Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Evince/Forms

So, I blogged about this last November. For gutsy, with the latest Gnome, it's become now mainline. Fillable forms in Evince.

Wow.

This is a huge step forward in functionality. The non Free version of Acrobat is... a little unstable for us (read: crashes constantly), and flpsed's a tad odd to use for end users. So, handling fillable forms right within Evince is going to make a big usability improvement for our users.

If we get the ability down the road to save a copy of the PDF with the forms filled in, that will be a really nice treat, and in fact, a step above what's available in the non Free version. But for now, my wish has been granted.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Fix It Friday, Edubuntu, LTSP5

Wow. Yesterday was Fix It Friday (FIF) for Edubuntu, and we got a lot of stuff done. Bugs were squashed in Sabayon, dhcpd, denemo, and LTSP, as well as a ton of testing. I personally put in 15+ hours, and Ollie did the same. Very worthwhile.

LTSP5 in Edubuntu's going to be the best we've had yet. Huge speed, security, and functional improvements, plus Francis from Mille XTerm has brought forward some ideas that have allowed us to add some basic multi-server load balancing features into LTSP. Very big news, indeed.

Finally, we've already been making use of PPA's (Personal Package Archives) in Launchpad to distribute updated docs pre string-freeze for the Edubuntu handbook.

Busy, busy.