Again, looks like I’m always late. Sorry for the delay people but I had some serious problems with reconstructor and am even going to write a little guide in my Blog about it, but now at least the i386 beta live CD of OpenGEU 8.04 Luna Crescente is here and it works
Download it, seed it, spread it and install it if you don’t have OpenGEU yet. Or you can just upgrade from a previous OpenGEU system following our guide. If you prefer, of course install our distribution from packages
The Beta release is somehow an RC candidate, as I said, and I’m going to build now a Live CD for 64bit machins too, just give me some time since I don’t have a native 64 bit system. The new Ubuntu is close and this release is getting somehow weird in timing but fear not, it is a great release and it works really fine, there has been tons of updates and new software and it is based on an LTS, therefore it will surely last for long on your system
Enjoy the great work of the OpenGEU team and thanks to every single member who made this enormous step forward in developing a user friendly E17 system possible!
So, what are you waiting for? Download the iso now and burn it!

I’m really happy to announce you this great new: OpenGEU Luna Crescente’s development just reached the Beta stage and we are now ready to show you all the progresses we’ve done from the Alpha release. You can get the beta only from the repos right now but we’ll have iso released for both i386 and amd64 machines by tomorrow.

To release the new OpenGEU we decided to change our repositories. We previously used Dunnewind as you surely know, but recently there has been a huge problem with their repos and all of you users had a very hard time upgrading. So, to be more independent, thanks to the great work of Quaker66, new member of our team, we developed a new repository, with a full version of E17, a very updated one. We’ll try to upgrade to a new E17 release every time it become significant or every month in any case.

Thanks to this upgrades and the work of our team members, in the Beta version of OpenGEU Luna Crescente you’ll find exciting new tools and features, such as:

• A very updated E17 system
• A working Trash Bin module
• Wonderful and really fast new OpenGEU themes: Murrina Sunshine and Murrina Moonlight
• A new and features rich OpenGEU themes manager
• A very fast settings daemon (no more gnome-settings-daemon, for now we use xfce-mcs-manager but Quaker66 is developing a new daemon already)
• Using the new Echo module for audio
• An ever growing number of OpenGEU themes for every taste and of every kind
• Various bug-fixesx

Hope you’ll enjoy this release and keep reporting important bugs and features requests
We have big plans for the future, we just need an help from volunteer coders and any other kind of donation / general help

To get the new OpenGEU Luna Crescente Beta version, you have several options. If you are upgrading from the Alpha release, please use this guide, if you are installing OpenGEU in any normal Ubuntu system or derivate, you should instead read this. If you experienced any problem during the upgrade or a previous update due to the Dunnewind problem, please read this guide before anything else. The Beta is very stable and you are encouraged in using it, no matter if it’s not a full release yet, believe me
We’ll try to keep you up and running with a fresh and working repository, trying to avoid any other problem with the repos!

Just to let you know I’m working hard on new themes, thanks to Jorge Mariani’s help. Right now we already developed a working Murrina Sunshine Theme, already available for download from our repos, and the Murrina Moonlight is almost finished.

While I wait for Jorge to implement the pieces of the wallpaper into a working animated e17 background, I’m creating OpenGEU themes, hope you’ll like them

All of the wallpapers are by Verdegal, you can find them all in the wiki. The e17 themes are taken from the great exchange site and the gnome icons and themes are from gnome-look! Enjoy

Bloody Imago

Simply White 

This is the official OpenGEU 8.04 Luna Crescente Alpha release. It’s a Live CD, so you can burn it and run it Live on any machine without hurting your system at all! In this release there has been a big number of changes on the software side, a lot of new tools and E17 modules are included and many of these softwares have been directly developed by our team.

Since OpenGEU Luna Nuova, a lot has changed and now there’s no extra panel in OpenGEU, no fbpanel and no gnome panel anymore. The user will be able to find any gnome tool needed in the very convenient OpenGEU menu entry of the E17 menu. The system tray can be found on the lower right corner of the screen thanks to trayer and should you miss fbpanel for any reason, you’ll just have to download the OpenGEU customized version of the panel from Synaptic!

The alpha version is already fully working and if you wish you can install it and use it on your machine, the system works like a charm and in the future releases we’ll just focus on bug-hunting and in creating new wonderful themes. So, if you find any bug, please report it to our development ML or to our forums. Enjoy the new OpenGEU

We talked some time ago about the OpenGEU Theme Switcher created by the great MadnessMike. Now, I’m showing you the real progress of this tool. Mike has improved it so much that it is now able of customizing an even greater number of pieces of your desktop! You know, or should know, why a Theme Switcher for OpenGEU was needed, but now let’s see the real progress done for this tool.

(more…)

A more official announcement will be released soon, just let me fix a pair of packages. And remember that installing the Alpha version will expose you to an incredible number of upgrades, one day after the other

You’re warned!

OpenGEU uses both Enlightenment and Gnome bits, a huge number of OpenGEU’s applications are from the Gnome world, that means they run on the GTK libraries. This makes it a little confusing for people trying to just change the OpenGEU theme, that is, to change not only the E17 theme but also the gtk theme accordingly. That’s why I created the Sunshine and Moonlight scripts to change from a theme to the other. In Luna Nuova there where only 2 themes to choose from. If you changed the E17 theme directly, the gnome wallpaper and gtk theme didn’t change accordingly of course. Now, this cannot happen everytime with every new theme but we’ll try to make it happen for as many themes as we can

Of course, we couldn’t fill the Preferences menu of FBPanel with tons of themes icons, so I asked MadnessMike to create a little application able of taking care of the OpenGEU Themes

The experimental but already working OpenGEU Themes Switcher by MadnessMike!

OpenGEU themes are basically the mix of E17 themes, gtk themes and icons, gnome wallper, GDM theme, eventually Entrance theme (if available), a mix of many things, trying to give the user a polished and smooth desktop experience. So, this theme switcher is really important for our project and I’m very thankful to MadnessMike for creating it (in Gambas)! I also mailed to a number of E developers and to E17 mailing list about the need we had of such an application but ’till now nobody was able to help us on this. Above you can see a screenshot of the Theme Switcher in this developing step. We’ll soon upload to everyone the source code and experimental deb file

Of course, for now, there are only 2 themes: sunshine and moonlight

Not bad since the number of themes is going to increase abnormally

The OpenGEU Sunshine (left) and Moonlight (right) themes

Well, these are animated backgrounds and the animations are not little pictures but cool and somehow big effects. What can I do about it?

• I modified a little the themes. Now the pictures inside them are much more optimized, resulting in an immediate gain in speed, no loss in quality and lighter files. You can already find the new opengeu-e17-themes in the repos, just update and then upgrade.
• I understand that while OpenGEU is also about eye-candy, Sunshine and Moonlight with such heavy animated backgrounds are still very hard on the CPU cycles. This means that if you have a slow machine you may probably prefer to change your current background to a static one (any of the pictures contained in OpenGEU or any other picture from the net will do). You’ll find an immediate gain in speed after changing to a static background, but e17 is also about effects and animations…. you can’t have everything. Sorry. E17 can be as light or heavy as you like.
• I’m creating two new OpenGEU Themes for you. Murrina Sunshine and Murrina Moonlight, these themes will have animated backgrounds but these BGs will be very easy on the CPU cicles and very little animated. So they’ll be very fast yest visually appealing. Instead of a PNG based GTK engine, these themes will use Murrine, a very nice yet extremely fast GTK engine by a fellow Italian, Cimi. Also the entire E17 theme will be the fastest possible, so I hope these themes will be very fast and that you’ll like ‘em. Also, the next OpenGEU, Luna Crescente, will have these themes as defaults, since they’ll be fast. Sunshine and Moonlight will always be available in the repos anyway if you’ll prefer them and find them fast enough for our likes

What can you do about it, if you think that Sunshine and Moonlight are still too slow for you? As I said, you can just change the background to a static one for now. And you can also wait for the new OpenGEU Murrina Sunshine and Murrina Moonlight themes

Visit it often, we’ll tr to keep the Blog as much updated as possible.