Yes, it happened — I’m one of four co-maintainers for the gnome-utils project (which encapsulates a number of individual apps). Quite happy about this, as I’ve been using and playing with Gnome since I first got started with Linux circa 1996 (8 years! Can you believe it?!). I’ve always thought it was the future desktop, and the whole project structure appealed to me, but I’ve never had time to put in the effort of developing anything for it.
Now that’s all changed. At the moment, I’m really doing administrative tasks, as my C coding was an age ago, and my GTK non-existant. But that’s okay, I like doing stuff like that, and in my (so-called) spare time I’m trying to read up on GTK tutorials, and especially Java-gnome (since I’ve been a Java developer for the last 5 years). I’ve also been on the mailing lists for a while now!
Next, I’ll install Yoper and start making Gnome packages for it. Yoper seems quite good to me — somewhere between SuSE/Redhat/Mandrake and Gentoo (the hackers Linux!). There’s not too much Gnome support in Yoper yet, it seems, but that’s another reason I should get on board quickly.
Personally, I’m interested in a couple of the apps from gnome-utils. gdict, the Gnome Dictionary applet (which should probably really be in gnome-applets, but hey) could use multiple DICT server support, and then it could (in theory) act as a multilingual translating dictionary (not phrases, but certainly single words). As I’m (on and off) trying to teach myself Mandarin Chinese, this would be rather helpful! Another gnome-utils app in a similar vein is gucharmap, the character map. I’m sure you can see why this might be interesting. I’m thinking that (if I’m up to it) adding personalised character sections might be useful — you know, you can make your own section and call it “Calculus”, then put all the characters that are useful in calculus into it.
On step at a time, of course! But for me … it’s “happy hacking” ahead!
(If only RL work was a little better! Sigh! Fjord!!)
Next, I’ll install Yoper and start making Gnome packages for it. Yoper seems quite good to me — somewhere between SuSE/Redhat/Mandrake and Gentoo (the hackers Linux!). There’s not too much Gnome support in Yoper yet, it seems, but that’s another reason I should get on board quickly.
Personally, I’m interested in a couple of the apps from gnome-utils. gdict, the Gnome Dictionary applet (which should probably really be in gnome-applets, but hey) could use multiple DICT server support, and then it could (in theory) act as a multilingual translating dictionary (not phrases, but certainly single words). As I’m (on and off) trying to teach myself Mandarin Chinese, this would be rather helpful! Another gnome-utils app in a similar vein is gucharmap, the character map. I’m sure you can see why this might be interesting. I’m thinking that (if I’m up to it) adding personalised character sections might be useful — you know, you can make your own section and call it “Calculus”, then put all the characters that are useful in calculus into it.
On step at a time, of course! But for me … it’s “happy hacking” ahead!
(If only RL work was a little better! Sigh! Fjord!!)