BOSS 3.0 Release Notes(September 2008)

Localization Support

BOSS 3.0 Desktop is available in almost all the Indian Languages such as Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani,Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu.

Web Browser

 BOSS 3.0 comes with the latest version of Iceweasel(Firefox-3.0) browser.

Features

One-Click Bookmarking

Clicking on the star icon at the end of the location bar bookmarks a site. Double click the star icon to choose where to save it and whether to tag it. File the bookmarked sites in easy-to-access folders and organize according to theme (like “job search” or “favorite shopping”). Find your bookmarked sites in a flash by entering the tag, page or bookmark name into the location bar. The more you use your tags and bookmark names in the location bar, the more the system will adapt to your preferences.

  

Instant WebsiteID

Want to be extra sure about a site’s legitimacy before you make a purchase? Click on a site favicon for an instant identity overview. Clicking on “More Information...” digs deeper: how many times have you visited? Are your passwords saved? Check up on suspicious sites, avoid Web forgeries and make sure a site is what it claims to be.

Anti-Malware

Firefox 3 protects you from viruses, worms, trojan horses and spyware. If you accidentally access an attack site, you’ll receive a full-sized browser message as a warning.

Anti-Phishing

Shop and do business safely on the Internet. Firefox gets a fresh update of web forgery sites 48 times in a day, so if you try to visit a fraudulent site that’s pretending to be a site you trust (like your bank), a browser message—big as life—will stop you.

 Password Manager

We’ve seamlessly integrated this feature into your surfing experience. Choose to “remember” site passwords without intrusive pop-ups. Now you’ll see the “remember password” notification integrated into your view at the top of the site page.

 Pop-Up Blocker

 Banish pop-ups (and pop-under windows) from your surfing experience once and for all.

 Tags

Label a site with names or categories that are meaningful to you. For example, you can label the site www.forums.bosslinux.in with the “boss” tag as well as the “forums” tag, plus give www.bosslinux.in the “boss” tag, too. When you enter “boss” into the location bar, both sites will be shown as results. A single site can have multiple tags, and there’s no limit to the number of tags you can create. You may not remember the exact name of a site, but with a tag, you’ll be able to find it in a way that makes sense to you.

A quick way to get to the sites you love—even the ones with addresses you only vaguely remember. The new Firefox 3 location bar learns as you use it—it’s so highly evolved that we like to call it the “Awesome Bar”. Over time, it adapts to your preferences and offers better fitting matches. Type in a term and the autocomplete function includes possible matching sites from your browsing history, as well as sites you’ve bookmarked and tagged in a drop down. For example, you could enter the tag: “boss” to find “www.bosslinux.in”. Matched terms are highlighted, making the list of results easy to scan.

Add-ons Manager

You can now find and install add-ons directly in your browser. You no longer need to visit the add-ons Web site, simply fire up the new Add-ons Manager by clicking Tools -> Add-ons

Download Manager

An all new manager lets you download seamlessly, with even greater security. A pause and resume feature means there’s no need to wait for a download to finish before you disconnect. So, if you’re halfway through the latest White Stripes album and it’s time to catch the bus, just pause and pick up downloading when you get home. The resume function also works if your system crashes or is forced to restart. The manager shows your download progress and lets you search your files by name or the Web address where the download came from.

Session Restore 

If Firefox unexpectedly closes, you don’t have to spend time recovering data or retracing your steps through the Web. If you’re in the middle of typing an email, you’ll pick up where you left off, even down to the last word you typed. Session Restore instantly brings back your windows and tabs, restoring text you entered and any in-progress downloads. Restart the browser without losing your place after you install an add-on or software update. 

Full Zoom

Visit your favorite news page and read the caption under the picture—or view the picture itself in a size you can see. An elegant new zoom feature lets you swoop in and see entire web pages. They scale in the way you’d expect them to, with all the elements of a page’s layout expanding equally, so you can zero in on what matters.

 Save on Exit

Now when you open Firefox, your tabs and windows look just like they did when you closed it down. No need to reopen all your windows each time you start a session.

If you accidentally close a tab, you can reopen it in one click. Just view Recently Closed Tabs in the History menu and select the tab you’d like to reopen.

 Drag & Reorder Tabs

Get your sites in order. Simply arrange the order of your tabs by dragging them in one swift move of your mouse

GNOME's Evince Document viewer, for PDF and Postscript files now supports interactive PDF forms, allowing you to enter information into a PDF that you receive, to save or print. 

Sound & Video

BOSS doesn't provide all the multimedia codecs by default, due to the need to obtain patent licenses for some codecs in some countries. This means that applications cannot always read every file format by default. But applications such as GNOME's video player, Totem, now offer these new codecs to the user for installation.

Text Editor

GNOME's simple but powerful text editor, gedit, has an all-new syntax-highlighting system which now supports syntax highlighting for scripting languages such as PHP and Ruby even when embedded in HTML, as well as highlighting of text such as "TODO" or "FIXME" inside code comments, and highlighting of gtk-doc source code documentation.

You can even choose from several color schemes in case you are already familiar with the colors used by a different text editor.

The Nautilus file manager now shows more information in the "Properties" window for drives, including a pie graph that easily shows how much space is left.

The file-roller archive manager can now open and save archives from networked locations, such as mounted ssh:// servers, by using the same gnome-vfs system that is already used by other GNOME applications. It is also now possible to copy/paste and drag-and-drop files between archives.

Window Selector Applet

For GNOME 2.20, the control panels have been reorganized slightly to reduce the number of control panels, making it easier to find what you need.

Theme, Background, Fonts, and Interface applets have been merged to create this new applet, simplifying the Preferences menu.

In addition, some of the Accessibility preferences have been moved to a new tab in the Preferred Applications control panel.

Protecting data from unauthorized access

BOSS 3.0 includes seahorse – An application to protect your files/folders and data from unauthorized access .  

For more information visit http://wiki.bosslinux.in/wiki/index.php/How_to_encrypt_a_file/folder

Power Management

Screensaver

The GNOME Screensaver now allows people to leave you a note while your screen is locked, by clicking the "Leave Message" button. You'll see these messages when you login.

Accessibility

BOSS Presentation Tool

BOSS Presentation Tool has enhanced features  in BOSS 3.0

• Any number of transitions can be applied
• The presentation can be started from any page no

• The run-time of the presentation can be specified which will be indicated by a bar at the bottom of the presentation.

• Instead of normal mouse pointer an image can be used as mouse pointer

The current BOSS GNU/Linux release, 3.0, contains a complete, binary distribution for the following architectures:
i386-this covers PCs based on Intel and compatible processors, including Intel's 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II (both Klamath and Celeron), and Pentium III, and most compatible processor by AMD.

More information on BOSS GNU/Linux

Further reading

Beyond these release notes and the installation guide, further documentation on BOSS GNU/Linux is available from the BOSS Website, Here one can get .iso images of all BOSS version, Developere's Docs, User manual and many more. For full details of the existing resources give a look at BOSS Website,

Getting BOSS GNU/Linux

You can get BOSS 3.0 in two ways:

To get BOSS 3.0 DVD sent a request to bosslinux@cdac.in mentioning your full contact address with phone no.

Getting help

There are many sources of help, advice and support for BOSS users, but these should only be considered if research into documentation of the issue has exhausted all sources. This section provides a short introduction into these which may be helpful for new BOSS users.