Well I have started on the Elyssa KDE Beta’s using the new Hardy base. My first Beta is up and running live in a virtual machine and it is all looking great so far. I think that since there is not much of a change in KDE 3 (3.5.8 to 3.5.9) that this will speed up development for me. I see the big slow down being porting the mint applications to Qt3. Well I had better get back to work.

Cheers Boo

After a long period of preparation and work on the mint tools we’re now entering phase 2: the migration towards the newly released Hardy base. Work has begun and the very first BETA of Elyssa was built today. Of course it’s highly unstable at this stage, it doesn’t fit on a CD and it’s full of rough edges. Things look very promising though and we should expect a first public BETA release within 2 weeks. We’ve had 6 months to think about this and almost everything is ready to be included so we should have a very smooth release.

Also, Octy and the Italian community translated the Daryna User Guide. The document should soon become available on all official mirrors.

Finally, Kronophage is working on the software portal and adding a lot of applications in it. The Elyssa section already features 145 applications. When finished the portal should contain around 1000 apps. Each application will feature a screenshot and we’re planning on using the same authentication system for both this portal and an upcoming home-made Brainstorm clone to encourage people to post comments, reviews and ideas online.

A lot of work has been put into mintMenu. In Elyssa this tool now comes in 16 different languages, with a configuration screen, improved drag & drop support in favorites, less delay and less memory usage. Each application also features a little context menu which can be used to automatically launch it at startup.

It’s also now possible to uninstall any application present in the menu by simply righ-clicking on it and selecting “uninstall”. A dialog box appears with the related packages and dependencies. This complements the easy installation of software provided by mintInstall and the software portal.

Finally, the “Other” and “System Tools” categories were merged into “Administration”. This makes the menu more compact and avoids the need for a scrollbar in the category pane.

Lars Peter Clausen, the main developer for mintMenu, is also porting this application from python to C. Although it was too late to include the C version in Elyssa, Lars’ latest version is very close to being stable and should hit the repositories some time after the release of Elyssa. The main advantage of porting mintMenu to C is a further reduction of the memory usage and extra speed gains both at startup and during the runtime.