What are we up to?

Our site has remained dormant for quite a while and we get the occasional visitor on the irc channel poking us with a stick to check for rigor mortis. It’s not that bad, actually. We’re very close to a 1.0 release, code-wise, and have been for quite a while. But the devil is in the details and the details are definitely in the packages. When we started the project, Debian 4 and CentOS 4 were sensible stable targets. Obviously, they’re not anymore. So our first effort into getting ready for a testable pre-1.0 branch is to pick up whatever pile of paperclips and rubber bands we used to autobuild the packages for both these platforms and re-adopt the contraption to work with their newer distro brethern, CentOS 5 and Debian 5.

The whole operation of converting to newer distros turned out to be a tremendous pain, basically leaving us at square one packaging-wise. At that point we decided to concentrate resources even further and focus first on Debian 5 as a target for OpenPanel. Right now we’re getting help from Tomas Šiaulys who is kicking the builds into submission. If you’re not afraid of a compiler and know a bit about packaging, perhaps you could help out as well. Drop by in #openpanel on the oftc irc network and ask around. We could also use a couple of CSS/javascript people to take a look at any dangling issues in that department.

Speaking of the GUI, it has become quite a magical environment. Widgets respond correctly to keyboard commands and focus events. We’ve been paying a lot of attention to little details. The look has been completely refreshed from the alpha release, following a more modern layout style. The GUI also scales with the browser vertically, leaving less screen real estate wasted:

A precise E.T.A. for the public release is hard to give. We’ll try to post more frequent updates as the 1.0 target approaches. Thanks for hanging on.