Releases

libsexy v0.1.11 released

We just put out a new bugfix release of libsexy. A number of important SexyUrlLabel changes went in, so please upgrade, as notification-daemon and xchat-gnome both use this.

As always, the latest version is available on the libsexy page or in the download directory.

Release notes:

  • Fix a typo in SexyUrlLabel that was causing the widget to never be marked as unmapped, which prevented it from re-mapping the event window when the widget was shown again. (Bugs #364030 and #353946)
  • Fixed the cursors to properly indicate whether the text was selectable.
  • Get rid of the unused SexyTooltipPriv structure to fix building on Solaris. (Bug #378066)
  • Remove some debug output from SexyIconEntry and SexyTreeView. (Bug #355129)

VMware Tango Icons รขโ„ขยฅ Creative Commons

The VMware Workstation 6 betas have been out for a while now, so I’m sure those using it have noticed that we’ve been trying to make our icon theme fit in with the Tango icon style (well, to the best of my current abilities). So far this has proven to be a dramatic improvement over our older icon style used in Workstation 5.x, and it really fits in a lot better on modern GNOME desktops. The overall look feels clean and polished, mostly thanks to the hard work of the Tango project.

We’ve been lucky in that the Tango project has provided such a good variety of high-quality icons. I haven’t had to do nearly as much work as I expected in designing these icons. There were several existing VMware icons that we needed to move to the Tango style still, such as power icons, USB, serial port, message log, etc. Just a handful, but while many of them may be somewhat VMware-specific, there are some that we felt could be useful to other software projects, icon designers, and, perhaps, to Tango itself.

So we’re releasing our non-trademarked icons (everything the lawyers are okay with) under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. It’s only fair that we give back, afterall. There will be a dedicated page for this later, but for now, you can download it directly from here:

Download: vmware-tango-icons-0.5.tar.gz

You can see what we currently have available in the image below. I’ll put out updates as we come up with new icons and tidy up some of the remaining ones that we still want to release.

Thanks again to the Tango project for all your work in making the Linux desktop a more beautiful place, and if any of these icons look at all useful to the project, please feel free to use them, modify them, or have me tweak them.

VMware Tango Icons

New libnotify and notification-daemon releases are out!

I’ve just put out libnotify 0.4.4 and notification-daemon 0.3.7 releases. I highly advise that everybody upgrades, as several memory leaks, rendering glitches and other bugs have been fixed.

Along with these releases is some basic support for accessibility in the notifications and a nice, subtle transparent effect on the notifications when running on a system using a compositing manager. Don’t worry, it’s not bad at all, and it doesn’t make the notifications any harder to read. I’ve been running this for some time at this point ๐Ÿ™‚ I would show a screenshot, but it’s probably best to see it on your own setup.

The downloads are available on the downloads page, and full release notes are below:

libnotify 0.4.4 changes

  • Fixed a bug where a notification’s ID could be reset when a different notification was closed. Patch by jylefort. (Bug #94)
  • Fixed a crash when the D-BUS proxy was not being freed on notify_uninit, which was problematic when used in a loadable module. (Bug #92)
  • Fixed a crash when a signal handler for the notification’s closed signal caused the notification to be destroyed. (Bug #116)
  • Fixed memory leaks when creating notifications. (Bug #112)
  • Fixed potential memory leaks where the function passed to notify_notification_add_action to free the user data was not being called. (Bug #119)

notification-daemon 0.3.7 changes

  • Fixed a compatibility issue with dbus-glib 0.72. Patch by Pawel Worach. (Bug #95)
  • The background of the window in the standard theme is now just slightly transparent when compiled against GTK+ 2.10 and when using a composite manager. Patch by Matt Walton. (Ticket #110)
  • Fix several rendering glitches with the borders in the standard theme.
  • Fix a memory leak when removing a notification. Patch by Sven Wegener. (Bug #105).
  • Added initial accessibility support with the standard theme engine.
  • Clicking anywhere in a notification should now close the notification. This was happening only on the body text sometimes.

VMware Workstation 6.0 beta 3

We’ve just put out VMware Workstation 6.0 beta 3. As per the ancient traditions set forth by the VMware founders, we decided to make this release awesome. I’ll go over a couple of my favorite, but for the rest, read the release notes.

  • Record/Replay

    Workstation 6 beta 3 is the first release to support our new Record/Replay functionality that we mentioned at VMworld. Essentially, it allows for making a recording of (almost) everything that happens to a VM between the time you hit Record and the time you hit Stop. This is not a movie recording, but more of an execution recording. You can play it back however many times you like.

    What is this good for? Well, have you ever tried testing a program only to encounter a bug that you just can’t reproduce? Maybe there was some memory corruption that happened under some specific case that you just can’t seem to diagnose. Or maybe it’s a network packet that came in in some form that your application didn’t expect. Under normal circumstances, you’d have to do a lot of guesswork in order to find out what exactly happened. Far too often, it’s just too hard to reproduce the bug and it goes unfixed for some time.

    Now imagine instead that you’re testing the program in Workstation and, before your testing, you hit Record. You attempt the test and the program crashes in some weird manner. No problem. Hit Stop and replay the recording. Just before the crash occurs, stop the playback and attach a debugger. Messed up? Didn’t find the cause? Replay that recording again.

    It should be pointed out that these recording logs take up a lot of space, so you don’t want to keep too many around. Also, the feature is very experimental, so don’t be surprised if there are problems. Some things are not yet supported, like 64-bit guests, Virtual SMP, and certain devices (USB, for example). We plan to change the UI around a little bit, and it’s likely that future Workstation releases will improve the usability and usefulness of this feature.

  • Debug guest apps from the host using Eclipse

    We now offer the ability to debug applications inside the guest from Eclipse on the host. This provides for a nice sandbox for the application. Your app can crash the computer during a debug session and your host won’t even feel it! There’s a good blog post from the developer of the Eclipse support discussing this feature and some of its many uses.

  • Fullscreen improvements

    A previous beta introduced the new combined Fullscreen mode. We used to have separate Fullscreen and Quick Switch buttons on the toolbar, each useful for certain purposes. The new combined mode is closer to Quick Switch, but until now has missed the nice aspect of Fullscreen where the image would actually by the size of the monitor (due to changing the screen resolution).

    Now, when in fullscreen, you have the option of changing the view mode (from the drop-down toolbar). The guest resolution can be changed to match the host’s screen resolution, the guest can be stretched (emulating the original fullscreen), or the guest’s screen can be centered on the monitor.

  • Tab dragging

    The Linux UI now supports tab dragging, thanks to the new support in GTK+ 2.10 and some hacks to get around some bugs. Combined with the multiple window support we put in a previous beta, you can now have as many windows open as you like and drag and drop VM tabs between them. While not a major feature itself, it is a nice usability thing we’ve wanted to do for a while now.

  • Many many bug fixes

    The new feature list may not be huge, but at this point in the beta cycle there shouldn’t necessarily be a lot of new features. So what have we been doing? Why, fixing just tons of bugs of course. A lot of crashers have been fixed, work has gone into improving multiple monitor support, the UI has improved in various areas, and code has been cleaned up. All in all, we’re in good shape, and will be mostly staying in bug fix mode until the final release to ensure that the result is a product we can all be proud of.

I should also point out that if you are not a Workstation user but have been contemplating a purchase, you don’t need to wait for Workstation 6. You can now buy Workstation 5.5 and get a free upgrade to 6. This only applies to new purchases, so if you’ve been a Workstation 5 user for a while, you’ll have to purchase 6 separately.

libsexy v0.1.9 released

libsexy, libsexymm, and sexy-python 0.1.9 have been released.

libsexy v0.1.9 is just bug fix release (but a good one), containing the following fixes:

  • Fixed a bug where the cursor position in a SexySpellEntry would change if the position was at the end of the entry and word was replaced.
  • Fixed a few enchant-related bugs in SexySpellEntry.
  • Fixed our GModule loading for enchant to let glib figure out the proper file extension, rather than hard-coding “.so”.
  • Fixed some uninitialized variables when creating the icon windows for SexyIconEntry that were causing valgrind to complain. Patch by Benjamin Otte. (Bug #349701)
  • Fixed a bug in SexyIconEntry where the caret would be invisible at the start of the entry when no icon was shown. Patch by Ed Catmur. (Bug #353671)
  • Fixed a bug with SexyToolTip positioning in treeviews without headers where the tooltips would immediately disappear when shown at the bottom of the screen. (Bug #333424)
  • Fixed a linking bug when building on win32. Patch by Steffen Eschenbacher. (Bug #351796)

libsexymm and sexy-python contain license updates and were updated to work with libsexy v0.1.9. Both bindings claimed to be GPL, while they were intended to be LGPL. Sorry for the confusion, packagers ๐Ÿ™‚

VMware Server 1.0 Released

As most people have probably seen on Slashdot or Digg by now, we just released VMware Server 1.0. As promised, it is a free product and should run your virtual machines much faster than the earlier betas did.

(If you’re not sure what VMware Server is all about, please read my original post.)

VMware Server has already been deployed at several companies ever since beta 1. I’ve always found that amusing, given how young the product was at that stage (even though this is essentially GSX 4). However, my experience in talking to beta testers so far is that most people are pretty happy with the product, especially given the price. I am personally running it at home for my Linux development VMs and it has been working nicely.

My thanks go out to all the testers that have reported problems or who have given us feedback of any kind. As one of the developers on VMware Server, it has been nice hearing positive reports and stories :).

libnotify 0.4.1/0.4.2 released

I just put out a release of libnotify 0.4.1. It has support for the new GtkStatusIcon (when compiled against GTK+ 2.9.2 or higher) and the documentation has been moved over to gtk-doc, so if you compile libnotify with –enable-gtk-doc, you should see a new “Libnotify” book in devhelp. There’s also a bunch of bug fixes too. Release notes are available.

I have some nice fixes and feature enhancements planned for notification-daemon that I’d like to get to before long. Some optional window slide-in/out or fade-in/out effects for the notification bubbles, maybe a new theme, and better notification placement.

Update: libnotify 0.4.2 is now released, with a G_BEGIN_DECLS and G_END_DECLS in notify.h so that deadchip can make C++ bindings. Woot!

New libnotify, notification-daemon and notify-python releases

I’m very tired, so I’ll keep this brief.

I just put out libnotify 0.4.0, notification-daemon 0.3.5, and notify-python 0.1.0 releases. Most of the really annoying bugs people have reported have been fixed. More information is available on the news post.

I made a decision that will be unpopular to some, and I expect some disagreement on it. notification-daemon 0.3.5 does not ship with the Bubble theme. A large number of the problems people have reported to me on IRC and in e-mail centered around this theme, and until I have the time to give it the attention it needs, I’m removing it from the default install. It’s still in SVN and the tarball, and development will resume on it at a later date. However, I want to give people the best out-of-the-box experience as possible, and the Bubble theme currently makes that hard. If people want to chip in and help, you’re more than welcome.

Aside from that, it’s a very good release and I highly recommend people update. As always, please make sure to report bugs.

I have a couple of neat things I plan to work on. One is a little event notifier for scheduled events on online calendars (30Boxes.com to start). This will be using the new libnotify Python bindings. If it proves useful, I hope to add Google Calendar support as well. I’ll make some sort of announcement once I get a prototype working.

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