An interview with Shane Coughlan to tell us more about Project Liberation.
What is Project Liberation?
It's a new project from Shane Land based on the old OpenGEM Experimental software. It's basically a GEM distribution that uses a lot of FreeGEM extensions to the DR GEM code, and because of this it's a lot more advanced than previous versions of OpenGEM. Project Liberation can do a lot more than any previous version of OpenGEM could hope to accomplish. It is the foundation on which we'll build OpenGEM 5.
What type of advanced features does it have?
Project Liberation can automatically detect new drives when it starts. It will add your hard drives and CD drives neatly to your desktop, and it'll dynamically scan for new drives each time you restart it. It has a great internal file viewer that allows you to peak inside many common file types without needing an additional application. It's small because of this. Project Liberation also has nice new 3D windows, window animation, and a new icon and pointer set.
Why are new icons and pointers important?
OpenGEM has never been about eye-candy. We've been about function. However, this does not mean aesthetics are not important to us. GEM has begun to look awfully dated, and it was time for an overhaul. Additionally, we need to consider things like usability. Project Liberation has new colors as well as new icons and pointers, and the combined effect is to make it easier to distinguish things. It's easier to know what window is in focus, it's easier to see what's a drive (and what type of drive it is). There are important factors in making it a better user experience.
How close is Project Liberation to official release?
Project Liberation is officially released. You can download it from our website. It's just beta software. That's why it's called a 'project' rather than a 'product.' Project Liberation will never stop being beta software. It's code will simply turn into OpenGEM 5 when it's mature. It's hard to say when that will be. At the time of this interview, Project Liberation is at Beta 3, and it appears to be as stable as OpenGEM 4. However, we'll want to add new features and build a lot of support documentation before turning it into OpenGEM 5. We want to make sure the transition from OpenGEM 4 to OpenGEM 5 is as smooth as possible, and we want to make sure OpenGEM 5 will be a significant improvement on what we already have.
Is Project Liberation compatible with OpenGEM 4?
Oh yes! 100%! Project Liberation is 100% compatible with OpenGEM 1, OpenGEM 2, OpenGEM 3, OpenGEM 4, DR GEM and FreeGEM. One of our main goals as software producers is to make a good user experience, and consistency is a big part of that. We don't want to break code, or change the way you work. We want to keep making things better inside the framework of GEM. Any application for GEM is perfectly transportable across the different distributions. And, if you make an application for OpenGEM 4, it'll work perfectly with Project Liberation and the forthcoming OpenGEM 5. It'll even automatically assume the new features, like the great new system font.
Would you recommend replacing my existing OpenGEM distribution with Project Liberation?
If you use OpenGEM Experimental, you should upgrade right away. You can do this through the OpenGEM Experimental Release 4 Update 5 patch. However, if you use OpenGEM Core or Complete, I would suggest holding off from upgrading to Project Liberation. It's not intended as a stable system replacement. When it's all working, and when all the new features are included, we'll release it as OpenGEM 5. At that point you'll be able to update OpenGEM 4 distributions using a simple update patch.
