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Am I the only one that thought his subject was a reference to gedit?

>> Hasn't Linux for the desktop been 5 years away for the last 10 years?

> It was only 3 years away 10 years ago.

And with some luck, and hard work, it might be 10 years away after the next 10 years!

Maybe not what the Gnome guys meant by the 10x10 goal, but hey it's a goal at least! ;-)

Eh?

Crowded-what?

That's Kraftwerk's Radioaktivität!
I concur, let me congratulate the author on his taste! :D

So have you reported this to GNOME bugzilla yet? Or do you expect developers to simply read slashdot for bug reports?

I don't have the foggiest as to what spacial tree mode really means. Can anybody enlighten me or point me at some screen shots?

I guess it's a sort of hybrid between spatial browsing and hierarchic navigation as in this screenshot.

What's New For Users

I'm more into KDE myself, and it's very much like Windows, though that's not why I like it. I like konquerer better than nautilus, mainly. But I like Aqua better than everything else I've seen, and GNOME seems to be headed that way, from my viewpoint, so I keep my eye on it. And the initiative of freedesktop.org means that the two work well together, which I think is fantastic.

Still, each to their own. Where would you like GUIs to go? It's a very interesting research question. So far there is nothing perfect, perhaps their won't ever be. Maybe we'll eventually end up with something like Plan9 or LCARS (which both feature hightly configurable, pannel-like interfaces, though LCARS is fiction and heavily supplanted by an oral interface), or maybe we'll develop something else entirely. But so long as we are stuck with a 2D pallette/mindset, we won't get a lot further anyway.

However for a "mainstream" GUI, where should GNOME/KDE/Commercials be aiming? For a future that is not supported by current tech, or for something that's the best we can do within current limitations?

n for next page

what fonts are they using for:

a) window title
b) application

in this shot for instance:

http://www.gnome.org/start/2.12/notes/en/figures/f igure-menueditor.png

don't include guesstimate answers

I've been trying the Evince in Breezy and it's a really neat application. Up till just recently I was defending Acrobat Reader as the only useful PDF reader, because no other reader handled thumbs, ToCs and were generally bug free enough for general consumtion. Actually, I still think Acrobat is ok, as long as you don't install the plugins package - that's what is taking all the resources. Drawback is that you can't click external links anymore and some other minor things.

And then: enter Evince. Does everything I need, has good support for thumbs, ToC, search and it is is really fast too. I can even click those links, both external and internal, very very nice. It also provides thumbnails to Nautilus, further strengthening preview. More formats will be nice, but I mainly do and will use it for PDF. Acrobat's a goner!

The only thing I'm missing is multiple documents, preferably in tabs. Acrobat has this via the "Windows" menu, and most other apps use this as a great way to collect multiple relevant whatevers in the same window instead of cluttering the task bar. Browsers, IMs, editors, well just about anything does this. Sadly it seems the makers of Evince disagree: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=306060 - I think they misunderstand the issue though, it's not about interlinking and "remembering to read". Hope it will be reopened at some point as it is both consistent with other apps (like Epiphany) and extremely useful.

I think Evince has been over-hyped. For instance, the Fedora Core 4 release notes says that Evince supports pdf, ps, "and many others". In fact pdf and ps are the only 2 formats Evince fully supports. The Fedora 4 version of Evince doesn't even display dvi files.

Perhaps in the future Evince will be the best thing ever, but I'm not sure why it's getting so much hype. At the moment it just seems to be a prettier ghostview.

Link to torrent:
http://torrent.gnome.org/gnome-livecd-2.12-i386-en -5.iso.torrent

Release notes.
What's nre for admins.
What's new for developers.

Release notes.
What's nre for admins.
What's new for developers.

Release notes.
What's nre for admins.
What's new for developers.

• podcast support
  
• iTunes-compatible music sharing
  
• iTunes-compatible music browsing
  
• iPod support

• podcast support
  
• iTunes-compatible music sharing
  
• iTunes-compatible music browsing
  
• iPod support

• podcast support
  
• iTunes-compatible music sharing
  
• iTunes-compatible music browsing
  
• iPod support

• podcast support
  
• iTunes-compatible music sharing
  
• iTunes-compatible music browsing
  
• iPod support

• podcast support
  
• iTunes-compatible music sharing
  
• iTunes-compatible music browsing
  
• iPod support

• podcast support
  
• iTunes-compatible music sharing
  
• iTunes-compatible music browsing
  
• iPod support

Click Here!
OK

That's not even comparing apples and oranges - that's comparing cars, toasters and computers.

Let's get this straight. C++ is a programming language (and it's standard library). Java is a programming language, a standard library and a virtual machine. .net is a framework that can be used by several very different languages.

> You can just feel the object oriented speed penalty in both kde and trolltech windows, compared gtk or win32 api c.

Sure. What about comparing programs that actually do the same instead of some that just somehow look similar? There is no such thing as an "object oriented speed penalty". OOP is a way of doing things that's often used even in languages that don't support it. OOP languages just provide some help and eye candy for doing things the OO way. Your beloved gtk API is definitely object oriented. If you don't believe me (and can't see it from the API), just check http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/gtk.htm l and read: "GTK+ has a C-based object-oriented architecture that allows for maximum flexibility.".

This "oop is bad" example is just ridiculous and has nothing to do with the actual experience in any OO language. The opposite is true. Normally you have something like:

something = SomeAllocFunction(something_specification)
someth ingElse = SomeAllocFunction(specification_for_something_else )
result = add_somethings(something, somethingElse)
FreeSomething(something)
FreeSome thing(somethingElse)

In an OO language with operator overloading you would get: result = Tsomething(specification) + TSomething(otherSpecification)

About your "suggestion" to use C as an intermediate language - good morning, there are things that can't (or can only with a some performance hit) be translated into C.

Praising BASIC really is an evil idea. You should't expose novice programmers to this pest when there are so much cleaner languages around which make it harder to write spaghetti code and shoot yourself in the foot than BASIC. For example, you already mentioned Python.

By the way, good morning, Java bytecode does not have to run interpreted. There are both available: Just in time compilers and ordinary compilers.

Perhaps you should also notice that C++ is not an object oriented language. Java is. C++ just allows you to do OOP. Or ordinary imperative programming. Or generic programming. Or mix them all.

Reading your comment once again I really get the impression I am just feeding a troll. Perhaps you are not, but I just can't let it uncommented as "insightful" when you obviously don't know what you are talking about.

Totem with the xine backend and the codecs have been able to play every file I've thrown at them, including Real audio/video formats.

Will there be any merger or code share between Gnome Office and Open office?
http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/
http://www.abisource.com/

Will there be any merger or code share between Gnome Office and Open office?
http://www.gnome.org/gnome-office/
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/
http://www.abisource.com/

Loading the PDF viewer is SLOW.

Have you tried evince?

Actually, they have more than that in common: they're not designed for Windows users. Kate and gedit are the editors that GUI users want to be using, and they're clearly superior to anything Microsoft ships with the base operating system.

Since you brought it up, what command line editors does Windows come with for when you need to SSH in to tweak the registry on a default system? See, I can raise new straw men, too.

For starters, why isn't there a shell that emulates the windows CMD? As useful greps / finds / pipe chains are, they can't match the simplicity of a DIR /S. I've been using MS-DOS for more than 15 years, moving to Linux is restarting everything from scratch. Is that really NECESSARY?

Yes, because you're wishing for a one-to-one mapping that simply doesn't exist. I think it could be argued (actually, I know it can - I'm about to do it) that it's better to discard any misleading abstractions and learn a new way of doing things than to doggedly hold on to the old, poor-fitting emulation.

I mean, I used an Amiga from '85 to '98. While it was certainly more Unix-ish than was DOS, it never occurred to me to try to find an AmigaDOS clone. What would it have bought me? Nothing but a false sense of security that I knew what was really going on. I also don't try to write Java in Python, or C++ in Perl (although I try to sneak some Lisp into any language I can), because they're just not the same paradigm.

At some point you have to say, "look, here's what I learned over the last 15 years. Let's see how I can apply them to the new situation at hand." This is not unique to computers, but is the way of cars, jobs, relationships, and the world in general.

I agree, there are some area where Linux still is trickier than competing systems (I use OS X).

Two examples, just off the top of my head:

1. Look at the list of Distros at Distrowatch: There are, by my count, 342 different distros. Now, choice is good and all, but I don't think you can say that having that many options makes it "easier" for an average user, much less a new user.
2. Look at the dependencies list for Gnumeric. 10 required dependencies, and 8 optional ones. Again, for the average user, this is a lot more complicated than running the Excel installer and having it install whatever it needs.

Linux is certainly getting easier to use, but as the parent stated, there's still enough of a learning curve to deter even fairly advanced users (I'm a computer engineer who's been using computers for the past 18 years, since I was 7)

I agree, there are some area where Linux still is trickier than competing systems (I use OS X).

Two examples, just off the top of my head:

1. Look at the list of Distros at Distrowatch: There are, by my count, 342 different distros. Now, choice is good and all, but I don't think you can say that having that many options makes it "easier" for an average user, much less a new user.
2. Look at the dependencies list for Gnumeric. 10 required dependencies, and 8 optional ones. Again, for the average user, this is a lot more complicated than running the Excel installer and having it install whatever it needs.

Linux is certainly getting easier to use, but as the parent stated, there's still enough of a learning curve to deter even fairly advanced users (I'm a computer engineer who's been using computers for the past 18 years, since I was 7)

I sat back and saw most of the video demonstrating the WinFS beta. Clearly the guys in the video are pretty excited about what they've done. But shouldn't the gnome community be excited by projects like Dashboard? What about gnome storage. It seems like both of these projects accomplished a lot in a short period of time. It seems like these projects should get "marketed" a bit more.

Dashboard is a great example of what can be done once information is easily searchable. MS makes these demos and tries to get people all excited about search. But come on, how hard are these things once the data is indexed? Like most things, it's all about how the applications use the API that make it cool. Having folders in a DB only goes so far.

What about Reiserfs4? Another project that could take the whole gnome-storage and WinFS concepts a bit farther.

BTW, It's interesting that MS has decided to try the non-polished look to get the word out on things. :) The video reminded me of the Wobbly Windows demo.

Well, imagine creating an application with nice 3D animation like that is a NO BRAINER. That's what Avalon + the new developer tools + .NET on Windows Vista will let you do, easier than a fart. Linux fan boys, enjoy your GCC.

Avalon? Avalon is supposed to be an XML descriptive language for GUI widgets, something like XUL or gladeXML. The only difference is that these tools exist right now while avalon is vaporware. So I'll go write a GUI in XML and finish it in a few minutes, while you still wait for avalon.

New developer tools? You really believe there are no developer tools on linux? Countless IDEs to choose from. From Anjuta to Kdevelop to Eclipse. Countless simple editors. Countless other tools like profilers, version control, etc etc. Detailed and thorough documentation on every tool you'll ever use. Please keep you uninformed opinions to yourself next time. Saves you the embarrassment.

.NET? .NET is BS. Read this very good article about .NET. It'll explain alot.
Now, If you're talking about managed programming languages like C# etc. there's mono. Pretty much everything .net has been transferred or will be soon, so your windows code will work on mono. Plus, mono has other extra subprojects you can use, not available on windows,

So yeah, you wait for your new tools MS fanboy, while we already have them.

Guess you've never heard of Cairo (as another reply pointed out), or maybe Xgl /Xegl?

Or even seen the videos of what luminocity can do? It can do that NOW. How about Project Looking Glass?

Just becuase you don't know about them yet doesn't mean they don't exist.

Guess you've never heard of Cairo (as another reply pointed out), or maybe Xgl /Xegl?

Or even seen the videos of what luminocity can do? It can do that NOW. How about Project Looking Glass?

Just becuase you don't know about them yet doesn't mean they don't exist.

And what do you think pixbuf uses internally?

Here's a clue, it's not imlib. gtk/gnome have never used imlib2 (which is what E17 etc. uses), and they moved from using libimlib a _long_ time ago. Random links:

And what do you think pixbuf uses internally?

Here's a clue, it's not imlib. gtk/gnome have never used imlib2 (which is what E17 etc. uses), and they moved from using libimlib a _long_ time ago. Random links:

And what do you think pixbuf uses internally?

Here's a clue, it's not imlib. gtk/gnome have never used imlib2 (which is what E17 etc. uses), and they moved from using libimlib a _long_ time ago. Random links:

I just add a bit on that list from top of my head.
Although I think the listed app goes beyond what the so called 'average pc user' wants, but there goes...

1. Konqueror ( http://www.konqueror.org/ )

2. Email - Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ )

3. I think Evolution is more like in this place.

4. Lately "Sound Juicer" is taking more attention too

5. VideoLAN aka VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ) and Ogle ( http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/ ) [and Goggles ( http://www.fifthplanet.net/goggles.html ) for Ogle GUI wrapper] for DVD watching.

6. There are plenty way to do this, but the typical ones could be 'Jinzora' ( http://www.jinzora.org/ ) and 'MusicPD' ( http://www.mpd.org/ ), even plain Apache does it fine too, in a way.

8. If you want easier to manage iptables wrapper, Shorewall ( http://www.shorewall.net/ ) and there are other wrappers too.

9. KOffice ( http://www.koffice.org/ ) and by individual components, Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ), Gnumeric ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ ), Gnucash ( http://www.gnucash.org/ )

10. Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) or Sodipodi ( http://www.sodipodi.com/ ) for vector graphics.

11. Miranda ( http://miranda-im.org/ ). Windows only.

13. Hmm , Samba? ( http://www.samba.org/ ), WedDAV (Look parent post), FTP (plenty ftp daemons, ex : http://www.proftpd.org/, http://vsftpd.beasts.org/ etc)

16. GPhoto ( http://www.gphoto.org/ ), EOG ( http://www.gnome.org/ ? ), GQView ( http://gqview.sourceforge.net/ ). The latters are for just viewing mainly.

20. FreeNX ( http://www.nomachine.com/ , http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) http://www.poptop.org/ ), L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpd ), RP-L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/ )

24. Postfix ( http://www.postfix.org/ ), Sendmail ( http://www.sendmail.org/ ), Exim ( http://www.exim.org/ ), Cyrus ( http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/ ), Xmail ( http://www.xmailserver.org/ ), qmail ( http://www.qmail.org/ )

25. Spamassassin ( http://spamassassin.apache.org/ )

26. Same as above.

27. XSane ( http://www.xsane.org/ ) for sane frontends.

30. Buzzmachines ( http://www.buzzmachines.com/ ) I could be wrong...

31. 'various GUI frontends' - X CD Roast ( http://www.xcdroast.org/ ), K3B ( http://k3b.sourceforge.net/ )

32. Don't know any opensource ones...

I just add a bit on that list from top of my head.
Although I think the listed app goes beyond what the so called 'average pc user' wants, but there goes...

1. Konqueror ( http://www.konqueror.org/ )

2. Email - Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ )

3. I think Evolution is more like in this place.

4. Lately "Sound Juicer" is taking more attention too

5. VideoLAN aka VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ) and Ogle ( http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/ ) [and Goggles ( http://www.fifthplanet.net/goggles.html ) for Ogle GUI wrapper] for DVD watching.

6. There are plenty way to do this, but the typical ones could be 'Jinzora' ( http://www.jinzora.org/ ) and 'MusicPD' ( http://www.mpd.org/ ), even plain Apache does it fine too, in a way.

8. If you want easier to manage iptables wrapper, Shorewall ( http://www.shorewall.net/ ) and there are other wrappers too.

9. KOffice ( http://www.koffice.org/ ) and by individual components, Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ), Gnumeric ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ ), Gnucash ( http://www.gnucash.org/ )

10. Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) or Sodipodi ( http://www.sodipodi.com/ ) for vector graphics.

11. Miranda ( http://miranda-im.org/ ). Windows only.

13. Hmm , Samba? ( http://www.samba.org/ ), WedDAV (Look parent post), FTP (plenty ftp daemons, ex : http://www.proftpd.org/, http://vsftpd.beasts.org/ etc)

16. GPhoto ( http://www.gphoto.org/ ), EOG ( http://www.gnome.org/ ? ), GQView ( http://gqview.sourceforge.net/ ). The latters are for just viewing mainly.

20. FreeNX ( http://www.nomachine.com/ , http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) http://www.poptop.org/ ), L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpd ), RP-L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/ )

24. Postfix ( http://www.postfix.org/ ), Sendmail ( http://www.sendmail.org/ ), Exim ( http://www.exim.org/ ), Cyrus ( http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/ ), Xmail ( http://www.xmailserver.org/ ), qmail ( http://www.qmail.org/ )

25. Spamassassin ( http://spamassassin.apache.org/ )

26. Same as above.

27. XSane ( http://www.xsane.org/ ) for sane frontends.

30. Buzzmachines ( http://www.buzzmachines.com/ ) I could be wrong...

31. 'various GUI frontends' - X CD Roast ( http://www.xcdroast.org/ ), K3B ( http://k3b.sourceforge.net/ )

32. Don't know any opensource ones...

Either online, or in RL. Talk to people, ask them which hosting company they use, if they are happy with it and why. Read the blogs of people of people you know, trust or who are into similar things as you. Jump on usenet, go to teh forums at places like webhostingtalk or at the actual hosting service itself and read what people are saying.

Ignore articles published by news sites, magazines and the like. They are out to make money and hence are biased. You cannot get a feel for how good a hosting service is, or how reliable it is, or how good their support is by playing with the hosting service's web interface for 5 minutes or by comparing feature lists, which is exactly what the journalist that wrote the article did.

I was looking for a hosting service a few weeks ago and I immediately thought of two: bytemark.co.uk and Linode. Why? Because a know a few people who use bytemark.co.uk and are happy with it and I have aread a lot about about Linode being good on places like Planet Gnome. So I compared the cost features of the two and chose the one that looked the best.

The information is out there, you just need to use it.

The GNOME project has some open source accessibility tools that are very easy to set up and use; the major Linux distributions such as Mandriva already include them. See the Gnome Accessibility Project pages for a good overview.

There is an on-screen keyboard; there's also Dasher a predictive text entry system which some people find useful and which can be used via a pointer device.

I'll also mention that there are pointer devices that use a dot on your forehead, so you move your head, which can be useful for people who have tremors in their hands; another option can be foot pedals. The Dasher page mentions use of an eye-tracker.

As others have mentioned, voice-over-IP can be useful, and tools like gnome-meeting and an always-on webcam might be worth considering.

The World Wide Web Consortium also has some resources about accessibility.

The GNOME project has some open source accessibility tools that are very easy to set up and use; the major Linux distributions such as Mandriva already include them. See the Gnome Accessibility Project pages for a good overview.

There is an on-screen keyboard; there's also Dasher a predictive text entry system which some people find useful and which can be used via a pointer device.

I'll also mention that there are pointer devices that use a dot on your forehead, so you move your head, which can be useful for people who have tremors in their hands; another option can be foot pedals. The Dasher page mentions use of an eye-tracker.

As others have mentioned, voice-over-IP can be useful, and tools like gnome-meeting and an always-on webcam might be worth considering.

The World Wide Web Consortium also has some resources about accessibility.

Both the Gnome and KDE desktops have assistive technology,as you may find at Gnome and at KDE. Whether either would be of any or sufficient help to you, I cannot say. What's loaded on my Debian system has at least one check-off for terminal/CLI stuff in addition to the graphic desktop. Best wishes to you in your present and future endeavors.
 
  Jim

I actually just graduated from a university CS program and I found that a laptop was useful in nearly all my classes. I used GraphViz for the finite state machines and related diagrams, and I used LyX for the ordinary notes. LyX, in particular, is really good at thinks like mathematical equations and all the Greek that seems prevalent in CS courses. Some times I'd use Dia for diagrams that aren't graphs.

I guess this thread is probably going to devolve into "is too!", "is not!", but I still have all the CS notes I value in soft-copy form and I expect to keep them backed-up for a long time.

Ian

I just said that it was "FTA"... I don't care who wrote what, that particular statement annoys me whenever I hear it... The reason it's in the article is because it's been repeated quite often all over the net.

The KDE and Gnome guys work hard to make our desktop experiences better, and that kind of FUD from MS belittles their efforts. Anyone ever hear of the "KDE Usability Project" or the "GNOME Human Interface Design Guidelines"?

• http://usability.kde.org/hig/
• http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/

This is unfortunately true. Lots of people say "For every Microsoft product, there is a free and open-source alternative". It's true. However, most of those free and open-source alternatives are in permanent beta-stage, while proprietary products have seen many release versions.

Visio -> Dia : The project seems dead, version is 0.94, latest news on the site dates from august 2004.

Outlook -> Sunbird : Seems to still be in development, but version number is 0.2, far, far from a stable 1.0 release. The latest news, from July 11th (after 5 months of inactivity), clearly mentions that "Please be aware that these testing builds are considered unstable and are made available only for testing purposes. We do not recommend these builds for the use on production machines", therefore, it is *not* an alternative.

Lots of open source projects have an insanely large amount of 0.9.x versions, making tons of bugfixes, but never having the guts to actually release a version 1.0 of the product. Either that, or they know that their software lacks the required quality to make it 1.0 stable.

http://www.anjuta.org/ http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/ http://www.monodevelop.org/ http://glade.gnome.org/ please get a clue

QT provides a ton of functionality for networking, XML, collections, database programming.

Or you could use GTK's free equivalents -- gnet, libxml, glib's collections, and gnomedb.

Or you could pay a tax to TrollTech, a company that wants to make money by controlling the GUI on Linux and taxing anyone that writes a non-OSS application. It is, of course, a free choice, but it seems pretty straightforward to me.

Nice choice of icons :/

http://www.dashpc.com/show_picture.php?id=2285

Personally, I would have gone with one of these sets;

http://art.gnome.org/themes/icon?sort_by=add_times tamp&thumbnails_per_page=1000&view=list&order=DESC

http://kde-look.org/index.php?xsortmode=high&page= 0

This is one of the screenshots I was refering to: http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-12/images/naut ilus-browse.png Compare that with this: http://www.baycongroup.com/win98/w98explo.gif The web browser looks pretty similar too. Although, I just noticed they let you use Google's cache for pages that can't be found. Now that's a really good idea.