ROSA Desktop 2011 GNOME Editon Alpha

Hello everyone!

As you probably know, Mandriva/ROSA officially supports only KDE as Desktop Environment. But as we promised earlier, we support any activity of our members with other Desktop Environments. For example, currently we have a good distro on the LXDE created by Alexander Kazancev. 

Today, I’m glad to announce a new distro based on the Mandriva/ROSA 2011 repository: ROSA Desktop 2011 GNOME Editon Alpha (ROSA Desktop 2011 GE, RDGE). This unofficial distro created by Arkady Shane and by me for users who, for any reasons, do not want to use official distribution with KDE and want to use GNOME. 

RDGE is an unofficial distro, it will be developed as community wants. So, if you are a GNOME user, and want to be involved in the RDGE development, or you just want to say an idea - feel free to write your comment here, in the my blog. Later, we’ll create a wiki page for the RDGE and if community is interested in RDGE and there are people who can take an active part in the distro making, we’ll give more opportunities for them (ROSA’s resources for building a distro, wiki, IRC, mailing lists, etc). 

OK. Let’s take a look at the distro. Default applications:

• GNOME 2.32 (yes, yes, a “good old” GNOME 2 :));
• Firefox 8, Evolution, Empathy, Ekiga, Deluge for internet surfing, mail, instant messaging and torrents;
• Shotwell and GIMP for photo editing;
• LibreOffice for documents making;
• Totem, Rhytmbox and EasyTag for playing and editing media files;
• Other software included by default: Gwibber, Evince, FBReader, SimpleScan, EOG, Cheese, File-roller, Brasero, Gnote, GNOME Games, GNOME Terminal; 
• Kernel 2.6.38.7 (will be updated to 2.6.39.4 soon);
• ROSA icons and ROSA-Elementary theme by default (with some bugs for now);

Some screenshots:

Pic. 1: ROSA Desktop 2011 GE default view

    Pic.2: LibreOffice and Nautilus in ROSA Desktop 2011 GE

Some words about the distro. Because it is based on the Mandriva/ROSA 2011 repositories it is quite stable and “Alpha” prefix is more about stuffing rather than stability. So, I appeal to all our testers and GNOME users: please download iso-image and test it and give your feedback! Do you like it, default applications, theme? I think, as RDGE is an community-driven distro, community should decide all about it. 

Known bugs:

• ROSA theme is used not in all components, and has some bugs (for example, Nautilus looks not ideal sometimes);
• Old kernel.

You can download iso-images from here. 

NOTE: ROSA Desktop 2011 GE is an unofficial distro, ROSA/Mandriva will not provide support for it.

Posted in: gnome , mandriva , rosa