NEWS RELEASE #2

This is the second of our fortnightly roundup of budgie-remix news.

Udara has been making some mockups of a Welcome to budgie-remix app. This will be a distro agnostic development i.e., other distros can take and enhance/change it without having to rewrite everything.

welcome mockup

David has been refining our budgie-remix Budgie desktop Debian packages making it ready for inclusion in the main Debian repos. He has pushed this to Debian Mentors and has tidied this after some review comments.  If this is accepted by the time of the Debian Freeze in August, all Ubuntu 16.10 users (and all Debian derivatives) will be able to install Budgie desktop without a PPA or compiling code!

We are waiting for a Debian Mentor to sponsor the package. So if you can/or know of someone who can sponsor the package, please please please help us!

David has also packaged the latest version of our default icon theme (Moka and Faba) and they’ll appear in your update queue. Changes include lots of bug fixes and new icons for Kodi, Terminix and Vivaldi and other icons as well. Kudos to the icons’ designer: Sam Hewitt!

Both Udara and David have been working a presentation for the Ubuntu Technical Board as part of our submission to become an official community flavor. More news on the forthcoming news roundups.

Both HEXcube and Udara have been polishing our website and introduced a Team page and Opportunities page.

As part of improving the budgie-remix logo, HEXcube has been doing some ‘out of the box’ thinking to improve the logo of upstream Budgie. Here’s a ‘work in progress’ wire-frame for the tweaked logo. Have a look at the svg source here. What do you think?

budgie-symbolic

AROUND THE WEB

FORTHCOMING OPPORTUNITIES

More opportunities exist to help out budgie-remix. If these sound interesting to you, please put your hand up. We would love to have you onboard as part of the development team. We will expand on these in the next few weeks, so remember to keep checking out our Google+ communitypage.

  • A small C based patch is required to allow us to show the budgie-remix logo in the system Details screen. At the moment, it is hard-coded with the Ubuntu GNOME logo.
  • HTML/CSS/Javascript & Python opportunities exist to further develop our Welcome app
  • Debian packaging: we need help tidying up our existing Debian packages to make them ready for possible inclusion into Debian/Ubuntu
  • Wallpaper competition organizer: help us get the best wallpapers for budgie-remix 16.10 users.
  • App-Indicator applet: fancy having a go at adding app-indicator support for budgie-remix?
  • ISO testing: we are coming up to 16.04.1 release and we’ll need help testing our 16.04.1 ISO images
  • Translators: we will need help translating our welcome app and the budgie-remix slideshow that you see on installation

UPSTREAM BUDGIE DESKTOP

There has been a mass of updates upstream. It seems Ikey (Budgie desktop maintainer) have been drinking lots of coffee over one overnight sprint! These are some of the highlights in the last fortnight:

  1. Adding applets has been made simpler by just double clicking the applet in the list
  2. Raven has been revamped – better animation and no more screen-tearing
  3. The various Switches in Raven will look much better with other themes in the future
  4. Raven will close when clicking on the desktop
  5. A new shortcut Super+A will be available to open up Raven’s applets section
  6. Adding new themes will be automatically visible in Raven rather than having to logout/login again