Where are we at?

I am currently testing the CD builds for the Community Preview release. Gradually getting closer to a release I can be proud of, free of showstoppers.

CHANGELOG for copland-cp-15-5-07 (Copland RC 2)

• One showstopper fixed in HfsBrowser, two more found which will be fixed for RC 3
• New wallpaper added, but not as the default.
• Default theme changed from the eye-straining Industrial to the lovely Obsolescence. (an interim build retained Industrial as the theme for root applications. This was changed due to memory usage concerns.)
• Shell scripts added to the desktop for restarting, shutting down, and displaying the panels.
• Release notes added to the desktop and the root directory of the CD itself
• A track by Jono Bacon, and my own cover version of Hi-5's "Inside My Heart" added to the default home directory.

CHANGELOG for copland-cp-26-4-07 (now Copland RC 1)

• Pidgin 2 beta 6 has SSL support and now works on MSN Messenger network.
• Bugfix: Root logins no longer open terminals.
• Xorg-profiles now works automatically on bootup before Xorg starts. User is completely unaware that anything has happened.
• BCMxxx (Airport Extreme) driver added, appears to load on startup.
• Gnash added, with OpenGL backend.

CHANGELOG for copland-cp-15-4-07

• Pidgin 2 beta 6 added. SSL support accidentally omitted. Desktop config file and About box updated to reflect new name
• Bug identified: Root logins (normally not permitted) will open half a dozen terminals. Fix committed for next build.
• xfce4-session non-starter seems to be fixed.
• Ubiquity icon fixed.
• AiffInterchange now works with Flac.

What works?

• System to login screen, login screen to desktop but not with panels.
• HfsBrowser works.
• All Pythoncard programs start up.
• The desktop, once it's all started, is reliable.
• Abiword
• The Gimp
• VLC with certain videos and audio
• Quod Libet
• Administrator Terminal
• Administrator File Browser
• AiffInterchange
• Gnash (pretty slow) and Gnash plugin
• Pidgin
• Calculator
• Pretty much anything, apart from the problem spots below

What doesn't work?

• Xfce4-panel doesn't start automatically. It works when you start it manually.
• xfce4-session sometimes does not start, but this may be fixed now. Caused inability to log out through GUI.
• X cannot be started by an ordinary user (is this a bug?)
• Double-clicking on mountable USB drives in XFCE causes an error message.
• Ubiquity crashes while starting up, but does not give an error message.
• VLC doesn't seem to have all the codec support it should, but it's good enough for a first effort.
• Attempting to shut down or restart through XFCE merely takes you back to XDM. Shutdown or reboot must be performed through the command-line.

What happens that is not terribly desirable?

• Memory usage is higher than I would have liked, but I don't think it's really possible to strip it down further.
• Manually mounting drives works, and Thunar picks up the manual mountpoints, but the desktop manager does not.
• The Window List seems to be missing the desktop manager's icon, but only before another program is started (seems to be an upstream issue).
• There is a menu item for Gnash, but this doesn't do anything as the Gnash player is a command-line program.
• Gnash is very slow - this does not seem to be fixable until the experimental Cairo renderer matures.

What hasn't been tested?

MoL Ubiquity (testing of this is blocked by its crash).