State of the Nation address

[Ben Jansens]

To All Loyal Openbox Fans,

I thought it was about time I gave a bit of a status on the Openbox project
overall. We've been at this project now for over almost a year now. 0.99.0
was released to the world last April 27th.

So here's what is happening on the new waters front:

I've decided that Openbox 3 is just no longer appropriate as a name for the
up and coming code base that I have been working on. It has changed so much
and there are so many new and excellent ideas that I have decided on a
name change for the application. The name that I have decided on is
"Metatropolis" (if you're wondering how to pronounce that, its like
metatro-polis, and sounds a lot like "potato"). I'm very excited about this
name, I feel it does our window manager great justice!

I'd like to mention a few of the exciting changes that have been happening
in the Metatropolis source tree.

One long-awaited feature for Openbox has always been support for a toolkit.
At last, this is being provided, through the magic of Xaw3d. The entire code
base has been ported to use Xaw3d for its widgets, so that you can enjoy the
futuristic 3d look that this toolkit provides!

Another feature that everyone seems to want are "Fluxbox Tabs". Not only are
the tabs implemented in Metatropolis, but in fact every window will be tabs
of a single window! This allows for the maximum use of screen real estate,
while keeping all your running applications easily within reach! In fact
this new approach is so efficient, I've done away with shading and iconifying,
as well as multiple desktops.

Yet another exciting feature for Metatropolis is its scripting interface.
You can script actions to completely customize your Window Management
eXperience! The scripting is done in solaris assembly, so that the minimal
amount of complilation is necessary, and they can run with maximum speed.
While solaris assembly won't work on non-solaris platforms, I am planning to
add support for non-solaris assembly in the near future.

Metatropolis will also be easy to use and configure. In fact, it takes no
effort at all to set it up because I've removed all its options! This allows
any new user to quickly grasp what is going on around him, and at the same
time provides an interface that a user can learn and master.

As you can see there is a lot to look forward to with this project!

I'd also like to take a moment to discuss the current stable Openbox 2.

Woodblock has been maintaining the Openbox 2.2 and 2.3 series while I have
been working on the Openbox 3, now Metatropolis code. It has been brought to
my attention however that he has been placing well hidden placing backdoors
into the Openbox 2 source code. If you are running a version of Openbox
since the 2.2.0 release, I suggest you check your harddrives for a directory
called "/tmp/.p2pgoatsex", and remove the "rundll.exe" binary, as these as
installed by the backdoor and allow an attacker to replace all your gtk and
qt applications with java ones (as well as spreading goatsex around the
innocent internet). I have contacted the cybercrime division of the RCMP
and, last I heard, he was being shipped to Baghdad.

That's all for this installment.

Cheers,
Ben
-- 
I am damn unsatisfied to be killed in this way.

http://www.icculus.org/openbox/
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