Changelog:

- a bug about session name was solved
- FCKEditor was updated to 2.6.2
- a bug with shadows CSS was solved (unused shadow.png file is not linked by screen.css anymore so we’ve no “file not found” in web server’s logs)
- P4A_Error_Handler() global function now uses the P4A::messageWarning() wrapper for P4A::message() solving a bug with the warning icon name that was changed in 3.0.0-rc5
- jQuery UI was updated to 1.5.1

For the first time p4a is also available as .deb package. We encourage all users of Debian based distros to test this new package and give us feedback.

Download P4A 3.0.1

After the first post about the idea, here you have the project page :-)

It was a long long journey started on December 17th, 2007, with more than 800 commits it has really been an hard work but we’re proud to tell everybody that P4A 3.0 is finally released!

Thank you everybody contributed to this wonderful release!

I suggest you to check the official release notes, they’re full of useful info and… For who was waiting… commercial license is available too.

Note: the image at the top is just a humorous revisitation of P4A logo with some “300 the movie” effect :-) hope you enjoyed.

Learn how to use the P4A_DB_Navigator and take a look at its drag&drop features on P4A TV.

We’re finally doing the final fine tuning and preparing for the big bang that is planned for next Tuesday, 24th June 2008.

In the meanwhile, please help us with a few clicks:

• nominate P4A for the SourceForge 2008 community choice awards
• rate P4A on freshmeat
• leave a comment about P4A on freshmeat
• rate/review P4A on ohloh

See you on Tuesday :-)

… if the servers are down?

UPDATE: mozilla.com is up now but pointing to a strange release candidate page (showing 2.0 releases + some 3.0 rc3).

UPDATE 2: mozilla.com is down again (Http/1.1 Service Unavailable).

UPDATE 3: yeah, firefox 3 is out, really :-)

I used Arch Linux from 2004 to 2006 with pleasure, with my company we also founded the Arch Linux Italian Community (managed by us ’till 2007, now it’s managed by the community itself) because we really loved this distro. In 2006 I decided to switch to Ubuntu because I switched to a laptop and I needed an easy wireless configuration and an easier printer configuration ’cause I was moving from office to office every day… but that’s another story.

Today I decided to give Arch a try to see what’s happened in these 2 years (actually I’m not in love with Ubuntu anymore, I can’t understand why but it’s far to be “stable” on my machines…) and also because I always liked the rolling release philosophy but AFAIK there’s no big distro using that (Arch apart).

1 - installation
The ISOs available on arch’s website are quite old, the latest is 2007.08-2, I think it’s time for an update. Anyway that’s not a big problem because I downloaded the FTP installer thus every package is downloaded from the Internet.

Here come the first real pain: the FTP installer ISO can’t install because of an annoying bug due to the updated pacman formats (actually it was easy to fix but they really need to release a working ISO).

2 - installing a graphic environment
I’m a gnome addicted thus I went into the newly installed system and typed the “pacman -Sy xorg xf86-video-ati gnome gdm”, waited a bit and then tried to configure X following the arch’s guide (note: I think that guide is definitively too long but let’s go ahead). None of the methods in the guide worked completely, hwd (which seems something old to me but maybe I’m wrong) printed out a bunch of errord, “X -configure” did not detect my resolution (1280×800, quite default on laptops), xf86config is terrible and I don’t want to see it ’till the end of the days.

The result is that I had to configure some things manually editing the xorg.conf…

3 - sound
Logging into gnome I found that sound wasn’t working (the volume applet was throwing an error about no devices found) thus I installed the whole gnome-extras metapackage which contains the gnome-audio. Anyway nothing. Ok, I didn’t take time to read a guide about audio while I should.

4 - wi-fi
I really need wi-fi, I saw that arch’s NetworkManager package was quite old so I decided to try wicd, installed it but nothing, it keep saying that I’ve no wireless card. Again, I didn’t take time to read a guide about wi-fi while I should.

5 - fonts
On my laptop the gnome’s fonts were horrible thus I looked for documentation and I found this arch’s fonts guide but… when I saw that I had to remove packages and install other ones from AUR I quit.

6 - conclusion
Arch needs more time and love than what I could give her today but it seemed to me that it has not evolved too much in the latest years and it should definitively be easier to setup, let me say KISS also for users and not only for the distro itself :-)

I’m sure the distro is great but I can’t take all that effort to configure it to have a decent desktop, I’m really sorry to say that and I don’t know no one to be offended by my words.

idea
Did someone ever created a newbie friendly auto-configuring live-cd based on arch? I think it would rock! (I’m so sorry I really have no time to work on that)

I spend some hours working on the new P4A wiki that’s finally open for contributions, I finished some guides:

• migrate your P4A 2 applications to P4A 3
• P4A 3 color schemas
• P4A 3 icons packs

and I’m working on the new P4A manual which is definitively a long work and would really need your help.

I think that we can expect the final P4A 3 release in a few days :-)

Check the new video on P4A TV

Todady I had a couple of spare hours so I wanted to try working on something about javascript and jQuery.

AFAIK jQuery and jQuery UI are missing a borderlayout, something like extjs’ one (check it out, it’s beautiful), so, after the jQuery UI 1.5 release, I thought to start creating one (thinking to P4A 3.2…).

The code is really early stage but it’s quite working cross-browser too, I did a quick screencast:

What do you think about this? Is someone interested in the project?

UPDATE: after some work the code is faster and bulletproof, take a look at it here:

Someone interested in having this code released as a jQuery plugin? Let me know. :-)

UPDATE 2: the project has been released, check it out!