It's hard to find free time to talk about what's going on during the Community Week, but I guess it's a good thing :-) But I'm quite excited about what we can do today: it's testing day on the GNOME side of the Community Week. There are several things that we prepared for this session...

Thunderbird 3

Our Thunderbird friends are hard at work on Thunderbird 3, and they have a special bug day around the linux version of Thunderbird today. It's a good opportunity to do have some cross-project fun, and Wolfgang made some packages of the current snapshots.

So just go to the Software Portal and click the relevant one-click install button to get Thunderbird 3. You'll enjoy the refreshed interface Andreas has been working on. And then join #bugday on irc.mozilla.org and #opensuse-gnome on irc.freenode.net to give some feedback :-)

GNOME Shell

At the beginning of the month, I prepared some GNOME Shell packages for openSUSE, so people could start playing with them. This is a good first step to help Owen aggressively push GNOME developers to switch ;-) Patches are still needed right now to make mutter parallel-installable with metacity (and to adapt gnome-shell to this change), but it'll eventually get fixed.

I'm updating the packages to git master right now, but you should already be able to install the previous packages: just head over the Software Portal and look at those nice one-click install buttons ;-) Once you have installed the packages, save your documents, and run gnome-shell --replace in your current session.

Wondering what to do after that? #gnome-shell on irc.gnome.org and #opensuse-gnome on irc.freenode.net will be a good place to chat about what's good and what's currently missing :-)

AT-SPI D-Bus

Stephen is working on some packages for at-spi-dbus. We hoped it'd be ready in time, but it seems there were some compilation problems. Hopefully, they'll be available soon -- I would think in the worst case, people will be able to test them this week-end.

Providing an easy way to test at-spi-dbus will certainly help accelerate its adoption since, well, bugs will be found earlier ;-) I'm pretty sure that Bryen is excited about this!

And more...

This is just a sample of what you can do for testing, and there are obviously more things to play with:

• the great Federico would love to know what's wrong with multiple monitors for you on recent versions of openSUSE.
• we have the latest PulseAudio available, which should fix a bunch of issues for many people.
• gnome-bluetooth is also available for testing, and you should play with all your bluetooth devices to see if there's anything that can be improved.
• we have a new theme to test, which will hopefully be our new default theme (more on this on a later post, if I find time).
• and really, there's more, more, more :-)

So that's it, join us, tell us what you think, try the packages, and have fun!