Red Hat's Plymouth Sees New Work

Not a lot of work has gone into Red Hat's Plymouth project since the release of Fedora 10, but now in the middle of the development cycle of Fedora 11 we are seeing some new work emerge. Plymouth is a boot splash program that leverages kernel mode-setting to provide a rich, flicker-free boot experience. In the past week there have been a fair number of commits to the Plymouth Git repository, which is the first time it has seen new work since early January.

The recent work to Plymouth includes various fixes, an improved layout of the help output, and command line parsing support for the Plymouth daemon. Yesterday afternoon support was added to Plymouth for a one-time animation helper and a simple progress sequence helper, both of which will help designers and developers construct new Plymouth boot plug-ins. In fact, Plymouth has now gained a glow plug-in. This plug-in flips through a series of images until the progress reaches 90% completion, and then at that point it runs through the series of images as an animation.

This new Plymouth work -- plus more work we anticipate ahead -- will find its way into Fedora 11. Canonical will also be using Plymouth as a USplash replacement starting with Ubuntu 9.10.

Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzExOA

I guess Joey was right when he called me "obsessed with Plymouth" in an earlier blogpost.

Feature Packed Fedora

Fedora 11 is reaching an impressive number of accepted features. Beyond introducing Intel and NVIDIA kernel mode-setting, Nouveau becoming the default NVIDIA driver, and a new volume control interface, there will be a plethora of package updates. Fedora 11 will have available Xfce 4.6, GNOME 2.26, and KDE 4.2 for the desktops.

Underneath these updated desktops will be X Server 1.6, EXT4 file-system (or optionally Btrfs), the Linux 2.6.29 kernel, and GCC 4.4.

The Fedora 11 BETA should be out by the end of this month.

More feature info on: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList


Source: Phoronix.com

Ubuntu Vs. Fedora Artwork

Aaron Toponce has a blog post on which looks better: Ubuntu or Fedora artwork.

Both distributions have done a solid job in artwork and look-and-feel for their operating system. No doubt. However, there have been some bumpy roads with both as well.
What do you think about the artwork between the two biggest GNU/Linux distributors? Share your judgments and opinions in the comments on Aarons blog.

All images are in order of release from oldest to newest.