ROSA DESKTOP 2012 Release Candidate

System components

Kernel 3.6.7 with nrj patches to improve work at Desktops. Vanilla, PAE and RT kernels are available in repositories, as well.
Kernels with CK1 +BFS +BFQ +TOI support are prepared, as well
XServer 13 with the latest drivers. When migrating to a new version, we have tried to preserve support for old video cards as much as possible.
Mesa 9
Systemd 194
Dracut 024
Grub 2
Qt4 4.8.4
Plasma Desktop 4.9.4
Firefox 17
Thunderbird 17
LibreOffice 3.6.2
Chromium 23.0.1271.95
ffmpeg 1.0.1
RPM 5.4.10
gcc 4.7
glibc 2.15

The latest versions of firmware and proprietary drivers are available in repositories, as well.

EFI/UEFI support is integrated in the main ISO images (a signed loader to work with SecureBoot is expected to appear in the release).
After installation, GRUB2 automatically detects and sets up the best screen resolution for the system
Install in basic mode boot item is added to be able to launch installer on as many hardware as possible. Use this mode if you are experiencing problems with normal mode.
Live and Install modes use text-mode plymouth theme to speed up booting.
Bot services are optimized to speed up overall system boot time
Added items to enable hibernating

A set of issues with hardware detection was solved:

Improved support for modern devices and graphic cards
Fixed problem with OSS functionality. Use cuse and ossp to work with OSS.
Fixed issues with Synaptic touchpads.
Fixed a set of issues with printer detection.
Reworked firmaware handling and loading. In particular, now proper wi-fi modules are always loaded correctly and wi-fi work is much more stable.
Improved work with modems. Implemented request for PIN code.
Improved stability of network connections managed by NetworkManager. Fixed issues with DNS record handling.

Plasma Desktop load time is decreased significantly (the gain varies from 30% to 40% depending on hardware configuration).

Totally renewed graphic theme:
- new GRUB2 them. ROSA patches for GRUB2 developed to make it possible to apply such a theme are pushed to Upstream;

- KSplash, KDM and desktop now use unified themes.
- More then 30 new items are added to ROSA brand-name set of icons. In addition, icons were improved for better integration not only with KDE, but with GNOME 3, too.

- QgtkStyleAlt theme engined developed by ROSA is enhanced with possibilities to drag windows of KDE applications by menu and toolbar without a need to press any additional acceleration keys.
- ROSA brand-name desktop theme is reworked significantly: the appearance became more contemporary, the areas that can be used to drag a window are now highlighted explicitly, and so on;

Lots of improvements in the major component of semantic desktop - TimeFrame 2.0:
- Added possibility to send messages to social networking services (these features are not included in the ISO image at the moment but available in repositories);
- fixed issue which allowed to post empty comments for messages;
- renewed graphical theme;
- overall refactoring was performed which allowed to improve speed and response time.

KLook is updated to 2.0, the new features include:
- Possibility to work with remote file systems using SMB, WebDav, FTP and other popular protocols. If the file being opened with KLook is an image or multimedia file then it is automatically downloaded to a temporary place and displayed, otherwise general information about the file is displayed.
- Lots of optimizations were performed in the rendering process that allowed to significantly increase quality of the image shown.

Many issues and errors are fixed in the RocketBar panel:
- thanks to different optimizations, RocketBar now consumes less resources;
- implemented correct integration of LibreOffice and Mozilla Thunderbird applications.

In the StackFolder tool, several issues were fixed and memory leaks were detected and eliminated when working with images of large size.

ROSA Media Player has got a renewed graphical theme and several bug fixes:
- Fixed issues with rendering of background of a video playback window;
- fixed issue with streaming mms-video playback (both in the player itself and in the Internet browser integration plugin);
- dropped ISO files support in ROMP for Windows;
- for DVD devices the /dev/cdrom device file is used by default if /dev/dvd is absent in the system.

Fixed issues with Samba in KDE4;
The KDE4 Font Settings modules now has possibility to disable bytecode interpreter. This allows to improve appearance of some fonts in cases when sub-pixel rendering is not used.

Fixed issue with Inkscape crashing in some situations when displaying "Open File" and similar dialogue windows.
A new YouMagic application - a SIP-client developed by МТТ mobile operator - is added to the default ISO image. More details here: http://www.youmagic.com.
Default ISO image now contains popular games - KMines, KLines and KPatience.