Denis Koryavov's Blog

rosa-devel@ mailing list is opened for all

2013-03-21T20:23:00.000+04:00

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.

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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.

ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 GNOME final

2013-02-12T11:57:00.002+04:00

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!

ROSA theme for the Chromium/Google Chrome

2013-01-18T11:46:00.000+04:00

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!

ROSA Desktop 2012 GNOME Edition Beta

2013-01-15T13:53:00.000+04:00

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!

ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 in round figures

2012-12-20T14:01:00.000+04:00

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! :)

My first GNU/Linux distros

2012-12-18T22:56:00.000+04:00

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.

KLook 2.0: Better than ever

2012-11-27T20:36:00.003+04:00

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. :)

Possibility to use KLook from File->Open/Save dialogs

2012-10-08T16:33:00.001+04:00

Klook is one of the most popular our utilities and we continuously extending its functionality. Now the time for some good news for KLook users: we added one more cool feature to it.

As you know, KLook was designed to be helper in some situations: when you need to quickly look at some file and decide what to do with them. This especially helps when you work with many files. It is natural to assume that KLook should be used with the "File->Open/Save" dialogs to look at files without leaving these dialogs.

Pic.1: You can use KLook directly from the Open/Save dialogs

Thus, we added this feature. Enjoy!

Do you want some "fresh" packages?

2012-09-13T22:17:00.000+04:00

As you know, ROSA Marathon 2012 was intended first of all for enterprise sector. There highly appreciate stability and security, so we use time-proved applications for RM2012.

But many people who use RM2012 in their desktops want some "fresh" applications, and we can understand them. If some application is new it not necessarily mean that it is unstable.

Thus, several volunteers created a "fresh_personal" repository where you can find new versions of some applications from the "main" repository, for example: Firefox 15, GIMP 2.8.2, kernel 3.4.1 and some others.

To add this repository just run this command in a terminal (required root access rights):

urpmi.addmedia fresh_personal http://abf.rosalinux.ru/downloads/fresh_personal/repository/rosa2012lts/`arch`/main/release

DISCLAIMER: BY ENABLING THIS REPOSITORY YOU SHOULD UNDERSTAND THAT SOFTWARE IN THIS REPOSITORY IS NOT TESTED BY THE ROSA QUALITY TEAM AND NOBODY WILL GUARANTEE YOU THAT EVERYTHING WILL WORK. ALSO ROSA TEAM WILL NOT SUPPORT SYSTEMS WITH PACKAGES THAT WILL BE INSTALLED FROM THIS REPOSITORY.

P.S OK, if you read all above-stated and this doesn't scare you... Enjoy! :)

P.P.S VOLUNTEERS ARE WELCOME: If you a volunteer and want to backport some package for RM2012 (or already built it in your personal repository), think about possibility to build it to the "fresh_personal" repository, so many users will can use it.

ROSA Media Player 1.5

2012-09-11T21:32:00.000+04:00

After a short period of testing since ROSA Media Player 1.5 RC1 (ROMP), I'm happy to announce that the new version of ROSA Media Player is ready for downloading. Information about new features in the ROMP 1.5 you can find in the previous post.

ROSA Media Player 1.5: New look

Changes since RC1:

When you open folder with audio files, they will be added recursively to a playlist;
Midi added as the one of supported file in ROMP;
Fixed crash when adding corrupted midi file;
Fixed bug with casual resizing of the "About ROSA Media Player" dialog in Microsoft Windows (tm);
Fixed bug with wrong version in the "About ROSA Media Player" dialog for Microsoft Windows;
Updated translations: French (many thanks to Sylvain ZUCCA and altadeos), Slovenian (many thanks to Jure Repinc), Romanian (many thanks to Cristian Gherman), started translation process for the Indonesian and Malay languages (these languages will be added after they will have 50% or more translated strings);

Where to download

The source code for ROSA Media Player you can find here. Version for Microsoft Windows is here. Version for ROSA Marathon 2012 will be very soon in our repositories, so follow the updates (if you can't wait you can download it from here).

Enjoy!

ROSA Media Player 1.5: call for translators

2012-08-23T15:25:00.005+04:00

Development process of the next release of ROSA Media Player has come to an end. Right now we are polishing some features and will release ROMP 1.5 very soon. What you will see in the ROMP 1.5?

Pic. 1: ROSA Media Player 1.5 RC1 for GNU/Linux

First of all, we worked hard on the engine of ROMP and added possibility to use other engines. Thus, we added experimental support of MIDI with the help of wildmidi engine.

Changed graphical theme - now it more corresponds to our requirements.

Completely redesigned a "Settings" dialog. Now it is pretty simple and usable.

Added support of IDv3 (2.4) tags in media files in UTF-8 encoding;

And last, but not least: we created a version of ROMP for ... Microsoft Windows! Yes, ROSA Media Player is a cross platform software now. But because it is first our version for Windows it will be in "beta" status. Also some function of ROMP for GNU/Linux are not implemented in Windows version now. Among them: screencasts and midi support.

Pic. 2: ROSA Media Player 1.5 RC1 for Windows

For preparing the new version of ROSA Media Player, we need the help of our community. If you can spend some time for translation ROMP on your native language - please, help us with this. Here is the information about current status of translations in ROMP:

http://translations.rosalinux.com/transifex/projects/p/ROSA_Media_Player/resource/translations

For starting translation you should to register in the project and make application to include you into a list of ROMP translators.

You can download a GNU/Linux version of ROMP from here (direct links: i586, x86_64), Windows version - here.

Thanks!

Use address bar as the search bar too. Or not?

2012-08-11T12:41:00.000+04:00

What do you think is better way: to use address bar as the search bar (like in Chromium/Chrome) or 2 bars - first as address bar, second - as search bar (like in Firefox)?

Both of variants have their advantages. When you using Firefox you can quickly use several search systems and quickly to switch between them.

Pic.1: Firefox has 2 bars by default and you can use them simultaneously

Also you can use Firefox in "mixed" mode, when address bar works also as search bar - you can use 2 different search systems very quickly: for example, Google/Yandex and Wikipedia.

Pic.2: Chromium has "lighter" interface than Firefox

Chromium does not suggest such freedom of choice, but you will see a much "lighter" interface than in Firefox. It signifies, that you will be saved to see many "information noise" (that is not needed for you 90% of time). Also you can see a much more long address line in the bar (that will be interesting for web-developers). If you are using several search systems, you will can use them and there - just add second (and each other) search system to the bookmarks. Anyway, you should to do one click (or press a "hotkey") as minimum to use it in both variants.

Thus both of variants are not ideal, and each of them has their own advantages. Which variant do you prefer?

ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME Edition final

2012-08-07T23:33:00.000+04:00

After a month since RC1 I'm glad to announce ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME Edition final release (RM2012 GE). RM 2012 GE it is a community-driven release with the GNOME 2.32 on the board. This release is intended for people who have no powerful machines, but do not want to use LXDE, or for people who do not want use GNOME 3.

Pic.1: ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME Editon Final

Sofware included:

Kernel 3.0.38 with the latest security fixes.
GNOME 2.32 software pack with the GDM 2.20 and original ROSA Theme.
Chromium Browser 21.
LibreOffice 3.4.5 LTS.
ROSA Media Player 1.0.
Pidgin 2.10.
FBreader;
GIMP 2.6 (you can install GIMP 2.8 from personal repositories of our users);
EasyTag;
a Cantarell (GNOME 3 font) font is used by default;

Pic.2: RM2012 GE Evolution

System requirements:

1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor;
512 MB (or more) RAM;
12 GB free disk space to install system;
DVD or flash to install system;
VGA monitor that supports 1024x768 pixels resolution;
keyboard, mouse;

Pic.3: RM2012GE Evince

Where to download

You can download ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME images from here. To install operating system, you can use flash or write .iso-image on a DVD disk. For creating Live-USB you can use Unetbootin or use a "dd" command (GNU/Linux only):

sudo dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/[you_flash] bs=1MB

Please, read ERRATA and check MD5SUM of downloaded images before you will start. Please, report any issues to our bugzilla (component "GNOME Editon").

Enjoy!

ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME Edition RC1

2012-07-05T01:12:00.000+04:00

Hello folks!

As the readers of my blog are know, we worked on ROSA Desktop 2011 GNOME Edition and the last news were several months ago. Many people asked me about the status of project, and believed that it is frozen. But development is not stopped!

Pic.1: ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME Edition RC1

Today I'm glad to announce ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME Edition RC1. A list of changes between RC1 and Beta1:

new package base - ROSA Marathon 2012;
fixed problem with mounting portable data mediums;
added possibility to restore your system into syslinux menu;
updated UI theme;
a Cantarell (GNOME 3 font) font is used by default;

Known issues

Installation image is sensitive to installation media. Please, use a good flash disk or DVD to install system!
There is some issues with graphic theme (we'll want to fix them until release);

You can download ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME RC images from here. Please report any issues and bugs to developers by mail:

arkady.shane [at] rosalab [dot] ru and denis.koryavov [at] rosalab [dot] ru.

UPD: By mistake we forgot to open the latest images, thus some of you, who downloaded the images yesterday, got RC0 :) Sorry for this. Now, everything should be OK.

New features in KLook and StackFolder

2012-06-22T11:54:00.000+04:00

KLook and StackFolder, are one of the most popular ROSA's utilities, which allows you to get a quick access to any file or folder. We continuously extending their functionality, let's see what we added to the new versions of our utilities.

Support of PDF and ODT files in KLook

Since the last release, we added possibility to open .pdf and .odt files in KLook. Thanks to KPart technology it is not very hard, and now, you can see in KLook any file that Okular supports.

Let's see, how it looks like in real life.

Pic.1: KLook: support of PDF files

Pic.2: KLook: support of ODT files

Unfortunately, due to focus transfer issues, in embedded mode (if you look at file with the help of KLook from StackFolder) you can only see the first page of document, but in normal mode (when you use KLook from the Dolphin) you can see multipage documents without any limitations. We are working on this problem.

Drag and Drop in StackFolder

Yes, we did this! You can use Drag and Drop in StackFolder. You can use it in forward direction (from StackFolder to other applications) as well as in backward direction (from other applications to StackFolder).

Pic.3: StackFolder supports drag and drop

This function is suggests fantastic possibilities for our users. For example, you can:

copy or move file/folder to the your desktop folder or any folder in Dolphin file manager;
copy or move file/folder from the your desktop folder or any folder in Dolphin file manager to a StackFolder;
you can do the same with symlinks;
you can copy a text in any text editor and press CTRL+V when cursor of mouse on StackFolder - it is easy way to create a text file;
you can copy a file from the 'Resent Files' section in SimpleWelcome to the your StackFolder (this function will appreciate users, who work with many files);
you can copy a file to the Thunderbird 'New mail' window if you need attach it to email;
you can use DnD in many other ways.

It is not very visually to see these changes on screenshots, so I suggest to you to try them by oneself.

Enjoy!

ROSA Marathon 2012 final is out!

2012-05-14T16:46:00.002+04:00

Today I'm glad to announce the new version of ROSA distro - ROSA Marathon 2012. Based on the considerably changed ROSA Desktop 2011 Extended Edition, it provide the best user experience than ever. Let's see what the new.

Package base
Technically, ROSA Marathon is based on the one's own package base that is originally based on the ROSA Desktop 2011. So, it is not completely new repository - it is considerably changed ROSA Desktop 2011. We use the same repository structure: main, contrib, non-free, restricted. The repositories, that supported by ROSA are: main, non-free, restricted. A 'Contrib' repository - is repository for our community members. ROSA will not guarantee support of any package in Contrib, except that package will be built and will not break your system if you will install it.

Installer

Pic.1: You can choose many ways to use RM2012

In the RM2012 we fixed a lot of bugs in the installer. It became more stable and beautiful. The most important bugs fixes and features:

unnecessary localization packages are now removed automatically in the process of installation, thus is not necessary anymore to remove them manually;
thanks to the new version of dracut, generation of initrd works properly on all systems;
fixed many usability bugs (like unnecessary 'Cancel' operations, e.t.c);
improved appearance and localization;

Pic.2: Each name of language that is accessible in system, written with the use of letters of the same alphabet

Pic.3: Relax with the ROSA Marathon 2012

System

Pic.4: New Plymouth (boot screen) theme for RM2012

The list of software that included into RM2012 is the following:

Kernel 3.0.28 LTS Desktop of different editions (including support for PAE, netbooks and modern Intel processors).
KDE 4.8.2 with enhancements and patches from ROSA (SimpleWelcome, RocketBar, StackFolder v.2.0).
ROSA Media Player 1.0 final.
KLook.
Dolphin 2.0 with patches from ROSA.
Updated drivers for Intel, NVIDIA and AMD chipsets with support for i3/i5/i7, GF6xxx and latests AMD products.
Mesa 7.11.
Basic support for NVIDIA Optimus technology using Bumblebee (not included in DVD, but may be installed later from the Main repository).
NetworkManager 0.9.2.
KnetworkManager 0.9.
VPNPPTP 0.3.4.
Updated and improved wizard for connecting Windows domains.
LSB Support.
Updated Perl/Python stack.
Mozilla Firefox 10.0.2 LTS and Mozilla Thunderbird 10.0.2 LTS.
LibreOffice 3.4.5 LTS.
Amarok 2.5.0.

As you can see, we used the latest stable software, and some software with the LTS syntax. Why? Of course, because we propose our new distro for corporate users, first of all. But it does not stand for, that home users cannot use this distro - quite the contrary it will be a good choice for users, who want to use stable system and do not seek a 'blending edge' software. As the advantage, this distro will have 5 years technical support.

As the old russian proverb says, is better to see one time, than hear 100 times, so let's see on screens.

Pic.5: KDM is beatiful and easy to use in RM2012

Pic.6: Compositing effects now are enabled by default on all systems (thanks to XRender engine)

Pic.7: New graphic theme - more than 50 new beautiful icons and updated window decorations

Pic.8: RM2012 - everything you need for comfortable work

Pic.9: KLook and StackFolder v.2.0

As you can see from the screens we made a lot of work with the design of the system. Since ROSA Desktop 2011 EE is out we changed Syslinux and Plymouth themes (boot screens), windows decorations, and created more than 50 high quality icons sets for rosa-icons theme. Don't forget to read about our new utilities, like ROSA Media Player 1.0, KLook and StackFolder v.2.0.

Bugs fixes
Since beta-version of RM2012 we fixed more than 500 bugs. All packages in the repositories that are officially supported by ROSA (main, non-free, restricted) passed through mass-rebuild. It gives a good guarantee, that packages have a good quality and you will have no problems with installing them. Unfortunately we have no time to rebuild all packages in the Contrib repo, but this operation will be started up in the nearest future. So, if you can't find some package from the Contrib repo that you've used in ROSA Desktop 2011, please be patient, it can be that it will be accessible shortly.

Download
ROSA Marathon 2012 is available in two editions: Free (free software only) and Extended Edition (with freeware applications and components whose distribution can be restricted in some countries due to patent issues) in major European languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (include pt_BR), Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.

You can download distro from ROSA or use mirror on the Yandex: RM2012 EE, RM2012 Free. Also you can use torrents:

RM2012 EE (i586) Torrent;

RM2012 EE (x86_64) Torrent;

RM2012 Free (i586) Torrent;

RM2012 Free (x86_64) Torrent;

Enjoy!

StackFolder v2.0

2012-05-10T14:29:00.000+04:00

As many people already know, ROSA Marathon 2012 is coming very soon. Thus, I decided to recount about new usability features in the RM2012. Today I will recount about new StackFolders.

StackFolders was the first public UI utility from ROSA. You can see an old (but topical) video here:

Since the first release we practically completely rewrote StackFolders (SF) from the scratch. The new version of SF is written on QML and this makes it possible to significantly increase responsiveness - now SF works incredible fast, even if you open folder with many pictures.

Also we added one small, but important feature - if you will download a file to the your 'Downloads' (XDG_DOWNLOAD) folder, the StackFolder that is associated with the your folder will be animated. So, you never will overlook when a download operation will be finished.

Also we integrated StackFolders with the KLook. You can use Klook to see any file directly from StackFolder. Just press the 'Space' button on the your keyboard when a mouse cursor is pointed over necessary file in StackFolder. You can see this behavior on a next screenshot:

Pic.1: StackFolders integrated with the KLook

And last, but not least, a plasma-applet StackFolder and KLook can be a parts of KDE. As minimum, we will bend every effort to do this.

To get the sources just do:

git clone https://abf.rosalinux.ru/uxteam/StackFolder.git

Enjoy!

ROSA Marathon 2012 Beta is out!

2012-04-06T22:34:00.002+04:00

Hello everyone!

I'm happy to announce the new beta-version of our operating system ROSA Marathon 2012. The main news is here. I will not touch this news and will concentrate one's attention on the some other news related to the main news.

As we promised before, we included KLook in this release. Thus, we opened source for this utility! You can download source code from here. A patch for KDE 4.8 that allows to use KLook directly from the Dolphin file manager is here. Or you can use git for fetching the sources:

git clone https://abf.rosalinux.ru/uxteam/KLook.git

What's New in KLook

Since last record of KLook we released 2 new features:

possibility to listen audio files;
possibility to see information about folder;

You can see them on the screenshots:

Pic.1: You can easily get information about folder in KLook

Pic.2: You can easily look through a music file in KLook

Also we reorganized "gallery" mode to work better with a small number of items, now thumbnails fill free space on the screen more correctly. Currently we working on integration of KLook with the StackFolders. The final version of KLook will be finished before the final release of ROSA Marathon 2012.

Enjoy!

KLook: new utility for KDE and ROSA

2012-03-11T15:20:00.000+04:00

It is time to disclose some interesting information. After 3 months of development I am glad to announce a new utility for KDE - KLook. KLook is an utility that allows you "quickly" look at your files (yes, it is a practically exact copy of MacOS X QuickLook utility). You can use it directly from the Dolphin file manager by pressing a 'Space' key on the your keyboard. KLook is designed to be fast and simple.

Let's see on it on screenshots and video.

KLook in action


You can see all files in KLook as gallery

In gallery view you can see files in different formats

KLook can play video files

As you can see on the screens, you can use KLook to see photo, video and text files, supported formats:

jpg, png;
all video files (that Phonon supports);
txt.

Later we plan to add support of PDF files.

Also, as you can see we use buttons on the window decorations. Really it is not KWin, it is independent panel. We created "our window" because KWin does not allows to add arbitrary buttons into window decorations area. Thus, KLook looks practically like QuickLook from MacOS X. :)

And last, but not least, we created a small video that allows you to see KLook in action.

KLook will be included in the next update of ROSA Desktop. Follow the news!

P.S All your wishes please write as comment for this post or send me to email.

ROSA Media Player 1.0 RC1

2012-02-02T17:58:00.002+04:00

Today we released a RC1 of the ROSA Media Player. Since beta version we fixed several bugs, and added 2 new features.

Possibility to get an audio track from video;
Possibility to get a screencast;

These features will be very useful for users, who want to do a basic video editing and do not want to use video editors (or can't - because do not understand how they work). Now, it is simple than ever.

Let's see them.

Extract Audio Track

For extracting an audio track, open the right side pane and find the menu "Cut audio".

ROSA Media Player: Cutting audio track

You can select output format for audio file: mp3 or Ogg Vorbis. The output file will be saved in the same folder as for your video file, or in the your "Video" folder if media with video is mounted in the read-only mode.

Capture Desktop

For creating a screen capture, open menu "Video" and select the "Capiture desktop" item.

ROSA Media Player: Capture Desktop

The player will be minimized to system tray at the time of video recording. Click on the red round icon in system tray to stop the recording.

ROSA Media Player: System tray icon while capturing video

The screen capture will be saved in the your "Video" folder.

After small period of testing we will release ROMP 1.0 final. Thus, if you know any bug in our player, please tell us about it. We'll try to fix it before the final release.

ROSA Desktop 2011 Extended Edition

2011-12-20T16:17:00.000+04:00

Hello!

Today I'm glad to announce our new release ROSA Desktop 2011 Extended Edition (ROSA Desktop EE). ROSA Desktop EE is based on ROSA/Mandriva 2011 repository including all updates and our new 'restricted' repository. This release is intended for people, who like a full distros (i.e Mandriva PowerPack), geeks, and professionals who use many applications. Also for people who have some problems with a internet access and want to have one .iso image for everything. What's new in this release towards ROSA Desktop 2011?

General

Pic1. ROSA Desktop 2011 Extended Edition General View

Distro base was updated to the current actual repositories state (updated more than 200 packages);
restricted repository was used while building .iso images (thus, in the ROSA Desktop EE you can find a full version of MPlayer and several other packages);
many european locales was addes into the images that was requested by lot of our foreign users;
it was added possibility to install image in 'safe mode' for people, who have problems with installing ROSA Desktop EE in normal mode;
it was added possibility to check .iso image and RAM directly from the start menu;
it was added possibility to disable Akonadi service directly from start;
kernel 2.6.39.4 was used as the default kernel in the distro;

Pic.2: Checksumming of files on the media

Bugs fixed

Thanks to kernel 2.6.39.4 hardware support was considerably increased;
SimpleWelcome was considerably improved: we have fixed many bugs and increased speed of operation (thanks to rewriting some code from Python to C++);
it is removed warning message that all contents on HDD will be erased while installing from flash drive;
memory leaks in the Nepomuk is fixed;
ability to use numeric keyboard in KCalc is added;
timezone for Russia and Ukraine is updated;
ability to save configurations for 2 monitors as default is added;
many minor fixes.

In general, It was fixed more then 120 bugs (12 critial) after release of basic version of ROSA Desktop 2011, which one was released at 29th of August. ROSA Desktop 2011 Extended Edition can be downloaded from here or from one of mirrors.

Many new beautiful icons for the ROSA Theme

2011-12-16T15:51:00.000+04:00

As you know, we use in ROSA/Mandriva distros our theme ROSA, which originally based on the Elementary theme, but currently our theme is practically different. We made from scratch windows decorations, cursors, wallpapers, KDE splash screen, theme for KDM, updated icons theme to work with KDE and GNOME, and made many new icons. But, icon theme is most complex, and first time we updated only basic set of icons.

As we promised before, we'll work on our theme and later. Today, we updated some icons in the rosa-icons pack and made several icons in the ROSA's style for other packages, that uses their own icons and do not use system theme.

Take a look at the image. I purposely didn't signed icons.

New icons for the ROSA Theme

Do you understand for which applications we created the new icons? You can check up your guesses by installing a package rosa-icons from the main/testing repository or wait while icons will be updated in the 2011 main/updates repository.

BTW, these icons will be included in the ROSA Desktop 2011 Extended Edition by default. We'll release it shortly.

Blog has been moved

2011-12-15T13:23:00.000+04:00

Hello all!

As you, probably, noticed my blog has been moved from Tumblr.com to Blogger.com. Unfortunately I had to do this, because problems of Tumblr are getting more and more unpleasant for me. For example, Tumblr has no search (yes, the 'Search' function doesn't work for this blog too for now, but it is problem of the my template and will fix it in nearest future), has no 'Read More' function, has no polls, and has limited resources, thus, my blog sometimes was inaccessible.

Also Tumblr has no 'export blog' and 'save functions', so, the further I would use Tumblr, the more problems I would have in the future. Thus, I decided to move my blog. It was found, that it is not very trivial - to move blog from Tumblr to Blogger. I found the solution, and moved all of my contents without serious problems, but, unfortunately I have lost all commentaries for the all my posts (more than 100 comments in common). Sorry for that!

Also, maybe some links to my blog will not work, but I'll try to find solution for this (blogger has redirect functionality). The users, who was subscribed to my RSS-feed should have no problems, because I use the same feed (thanks to FeedBurner). If you will find any problems, feel free to comment this post, I will try to fix them.

Thanks, and welcome to the my new blog!

ROSA Desktop 2011 GNOME Editon Alpha

2011-12-06T11:20:00.000+04:00

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.

ROSA Media Player 1.0 Beta

2011-11-28T13:34:00.000+04:00

Hello everyone!

Today ROSA team is glad to announce the our new product ROSA Media Player 1.0 Beta. What is the ROSA Media Player?

ROSA Media Player (ROMP) is a new media player for the ROSA/Mandriva. Technically it is based on MPLayer and SMPlayer code, but considerably differs from the SMPlayer (yes, ROMP is fork of the SMPlayer). What for? The main reasons that made us to fork SMPlayer are:

possibility to allow our users to just see a video without taking the trouble with many features (yes, we don’t want to refuse the our “pure choice” concept);
impossibility to put our code to upstream project because of different ideology;
modern look and best usability;

Just see the screenshots:

Pic.1: ROSA Media Player is playing video

Pic.2: ROSA Media Player cutting video

Pic.3: ROSA Media Player Plugin allows to show streaming video

As you can see, we made not only the player itself, we also made the ROSA Media Player Plugin (ROMPP) - plugin for the Firefox/Chromium web-browser to show the streaming video. The ROMPP is created from scratch.

Some words about stability. Because ROMP is based on the SMPlayer it has a good stability and word “beta” in the title speaks more exactly about new features and usability that we want to do before we will release the ROMP 1.0 final. So, you can use it without a fear that it will be unstable.

If we speak about our further plans, I can mark out several important (in my opinion) features:

possibility to record video from the screen (like recordMyDesktop);
possibility to strip the video by size;
possibility to connect, download and play a video from some video services like Youtube (as in Miro);
New interface (maybe on the QT Quick);

And this is not all! Today we want to ask you, our users: what features do you want to see in the video player? How do you see your best video player? Please, feel free to send me emails or comment on this blog post with any your idea. We don’t promise that we’ll implement all of your ideas, even right now, but you can be sure - we will consider any of your ideas!

P.S. The packages (rosa-media-player and rosa-media-player-plugin) already in the Mandriva Cooker and Mandriva/ROSA 2011 ‘main/backports’ repositories.

UPD: The source code for the ROMP is here and for the ROMPP here.