February 11th, 2016

Lumina Desktop Getting Ready for FreeBSD 11.0

Larry the BSD Guy

The BSD licensed Lumina Desktop aims to release version 1.0 in July.

It appears the sun is rising on Lumina.

Ken Moore, the lead developer for the BSD-based Lumina Desktop Environment, announced that another step towards the release of a full-fledged desktop environment for BSD variants (and Linux distros, for that matter) has been achieved with the release of version 0.8.8 yesterday.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Lumina Desktop Environment — let’s just call it Lumina for short — is a lightweight, XDG-compliant, BSD-licensed desktop environment focusing on getting work done while minimizing system overhead. Specifically designed for PC-BSD and FreeBSD, it has also been ported to many other BSD variants and Linux distros. Lumina is based on the Qt graphical toolkit and the Fluxbox window manager, and uses a small number of X utilities for various tasks.

Moore said in his announcement that he, along with his team, are targeting the release of Lumina version 1.0 to coincide with the release of FreeBSD 11.0 in July, “but that schedule is also subject to change a bit as needed down the road.”

“This release primarily contains bug fixes, interface tweaks, and some small expansions of current functionality,” Moore writes. “In addition to this, we also now have support for NetBSD systems out of the box.”

A list of developments – including feature updates, translation improvements and bug fixes – can be found on the announcement page. For further information on the desktop environment, you can visit this page.

Many of you know me as dyed-in-the-wool Xfce guy, but I’m no stranger to window managers like Fluxbox (and Openbox for that matter, which CrunchBang used back in the day). You can be sure I’m looking forward to giving Lumina a shot once it’s ready for prime time, and I’ll give you the details once I do.

One more thing: It happened again. Apparently BSD might be too scary for the general public – at least in the cafes I frequent. My early-morning MO at one cafe which, sadly, isn’t Firefly Coffee House (it’s not open this early, Caitlin — I’m sorry!) entails my setting up my ThinkPad, pushing the on button, and then going to the counter to order. Earlier this week — Monday to be exact — a guy yelled at me from the back of the cafe, “Hey, man, you’re computer’s freaking out.” I walked back to the ThinkPad to see PC-BSD going through its normal start-up paces, and I explained to the concerned fellow that this is normal for the operating system. “It’s telling me exactly what it’s doing,” I explained, though it did start me on a search for a “quiet” boot mode, if one exists. Cue the helpful BSD folks to offer multiple suggestions, which is one of the great things I am finding about this community.

See you next week.

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