Originally set up to meet the Unity Linux core branding demands, the Graphics Team will also participate in any design and artwork-related needs for branches.

For the primary Unity Linux logo, they are presently at the black-and-white ideas stage.  From there, they will get deeper into a general visual identity, colour scheme and such.

To follow what’s going on, check out:

• Graphics Team blog. (RSS)
• Planet Unity aggregate blog, which will include Unity Linux-specific graphics updates.  (RSS, Atom)
• Graphics Team mailing list. (Feeds)

Any major announcements will also be made here and through the usual channels.

The existing forum posting and forum RSS concept was too spammy on everyone’s list of new posts.  The 140-character Twitter limit was too restrictive for our needs, so a SourceForge RPM commits feed has been set up:

• Web-viewable
• RSS feed

One of our developers, David, has been working on the ability for community members to browse and possibly even install software via web browser. The first step in getting this type of system online has been accomplished. On behalf of David, I’d like to introduce the rpmfind utility for Unity Linux.  Using this utility, users will be able to quickly find packages that they’re looking for.  This is also the first step toward a truly fantastic package browsing and searching interface.

As some of you know, Granular Linux developers are also part of the Unity development team here.  Granular (specifically, Anurag Bhandari) designed a truly magnificant web interface for packages in the Granular Project.

Both of these tools attempt to accomplish the same thing.  These two developers are putting their heads together to give us a package interface worth browsing for project Unity.  The ultimate goal would be to have user reviews, screenshots, and robust package descriptions.  Look for more to come on this endeavor as David and Anurag move closer to their goal.

Another development on this front: two other developers (gri6507 and Didouph) have expressed interest in setting up graphviz attached to our package tracker.  In this instance, graphviz would draw package dependencies with mindmap-like relationships for packages they might be working with:

Not only will this help packagers, but it can also help users to see exact representations of dependencies and possibly to spot bugs if we miss a dependency!  Stay tuned for more…we’re finishing up a 3rd development snapshot soon and the 2.6.29 kernel has moved into our snapshot.  While this isn’t publicly available…it brings us one step closer to an alpha/beta release of core that people will be able to play with.  Thanks for reading and look for more info on our package tracker in the future.