Lumina Desktop 0.8.2 Released!

[Ken Moore]

The next version of the Lumina desktop environment has just been released! Version 0.8.2 is mainly a “spit-and-polish” release: focusing on bugfixes, overall appearances, and interface layout/design. The FreeBSD port has already been updated to the new version, and the PC-BSD “Edge” repository will be making the new version available within the next day or two (packages building now). If you are creating/distributing your own packages, you can find the source code for this release in the “qt5/0.8.2″ branch in the Lumina repository on GitHub.

The major difference that people will notice is that the themes/colors distributed with the desktop have been greatly improved, and I have included a few examples below. The full details about the changes in this release are listed at the bottom of the announcement.

Reminder: The Lumina desktop environment is still considered to be “beta-quality”, so if you find things that either don’t work or don’t work well, please report them on the PC-BSD bug tracker so that they can get fixed as soon as possible.


Click to view slideshow.

Changes from 0.8.1 -> 0.8.2:

New Utility: “lumina-info”

• This utility provides basic information about the current version of the Lumina desktop as well as link to various information online (source repository, list of contributors, bug tracker, etc…).

Theming:

• New Color Scheme: PCBSD10-Default (the default for new PC-BSD users)
• Lumina-[Red/Green/Gold/Purple] color schemes updated.
• “Lumina-Default” and “None” theme templates updated significantly.
• Make it easier for a distributor to set a default theme/color by just supplying the name instead of the full path (since paths can be different on different OS’s)
• Fix issue with some fonts not loading properly.
• Distinguish between “Save” and “Apply” in the theme template editor (“Save” to update the file but keep the editor open, “Apply” to update the file and close the editor). This makes it much easier to test changes to the current theme template as you don’t need to close/re-open the editor to try it out.
• Add the ability to distinguish between transparent/opaque desktop plugins in the theme template.

Configuration Utility Changes:

• Add a new dialog for selecting plugins of all kinds. This makes it easier to browse through and read the descriptions of the plugins before actually selecting one.
• Re-arrange the interface quite a bit. Now the general page arrangements make much more sense (Appearance [wallpaper/theme], Interface [desktop/panels], Applications [auto-start/file defaults], Shortcuts, Session [general options/window system] )
• Add the ability to set your preferred time/date format(s) in the general session options.
• Add the ability to reset your preferred file manager/terminal/web browser/email client back to defaults.

Insight File Manager Changes:

• Make all the file operations happen in a separate thread (does not lock the UI any more).
• Clean up the detection routine for Qt-editable files (for rotating images in the slideshow in particular).
• When removing a file in the slideshow, make it simply go to the next/previous image instead of the beginning of the list.
• Make the ZFS snapshot search functionality a lot faster if just refreshing the current directory.

Desktop Session Changes:

• For vertical panels, have the clock plugin try to use vertical space instead of horizontal.
• Clean up a few desktop plugin stability issues.
• Streamline the session cleanup functionality.
• Fix some issues with 2nd panel functionality.
• Reduce the number of backend filesystem watchers (only one per session instead of one per screen now).

Lumina Search Changes:

• When searching for files/directories, make the initial starting point user-configurable as well as add the ability to exclude directories from the search routine (also configurable by the user).

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