Last updates before Christmas»

With Xubuntu, we are currently finalizing the specifications for those roadmap items that need community approval. I discussed those briefly in my blog, in the Roadmap closed -article. All specifications should be ready by December 29, 17UTC, when we have our community meeting (see the Meetings wiki page for more details and the agenda). Please join us then, it’s a great way to be involved and a good time to start contributing too, since we still need to implement all the blueprints – while all of them have an assignee already, any help is always welcome.

On other news, we talk a bit about work done in the last weeks in the Shimmer Project blog. Check it out!

Have a peaceful Christmas time and a very happy new year 2012!

December 21, 2011 — 1 comment »
Shimmer, Ubuntu — , ,

Roadmap closed»

The planning period for Xubuntu Precise Pangolin has ended. All in all, we have fifteen (15!) roadmap items with assignees! Thanks for all of you who submitted ideas, discussed the roadmap items and took action items! By the way, there is still a few items up to grabs. The roadmap has been closed for direct submissions, and all ideas must now pass, and be approved the community meeting separately.

If we don’t get any counterarguments for the items (see my email about approving roadmap items) and everything goes well, we will be expecting to get at least 11 of these in Precise.

The four roadmap items that still need a separate approvals from the community after the specification writing part, which last all the way to the end of this month, are:

  • New default media player (audio)
  • Ubiquity “Application sets”
  • Rethink shortcut keys
  • Clean themes (GTK, xfwm, wallpapers) list

To be honest, I expect at least three of these to get community approval after none to slight discussion and reviewing of the specification.

Yes, you guessed right, the one I’m not sure is the new default media player. It seems that we have had a lot of debate about this during my involvement in Xubuntu; we have changed the default player three times! While I think gmusicbrowser is a wonderful player and am very proud to ship that as our default player, I think there might be some viable alternatives, especially those players that are really simple. A bit like Listen was when we shipped it. I’m waiting the discussion with lots of interest, but I do hope we will have a civil and as objective as possible, discussion to make the best choice for most of our users.

Let’s keep on working hard, and this will be our best release so far, by far!

November 22, 2011 — 3 comments »
Community, Ubuntu — , ,

Xubuntu Precise Pangolin roadmap»

We have started to brainstorm Xubuntu Precise Pangolin! The Xubuntu Precise Pangolin roadmap will contain all the information you need to contribute, including the schedule for planning and all the items in the roadmap.

The first step is to brainstorm all the new features we want in, the bugs we really want to fix and the default applications we want to review. The brainstorming period has already started, and will end on Monday, November 21.

Assignees for ideas should be found during this month. If you want to take an action item, feel free to add your name/nick in the list too already. We will send an another mail asking for assignees for not-yet-taken items on when the brainstorming period is over though, so don’t worry about it just yet. Implementation for the features and other stuff will be expected to happen according to the Ubuntu Precise Pangolin Release Schedule.

November 13, 2011 — 2 comments »
Community, Ubuntu — ,