Fedora and openSUSE Linux Drop drive efforts

Canonical made quite a splash of autumn, when it announced that the interface units used in his edition of Ubuntu Netbook would become the default interface of the Linux distribution as well as desktop version starting with version 11.04 or narwhal Natty.

Previously used Ubuntu, GNOME shell by default. Conflicts on design issues between Canonical and the GNOME project, however, apparently caused canonical move instead to shell and 3D multitouch enabled units.

Not long after the announcement of canonical, developers on projects both Fedora and openSUSE indicated that they would start implementing unit on their distributions as well. Whereas now, Ubuntu is the Linux distribution of no 1, according to Distrowatch, Fedora is no 3 and openSUSE is no. 5.

«Still stuck on this Bug»

"Unit of an interesting project," wrote Fedora Developer Adam Williamson back in December. "I want to look at and compare it with GNOME Shell and I think very few others do too, so it looks nice a package so that you can run both on Fedora."

This week, however, both efforts apparently stuck.

Williamson of Fedora, for example, said on Monday that he "had little time or inclination to do much with unit/Poulsbo.

"The drive is still stuck on this bug that promised the upstream maintainer to look after Christmas (I presented Last change prompted on Jan 25, and it was crickets from)," explained, noting that his work effort is entirely voluntary. "If I had the inclination might have set up a repo for side carry on building stuff, or spied on ajax to include the patch anyway. Only I didn't. "

"Lack of satisfactory"

Nelson Marques of the openSUSE project, meanwhile, has encountered similar obstacles.

Marques "packaging unit was much of a problem, but the implementation is to be translated in frustration," he wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. That "and the lack of satisfactory results may lead to situations pre-burnout, and not I'm walking that road."

Marques cited problems encountered as part of his frustration, including "Compiz git different behaviour on different snapshots", and "gconf defaults requests from the drive and backup and restore operations from openSUSE defaults."

Compiz is a window manager that is used by default to unity in narwhal Natty.

"Maybe it's wiser to wait for some more development from upstream, before examining the question," concluded Marques. "openSUSE is supposed to be stable and reliable, and I don't see this branch of Compiz correspond to those two quality yet."

Ubuntu is isolated

Both developers did welcome the involvement of other stakeholders in the effort, and Marques said that he would look into it later, "once there is an official release of Compiz from branch that you need for unity".

In the meantime, however, seems narwhal Natty--whose final version is expected to be published at the end of April--will be the only one with the unit turned on by default, at least for the foreseeable future.

The unit can now be seen in the second alpha version of Natty, which is now available for download on the Ubuntu site. A video on YouTube shows the release in action. If you have checked out the new interface, please share your impressions in comments.

Follow Katherine Noyes on Twitter: @ Noyesk.