Announcing session-migration now in ubuntu Just fresh hot of the press, session-migration is now available in quantal. This small tool is trying to solve a problem we encountered for a long time as a distributor, but had to postpone it way too long because of other priorities. :) It basically enables packagers and maintainers to migrate in user session data. Indeed, when you upgrade a package, the packaging tools are running under root permissions, and only hackish solutions was used in the past to enable us to change some parts of your user configuration[1], like adding the FUSA applet, adding new compiz plugins on the fly… There are tons of example when a distribution needs to migrate some user data (logged or not when the upgrade is proceeding) without patching heavily the upstream project to add a migration support there. 16 July 2012
Added rhythmbox radio support to unity music lens Just got it merged (and will be freshly available in Unity 6.0 coming soon in quantal)! I spent few hours last week to add rhythmbox radios (and writing unit tests) for the music lens. It's been a long time I didn't write some serious vala (I guess last time was for unity's Alt+F2). I confirm it's still not my favorite langage ;) Coming back to the radios, they will now show as the last row (after tracks, albums and eventually online purchase ones), and they respect (if the metadata are provided in rhythmbox) to every usual music lens filters. 04 July 2012
Android ICS on wetab (exopc slate)! Spend few hours installing Android ICS (Cyanogenmod built for x86) on my exopc tablet and playing with it. I've never been impressed by Meego installed on it as a developer preview, performance and feature-wise. I've found yesterday evening those instructions and links about a corvusmod rebuild of cynagenmod and I gave it a try! Of course, as this is not an arm device but x86 one, not a lot of applications are working out of the box, but overall, the UI is totally functional and browsing the web is a delightful experience. 30 June 2012
Precise Pangolin has now its finale Unity release (5.10) Most of the time, after an Unity release, I look like that: Well, ok, not really, but in fact, this is after doing some exercice after an unity release, so it's exactly the same, isn't it? :) This particular release didn't follow this rule though. Even if last Friday and Monday were a little bit rushy, we kept merging latest patches on a regular basis to polish the Unity experience on 3D as well as on 2D for Ubuntu 12. 12 April 2012
Unity 5.8 out, ready for beta2! As I write Unity 5.8 is currently building on our official builders and will reach ubuntu precise soon. For this release, a big part of the stack was uploaded (14 components) including unity, unity-2d, nux of course, but also compiz 0.9.7.2 and the lenses (with some ABI breaks in the middle). What's new on this unity release? Well, you can see the 3d milestone and 2d bug fixes (look also at this one for unity 2d which landed last monday). 23 March 2012
New, shiny, Unity 5.6 released! Phew! it's been a long road to release the next unity, but I'm more than happy to finally announce therelease of 5.6. Unity components (dee, libunity, bamf, lenses, nux) and unity itself, plus some compiz snapshots (post 0.9.7.0) are part of this release. The packages are currently building on the official builders and should be soon available to you. No particular new feature apart from better ibus support are part of it, plus a tons of bug fixes and some miscelleanous improvements: - Daniel van Vungt landed a patch in compiz that enhances its performance for more than 51%! 12 March 2012
Unity 5.2 is now released! Phew! It's been a crazy ride to release Unity 5.2 once ubuntu precise released its alpha 2, but we finally get there! Thanks a lot for all the community participation, we actually got 27 testers answering to Nick's call for testing. Those were high quality contributions and enabled us to get closer to the unity release. So, what's new since 5.0? Well, a lot! :) More precisely, we got multimonitor support with screen edge detection, " 03 February 2012
Some unity configuration in gnome-control-center. Just finished some hacking for implementing some unity configuration options that are blessed by the design team, as shown in this official specification. It contains as well other ui tweaks. You can notice in particular the "Restore defaults" options that work on each tabs and restore every page's defaults. Those options are impacting both unity and unity-2d. This gave particular challenges as their features don't align (for instance, we don't show the " 26 January 2012
Nautilus precise unity quicklist gets bookmarks! Flying back from Budapest, I hacked on a long-time awaited design whishlist: "Nautilus quicklist does not contain the locations previously found under the 'Places' menu.". This is about getting the Unity quicklist for the nautilus launcher icon to display the list of the user's bookmark. It was unexpecdictly more "fun" that what I thought it would be. Indeed, there is already one dynamic quicklist, appearing when you are making a copy operation which can take some time (when the copy dialog appears), giving the possibility to " 17 January 2012
Unity 5.0 into precise! Now that the Canonical rally is ending, I'm happy to announce that we released and uploaded Unity 5.0 to precise! This is by far the most exciting and the best Unity released we ever had, and I'm happy that we've be able to accomplish all of this thanks to the community and the excellent developer team. We received a lot of testing and got more than 50 test results from my previous call for testing. 13 January 2012