The development version, shortly

As the development version is no more based on Debian Lenny but on Debian Squeeze, many changes have occurred because the system has improved, some softwares have changed, other new softwares are now available, and also because some software may now be missing in Debian. This page tries to summarize the differences between Gondwana and the current development version.

Additional and removed softwares

The development version is shipping the following new softwares:

• multimedia → Cheese, Jokosher, Vmpk
• work → TBO, GoldenDict, Gvrng, Laby, Kturtle, LittleWizard
• games → Kigo, Gmchess, Gtans, Pixfrogger, BurgerSpace, Monsterz, Free Alchemist, Hex-a-hop, Numpty Physics, Pixbros, Lbreakout2, Magicor, Biniax2, Tworld
• education → Tanglet, Marble, Raincat, Tictactoe-ng
• system → Plymouth (the graphical boot)

Also note that Apertium is now shipping on the Italian CD too since it is now able to conjuguate Italian verbs. The following applications have been removed (or replaced):

• multimedia → Vkeybd
• system → Splashy (the previous graphical boot)
• work → OpenDict (replaced by GoldenDict)

As some new applications are overlapping older ones (Marble ↔ KGeography, Gvrng ↔ Laby ↔ Kturtle ↔ LittleWizard), we will have to remove softwares in the near future, when we’ll have chosen which ones are to be kept. The software set of the development version is not yet frozen. You will find more information about new applications in the dedicated page New applications.

New features

New features and improvements have been brought to the development version:

• The audio volume control in the panel now changes both Master and Master Mono volumes
• The panel now has a keyboard layout indicator
• Added playlists for music and videos online using contents from archive.org (browse directories in Whole DoudouLinux)
• Improved look & feel (window decorations, theme, icons, cursor, buttons, panel layout, etc.)
• Position of all buttons on window title bars have changed to left on LTR languages since many OS’es now do this
• Size of icons in advanced activities is now computed at boot to occupy around half the screen area
• Graphical layout is now adapted to LTR/RTL languages at boot and session start
• Autologin can be activated by selecting only one activity in the activities menu
• Boot is about 30% faster, thanks to Debian Live improvements
• Music/audio messages can be skipped at bootup and shutdown (configuration file in /etc)
• Better hardware support, especially network, webcams and video cards
• New upstream version of Songwrite, which solves issues with non-Latin alphabets and music signs not shown
• Epiphany now has an update process for its black lists of ads websites, it should then better block ads on web pages
• Internal hard disks are now all mounted read-only at boot, which really prevents children from writing on them, and even from reading using the file explorer PCManfm
• Improved system security: now only DDL activities don’t require a password to be started, instead of all users!
• Dailybuild ISO images named iso-hybrid may also be used to make a Live USB key [1]

CD image size

Currently the CD ISO image size is much larger than a CD. While we still want to provide CD images, we are not able to reduce the CD size to 700MB right now. In a quite near future we will propose a multi-lingual DVD with even more applications while working on reducing the required disk space to reach a CD size. We will try to work on data set reduction instead of removing many applications. In the meantime, you might choose to use a USB key or a rewritable DVD unless you have trouble with these.

Translations

No translation work has started for the development version. For this reason we provide only few languages. Translation resources are now frozen on Transifex for the current stable release Gondwana. The shift to the development version is expected for late March or early April.