I can't beat Mongol Hordes

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

But I can release packages of them. But first, an homage to our more
artistic and less violent side.

Obligatory Haiku
================

shining new software
ooh, ahh, shining. and broken.
one with bugzilla[1]

What the hell is Luis talking about?
====================================

There is a new, almost painfully unstable, Ximian Desktop in red
carpet's 'xd-unstable' channel. Why 'unstable', you ask? When it is
based on the uber-wonderful, uber-stable, uber-Khan-like GNOME 2.4?
Because-

(1) it is currently full of regressions from XD2.0.

(2) Some packages are still not GNOME 2.4.0- they may be 2.2, or
2.3.late. Mostly 2.4.0, though.

(3) we plan on moving it to GNOME 2.5 as we get our patches upstream, so
it will probably get more, not less, unstable as time passes.

(4) it is unsupported. If we break it, you pick up the pieces.

I can't stress (4) enough- if you're a paid RCX customer, if you
install these packages, your support is Nullo and Voido. In fact, you
can't actually install over RCX right now- it's basically a bug, but
we're thinking of keeping it that way. [You can 'rug up' but that might
leave you with an even /more/ broken setup.]

This is the greatest thing since Red Carpet 0.9.2.[2] How do I get it?
======================================================================

First, you go to http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/xd-testers
and sign up for the xd-testers list. If we decide to take a hammer to
your setup one morning, this list /might/ contain tips on putting it
back together again, or possibly even a 'duck!' warning the morning that
it happens.

I've signed up for the list I swear
===================================

Then follow the instructions at
http://codeblogs.ximian.com/blogs/desktop/ to install. :)

Known Issues
============

* only RH9 right now; SuSE 8.2 is Coming Real Soon when the Heroic
Miguel Ibarra completes his Dramatic Attack on the packages.

* It will install over a 'clean' RH9, but we recommend using it over XD2
since that's slightly more tested internally.

* no gnomemeeting; still having problems getting the latest version of
the deps building reliably. Will have it by the end of the week.

* we aren't currently shipping galeon in xd-unstable, and we are
shipping a slightly newer mozilla. So, installing xd-unstable will 
remove galeon in favor of epiphany. We realize that's not for everyone.
:)

* lots of panel/menu work still to be done, including rounded corners (I
blame Mark, also I suck for not bitching about the regression.) Oh,
also, you'll pretty much have to set up your panels from scratch after
you install. :)

* related to that, if you're using a new account, your panel setup  will
be totally foobared. It should upgrade from an existing XD2 setup fairly
cleanly, though.

* quite possibly will break your gstreamer setup if you have one that
currently works.

So... hope that is sufficiently scary. Still, should be fun. Hope to
see many of you along for the ride.

Luis, on behalf of the rest of the very kick-ass Ximian Desktop team
[and with great thanks to the Mongol Horde that makes our desktop
possible.]

[1] bugzilla.ximian.com in this case. Though I'm all in favor of
one-ness with any bugzilla.

[2] I am /still/ in awe of this release announcement and realize that
nothing I can write can be more than a pale imitation of that
release. Go google for it. Worth your while. I swear. Though now that we
have all of these Novell resources we're thinking of commissioning
McSweeney's to do our next announcement for us.