Here are some updates on recent LXDE progress.

The file manager has much exciting progress:

1. I”m now doing “direct” udisks support without gvfs or gnome-disk-utility. So far the progress is good and it already can listed volumes. Mounting and unmounting should be available soon. This enables volume management totally without gvfs. You can test the source code in libfm udisks branch.
2. The current code and translations are in good shape and only some minor glitches need to be fixed.
3. Naveen Kumar Molleti is working on adding custom actions to pcmanfm as a Google SoC project.
4. Shae Smittle is working on adding file searching utility as a Google SoC project, but there is no usable code yet.
5. Although 1.0 release is planned, I’m seriously considering adding udisks supoprt to 1.0. Gvfs actually causes various problems and its behavior is not predictable sometimes. In addition, it’s not configurable and the volume management interface it provides is quite limited. Moreover mounting options cannot be changed. Using our own implementation can make things easier and we don’t need to check if the problems are caused by gvfs or our code since we used our own code only. But this only will happen when udisks branch is prooved to be working well and stable. If it’s buggy, it won’t be in 1.0.
6. During hackweek of openSuSE community, Josef Reidinger and I started a new project named gfusevfs. It’s a new lightweight gvfs replacement based on fuse. It’s not fully working now, but the basic skeleton is already done. This will work both in LXDE and XFCE. So, we’ll be gnome-free soon.

Image viewer:

1. Kuleshov Alexander is now working on a rewrite of GPicView as a Google SoC project
2. The rewrite will utilize new stuff in glib/gio and try to work with multi-threading
3. We may try to integrate screenshot utility with this

LXPanel:

1. Marty Jack is now doing some major improvement, but the release date is unknown.

Please help testing and give some feedbacks or even better, patches.
Cheers!