[gnome-love] Guidance for a newbie?

[Elijah P Newren <newren math utah edu>]

Hi,

I've recently decided to spend some spare time and donate back to
Free/Open Source software since I've gotten so much out of it.  I
thought GNOME would be a good place to start, though I'm not sure what
part of GNOME to start on.

I'm still a linux newbie, but I have been programming for a number of
years.  Mostly I've used C/C++, but I have some *basic* familiarity
with other languages (pascal, x86 assembly, matlab, fortran, perl,
Tcl/Tk, and even scheme).  Since most of my programming was
self-taught, I'm highly ignorant of tools and skills used in group
projects (though I tend to know the names of some, such as CVS).  I'm
also sure that I have large holes in my programming knowledge that
formal training or a more focused learning method may have covered
better.  I would like to learn, though...

I'm hoping to have about 5 hours per week, maybe more if I can, but
I'll shoot for 5 hours.  One possibility that looks interesting is to
make gnome-terminal have a "tabbed terminal" similar to Mozilla's
tabbed browsing.  I even found this link:
http://www.gnome.org/todo/view.php3?id=40.  However, I know that I
personally tend to drop large projects without good motivation unless
I first get some successes behind me on smaller tasks that are
similar.  So I don't want to take on the tabbed terminal project if
it's going to take me too long (say a month or so to at least get an
alpha version).  But I really can't tell how long that project would
take.

So, I guess I have multiple questions: What are some simple tasks that
I might be able to do, just to get some accomplishments under my belt?
Will I first need to have GNOME2 on my system (I'm planning on
upgrading to Mandrake 9 soon)?  Anyone have some *wild* guesses on how
long the "tabbed terminal" project might take?  And, the overall
question: Does anyone have some good pointers on how to become an
effective contributor to GNOME?

Thanks,
Elijah


-----------------------------------------------------------------
Elijah Newren
Internet: http://www.math.utah.edu/~newren   newren math utah edu
Tired of pop-up webpages when surfing the internet?  Look at
   http://www.math.utah.edu/~newren/noPopUps.html
for how to get rid of them without spending a penny.
-----------------------------------------------------------------