Slashdot Mirror

Epiphany.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/

http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/ui/

http://dot.kde.org/1135283071/

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/

http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/2006/08/explorations- in-firefox-ui.html

There is a tentative plugin for Rhythmbox that enables transfer to/from and playback from all MTP devices supported by libmtp. You can take a look at the bug report: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=345006 . From the bug report:

What works:

*Copy podcasts now works.
* Play music from the device works.
* Copy music from the device works.
* The plugin actually checks if the device can handle the mime-type of a file
before transferring it.
* The gui-actions works now.
* Renaming the device works.
* Ejecting the device works.

What still doesn't work.
* The hotplug code is broken. It worked well when I wrote it originally. If
someone with more experience with hal could take a look at this I would
appreciate it very much. The problem is that the callbacks I register never
gets called.
* I tried to add suport for transcoding files if the mimetype isn't supported,
but since the RBEncoder is threaded and libmtp and the plugin is very
non-threadsafe it's no hit.
* When transferring files to the device all files ends up in the root
directory. It probably should use the rhythmbox setting on how to organize
files copied to the library. Is there a function to get this path from a entry?
* Sometimes when on tries to play music from the device the magnatune plugin
crashes and make rhythmbox jump to the next song. I think this is a bug in the
magnatune source.

I have been using this plugin for months now and it works flawlessly. We are in need of additional developers to finish the work though! There is also a HOWTO in the ubuntu forum with step-by-step instructions to set it up.

Tomboy? MoinMoin?

Why not just write a C string class? Or use an existing one like that found in glib? For stuff where I can't use GPL or even LGPL code, I wrote my own string class in C that has a similar API to the glib one. It took me all of a couple of hours, and includes a unit test that exercises each function. It removes the worry of memory leaks and buffer overruns from the vast majority of my C code that has tonhandle strings, all without the overhead of C++.

And the fact that if you want to use any programs on linux you usually have to compile the source yourself.

And the fact that there are no human interface designers working on the linux project.

Yeah, I heard the AbiWord spreadsheet is particularly good.

I'd switch to Epiphany, but there isn't a rich library of extensions for it as there is for Iceweasel/Firefox.

That may be true, but then again you may ask yourself if you really need an extension to play an MC Hammer sample when you stop loading a page. Plus, it's pretty easy to write an Epiphany extension in C or Python yourself. No Javascript knowledge required.

Phoenix was literally just gecko + some ui and it was really really light and fast.

wusb54g uses ralink 2500 drivers. They dont support network-manager extensions, so you have to use the old method and disable or uninstall network-manager

http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManagerHardware

"I apologize that this letter is so long. I did not have the time to make it short." -- attributed to many people.

Maybe the issue is that Apple spends time simplifying and removing unneeded UI cruft. I looked through some gnome screenshots and UI guidelines to try and find specific reasons gnome isn't as polished. Looking at gedit, for example, the window has a menu bar, large icon toolbar, tab bar, then, a full inch and a half below from the top, is the actual text. Oh, and there's also an information bar at the bottom.

This just looks cluttered to me..

• The tab bar: does nothing but waste space when only 1 file is open.
• The toolbar: large icons waste space. Also, they seem to be for such common actions (open, save, cut, copy, paste, etc) that the well known key combos are faster than trying to mouse around. The text names for the icons waste even more space. Use a tooltip (or does that violate an MS patent?)
• The text edit area: the text edit is indented. (For that matter, so is the menu bar and the toolbar). The Apple approach would be to have them go straight to the edge. Or maybe that's due to the window border being too thick. Either way, i think it clutters up the appearance.

I'm sure it will be good for the competition, and it will make more people interested in getting their applications to run on embedded devices. Ubuntu is generally good at contributing patches upstream and I'm sure this will give the GNOME Mobile And Embedded initiative an extra push. It's nice to see free and open software becoming more widespread on other devices than just PCs.

The best solution would be for the Linux Kernel project to say, "Open source developers can do as they please, but we here at the Kernel project encourage developers to contribute to THESE specific projects: Gnome, Open Office, etc...

That is not going to happen, but if it did it would not include Gnome.

You talk about the open source value of meritocracy. I agree that it is an important value. But it is a value for "consumers" to consider, not Novell (the parent company of SuSE and Ximian.) If people were supposed to only support the development of the better software, then there would only be one choice out there. So I don't think it undermines the value of having a meritocracy to have companies fund alternative environments.

Just as an aside, you say that the "Big Distros" rally behind GNOME. That's just false. Until relatively recently, Red Hat was the only Big Distro to come with GNOME as default. They have to consider their interests in doing such: they have been using GNOME for a long time and probably care more about familiarity and consistency than about which environment is better.

You also mention the Ubuntu forums. Ubuntu uses GNOME as a default and is the most popular linux distribution out there. Couldn't that be evidence that people like GNOME?

Or are the statistics only worthwhile when they support your desktop environment?

Oh yeah -- and of course KDE is getting more commits, etc, than GNOME. They are between major version numbers; GNOME isn't.

Mm. Interesting.

Well, I'll give the satisfaction hardly anyone ever gives me and say I was wrong about something critical; last I looked, not so long ago, Novell had not yet done their devil's bargain with Microsoft, and while the Mono guys were hard at work cloning the .NET APIs, it was a reverse engineering effort, they were not done, and there was every indication that Microsoft would sue the crap out of them once they finished... though they might choose to wait a little while after, till more people were using Mono, and sue them all, just to make a point.

And there were lines of reasoning like this.

It seems now Mono and Novell are good friends with Microsoft, and MS is opening up the platform more after all. At least to them.

This changes my whole perspective on the thing.

With a few caveats, that is:

You're still dodging the issue of which language is bigger - they compared posted jobs on craigslist, c# is not really placing as well as perl, simple as that. Divide and multiply the job posting numbers by other things to your hearts' content, if it makes you feel better. That said, if .NET is truly going to be open, it has a future, so the trend will be better for it.

I think you answering "Never said I wanted to" about leaving Microsoft is hilarious - if you ever get in bed with a vendor and find you can't get out, you will learn why having the option matters soon enough.

Microsoft's .NET is not free - unless you steal Windows Server, that is. :)

I never said .NET was a language. Try and quote where I did.

All this said, if I can go to Mono and get a GPL .NET implementation, then I might use it. And that certainly would be free. It's not caught up with Microsoft now, but say they stay on schedule, and/or MS helps them, I suppose they could.

Java has been encouraging others to make totally compatible JREs and JDKs since the beginning. There have been GPL ones from early on - Sun encouraged it, unlike Microsoft, who I don't think were so encouraging of Mono at first. So it's hardly lock in, is it. :) Also, the source was open for most of the time - just not under a free software license. :) But now even Sun uses the GPL.

The interesting thing will be: will Microsoft really allow Mono to be a free replacement for their platform? And will the free alternative really be adopted in production, in major enterprises?

Will it really be possible/practical to migrate a .NET app from Windows to Linux, actually creating competition? Maybe not... after all, while Pure Java is a credo everyone knows, MS encourages users to interop with native code, making things non-portable. Time will tell. But I'll be very surprised if Microsoft makes it so easy to escape their platform.

A lot of people complain about NM, but I've never had an issue with it. It's worked perfectly for me, even with WPA, since Dapper (IPW3945). The ones who complain are the ones who have hardware not found on this list: http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManagerHardware If yours is working fine, it's because your network card is supported.

The improved wireless support comes from network-manager not avahi, avahi is a service for automatically discovering network services on your local network.

Tomboy and f-spot at least, were included in Ubuntu 6.10.

There are *lots* of small incremental improvements in Ubuntu, that's the benefit of 6 month release plan. Some of them are detailed here: http://philbull.livejournal.com/34930.html There are also a list of improvements from Gnome 2.18 here: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.18/notes/en/

I imagine the new kernel release adds support for new hardware and things too.

I know people have been trolling for years about drag and drop in linux. The thing is that it is still not working as reliably as in Windows. Make no mistake. I use Ubuntu and i know what i'm talking about...

Drag and drop doesn't work reliably. In Dapper (2 versions of Ubuntu back), when you tried to unzip something (from fileroller to nautilus) by drag and drop, you had to hold during the "drop" for as long as fileroller needed to decompress the files. If fileroller didn't have sufficient time to decompress then nothing happening.

In feisty (the current beta Ubuntu) drag and drop from fileroller (the WinZip of Ubuntu) to nautilus (the Explorer of Ubuntu) doesn't work at all due to incompatible Drag&Drop protocols (fileroller uses XDS whereas nautilus does not).

For the nonbelievers:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file-rol ler/+bug/13199
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171655

It is a joke to suggest that linux is desktop ready, when such simple things do not work. I manage fine because i'm more of a command line person. My parents would not. They would just try to drag and drop the damn file inside the zip to where ever they need it....

For those who don't know what Evolution is. Screenshots.

YouTube.

I bought a TV card specifically to do this but never used it because this has worked so well:

I play the tape on a good VCR. The video and stereo audio output are hooked up to a Sony Digital Handycam (it's a DCR-TRV350). And the camcorder Firewire cable is connected to the PC.

This lets the Camcorder do all the heavy lifting. It outputs standard digital video which I capture with kino. I also use kino to do the clean-up, capture a frame (as a jpeg) and export some sound to use as the title screen for what will be the final DVD. The sound gets exported as a .wav which I convert to mp2 with ffmpeg.

Still with kino, I break up the video into chunks (about 4-6 minutes each) for chapters so I can skip through the DVD when it done. I then export the video in DVD format, telling kino to split chapters into seperate files (this makes chapter creation automatic in the next step).

I then use 'Q' DVD-Author to build the DVD filesystem. Although 'Q' DVD-Author can create the DVD automatically (calling dvdauthor), I prefer to tweak the dvdauthor.xml file to do some fun menu things and run dvdauthor manually.

I check my DVD (while still a directory on my hard disc) with totem, or mplayer. Finally I write it out using growisofs from the dvd+rw-tools project.

All this is running on a Debian system that is several years old. Nothing fancy or top-of-the-line here.

That's pretty much it. Been working great for me.

As for that TV card? Well, I watch TV with it - it's hooked up to my cable.

Have you tried using the DejaVu fonts (a derivative of Bitstream Vera)? In my opinion, they look far better than the Microsoft core fonts, especially when you use subpixel antialiasing on an LCD screen. They also support a lot more glyphs than Helvet^WArial, Times [New Roman], Courier New, Verdana, and Tahoma.

I haven't really used the new fonts from Vista, however, so those might actually look nicer for all I know.

Also, if you have a copy of OS X, it's always a nice idea to copy all the fonts from /Library/Fonts/ and use Fondu to extract the fonts in the dfont resource fork files. That way you get some nice fonts for printing (from Adobe) and some nice designer fonts as well.

I have not actually seen what is on their CD, but there are some examples of free programs, most of which, have already been mentioned, that are available for both Windows and Linux.

• Firefox Web browser
• Thunderbird full-featured email program
• GIMP Image Manipulation Program
• ImageMagick software suite for creating, editing, and composing bitmap images
• Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor
• ClamWin free antivirus scanner for Windows
• 7-Zip file archiver
• Celestia space simulater that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions
• OpenOffice office suite
• Scribus professional page layout program
• AbiWord word processing program
• Gnumeric spreadsheet
• LyX Document Processor
• Gaim multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client
• Audacity Sound Editor
• Blender the advanced 3D modeling program capable of producing high quality animations
• VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server
• Nvu complete Web Authoring System

GNOME is Free Software and part of the GNU project, dedicated to giving users and developers the ultimate level of control over their desktops, their software, and their data. Find out more about the GNU project and Free Software at gnu.org.

GNU didn't create GNOME or ...

Try gnumeric it has pretty much everything you're asking for. One thing about it is that you set up your graphs (axes etc) differently than you may be used to in Calc or Excel but once you get a feel for it it's nice.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/

Thats pretty much right but don't write off Gnome so quickly, its also a very usable system. There are some things that could be better about it but in the case of a few things Apple has patents on them.. for instance the spring loaded folders. Nautilus had this some time ago but had to remove the function as Apple was going to sue.

>> Early on, Apple put a lot of research into their human interface guidelines.

So has Gnome. Sun spent a great deal of time user testing, and researching Gnome. This VASTLY improved Gnomes usability from 1.4 to 2.4'ish. Gnome has also done this testing on modern fast web connected computers. http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report /report_main.html Gnome is very pleasing to use, and it follows its UI Guidelines closer than anyone else. Gnome gets a lot of flack for removing preferences, but some should be removed.. for instance the Task List applet.. at one time you could set (in pixels) how large each task in the list would be.. now the applet determines the best size depending on how much space is free. (whereas you could still have a preference for this now.. the *need* for it is very low.) I think Gnome is for people who don't want to know about the computer they just want to get stuff done. (Much like OS X)

however.. lets say you want a power users desktop.. well Linux just so happens to have the best thing there as well, KDE. Or maybe its something fast and light weight.. again in comes Linux with XFCE and Fluxbox.

OS X is a great system, but my biggest complaint with it is its performance vs Linux, All the UI's in Linux mentioned give better performance than Aqua. (or Aero and Luna for that matter.)

I would recommend trying Kubuntu, OpenSUSE (or SUSE even, although that would involve supporting that damn Microsoft-Novell patent deal), Mandriva, or Linspire/Freespire. These distributions use KDE (K Desktop Environment), which in my opinion (and even Linus himself along with many, many others) is far more usable, customisable, and useful than GNOME, the default desktop environment for many other distributions such as Ubuntu. Although GNOME tends to look cleaner than KDE, its usability is quite, well, limited. I don't understand the circle jerk going on between most distributions and their need to use GNOME by default, but I do know that a lot of people's complaints in regards to the GUI on Linux are GNOME-specific and are not a problem with KDE.

...to my knowledge GNU doesn't produce one.

• http://www.gnome.org/about/ “GNOME is Free Software and part of the GNU project...”
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME (third paragraph) “GNOME is part of the GNU operating system, and is its official desktop environment.”
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#Origin (third paragraph) “The name "GNOME" was proposed as an acronym of GNU Network Object Model Environment by Elliot Lee...”

They wants to talk to GNOME people about GNOME 3

Funny, I've got an IBM Thinkpad R51, and I've had the same experience. It was nearly flawless. The only tricky part was configuring the wireless support, which was actually incredibly easy once I read that I should use the Gnome Wireless Network Manager applet. Built-in support for WPA/WPA2 + VPN. Easy as Windows.

I was even able to get Beryl working, since the built-in graphics hardware is Intel. It's old as hell, but it's Intel (open-source drivers), so now I've got a desktop that rivals Windows Vista's "Aero," running on laptop hardware that's five years old (Pentium 1.5 Ghz).

I don't know what project the parent post was refering to, but it is not only GIMP (with some interesting ideas) that got rejected.

Other projects that were not selected include interesting improvements to the desktop infrastructure, such as GStreamer (list of ideas) or Avahi (list of ideas).

The GNOME project never shipped Mono.

So what? The full GNOME desktop environment, as released by the GNOME project, includes Tomboy and hence requires Mono. Therefore, Mono is a part of a working GNOME desktop environment.

The fact that you can hack bits out of the full GNOME release and have it still work isn't good enough, which is why I've switched back to KDE.

I'm looking at this screenshot and thinking that it looks quite good.

I like it too. Does anyone know where one can find that specific wallpaper?

Here you can see the evolution of the patches: Dependency tree of the patches submited by Linus to GNOME: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/showdependencytree.cgi?i d=408898

You can see how many "bugs" were solved.The two first patches were introduced immediately without discussion. The next was one of the most important and with more discussion, but finally it was introduced to next version of GNOME. The other patches seem to be discussed.

Someone took the effort to put the patches on Bugzilla, and they are being handled conveniently by the people of GNOME. All the patches weren't integrated in a row, but each patch has his own way of discussion and modifications. GNOME has interest that his project is used by more people, including Linus.

Just go and vote for Bug 89259 - Make scroll wheel step dimensionally correct

Oh sorry, KDE's Bug-Tracker was the one with voting enabled.

Honestly, it is much better to supply yourself with an external mouse, just don't use that touchpad for scrolling, they are too sensitive for gnome. (SCNR - ROTFLBTC)

Except that they aren't.

I reported a bug in Metacity's focus-follows-mouse behaviour years ago. It turned out to be a dupe of another bug where we were told that the behaviour (different to every other WM I have ever used) was "by design". When a few other people chimed in agreeing and suggesting that the traditional behaviour restored or a (possibly hidden) preference added to control it, the bug was unceremoniously closed. The Metacity developer preferred some tweaky special casing approach that could "do the right thing", but five years later noone has gotten it to work.

Likewise, I reported a bug in gnome-terminals handling of tab-selection keypresses, also with a patch. It languished for a couple of years before someone finally tweaked the patch and committed it.

In the meantime, I quit using GNOME and started using KDE. I haven't looked back - it is heaps faster, uses less memory and is able to do simple things like configure my keyboard shortcuts from a GUI.

If you really care, here's the tracker for his patches in Metacity's bugzilla http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408898

I'm looking at this screenshot and thinking that it looks quite good. People often complain about the brown in Ubuntu being "ugly", and Ubuntu has stated that they don't want to be "just like Windows" by going for blue. Well, based on that screenshot, I think green would be a good choice.

Please tell me the bug number and I will look at it.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391461

Oh yeah, I forgot the only way to get a bug looked at is to complain about it on Slashdot. In any case, it's already been "looked at"... what it hasn't been is triaged. I'd be happy with a "yes we will fix this," or a "no we won't fix this."

Haha, do you guys know that C# is an open standard, and so is CLI (.Net). I suggest you read the Mono FAQ, it will go over anything I can say a lot better.

I'm just surprised because I hear many people putting Mono and C# down pretty quickly when, when in fact thanks to these things, there have been quite a few innovative things done on the Desktop for Linux, including Banshee, Tomboy, Beagle, and many many more.

Typically the reason for such comments is either ignorance (I don't mean to troll, just trying to think of what can be the cause), as in, the people don't really know the situation, or just doing it because everyone else does it. There's a whole Mono section in the current issue of Linux Format Magazine which seems to kind of inform people on just how Mono is benefiting the Open Source community.

The point isn't for everyone to like it, but at least respect it, after all it's just another Open Source initiative/project and we all should stick together :) Just curious why there's such behavior/attitude towards it.

Wow! since when Balmer is using gnome?

You forgot the classic... http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/liboobs/

If any one here uses garnome, I submitted a metacity build with the patches from linus that I could find. Look here, if your interested http://mail.gnome.org/archives/garnome-list/2007-F ebruary/msg00060.html

Let's use the GNOME application Evince as an example. Evince is a PDF (and other) file reader. The GNOME usability gurus, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that hiding preferences in an option or preferences dialog is bad UI design. They'd rather have all your viewing options up front in the menus.

Not bad, except for one thing -- there's no way that I can find to set a default for the settings you want to use to view a PDF. Everytime I open a PDF in Evince, I have to spend a few seconds turning off "continuous" display of pages (which mucks with paging through a document), setting the zoom level to "best fit," closing the thumbnails view, and resizing the window. Evince will remember these changes for about 30 or so files (I think) for the next time you open them. If you open a lot of different files, or you're viewing a new file, this memory is utterly useless and you have to change your settings over again. It gets to be a real drag.

There's no menu option for "use current settings as default," and the only reference I can find to preferences is a message on their bug tracker where a developer basically shoots down a request for globally persistent preferences stating that it's not what they want to do.

The attitude of the the Evince developers is that their "smart" sizing choices should always be the default, and they ask users to attempt to justify why they should be allowed to set personal preferences with the attitude that they must explain why they're rejecting the defaults that the developers prefer. That sort of looking down your nose at users is just intolerable in my opinion.

The only reason I haven't dumped Evince entirely is because it reads CBZ & CBR files.

No, glibc developers never accepted strlcpy() and strlcat(). glibc provides several functions from BSD just to ease porting, but for some weird reason they don't want to accept these tiny functions to ease porting.

Right you are, Anonymous Coward. The GNUs are safe-coding refuseniks. Lucky me, I live in BSD la-la-land.
It was Glib, IIRC, that received said patches. I believe Dave Wheeler (notorious Linux security guy?) patched Glib.
Anyways, as I recall, GNOME dude Havoc Pennington was very reluctant to accept those no-nonsense functions. I just checked
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2000 -May/thread.html#00029
and it looks as if some messages were deleted in the archive (see "Re: Glib proposal: add strlcpy and strlcat to glib"), so it may be that History was just erased. Whatever, I'm a happy *BSD, so what do I care (actually, I do, because of endless stream of buffer overflows from safe-coding refuseniks).

Is Gnome really developed by volunteers? I thought that Gnome was mostly developed by corporations,
Sun, Novell. ( http://foundation.gnome.org/ ) I'm sure there are quite a few volunteers involved, but do they determine the direction of the code?

My understanding (which may be wrong) is that KDE is a leaner project with less sponsorship, but more
volunteer effort (more democratically development maybe). To me, both GNOME and KDE are very impressive projects which are sufficient to support Windows users with Linux.

Personally I prefer Enlightenment which may have once been part of gnome project but is no more. However
if the (arguably) greatest and (not arguably) most important
programmer alive today took an interest in any project that I was working on, I would be very excited
to learn what he thinks about software design and making software that millions of people want to use!

Slightly OT: does Linus use VI or EMACS?

I gave up on evolution when I found a bug before I'd even managed to configure it to read my mail.