There's been a lot happening with OzOS and Enlightenment lately and the CafeLinux Forums have been running hot with news and changes. I thought it would be a good idea to blog a summary of what is happening and to give an overview of the ongoing changes in both OzOS and e17.

1. OzOS 0.9 Released
The big news, I guess, was the formal release of OzOS 0.9 earlier in November. Both the 64bit and a 32bit version are based on Xubuntu 8.04.1 and come with a freshly compiled and updateable e17 desktop and the OzOS tools. This will be the last "preview" release before we do a Version 1.0. The new isos and torrents are available HERE.

But things do move quickly in world of OzOS and e17. Since the release of 0.9, we have seen some significant development of the OzOS tools and some important changes to the e17 code base.

2. Safer Updating
Following a few months of frustration with "bad code days" on the Enlightenment svn, Rui Pais revamped the "Update e17" tool to provide a bit more protection from code that fails to compile. Before it starts downloading new e17 code, the script now does a quick check of a new thread on the CafeLinux forum to see whether any of our Admins or Universal Mavens has struck non-compiling code in the current revision. This thread has a simple "ACTIVE/INACTIVE" flag in its title - "ACTIVE" meaning there are problems and "INACTIVE" meaning "all clear". The revised script will warn if the "ACTIVE" flag is up and give users the opportunity to abort the update.

The new script is part of the oz-tools package and will be updated whenever your do a "sudo apt-get update / sudo apt-get upgrade" or use the Update Manager.

3. e17 Changes
The other "big" development has been some fundamental changes in the Enlightenment code that change the way "Configuration" works. If you have updated e17 since 22 November 2008, you may have noticed that the Main Menu entry itself has changed to "Settings" and the "Configuration Panel" has become the "Settings Panel".

The downside of this change is that the panel now doesn't work properly with most themes! It isn't fatal, but only the "Display" options will work with anything except the e17 default theme (b_and_w). To see the new panel layout and use the other options, you will need to first change to the b_and_w theme. See This Forum Thread for pics and discussion of these changes.

Rui and I will be editing our themes (including the OzOS "....Emerald" themes) over the next week so that we can upload revised versions that work with the new code.

For those using "third party" themes, you are at the mercy of the theme creators for the time-being.

When I've looked into further, I'll post some work-arounds and some suggested ways of editing older themes to accommodate the new Panel.

Update: A fairly simple manual workaround is now posted here and we know of at least three other themes that have been updated to work with the new Panel - Cerium, Simply White and Grunge (available at Exchange).

None of this will surprise veteran e-users. It has happened before and will probably happen again. But we hope that "normal service" will resume as soon as possible.

4. OzOS Desktop Packages Now Work With Intrepid
The other Big Change to OzOS is very much under the hood, but important all the same. The oz-desktop package has been revamped so that it now works with Ubuntu Interpid Ibex without throwing error messages. This involved some quite fundamental changes but they won't be visible to users or affect existing installs on earlier Ubuntu versions or other Debian-based installs.

It does mean that we'll now be testing and evaluating an Ibex-based version of OzOS for Version 1.0. Stay tuned!

Stay Tuned
I'll try to keep this blog rolling on at least a weekly basis. So drop back in if you prefer to get your OzOS news predigested rather than by trawling through the forums.

Aubrey.
24 November 2008