I was going to hold off on posting today until after I got finished going through my email and news feeds, but I decided there’s one bit of news that simply can’t wait. That’s right, Virginia, Mac4Lin 1.0 has finally been released!
We’ve been waiting for a while, but I think you’ll find it worth waiting for with all these improvements:
- Fully supports GNOME 2.26 and backwards compatible
- Improved support for GlobalMenu, support integrated in the default GTK theme
- Better native Xfce support
- Icon additions
- Statusbar is now fixed
- New progress bars
- New tabs
- Improved installation and uninstallation scripts
- Integrates well with Gloobus
- Finer UI refinements
- Metacity theme now supports different button sizes
- Firefox 3 themes are now updated
- Songbird plugins included
- Pidgin AWN 64bit plugin now included
- Fonts are now consolidated
- Transparent top panel
- GDM theme is now in-line with Mac OS X login window
- Cairo dock is the default recommended dock
The docs aren’t included in the release but we should have that posted in the next day or two, if not by the end of today. We ended up having one section of the docs added at the last minute and we’re simply needing to make sure it doesn’t need changing before we generate the PDF version.
There are a few known issues (in addition to the missing docs).
- There is an issue with how the installation script installs the Emerald themes. You will have to install them manually until we can get that fixed.
- The wallpapers aren’t showing up due to a permissions issue. It should be an easy fix for us and we’ll include them in the update already being planned. Until then you can always add them by hand from the Wallpapers folder where you extracted the .tar.gz.
- Usplash is still buggy (I hope to have that fixed today)
- Thunderbird theme is still buggy
- GDM theme is not automatically set by the script (this seems to be a GNOME limitation rather than a Mac4Lin issue)
There is one other thing that I just saw: The uninstall script will not actually remove your installed files. This is due to an issue in the bash script itself that we’re still having to deal with so we’ve disabled it for the time being.
Check out some screenshots on the official announcement, and if you run into any issues we haven’t covered in the documentation feel free to post them in our Ubuntu Forums support thread. Just please don’t post that there aren’t any instructions. We’ve already said we’re working on that.
Mac4Lin is a finalist!
Anirudh had some great news for us this week. You may remember that last month I shared with everyone that Mac4Lin was getting nominated for the 2009 edition of the SourceForge Community Choice Awards. Now we’ve learned that Mac4Lin was selected as one of the finalists, and it looks like the final voting should start around the 22nd. I’ll let you know when the voting is open.
15 June 2009 at 9:29 am
Um, first time I hear about this. Lol, apparently this project wants to add the name of “too cheap to buy a mac” to the linux users symptom list.
15 June 2009 at 12:01 pm
lol I hope not, just for how that sounds. We’re actually just trying to users more choices, but I am seeing that Mac4Lin is pretty popular among users.
15 June 2009 at 12:25 pm
Peng
I think your reply to Vadims cheep shot “to cheep to buy a Mac” was very classy. My response to the spoiled little rich kid wouldn’t have been as polite or reserved.
Will look forward to doing a test drive of Mac4Lin.
15 June 2009 at 12:31 pm
Vadim’s a good guy and a great source of Ubuntu info so I don’t want to slam him too hard.
We should have docs for you to use in a couple of days. I got a mess of edits to do before we publish the 1.0 docs this morning, and I hope to make them either this afternoon or tomorrow. (Yes, I’m doing most of the work on the docs, but I’m gladto be able to contribute even that much to such a nice bit of software.) But I’m getting a tooth (or two) taken out tomorrow morning so I can’t make any promises on how much work I’ll be able to do after I leave the dentist.
20 June 2009 at 4:04 pm
@Year One Online:
Good try. Too bad your comments show someone who couldn’t be bothered to look for an answer to their own comment. Welcome to my Spam list.
14 November 2009 at 1:42 pm
Is it already had a dock (avn/cairo) or we have to download ourselves… Im confuse here… When i see the folder, i see AVN, but it didnt come after i installed it… Please explain to me how it works
14 November 2009 at 2:00 pm
The docks are not a part of Mac4Lin and need to be installed seperately. This way users can pick which dock they prefer using. What we include is a theme for AWN and some plugins that you can use.
Just keep in mind that the theme, and maybe the plugins, are not written for the rewrite (trunk/testing) version of AWN. I’m waiting for theme support for the rewrite so I can try to get a Mac4Lin AWN theme working for it.I’m definitely looking forward to it because the AWN rewrite is damned sweet.