ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 Operating System

ROSA company is pleased to announce a new operating system for desktops - ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012.
The product is targeted at enthusiasts who are likely to appreciate the wide choice of fresh
software components. ROSA Fresh edition is a non-commercial product distributed free of charge.

ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 is a new name for a line of non-commercial desktop operating systems
developed by ROSA. The name underlines the fact that the system contains "fresh" versions of user
software and system components (compared to enterprise editions of ROSA). The system is compatible
with a wide range of modern hardware. 

While working on ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012, the ROSA team (which includes engineers from Russia,
Ukraine, Italy, Romania, USA, Brazil and other countries) have performed a great work. More than 1
million of lines of code were added or modified. We have even prepared a video clip that visualizes
that process.

Among major Fresh advantages one should mention excellent state of all repositories, stable work
and fast boot of the system as a whole. As experiments show, the system now boots two times faster
on averageis than its predecessor. It was achieved mainly due to improvements in ROSA ABF (software
build and development infrastructure) and active use of international testing and verification
practices. Besides, the developers accomplished migration to a new version of the package manager,
carried out much work on adapting distribution package base to new system components and fixed a
lot of issues with inter-package dependencies.

In addition, almost all user-level software was updated to the fresh versions. Nearly 16 thousand
packages were updated in our repositories. 

In ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 we continued development of ROSA brand-name products:

TimeFrame, as well as SimpleWelcome, was completely rewritten from scratch using the QML technology
which allowed to improve their performance.
Developers abandoned use of Plasma in SimpleWelcome, and this allowed to decrease memory usage and
significantly improved speed and stability.
The main new feature of TimeFrame is support for social network services. Now it is possible to use
Facebook and VKontakte without a browser. In addition, possibility to scroll time feed was
implemented which can be performed also by means of multi-gestures.
The new major feature in SimpleWelcome is possibility to group icons and preview of applications
included in the group. The "Welcome" tab got the possibility to pin icons to their positions. And
the icon size will be definitely appreciated by touchpad users.
The KLook tool was extended with possibility to work with remote file systems using SMB, FTP,
WebDav and other popular protocols. The image rendering quality was significantly improved.
A memory leak was eliminated in StackFolder when working with large images. Detailed documentation
was added which describes stack features and integration with KLook.
Several issues affecting stability were fixed in ROSA Media Player. The application got a new theme
that made it even more attractive.

Original design has always been one of the key features of ROSA products. Specifically for ROSA
Desktop.Fresh 2012, the brand-name graphical theme was significantly redesigned. The areas that can
be used for dragging application windows are now explicitly marked out. We continued the process of
style unification of different elements. For instance, a graphical bootloader theme was updated. As
a result, the system appearance became more consistent and contemporary.

Some of our improvements developed when working on ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 are now pushed to
upstream of different open source projects. For example, patches for improving work with remote
file systems will be available in KDE starting with Plasma Desktop version 4.10. And the GRUB2
project got support for displaying non-ASCII (e.g., Cyrillic) symbols in console and possibility
for custom decorations of inactive menu items. More details about these upstream contributions will
be available in the New Year's issue of "ROSA Planet" bulletin.

Fresh differs from its predecessors a lot. This platform was developed by ROSA company as an area
for experiments with the freshest software components. The distribution is targeted at community
users who are familiar with basic Linux components and want to get a product with a wide set of
customization and personalization possibilities.

Please reports any bugs and issues to our bugzilla.
You can check list of known issues of the release here.
You are welcome to discuss ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012 and ask your questions in our forums.
For more information please contact Konstantin Kochereshkin, ROSA PR-manager. Tel.: +7(495)
229-8812; e-mail: kocher@rosalab.ru 

P.S. During the work on ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012, we got a sad news about tragic death of Eugene
Dodonov, an active member of ROSA community. It was mainly to his efforts that the 2011 release of
our operating system saw the light. He was a leader of migration to RPM5 package manager in 2011.
And we would like to deedicate the release of our new operating system to him.

Original press-release: http://www.rosalab.com/blogs/rosa-desktopfresh-2012-opera... 

Links to Video and screenshots:
http://vimeo.com/55764790
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&...
http://cdn.2safe.com/20011033557/Fresh картинки 1.zip

-- 
С уважением,
Константин Кочерешкин
ЗАО "РОСА"
PR-менеджер
Тел.: (495) 229-8664
Моб.: 8-910-428-1319
E-mail: kocher@rosalab.ru
skype: kochereshkin
www.rosalab.ru