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D-BUS is a system for interprocess communication (IPC).

It's a common successor for Gnome's CORBA and KDE's dcop usage.

I've been saying this multiple times, but apparently it's hard to get the messae through...

So to reiterate:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=86935&cid=7549 751

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=87104&cid=7568 675 The Freedesktop specification is written in a way that you get the impression that the author can't even imagine using clipboard for something other than text data (there's no mention of non-text data, and little mention of the fact that only text data is discussed - the author takes this for granted):

http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/clipboards-sp ec

We need to talk to them, get the message known!

I find it always funny that KDE supporters always list re-use of existing libraries as a big minus point of Gnome

That's a straw-man argument. KDE supporters don't "always list re-use [...] as a big minus point."

In Gnome the supporting libraries are almost never Gnome dependent they often use already existing libraries or help to modify them too their needs, without Gnome-ifying them.

The same is true of KDE.

Which makes the KDE supporters scream that Gnome is taking everything over.

I think you may be listening to trolls, not KDE supporters.

This isn't true, but Gnome by using the above philosophy, doesn't alienate itself from other Linux/*nix projects in stark contrast too KDE.

Can you give an example of how KDE alienates itself from other projects? I don't see that happening at all, in fact KDE developers have put a lot of effort into increasing compatibility between KDE and GNOME in particular.

Gnome is not only about building a great desktop, it is about building modular desktop technology that can be used and reused by more projects then Gnome only, which make Gnome more cooperative too other projects then KDE.

No, that's the job of Freedesktop.org, which both GNOME and KDE developers participate in.

I find the KDE community extremely vicious against everything not KDE

I don't. I find a lot of people who criticise KDE, and compare it against GNOME without becoming familiar with KDE first, leading to a highly biased point of view.

Some research: freedesktop's X server is derived from x.org's and according to the developers, can't be used with XFree86 because of significant driver differences. This makes it non-trivial to get it up and running if you use Fedora, RH, Debian, or other XFree86-based distros.

This working group is also supported by OSDL's Linux User Advisory Council, which is comprised of senior IT executives from global 500 companies. The overall working group objectives have been developed by an exploratory committee with representatives from freedesktop.org, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, OSDL, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems.

Note that the only non-profit member of the committee is precisely freedsktop.org - For those who don't know, freedsktop.org is (in a nutshell) a common effort by the GNOME and KDE developers to develop standards to let Linux Desktop Enviroments coo- and interoperate. Things like a universal protocol for the system tray, etc.

It just makes sense to see OSDL and their corporate partners sponsor Freedesktop.org, it is a win-win investement for everyone involved ... and I would much rather see the big corps interested on GNU/Linux support Interoperability and Standards than adopt one particular technology as a "de facto standard". Way to go !

While I personally prefer GNU/Linux system for a miriad of reasons, I simply took into account the phrase Does anyone know of any complete voice activated computer control for Windows XP or Linux? in the original question.

It does look strange IBM's VivaVoice is listed as supporting Linux, but it never says so on the web page. I thought it was worth some attention since hiding GNU/Linux support in a dark corner is not so general these days as it used to be.

But since most solutions for disabled tend to be disgustingly overpriced or at least pricy, it is rather probable they would target a proprietary system and so a Microsoft platform will probably be better choice for you anyway.

There is also the problem that most X11 toolkits don't have straightforward and compatible automation interfaces and such a solution might be a lot more difficult to do for an X11 envronment. It would be a worth project, however, and perhaps this question should be rerouted directly to the FreeDesktop project, since a good set of standard and interfaces would probably produce good base for a free solution.

Given the general efforts by freedesktop.org and the like to improve interoperability between the two largest free desktops, isn't the so-called desktop war is really a mute point? Sure there are two complete systems, but even as a die-hard GNOME user myself, I still want all the KDE desktop available even if only to occasionally try out some KDE app or feature.

I think keeping both desktops as strong and competitive as possible is the best for all of us. In fact, my concern down the road is that through general merging of functionalities and core libraries (even allowing for C v. C++ differences), the whole thing may become one big homogenous effort prone to stagnation. (The wheel gets so big, it gets harder and harder for the community as a whole to re-work efficiencies or pursue dreams beyond current capabilities.)

Perhaps the (justified) business concern of trying to do too much without focus applies here, but why can't the KDE effort simply fork and find supporting funding if abandoned? If the demand is there, no one business can ever kill off Free Software. Maybe how Novell decides to treat KDE (or Ximian) really doesn't have as big an impact as we think. Does corporate funding really prove to be the most significant factor in a desktop's success or effectiveness?

Remember that the "RAM" allocated to XFree86 when it's running actually includes the entire address space allocated to the video card.

Thus, if you've got 64MB of RAM on your video card, XFree86 appears to take 64MB of RAM according to top.

Some of those things aren't really X's domain. (Printing is really not something that X needs to concern itself with.)

XLib sucks, agreed.

You really need to look on freedesktop.org
Replacement for XLib that uses X11 protocol; and even the same ABI as XLib is available (of course, not as good as native XCB): XCB

In fact; check out all the software on
http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/

Especially their XServer implementation is much closer to the sorts of things you want to do - client side fonts become the norm; XRender is pretty much the way everything's done etc.

Remember that the "RAM" allocated to XFree86 when it's running actually includes the entire address space allocated to the video card.

Thus, if you've got 64MB of RAM on your video card, XFree86 appears to take 64MB of RAM according to top.

Some of those things aren't really X's domain. (Printing is really not something that X needs to concern itself with.)

XLib sucks, agreed.

You really need to look on freedesktop.org
Replacement for XLib that uses X11 protocol; and even the same ABI as XLib is available (of course, not as good as native XCB): XCB

In fact; check out all the software on
http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/

Especially their XServer implementation is much closer to the sorts of things you want to do - client side fonts become the norm; XRender is pretty much the way everything's done etc.

Gnome and kde used to do a different thing with regards to copy and paste. But ever since gnome 2.x and kde 3.x they work identically (for text).

Also, a lot of the graphical effects in gnome and kde are realised through the render extension today. However, the render extension is horribly slow. It's not even anything remotely approaching fast for a software implementation. So, yes, X is to blame for the slow speeds of kde and gnome.

Audio won't "put linux over the top", but if it stops sucking so bad then one more barrier to widespread linux usage will be removed :)

Who on earth would want to use their new X server? It's full of bugs! (Ark ark ark).

Couldn't resist. :)

Who on earth would want to use their new X server? It's full of bugs! (Ark ark ark).

Couldn't resist. :)

Something like this?

Though consistency of interface is important in creating a distribution which is targeted at end-users, this does not have to come with the baggage which is associated with the current two leading DEs. A desktop should be simple, light, and operate well with anything which follows a set of standards; the standards, rather than the fact that all the applications are part of the same monolithic heavyweight project, should be the source of consistency. Most commercial companies would, I think, prefer a desktop which is development environment-agnostic over one which makes the choice for them, be the chosen environment lgpl'd or no.

When shadows and transparency are supported by the X server, you will probably see the features appearing in Gtk.

Already in progress at Freedesktop.org, thanks to the awesome Keith Packard. There's Cairo for vector graphics rendering and some unnamed project for double buffered/transparent/warpable windows (and yes there are screenshots, click the link!). Freedesktop.org is rapidly becoming host to many projects that are innovating in the Linux desktop arena. Check out some of the other software hosted there. Of particular interest (to me at least) is D-BUS combined with HAL.

Already in progress at Freedesktop.org, thanks to the awesome Keith Packard. There's Cairo for vector graphics rendering and some unnamed project for double buffered/transparent/warpable windows (and yes there are screenshots, click the link!). Freedesktop.org is rapidly becoming host to many projects that are innovating in the Linux desktop arena. Check out some of the other software hosted there. Of particular interest (to me at least) is D-BUS combined with HAL.

Already in progress at Freedesktop.org, thanks to the awesome Keith Packard. There's Cairo for vector graphics rendering and some unnamed project for double buffered/transparent/warpable windows (and yes there are screenshots, click the link!). Freedesktop.org is rapidly becoming host to many projects that are innovating in the Linux desktop arena. Check out some of the other software hosted there. Of particular interest (to me at least) is D-BUS combined with HAL.

There are some areas where standardisation is necessary. Copy-and-paste between apps and interprocess communication are things which need to be standardised, otherwise things just plain don't work.

I just got back from the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles at the LA Convention Center. They had a seminar with Seth Nickell on "The Unified Linux Desketop" made a valid point. He talked about FreeDesktop.org and what they are doing to move linux to the desktop market.

For reference, the screen shot is here.

Personally I think this kind of thing is a bit silly and pointless, but it seems people want to be entertained by their menus, so I guess we're stuck with more of it ;)

However, I think the challenge for open source is that often times several different groups are writing competing code for competing projects will little consideration of the massive duplication ... in efforts

Bah... this comes up so often, and you know what? It's crap. Competition is at the very heart of innovation! You know why the desktop on Linux has come as far as it has? Because of competition. The same thing goes with media players, email programs, and any number of other application domains. The fact is, sure, there's some duplication of effort, but in the end, the competition helps to raise the bar for everyone else.

Moreover, you also assume that, if everyone worked on the same project, then that one project would develop faster. But, as anyone in the software industry knows, this couldn't be further from the truth. More man power != faster development. Plus, these separate projects exist because each one has different goals and values which drive the development process. If they all tried to work on the same project, nothing would get done, simply because no one would be able to agree.

And, speaking of differing goals, the fact that there is choice means the consumer is free to pick the product they like best. For example, in terms of window managers, I like WindowMaker. It fits my needs and has certain features that I really like. There are many who prefer Enlightenment, being big fans of eye candy and ultra-configurability. Others prefer fluxbox because they like something lighter and a little more spartan. The point is, each of these projects has different design goals, and thus different market niches. So, this plethora of choice does nothing but serve the user.

Now, you do have a point in that there are issues with interoperability, in some cases. However, with projects like freedesktop.org, things are gradually improving. KDE and Gnome are slowly converging in some ways (desktop config formats, etc... heck, they may even share gstreamer for multimedia) while remaining independant projects. So, yes, projects working together is a good thing. But to claim that excess diversity is a bad thing is, IMHO, quite naive.

Plus, the freedesktop.org people are working on XCB and XCL, a replacement for xlib on resource-comstrained environments and an xlib compatibility layer, respectively. It is also useful for some other reasons; see the link for more details.

Something like http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/menu-spec maybe?

I'm wondering how long before we see this in XFree86.

It probably won't go into XFree86. The freedesktop.org X server contains a rewritten core and relies on many X extensions that the XFree86 project is really not embracing. Despite the good work the XFree86 team has done over the years, they have a long history of hesitation and, even worse, conflict with those that would take XFree86 in a non-standardised direction.

I applaud the new efforts on freedesktop.org, especially by the evergreen Keith Packard, and this is what we need to see in the FLOSS world.

X11 is one of the few areas where there is no real competition between projects. Linux vs. BSDs (vs. each other) or KDE vs. GNOME. It's healthy; it pushes the projects to higher levels of progress. Once freedesktop.org's X server is ready for mass consumption (hopefully not too long) then this 'lack of competition' changes.

FLOSS will see a whole new world of graphical coolness as Window Managers and Desktop Environments add Compositing Managers to produce awesome effects using freedesktop.org's X server and the group of projects supporting it.

The freedesktop.org X server intermingles with things like Cairo and lots of other exntensions. Conversely, XFree86 seems to fight any hopeful extensions.

What will happen is that in a couple of years, many DEs and WMs will ship with a 'feature X requires freedesktop.org's X server and will not work with XFree86' and XFree86 will lose backing and momentum.

The only downside to freedesktop.org's X server is that it will no longer run well on a 20mhz 486.

Yeah, I don't care either. :)

This (standardization) is exactly what the freedesktop project is working towards.

Freedesktop.org has specified a standard that does What You Want(tm):

Apps that follow these guidelines give users a simple mental model to understand what's going on. PRIMARY is the current selection. Middle button pastes the current selection. CLIPBOARD is just like on Mac/Windows. You don't have to know about PRIMARY if you're a newbie.

http://freedesktop.org/Software/xserver

I can understand their decision. XFree has matured to be a really broken pile of software which is badly maintained after all. There is a known CMS and XLIB locking problem in XFree 4.3.0 and upwards which they reject to fix (and this is known for many months now). Even patches and fixes exist for it and they still reject to fix it. When you use GTK+ 2.3.0 on it then it heavily crashes.

Read here the fixes

I can imagine that there are to many trouble but I think that the remaining people working on XFree are fucking dumbasses and the primary troublemakers here. They threw the major leading developers out, those that liked to bring XFree up to new roots, fix many bugs, make it modern. And what do we have now ?

Xouvert as lame fork with people who may not be able to deal with it.

XFree as a lameass project full of bugs they not gonna fix, full of people who slowly develop it and who use old versions of xcursor, freetype, fontconfig and stuff like this. Ignore bugreports and fixes

FreeDesktop org as last bastion for people like Keith Packard and Jim Gettys to fix all the stuff.

I think we should start to boycott XFree.

Actually, I wish that they would use Enchant, so that they could let the user decide what spellcheckers to work with. This also lets them continue using and distributing MySpell if they so desire, as Enchant's MySpell backend is top-notch.

Also, Enchant has a FreeDesktop.org endorsement, of sorts.

(disclaimer: I wrote Enchant, and thus am biased)

I am also a Linux user, and I think you are only half right. Apple doesn't think that Linux is a second class citzen. It never has. Why do ou think that they sold some 10,000 Xserves all running Yellow Dog Linux to the U.S. Navy?? I garantee that the reason wasn't because of fear.

No, the reason why they don't support Linux is because of the almost infinite number of distributions out there. However, even then it is becoming less of an issue because Gnome and KDE desktop environments are becoming more and more unified, through standards like Freedesktop.org. Probably then, will we start seeing things like QuickTime and iTunes for Linux.

This is simply not true; there is no dependency on Xft whatsoever. GIMP depends on fontconfig but that's just a library to manage fonts and it doesn't need Xft (although the two used to be distributed together).

I am also willing to bet that the dev's enjoy playing all those fun games with their investors and publishers. It is a fun game that all should play! Perhaps this helpful and well thought out approach by any potential underground groups will indeed free us all from the tyranny of having to pay for games and broaden our social awareness by robbing Peter to pay ourselves (fuck Paul, what did he ever do?). Much like I would expect a child or dog to respond favorably to daily beatings, I expect Valve, the interactive entertainment industry and yes even the whole computer industry to be highly motivated to support that group of whacky Linux hackers.

Oh, and by once again tying crackers and thieves to Linux and Open Source we can all expect to be taken more seriously and of course this will do NOTHING to provide ammunition to various behemoths like MS in the coming years.

</sarcasm>That said, I do wish there would be a completely legal sametime release of HL2 on Linux... perhaps this and various multi GUI/Window Manager languages are a step towards helping that become the rule rather than the exception!

Until it gets fixed, you can read it at http://www.freedesktop.org/bin/rdiff/Software/dbus

Well, I've only gotten as far as the critique of X at the start of Thomas' paper. This critique is a classic /. "X sucks" troll in academically semi-polished form.

Point by point:

• X has too much latency: See Packard's paper in Freenix 2003: high latency is not an inherent X attribute, even over high-latency connections.
• X requires a toolkit for ease of programming: Duh. As opposed to what, exactly?
• X needs standardized UI semantics: This is moot. You may use X+Gnome or X+KDE if this is what you desire. Either is a fairly good and fairly complete system with standard UI semantics. The existence of two such systems is no more troublesome than the simultaneous coexistence of Windows and MacOS.
• X is "an incoherent mess": When making this argument, it is always useful to confuse the protocol with the implementation. The existence of Kdrive is a nice example of how much the latter can be cleaned up. The protocol hasn't changed in 20 years except for extensions: the argument that the extensions don't work together is supremely unconvincing, supported by one lame example. freedesktop.org has made a lot of progress in a short time in refactoring and standardizing X.
• X is complex: It is. Unfortunately, it is a response to complex application requirements. Again, one lame example involving perhaps the most demanding application running is cited. And again, freedesktop.org is standardizing mechanism for dealing with the cited problems.

It's perfectly valid to want to write a new window system. I can think of a variety of justifications, starting with "it's nice to try something different" and "I wanted to learn some things". Trolling is hardly necessary, and hardly welcome.

The freedesktop.org url you have is incorrect - it is pointing to freeesktop.org!
correct: click

it may habe been nice to provide the correct link. http://www.freedesktop.org

Maybe if the WM's would design some sort of common application interface so things would look right on all the WM's that confirmed to the standard then we'd see a lot more x-compatibility in those applications.

Well, we'll effectively never see the the merging of GTK and Qt, but KDE and GNOME are sharing more and more desktop specifications these days, thanks to projects like FreeDesktop.org!

As for browsers/file managers, GNOME does this right, IMHO, by keeping your web browser and your file manager separate (as Epiphany and Nautilus, respectively). The two tasks have very little to do with one another, so using the very same program for both is foolish, IMHO. It would be a tremendous boon for KDE to develop a discrete shell for KHTML that did *just* web browsing...

No site that breaks online articles into arbitrary pages should be allowed to run articles on "usability."

Feh.

Single page link to the article.

That said, what this person is asking for is already done. In practice most Linux installs are using a packaged distribution. An increasely large number of users just stick with whichever window manager and desktop environment the distribution provides. The big who desktop environments and toolkits, KDE and Gnome, are working together increasingly well. The big distributions are all working to minimize the differences between KDE, Gnome, and other applications for end users. For interoperability most distributions just ship Gnome, Motif, and KDE; they coexist happily. My Red Hat 9 box works great, I run a mix of Gnome, KDE, and other applications without thinking about it, they all look and behave similarly.

The author simply got distracted by the choices. You don't need to look at them and your distribution provider is likely happy to pick some reasonable defaults for you.

This article from earlier today explained it all
The lack of starndardized libraries. KParts, Bonbobo, XParts, DCOP, XUL, OpenOffice are all competing technologies. No one component model for linux. Wan't the KHTML part to display a webpage in your gnumeric spreadshit? No, you can't do it yet.

I just hope the proposed Xembed standard gets implemented soon, or Linux will be screwed on the desktop for a while

There's this thing called freedesktop that defines common standarts on Drag and Drop etc. Gnome & Kde are starting to follow it. and even xfce 4 is compatible,so it's even easier to cross use things

First, there are serious efforts being made to interoperate between the major desktop - e.g. freedesktop.org.

Second, Linux's first desktop target, according to industry analysts, is very large corporate desktops - where Linux's security, the ability to have defaults set by a sysadmin, and low TCO are winners. In this space, Linux doesn't have to be perfect - nor does it have to allow users to install "any old application". It just has to be good enough.

I suspect that as Linux desktop developers' experience grows from these initial big installs, they will develop the capabilities to move into the mainstream home market - which is much more picky, has user demand for much more varied apps, and also doesn't make much cash. But even if this doesn't happen, I don't mind if Windows maintains market share here. So long as its total monopoly is broken, that is the main thing.

There is a organization known as FreeDesktop. They have published standards to make OpenSource desktop enviroments interoperate. Gnome 2.4 when its released be compliant with the new standards and KDE 3.2 will be as well. Other Desktops and Window managers are also starting to comply. There are also more standards being drafted.

We don't need a unifed desktop, we need STANDARDS.

What the fsck is the "gnome2-compliant" crap I'm hearing about? Hasn't GNOME heard of wm-spec?

I don't suppose there's any chance that it's going to aim to play well with the freedesktop.orgDesktop Menu Specification?

If there's one thing that irks me about having a multitude of window-managers/desktop-environments, to chose from(don't get me wrong, I love that they're there), is all the menu maintenence needed to keep everything up to date. (I know, some linux distros attempt to duplicate all that menu data for each wm, but that seems like a hack to me, all those redundant files...and if you install something not pre-packaged by your distro...it never shows up in the menu system. grrr...but I digress)

Anyway, I'm glad to see that a common menu system spec is being worked on... it would be nice to see it put to some use. (GNOME already does, I think, and KDE is going to? Anyone else?)

It's true that Gnome apps use GTK and KDE apps use Qt. However, GTK and KDE interoperate extremely well thanks to the efforts of freedesktop.org.

It may surprise you to hear that you do not even need to run a Gnome or KDE to use their applications. I'm running a blessedly clean IceWM setup and I still get to use Evolution.

Dude, hold on a second.

Debian is not planning to switch to KDE's menu system nor they're planning to dump their menu policy and all the beautiful thoughts behind it. It's just about the format of the menu entries.

Namely they're planning to switch their own, though working and widely used (withing their distribution), menu format to use the same standard as described in freedesktop.org's Desktop Menu Specification. Or at the moment it's still just a proposal, I haven't been following the discussion, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

But anyway, it's the same thing what GNOME and KDE of the future will be using to build their menus. Now is that a bad thing then? GNOME, KDE and Debian sharing the same menu entries but still everyone is able to present those menus as they natively please (as long as they implement the freedesktop.org standard)?

Hello! Stop complaining and look what the menu system is really turning into at freedesktop.org

and more specifically here:
freedesktop menu spec.

debian/rules

Hello! Stop complaining and look what the menu system is really turning into at freedesktop.org

and more specifically here:
freedesktop menu spec.

debian/rules