rosa-devel@ mailing list is opened for all

As many of our users know, rosa-devel@ is the main mailing list for ROSA developers. This channel was opened for all, but history of the channel was accessible only for subscribers, and subscriptions were pre-moderated. Some time ago this was necessary, but now we want to interest more developers to develop ROSA or for/on ROSA. 

Thus, today we opened rosa-devel@ for all users. You can read the history of the channel and  subscribe to it without pre-moderation. 

If you want to develop ROSA, or create an application for ROSA, or create any distro on the base of ROSA platform, you, probably, will be interested in the subscription to this mailing list. 

Please, read the our mailing lists policy before subscription. 

---

P.S For Russian developers:

Обращаю особое внимание русскоязычных разработчиков на то, что общение в списке рассылки rosa-devel@ с некоторого времени осуществляется только на английском языке. Пожалуйста, не пишите в список рассылки на русском! Если у вас проблемы с английским языком, пользуйтесь online-переводчиками.

Read More...

21.3.13, 0 comments

ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 GNOME final

Today I'm glad to announce the final version of ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 GNOME (based on ROSA 2012.1 platform). This distro is intended for people who love GNOME 3 and want to use on the ROSA platform. What's new since beta release? 

Pic. 1: ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 GNOME, Plymouth theme

Pic. 3: ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 GNOME

First of all, we decided (yes, again) to change name to ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 GNOME in order not to confuse our users.  Also we fixed many bugs and made several improvements.

Fixed bugs:

• Fixed bug with autologin in GDM (Bug #1479). Now you can use samba shares directly after installation. 
• Fixed bug with Cheese (Bug #1385). 
• Fixed bug with crashing gnome-documents at start (Bug #1419).
• Fixed bug with crashing Orca at start. 
• Fixed bug with crashing GDM when you use fingerprint for login.
• Fixed bug with the sleep mode (when laptop going to 'sleep' 2 times if you close the lid). 
• Added gtk3-modules package to work GNOME applications with the printer system.
• Fontconfig was rebuilt with patches from Ubuntu for better fonts smoothing.
• Removed printer setup module from gnome-control-center (Bug #1421) because it do not work with samba printers. For configuring printers we suggest system-config-samba application. 

Improvements:

• Updated icons theme. 
• Updated white (Elementary) theme for GNOME Shell, fixed many bugs in it. 
• Added Seahorse and Transmission applications. 

Pic. 4: ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 GNOME, applications 

Due to the huge number of requests of our users we created i586 image, but we tested it not as carefully as x86_64 image. Thus, we recommend to use x86_64 image, but if you want to use i586 image, you can do this now.  

Basesystem 

• Kernel - 3.6.10 
• Systemd 194
• dracut 0.24 
• GCC 4.7.3 
• Pulseaudio 2.x 
• Grub2 
• rpm-5.4.10

Applications

• GNOME 3.6.2;
• Chromium Browser 24;
• Evolution as email client;
• LibreOffice 3.6; 
• ROSA Media Player 1.5 as video player;
• Audacious as audio player;
• Transmission as a bit-torrent client;

Minimum system requirements: 

• a PC with CPU Pentium 4 or higher; 
• 1 GB RAM (2 GB and more is recommended); 
• modern VGA video adapter with OpengGL support and display supporting 1024x768 resolution, 24-bit color depth; 
• DVD drive or SSD of at least 4 GB in size for installation; 
• minimum 15 GB of hard drive free space; 
• keyboard and mouse.

Pic.5: ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 GNOME Shell

How to write ISO image file to a USB flash drive:

1. Windows and ROSA users can write the ISO image to USB using the ROSA Image Writer program; 

Linux users can burn the ISO image by means of 'dd' command: 

dd if=ROSA.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1MB 

(where /dev/sdb is a device corresponding to your USB drive).

Download

You can download ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 GNOME from here (mirror is here). PLEASE: spend 5 minutes to read errata page before you will start installation! 

Submit all bugs (if you will find any) to our bugzilla, component: GNOME Edition, or to rosa-devel@ mailing list. 

Enjoy!

Read More...

12.2.13, 12 comments

ROSA theme for the Chromium/Google Chrome

As you probably know, that Chromium/Google Chrome uses its own graphic theme for window decorations, toolbar, tabbar and scrollbars. And even if you will enable option "Use GTK theme" in the settings it will have several differences with the native theme. 

It looks not very good (even if you use a native windows decorations), so we tried to change this. 

Pic.1: Chromium before

First of all, we updated our GTK theme and added special block to it for work with Chromium. Now it looks much better.

Pic.2: Chromium with ROSA Theme

Unfortunately there is no way to change the tabbar look, but we tried to change scrollbars. And it seems we found a way how to do this. To change the look of the scrollbars for Chromium/Chrome you need to install this extension. 

After you will install it, restart the browser. The result should look like this: 

Pic.3: Chromium new look

Enjoy!

Read More...

18.1.13, 0 comments

ROSA Desktop 2012 GNOME Edition Beta

Today I'm glad to announce a new development version of ROSA GNOME Editon - ROSA Desktop 2012 GNOME Edition Beta. ROSA Desktop 2012 GNOME Edition is fully community edition distro, that is not  officially supported by ROSA. This distro is intended for people who love GNOME 3 and want to use it instead of official desktop based on Plasma Desktop.

I already hear the question:  Whaaat?! Why 2012 when we have 2013 outside the window?!

Well, this is normal. Our distro is builded on the ROSA 2012.1 platform that is used for ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012. But because ROSA Desktop 2012.1 later was named as ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 we decided do not break a logical connection for the our distros and solved to give name for the new distro ROSA Desktop 2012 GNOME (but because we use the same grub package as in official distro, after installation you will see "ROSA Desktop.Fresh" menu item in grub). The previous release was named as ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME. I hope all this naming will not confuse our users. Anyway, we will be glad to see your comments about this.

Pic.1: ROSA Desktop 2012 GNOME Beta

Features:

• Only 64-bit image will be available since this release. 
• System components are the same as in ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012;
• GNOME 3.6;
• ROSA Media Player as video player;
• Audacious as audio player;
• Chromium Browser as default browser for the Internet;
• Evolution as email client;
• ROSA icons (adopted for GNOME 3!);
• GNOME Tweak Tool included by default;
• Fixed bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643111 

Pic.2: ROSA Desktop 2012 GNOME, applications

Known bugs:

• Sharing files through SAMBA requires manual configuration of "net usershare" function before using (just add your user to the group users, to do this, run in console under root: gpasswd -a [your_user_name] users);
• gnome-documents works unstable with the Google Docs (Drive); 

You can download ROSA Desktop 2012 GNOME from here.

Next release will be a final release and we plan to do this no later that the end of January. So, please, help us to test this beta version! Submit all bugs (if you will find any) to our bugzilla, component: GNOME Edition, or to rosa-devel@ mailing list. 

Enjoy!

Read More...

15.1.13, 3 comments

ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 in round figures

As many of you probably know, ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 (aka 2012.1) already out (if not, you can read this post).

Development process for the new release was really short - only seven months have passed since the previous release - ROSA Marathon 2012.

It has become a good tradition to put some "news from the front" after release, so, here is some interesting statistic information about this release:

• since first alpha (including it), we made 5 releases (alpha1, alpha2, beta, RC, release);

• More than 50 developers from 15 towns and 7 countries (Russia, Ukraine, USA, Brazil, Italy, Romania, Germany);
• More than 70 testers;
• solved more than 700 issues; 
• our testers downloaded more than 2 TB of data while tested new images;
• more than 700 iso-images for testing have been builded (not all of them were in public access); 
• more than 8500 messages have been sent by developers in different mailing lists;
• our developers wrote more than 62 000 lines of new code (not including many patches!);
• more than 7300 cups of tea and coffee have been drunk by our workers while we prepared our new distros;
• more than 21 700 packages in the repositories;
• more than 15 big changes/new functions in the new release.

I hope you will like ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012.  

Enjoy! :)

Read More...

20.12.12, 1 comments

My first GNU/Linux distros

Year 2004. I'm an Java EE programmer on MS Windows decided to plunge into the fantastic GNU/Linux world.... 

These were my 2 first GNU/Linux distros that I used on my home desktop (actually, I met with GNU/Linux a little earlier - the very first GNU/Linux distro that I saw, it was  RedHat 9.0).

Unfortunately both of them no longer develop now.  

Read More...

18.12.12, 1 comments

KLook 2.0: Better than ever

Hello ROSA users and just KLook fans. I have some great news for you. Several days ago we published on the our build system  - ABF a new version of KLook with the many improvements. Most of these improvement have made in KLook architecture, so you will not see many visible changes, but you will felt them. 

A first and main improvement: we added support of remote file systems! Thus, you can use KLook with FTP, SMB, WebDAV and other directories and files that can be opened in the Dolphin file manager. 

Pic.1: KLook 2.0 - work with remote objects

If the file that you will try to open in KLook will be a folder or an archive - then KLook just show information window about it, otherwise KLook will try to open this file and show it to you. 

A second improvement: we moved handling of previews in the 'Gallery Mode' from the QML side to C++ side, so the quality of previews has been significantly improved.

For people, who still not use ROSA: a fly in the ointment: it seems that we'll can't push KLook to the official KDE repositories. A new maintainer of the Dolphin file manager refuses all our attempts to pass our code into KDE upstream. So, it can be one more item "+" to use ROSA. :)

Read More...

27.11.12, 4 comments