Some time back the Ayatana project introduced the Application Indicator Framework, based upon technology created by the KDE project. We have been shipping this technology in Ubuntu for a few releases now and it makes the top-right part of the desktop a smooth, efficient, and pleasant experience, getting over the inconsistent and limiting notification area we had before.

To help build integration in the GNOME panel for this indicator work we had Ted Gould, Cody Somerville, and Jason Smith produce an implementation complete with C, Python and C# bindings, had Aurélien Gâteau continue to perform his excellent work with KDE, and Jorge Castro to help spread awareness of this work. In addition to this we contracted some developers to port apps with notification indicators that we ship in Ubuntu to the new framework, and this included apps such as Brasero, GNOME Bluetooth, GNOME Power Manager, Gnome Settings Daemon, XChat-GNOME, iBus, Nautilus, Policykit GNOME, Empathy, Gwibber and more. All of these patches are publicly available if other distros would like to use them.

The community has really got involved with the technology too, with community patches for Lernid, Banshee, LottaNZB, and DejaDup, and System Monitor, Weather, Screenshotting, Workspaces, Device Mounting indicators, support for the indicator framework built into AWN and Lubuntu, and more. I am absolutely delighted to see so much interest from application developers in the technology.

Dear Gnome,

Please, have some empathy and help me out.

Because of you, my boyfriend is chronically attached to his computer and has
ceased to pay attention to me. I try to plan fun things for us to do on the
weekends and then he cancels on my because of GNOME conferences! He even went
to the Netherlands to GUADEC two weeks ago and left me at home alone for a
week! He keeps going to all these conferences and I just don’t know what to
do. Apparently there is some Boston Summit thing he keeps talking about?

Way back when, he used to talk about Linux every once in a while and I found it
nerdy and cute. However, as of late, his obsession has become a large dark
gloomy cloud on our relationship. Even when we are away from our apartment, he
is perpetually attached via his MAEMO Linux phone.

He even tried to put Linux on my computer and I simply could not take it. I
came home from work one day and my computer said “UNIX” all over it! Recently,
he installed Linux on his mom’s computer and now she is calling me complaining
and I don’t know what to do!

Please, help me bring my boyfriend back from “Linux Land.” His name is Zach.
If you find him, you may have to shut off the computer you find him in front of
to get him to speak in anything other than “C.” Sometimes he will speak to you
in French, but thats only because he has his phone in French. I don’t speak
French so this too has become a wedge in our relationship.

This is a severe issue. Please fix this.

Desperately,

Ilana

(LOL) Read about this weird bug on BlankOn-dev mailing list this morning. See the detail here.

Some weeks ago I had to change my subnet including all static IPs. Thus my bi weekly backup failed to connect to the storage located on a Samba share on my NAS.

Usually in Windows you're used to find your config files - right, no where.
But as you all know I'm using Ubuntu and this feautres Gnome, a collection of tools and packages which work well together. But even further, other 3rdparty software projects like deja-dup took a look at the "rules" and integrated their solution into the same settings structure.

For this reason it was very easy to determinate deja-dup in the gconf-editor and change the IP stored in the text area shown in the screenshot.

© benste CC NC SA

As a GNOME user, have you ever wondered - How big is the GNOME project ? What is its make up ? How are decisions taken ? And how many GNOME developers are there ? If yes, then you need look no further. Because Neary Consulting - A Free software consultancy, has released the GNOME Census giving an overview of the GNOME project and its functions. The census report analyzes how developers participate in the GNOME project and looks for patterns within the project itself.

A glance through the GNOME census report brings out the following details -

• The GNOME 2.30 release and external dependencies consists of 189 modules. This represents 13 years of coding, and over 468000 individual changesets. 
• Since the project's inception, over 3000 individuals have committed changes.
• The most prolific 5% of the developers (top 165) have together made 65% of all the changes in the 13 year history of GNOME.
• Red Hat is said to be the biggest contributor to the project and its core dependencies, with its employees being responsible for nearly 17% of all commits. Canonical, Collabora, Fluendo, Intel, Novell, and Sun Microsystems have also contributed substantially to the GNOME project.
• 70% of the GNOME developers are volunteers. A further 20% say they have contributed to GNOME project both as a volunteer and a paid developer.

The full report titled "The GNOME Census : Who writes GNOME ?" is available as a free download from Neary Consulting.