weeks, but is now available for free. What a nice Christmas present, and what a year it's been."

Comments

Linux developers.. post about the future here

[wackybrit]

I use Linux, and I develop on Linux, but being locked in the world of servers and system administration, I find it hard to keep up with all the latest app, GUI, and tool developments going on with Linux.

This timeline is great for the past, but since it's Christmas day and all, I figured it wouldn't be too bad if I could ask some Linux developers to post here about what they've got coming up in 2004.

For example, are you working on sub-pixel font rendering in X.. got a totally unique productivity tool ready to come out in 2004.. or..? What great new steps forward can I expect to see in terms of what you're developing, next year?

Re:Linux developers.. post about the future here

[IamTheRealMike]

I'm not sure why so few people have posted to this story (having fun at christmas i guess :) but as my family are just taking a break between watching Monsters Inc and starting the evening meal, I might as well post the things that are most likely to happen. BTW this is most appropriate for new years day - maybe we can get an article posted.

First, my own projects. autopackage will hopefully make it to 1.0 this year, or very near to it. We're starting to get aggressive about dropping non-essential features and by the end of 2004 hopefully the Linux community will have:

• A nice framework for building installers that install Linux software on nearly any (sane) distribution, give you a pretty gui, detect and resolve dependencies regardless of how they were installed and integrates with existing RPM based technology.

• A guidebook on how to write portable binaries - Linux binary portability is much better than most people seem to think but a best practices document won't hurt.

• Some example packages that show how to do it.

Hopefully during 2004 Wine will release 0.9, which focusses amongst other things on ease of use. Or it might not. We're pretty bad at sticking to schedule there :(

On other fronts, expect to see multimedia finally start getting polished. We've got some really nice apps in development (in particular the Totem movie player and the Rhythmbox/JuK music players). These apps all still need a bit of work - for instance, inserting my Monsters Inc DVD today gave me a "Could not seek on NAV packet" or something equally cryptic: I needed libdvdcss installed. Easy for someone who's been around this block a few times already, useless for anybody else. Once that lib was installed though, it all worked perfectly, with a great user interface to boot.

Expect to see hardware integration getting into gear. Now RML is hired by Novell to hack exclusively on kernel desktop integration issues we're about to get *much* closer to plug and play hardware.

Gnome 2.6 will come out about half way through the year (prolly a bit earlier) and totally kick ass, as will KDE 3.2. In particular Gnome 2.6 will include Epiphany, which is one of the few native widgets browsers IMHO that I'd be happy presenting to my family. Firebird is great, but XUL/Gecko is still slower on X than Windows and has been for years, it's probably not going to improve much more soon.

Ephy was in Gnome 2.4 but unfortunately was release before it was really ready. The current version is buggy and missing essential features like popup blocking. You'll be pleased to hear that already in the Gnome development releases these problems are all gone, and it's a really cool little browser. It also takes advantage of lots of cool stuff from GTK 2.3, as well as some stuff still in development like a MacOS X style toolbar editor (with sliding buttons). Unfortunately that stuff won't get into GTK proper until it's proven itself in apps like Epiphany so it'll probably be 2005 before we start seeing it widespread.

The FDO X server (kdrive) will start getting usable in 2004. I have no idea if any major distros will switch, hard to tell while the driver situation is so uncertain, but where it works it'll bring Linux up to new levels of prettyness - not bad considering it already looks very professional IMHO.

Finally, expect to see lots of stupid desktop bugs and interop problems get nailed, as was the case during 2003, especially with things like removable media.

That's all I can think of! Definately we have to do this proper in the new year. Merry Christmas! :)