FOSSwire

In a recent mailing list posting, Quinn Storm, the lead developer of Beryl, stated a possibility of a Beryl/Compiz merge in the future if both projects want to cooperate.

In a nutshell, Storm's ideas were to:

• Merge the two projects into one, community project
• Come up with a third name for the merge
• If the merge is unsuccessful, re-fork back into Beryl.

The only problem I can see with this is the third name. The Compiz developers would probably want to keep the name Compiz as it is. After all, it was Beryl who forked it in the first place, so if they plan to re-merge then you would think they would adopt the Compiz name once again.

This will be an interesting situation in the coming months for both projects. Stay tuned to FOSSwire!

The release of Ubuntu 7.04, named Feisty Fawn, is scheduled for release in April. Herd (Alpha) 2 was recently released, but no one seems to know what has changed. I took a look into the system and found some very interesting changes relating to the GUI and GNOME 2.17. (GNOME 2.17 will be released as GNOME 2.18.)

The first change I found was the addition of a Control Center. This new application replaces the long, sometimes overflowing System Preferences and Administration menu with a simple dialog.

The next, and my personal favorite change, is the addition of color changing functionality to themes. I like green a lot, so I chose it for my menus and window border.

Another change related to themes is the new Clearlooks theme. The only major change here is the new, more defined menu style:

New to Feisty is the addition of a Power History dialog for laptop users. Since I don't own a laptop, I'm unable to show it in action, but here you go anyway:

Next up is a minor, but very handy change: The addition of a bug reporting menu item. On Canonical-supported applications, there has always been a menu to get support and help translate applications. Now, there is an item to report a bug should one arise.

Other changes include the usual bug fixes, an updated GNOME System Monitor that shows system specs, a new kernel, and ZeroConf networking. ZeroConf is a project to try to make configuring a network connection require as little user-intervention as possible.

Stay tuned as we follow the development of GNOME 2.17/18 and Ubuntu 7.04!