budgie-remix 16.10 released

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16-10

I’m very pleased to announce the release of budgie-remix based on the solid 16.10 Ubuntu foundations.

For the uninitiated, budgie-remix utilises the wonderful budgie-desktop graphical interface from the Solus team.

This is our first release following the standard Ubuntu release cycle – alphas, betas, release candidates.  Certainly eventful with this release we are very proud with the results.

The level of interest has been spectacular – a growing number of contributors, offers of help – so much so we just could not incorporate everything!

With a dynamic team and community developers & testers we are certain we have a good future ahead of us.  Roll on 17.04.

Just a few thanks – there too many people to individually thank – but you know who you are – so three cheers to you.

  • Our Debian reviewers – Adam Borowski & Gianfranco Costamagna
  • Our Ubuntu reviewers – Jeremy Bicha & Daniel Holbach
  • Ikey Doherty
  • Rob Peters and all the budgie-remix bug-busters – massive thanks for your detailed testing effort.
  • Ossian Mapes – we will definitely be looking to showcase your budgie-remix lightdm webkit2 greeter in the future!
  • The budgie-remix team Udara, Niyas, Joshua, Hexcube, Nikola,  Mikl
  • Our financial supporters
  • Our exponentially growing community who have embraced us on all social media – twitter, reddit, G+, Facebook

Read the official release announcement here.  Downloads are here.

budgie-remix 16.10 beta 2

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16.10beta2.png

The very latest budgie-remix distro based on the firm 16.10 Ubuntu foundations is now available for testers.

More details available on the project-page – and download links are available from sourceforge.

I have submitted many of the budgie-remix key packages to Debian and these are now available direct from the Yakkety repositories:

  • budgie-desktop,
  • Moka icon theme,
  • Faba icon theme,
  • arc-theme.

Similarly, Ubuntu has accepted our budgie-artwork and budgie-wallpaper (xenial) packages as well.

We look forward to working with the Ubuntu devs and hopefully our remaining packages of budgie-remix will be accepted in 17.04 – budgie-desktop-environment, budgie-welcome, budgie-wallpaper (yakkety) and arc-firefox-theme.

In the interim – these are available from the budgie-remix PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:budgie-remix/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install budgie-desktop-environment

 

new rhythmbox 3.4 released

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Unusually early this time, Rhythmbox 3.4 has been released.

Its available for Yakkety users – but I’ve done some judicious hacking and its now also available for 16.04 users as well.

ubuntu xenial (before 10.2.6) [Running] - Oracle VM VirtualBox : 1_043

(screenshot taken with rhythmbox 3.4 + my alternative-toolbar plugin)

Thanks to the key Rhythmbox maintainer Jonathan Matthew we have a good release that incorporates a variety of fixes and improvements over the rhythmbox 3.3 available in xenial by default.

This version contains the following:

Overview of changes in Rhythmbox 3.4

  • New web-control plugin –> I couldn’t get this to work in Yakkety nor Xenial so lets skip over this bit…
  • Grilo plugin now uses Grilo 0.3 –> only relevant to Yakkety, downgraded in Xenial due to the older Grilo available
  • Soundcloud plugin fetches more search results and allows pausing
  • No longer uses webkit (partly due to OpenBSD W^X enforcement)–>my plugin coverart browser is broken due to GTK3.18 changes in xenial.  This webkit change basically will necessitate a rewrite 😦
  • Slightly better handling of keyboard shortcuts for playback
  • Core and some plugin data files compiled into binaries using GResources 
    Bugs fixed:

703910  Entering then leaving Party Mode breaks the app menu; Party Mode status incorrectly reported
721926  TerraParser (lyric's plugin) is not fetching lyrics correctly
759589  grilo: Port to 0.3.0
765833  [regression] Cover art shown superposed over the song titles and artist names when cover art is 
disabled
766584  Referenced website replaygain.org is not about ReplayGain
767318  Use correct pkg-config binary
767466  daap: Fix warnings when configuring music sharing
767524  "To translators: the context is" doesn't continue the sentence
768545  Cannot change MP4 encoder settings
769404  Memory leak

Stock Ubuntu 16.04 users should definitely benefit for 12+ months worth of bug-fixes and refinements.

IMPORTANT:

If you are using my plugin alternative-toolbar this version of rhythmbox introduces a nasty regression and breaks the plugin.  I’ve fixed this now for xenial users and is available in my rhythmbox-plugins PPA or via GitHub.  I’ve uploaded a fix to Debian Unstable and have created a bug-report on launchpad requesting a resync from Debian for Yakkety.

If you are looking to have the latest, I’ve packaged this together and is now available in my Rhythmbox PPA. This PPA contains the existing Ubuntu patchwork – hide on close, support for local and global menu etc. N.B. – I tend to update my PPA as and when I’m investigating what is new in upstream Rhythmbox.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fossfreedom/rhythmbox
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt full-upgrade

Note: sometimes the upgrade doesn’t quite work.  If you get a segmentation fault repeatedly on startup then uninstall and reinstall rhythmbox

sudo apt-get purge rhythmbox rhythmbox-plugins rhythmbox-data librhythmbox-core10
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rhythmbox

 

budgie-remix 16.10 wallpaper contest

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budgie-remix 16.10 Yakkety Yak Wallpaper contest
We invite everyone to contribute – even if you are not currently a budgie-remix user 🙂
For guidelines, rules & submissions : Official Flickr group
https://www.flickr.com/groups/budgie-remix-16-10/

 

budgie-remix 16.04.1 released

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Actually we released last week but since this is my first Planet Ubuntu blog seems like an opportune moment 😉

Using the superb Budgie Desktop, we are pleased to follow the official Ubuntu and community flavour release cadence and offer up a new release incorporating the mass of updates since 16.04 in April. Download links are here.

Our first release was released immediately after 16.04 – built from scratch in less than two months!  This time,  16.04.1 is actually not just a standard point release though. We now build budgie-remix in an automated repeatable manner based on the iso-builder from the Elementary team.

sleeping_beauty_by_jordan-whitt.jpg

Sleeping beauty (above) is just part of a new selection of wallpapers – thanks to Jeremy Bicha for supporting and guiding us – this package has been submitted to the Ubuntu 16.10 proposed queue.

We’ve included the very latest budgie-desktop available (10.2.6) – the same package that I submitted to Debian, together with Moka, Faba and Arc-Theme packages (all submitted to Debian and now available in Stretch as well as Yakkety).

The budgie-remix team have developed for this release a welcome app to introduce new users to the desktop and offer advice to get the best out of the distro.

Screenshot of Budgie Remix Welcome App

All the remaining packages that make up budgie-remix have also been submitted for review.  The goal is to ensure all packages are in the Ubuntu repo’s … we aim to demonstrate that the budgie-remix team can support its software on an ongoing basis through official distribution procedures.  Maybe also in the future become an official community flavour 😉

David

budgie-remix project team lead