Lumina Desktop 1.3.0 released with new media player and material icon theme

The Lumina Desktop team has announced release of version 1.3.0, latest stable release of independent, lightweight and simple desktop environment developed by TrueOS project. This release comes with various visual and functional improvements and other under the hood improvements to provide better performance.

Lumina Desktop 1.3.0 comes with a brand new media player, which can play audio and video files present in local and also remote streams. It provides a simple interface with which users can play their media files with minimal distraction.

Media Player in Lumina Desktop (Credit : Lumina project)

The default Oxygen icon theme in Lumina Desktop is replaced by a material inspired icon theme developed by Lumina project itself. It comes both in dark and white variations.

The Insight file manager of Lumina Desktop comes with various performance and visual improvements. One functional improvement is tree view enabled, which facilitate browsing files in very trivial way.

All highlights in Lumina Desktop 1.3.0 can be listed as:

• New Utility: lumina-mediaplayer. Lumina Media Player is a graphic interface for the Qt QMediaPlayer Class, with Pandora internet radio streaming integration. Lumina Media Player supports many audio formats, including .ogg, .mp3, .mp4, .flac, and .wmv. It is also possible to increase the number of playable formats by installing gstreamer-plugins. This utility is found in the Applications → Utilities section, or opened by typing lumina-mediaplayer in a command line.
• New Utility: lumina-xdg-entry. This is another simple utility designed to help users create .desktop entries and shortcuts. Find it in the Utilities application category, or open it by typing lumina-xdg-entry in a command line.
• lumina-desktop:
  • Desktop folders are integrated, and can now be manipulated directly from the desktop.
  • Added the automatic settings migration of a desktop monitor (single monitor only, for now).
  • Numerous speed and performance improvements with how icons load and the system interacts with the desktop.
• lumina-fm:
  • Now fully integrated with lumina-archiver.
  • A “System directory” tree pane is available. Options to enable/disable it are being added later, as it is on by default.
  • Numerous speed improvements with caching and loading icons.
• lumina-texteditor:
  • There is a new json manifest file format for syntax highlighting support. Users can open this file, customize their highlighting options, and immediately see their changes without rebuilding the utility.
  • The text editor now supports more than 10 different file formats.
  • Added options for file-wide preferences in syntax files. Options include: word wrap, character per line limits, excess whitespace highlighting, font style restrictions, and tab-width settings.
  • lte supports tabs with detach, drag’n’drop, and location customization with the View menu option.
  • Add checkable menu option to show the “unsaved changes” dialogue box on close.
• lumina-screenshot:
  • Adjustments to the lumina-screenshot interface.
  • Add an adjustable warning to lumina-screenshot when closing with an unsaved image.
  • Add functionality to select a specific area of the screen for screenshots.
• lumina-archiver:
  • Functionality improvements.
  • Bug fixes.
  • Interface changes.

You can also find original release announcement in Lumina project blog.

Lumina Desktop 1.2.0 released; Prime focus is on enhancements

Celebrating the beginning of new year, the TrueOS developers has announced release of Lumina Desktop 1.2.0, latest updated release of lightweight, fully functional desktop environment for unix like systems.

Past year, 2016 was a eventful year for Lumina Desktop as the first release of project 1.0 was released and an updated bug fixes release 1.1 was released later. 2017 is also expected to be another big year for Lumina as the there are several tasks on queue such implementation of own window manager. The release of v1.2 can be seen as an indication of upcoming events in 2017.

Lumina Desktop 1.2 is mainly focusing on enhancement of current system in terms of bug fixes, performance and stability improvements. It also includes some new plugins and other updated packages. By keeping inline with main focus of minimalism, this release eliminates several unused things.

First, the LuminaUtils library has been completely dismantled and is no longer installed or required as part of the Lumina infrastructure. Instead, the files within the library are broken into small, nearly standalone modules within the source tree so each tool can build or incorporate just the necessary class(es) directly into the utility itself. This results in faster and more stable binaries without the need to load any additional libraries on the system.  Second, we are putting a lot more work into depreciating external utilities and moving toward using the same libraries that Qt itself requires or uses (such as the XCB libraries on X11 systems). This phase is not yet finished, but we are making significant progress and expect to announce a large reduction in runtime dependencies later this year.

For more details, see release announcement published in projects website.

Lumina Desktop 1.0.0 released

The Lumina Desktop team has announced release of Lumina Desktop 1.0.0, first stable release of lightweight, highly customizable desktop environment for Unix like systems. Lumina Desktop is flagship desktop environment for PC-BSD, however it can also work in other distributions sharing the same core.

The soul idea behind Lumina Desktop is to provide a simple, robust desktop environment that configured to match with everyones needs. It took almost for years to unveil first stable release of this project. The development team is constantly looking to improve this desktop environment in next phases of development.

Some key features of Lumina Desktop includes:

• Completely customizable interface! Rather than having to learn how to use a new layout, change the desktop to suit you instead!
• Simple shortcuts for any application! The “favorites” system makes it easy to find and launch applications at any time.
• Extremely lightweight! Allows applications to utilize more of your system hardware and revitalizes older systems!
• Multiple-monitor support! Each monitor is treated as an independent entity – making it great for presentation systems which use a temporary monitor or for workstations which utilize an array of monitors for various tasks.
• Personalize the initial settings for users with a single configuration file!  
• Easily ported to various operating systems (OS), with various optional features setup within a single source file for each OS. Already ported to several BSD distributions like TrueOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, NetBSD and linux distributions like Debian, Gentoo, kFreeBSD, generic “Linux”

For more information on this stunning desktop environment, see release announcement published by project.

Lumina Desktop 0.9.0 released with desktop compositing

Mr Ken Moore of PC-BSD announced release of Lumina Desktop 0.9.0, latest development release of Fluxbox based, modern, lightweight, user friendly desktop environment for BSD distributions like PC-BSD and FreeBSD. It is expected that, first stable release of Lumina Desktop, version 1.0, will be ready by end of the year aligned with PC-BSD 11.0.

Lumina Desktop 0.9.0 comes with a set of nice features including composting effect(window transparency), a brand new text editor, new set of wall papers ..etc.

Following are changes introduced in Lumina Desktop 0.9.0 since after previous development release, Lumina Desktop 0.8.8.

Visual Changes:

• Change the default wallpapers for Lumina/PC-BSD and add some more 4K Lumina wallpapers.
• Significant update to lumina-screenshot. Now there is quicksave/open button for opening a full editor, windows to snapshot may now be clicked on to select them rather than using the list of open windows, and screenshots may be cropped as needed within the utility before saving them to a file.
• New Utility: lumina-textedit. This is a simple plaintext editor with syntax highlighting, find/replace support, line numbers, and bracket highlighting.
• The Lumina theme engine will no longer use stylesheets to modify non-desktop applications (including the Lumina tools/utilities). This opens the door for a full Qt5 theme plugin to be used for non-desktop utilities instead.

Backend Changes:

• Update which XDG mime-types are used for the default web browser and file manager. This should make it align a bit better with what applications expect (if they try to read/use the database directly – such as some popular web browsers do).
• Some minor updates for Linux harddrive device detection (“nvme” devices).
• Add Gentoo Linux support and an “ebuild” file.
• Cleanup some minor source syntax issues with Qt 5.6
• Fix up a number of multi-monitor issues. Screen resizes/changes will now be properly detected on the fly (on any system – including VM’s), and panels will be placed properly on monitors not aligned with the y=0 axis.
• Ensure the current system volume gets saved on logout so it can be reloaded on next login (in case the volume was changed by some external tool during the session).
• New startup binary: “start-lumina-desktop”. This will be used as the primary “entry point” for launching the desktop as opposed to the “Lumina-DE” binary (Please adjust your .xinitrc files and wrapper scripts as needed). The xsession desktop entry that Lumina installs was already changed to run this tool instead, so graphical desktop managers should be unaffected by this change. This tool will eventually be used to perform the X session setup/configuration (so CLI users will not need to run xinit or startx directly anymore), but the X integration has not been implemented yet.
• Update the FreeBSD appstore shortcut to point to the new appcafe.desktop file from PC-BSD.

Organizational changes:

• Cleanup a lot of old shell scripts from the source tree (not needed for builds any more)
• Streamline the build procedures a little bit.
• Completely reorganize the source tree. Now all the Lumina tools/utilities are kept separate from the general build scripts/files within a src-qt5 directory, and additionally organized into categories (core, core-utils, desktop-utils). Automated build systems should not be impacted by this change, as the main project file (lumina.pro) has been left in the same place within the repository and just had all the internal paths adjusted accordingly.

Bug Fixes:

• Make all the installed desktop entries use relative paths for the icons (better cross-OS support).
• Fix up the detection of “sloppy” URL’s given to lumina-open.
• Adjust one of the include files for the Lumina library so that now external applications can link against the lib without the availability of the Lumina source tree (although still not recommended).
• Stability fix for the desktop when an invalid desktop plugin is set/registered.

For more information, see official release announcement published by Lumina Desktop team.