The first day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Boston ended. It is quite nice to see a lot of people from other projects and distribution here around. Furthermore juding from the number of quality assurance guys the next LTS release is going to be very polished and rocking stable.
PackageKit
Several distributions made a statement of interest in gaining a common infrastructure to tigger simple software management operations, e.g. the clock applet could install the ntp client regardeless of which distribution you use. Furthermore PackageKit will allow us to share basic software management applications among many distros, e.g. the update manager is currently implemented by every distribution differently.
I am currently preparing packages and will upload them to my PPA soon - although the apt backend is very very basic at the moment. Porting gnome-app-install and update-manager to PackageKit will be a quite interesting task and I hope to get it all done for Hardy+1.
DisplayConfig - XRandR
Setting up multiple monitors will greatly improve for Hardy. Michael and me wrote python bindings for XRandR that will be used by DisplayConfigGTK. This will allow you to configure e.g. your TV output or second screen instantly by two or three simple clicks. Since Fedora works on a simliar projects we are negotiating areas for collaboration. It is nice to see that we all want to get things solved and working!