Are there any alpha or beta images of 5.5 to test?
Are there any alpha or beta images of Trisquel 5.5 (based off of Ubuntu 11.10) floating around? I am curious because I want to test out the distro and potentially help and/or break things to help with the team.
It has been a long time since Ubuntu 11.10 was released in October and any updates would be nice. Especially with this being my main distro and I have loved using it.
I believe the beta is just starting to be produced. The beta images should be released soon. If you join the IRC channel it says it is "in the kitchen"
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There is a Triskel 5.5 iso image for i686 (KDE and Xfce) at http://devel.trisquel.info/makeiso/iso. You could also update a 5.0 install against brigantia (with "deb http://archive.trisquel.info/trisquel brigantia main" and so on in sources.list) - but please use a virtual machine or a spare partition for this, as stuff will break:)
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I might give it a go, I'm still needing the latest Nouveau to get my Fermi card to work without needing the binary drivers or at least the firmware from them.
XFCE? Ewww. Come on guys!!!
If you want to get the look of past releases try using MATE. Either offer that as a "classic option" and then make Unity, Gnome Shell, or Cinnamon as the default. Or swap. Just don't use XFCE.
Cinnamon: http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/?p=119
As has been mentioned before, we cannot use Gnome 3 Shell (including forks like Cinnamon) and Unity 3D because they require graphical acceleration.
The DE choice is not currently based on wanting the classic look. At least, this is not the issue at hand now.
The criteria for our new default DE include:
1. working without graphical acceleration
2. accessibility
Only then would the choice of classic verus new desktop paradigm come into question.
As mentioned on the devel mailing list, MATE is too risky at the moment. There is simply too much code and too few developers and users. Both the developers and Mint, the main distro backing it, state that it is not yet complete/stable/on par with Gnome 2.32. We would be taking a big risk to use that as our default DE on a LTS release.
The only major choices we have include:
- LXDE
- KDE 4
- Unity 2D
- XFCE
- Gnome 3 Fallback
LXDE is too lightweight for a main DE. We already have the Mini version for that.
KDE 4 is a major shift (away from GTK).
Unity 2D looks like Unity 3D. If Unity 2D poses no technical/accessibility issues, then the choice of Unity 2D would come down to desktop paradigm preference.
XFCE is the closest to Gnome 2.32. This would be my second choice.
If at all possible, I would go for Gnome 3 Fallback. We get to stick to the standard gnome software and we'll be moving forward with GTK3. I agree with grvrulz that with some tweaking Fallback will be our best bet if we want to stick to the classic desktop. He has done a lot of work on theming and we can get it to look like Trisquel. It might still not be on par with Gnome 2 in terms of functionality, but I believe the most common use cases are covered.
I am not sure what quidam's current opinion of a Gnome 3 Fallback-based DE is. If there are any issues with what's in the Ubuntu 11.10 repositories, then it might be better to go for a more established, albeit less functional, DE than with something that could cause problems on a LTS.
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That image isn't an "official" Trisquel install, it's Triskel, which is a KDE-based derivative of Trisquel. I wouldn't expect it to be representative of what Trisquel 5.5 will actually look like. To my knowledge it hasn't been decided to move to XFCE yet (from Quidam's post here http://listas.trisquel.info/pipermail/trisquel-devel/2012-January/000556.html although someone who hangs out in IRC might know about more recent developments)
Gnome Shell, Gnome fallback mode and Unity are pretty much ruled out. Consensus on the thread seems to indicate that Mate is too unreliable at this point. XFCE looks like it could be a good choice, actually. I've never actually used it but it looks like it's compatible with Gnome Panel applets, so you could build a Gnome 2-ish experience with it. Honestly I'd love it if Mate were the default desktop for 5.5, but I doubt that would be the case.
Or maybe I'm wrong and Trisquel will actually be KDE-based from now on. Personally I hope not.
I've been using XFCE 4.8 from Trisquel 5 repos and liking the experience overall. With just a bit of tweaking you get a very GNOME 2.x-ish experience.
I think I'll try out this test release. (Common last words?)
Looks wise, I have tried to tweak the heck out of it but it never looked as good as Gnome 2. If you guys can make XFCE look as good as Gnome 2 did in 5.0, then I will be estatic.
Just for fun I took the Trisquel 5.0 ISO, installed MATE from Linux Mint 12, and applied all the Trisquel themes, icons, and backgrounds in it.
It looked pretty much identical to the standard Trisquel 5.0 release with some minor bugs due to testing with an older Ubuntu 11.04 codebase because the Linux Mint MATE was based off of 11.10. I was hoping to get a beta of Trisquel 5.5, install MATE, and give you guys feedback on the look and feel.
Back them 2006
http://jagonzale.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/ubuntu6-06.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Xubuntu-6.06-pl.png
Why don't make the same today? in fact, I think it will be better.
I made some modifications in Xubuntu 11.10 to look like the default theme Trisquel. Adding also applications of GNOME 3.
It's beautiful. Good work.
Out of the blue today I did the same thing with Xubuntu 11.10 in VirtualBox. I see that you don't have the Trisquel icon as the Application Launcher. When I tried one of the Trisquel themes and/or icon sets it changed automatically. I'm starting to really warm up to XFCE after playing around. If the Trisquel team can move over their themes and make it as good looking or close to Gnome 2, then I will be happy.
Oh and have any of you played around with Razor-QT yet? I grabbed it from their PPA at https://launchpad.net/~razor-qt/+archive/ppa/ but it still seems pretty early to do pretty much anything.
Good stuff Icarolongo! It could be an option, or an alternative to the heavy gnome 3 desktop.
Is the panel accessible from the keyboard? I think not.
sorry to be a bother, but ompldr.org has been down for at least a few days. Would you mind posting the the image to http://imgur.com/ ?
Thanks!
edit: hmm... this was a duplicate post somehow.
Maybe this is what we need!