Domain: gnome.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to gnome.org.
Comments · 3,430
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Linux has "VB"
We have own our GUI BASIC: GNOME BASIC.
http://www.gnome.org/gb -
Re:pointless mudlingingIn another chapter from the can-dish-it-out-but-can't-take-it-dept., I notice that the GNOME developers, who built their position in large part by an endless stream of anti-KDE FUD are now considering disabling reader comments in Gnotices. Partly because of crapflooders, mostly because they're opposed to allowing any negative messages to be expressed.
In my experience, the anti-KDE FUD is rarely from the developers, but from a distressingly very vocal minority. I don't doubt that there may have been a stong anti-KDE feeling in the past, but I am hard pressed to try to find it these days. And KDE isn't immune to it either... their loudmouth trolls are just as bad as GNOME's.
As for the comments, if you read the whole thread, people have been spoofing as Miguel, Havoc, and others in the comments to the point where they are getting emails asking, "why would you say that?" I think that some people are against allowing negative opinions, but I would hardly classify that as an official GNOME position or even having consensus. The GNOME developers are pretty reasonable people and will listen (or at least certainly not censor) criticism of their work that is presented in a coherent and intelligent manner. The consensus seems to be to disable comments until someone volunteers to write a nice registration system.
The email to which you refer (From Alan Cox):
That isnt the problem. In fact if gnotices fell down irrepairably it would be a major plus point for the gnome project. Gnotices consists of nothing but libel, defamation and actionable hate speech.
could not be more true. Why should GNOME allow such garbage to be posted to their site? We're talking about lies, spoofing, and trolling, not censoring sensible criticisms and reasonable technical arguments. You may say there is a fine line, but in that case, I recommend you read -all- of the Slashdot comments for any story and then read all of them on Gnotices or the Dot. Eliminating the anonymous posting and requiring registration with an email address would cut down on the crap a great deal, and just because these sites look like Slashdot doesn't mean that you or I have any right to post our comments on them; please direct me to any newspaper which prints every letter to the editor they receive unedited.
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Re:pointless mudlingingFirst we get mad when MS calls us a 'cancer'. Then we call MS an evil, unkillable menace.
Yeah, the level of emotional tenderness around here always surprises me. There's the neverending stream of rage and hatred directed at Microsoft. They're evil! We hate them! We're going to destroy them! I mean, look at the freaking icon for Microsoft articles!
But as soon as anyone at Microsoft voices a criticism of Linux or free software, everyone turns into a bunch of traumatized crybabies. Of course, as it happens:
- The vast majority of Slashdot readers are running Windows/IE
- The editors seem to spend more time playing Windows-only games than they do with anything related to Unix
- Jon Katz, last we heard, had abandoned Linux and gone back to his Mac. I'd guess he probably wrote this rant in Word; certainly not on a free system. (Jon, since you're the one editor who actually reads comments, let me know if I'm wrong.)
In another chapter from the can-dish-it-out-but-can't-take-it-dept., I notice that the GNOME developers, who built their position in large part by an endless stream of anti-KDE FUD are now considering disabling reader comments in Gnotices. Partly because of crapflooders, mostly because they're opposed to allowing any negative messages to be expressed.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
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Re:I don't think so
If the GIMP people want to increase their market share they need to fix the UI
Market share? Who is interested in market share? The GIMP developers are writing free software. We want the GIMP to be a useful tool that serves the needs of those who contribute to its development, and hopefully also serves the needs of many others. But market share is not a goal in itself.
That being said, the user interface needs to be improved and the developers are aware of this. Some parts of it have already been re-written in the current 1.3 branch and you will get a slightly better look in the Win32 version as soon as the Gimp and other GTK+ applications are converted to GTK+ 2.0.
If I find it bad as a computer guy, you can't bet your bottom dollar that graphic artists are going to hate it.
There are some graphic artists who contribute to the development of the GIMP and make constructive suggestions about how the interface can be improved. Although this may surprise you, some of these artists are happy with the current UI. It can of course be improved, but you should not assume that it is not good for experienced artists just because you do not like it.
If you want to have an idea of the improvements that have already been suggested for the UI and other parts of the GIMP, you can have a look at the list of suggested enhancements or the list of all bug reports about the user interface.
Once the UI has been fixed, then documentation needs to be re-written so that it's not orientated towards computer geeks.
This may sound like a cliché, but the best way to improve it is to contribute... If you do not have programming skills to improve the UI, you could help by writing a better documentation. If the documentation has too much of a "geek style", this is probably because those who contributed to it so far (most of them are not native english speakers) did not have enough time to improve the style. Please contribute if you have some spare time, as this would benefit everybody.
By the way, I assume that you know about the good books and tutorials about the GIMP. Some of these are suitable for non-technical users. One book that is often recommended is "Grokking the GIMP" by Carey Bunks and published by New Riders. The whole book is available online at http://gimp-savvy.com/.
To many people, it won't matter whether it's free, or whether it supports the same features of a commercial product from Adobe that is far more polished.
Maybe. But then again, to many people, it does matter that the GIMP is free software. It does matter that the GIMP has far better scripting abilities than other products (other features like color separation and support for different color spaces are planned for the next version). Some people are happy with Photoshop or other proprietary products... Well, then let them use the product they like. Once again, this is not about market share. This is about making a useful program (that is suitable for those who are interested in free software).
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Why Mandrakesoft has got it
As has been mentioned, Mandrakesofts donations page came about after numerous requests from the users. I for one am glad to see it -- I've used Mandrake since years ago, and until now I've never paid a cent for it. I love the distro and I would like some way to show it monetarily
:-) But I wouldn't go out and by a boxed set because I wouldn't read the manual, I'd throw the box away, I wouldn't need support (if that's even included) and I know retailers probably make more than Mandrakesoft from these sales anyway.
Now the great thing about Mandrakesoft is that they hire lots of developers from many free software projects, like KDE, GNOME, PHP-Nuke, Plex86, Apache and many others. When you make a donation, you can mark those money for, say, KDE development. This way KDE will get better, KDE developers will eat, Mandrakesoft will save some dough and I can sleep at night.
In my opinion Mandrakesoft is heading in the right direction -- their way of income is a lot better than that of SuSE, which seeks to sell more boxes by making it extremely difficult to download their distro. And it's better than that of Red Hat, which charges for services such as automated software updates (which is included free with Mandrake).
Indeed, I think Mandrakesoft is discovering the future ideal way of making free software and still eat three meals a day. Their method is in many ways compliant with The Street Performer Protocol, in that users will pay up if and only if they actually like what they get.
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OT---BUSTED: Read for funny Detective troll-work:The author of the above comment, blackfam972, appears to be a KDE fan named CRAIG BLACK. He has been posting comments like this recently on Gnotices, dot.kde.org, and probably others.
Here is some information about him:
blackfarm@mountain.net
HomePage:http://sites.netscape.net/blackfam972/hom epage
Your ICQ: 103920729
Your AIM: blackfam972
Location: Suagr Grove West Virgiana
Occupation: Navy
Apparently, Craig has figured out how to spam PHP-NUKE webpolls, and done this two two recent "What's your favorite Desktop Environment" polls: one at Warped Systems and another at PCLinuxOnline.com, which was removed due to the controversy.
The evidence for this accusation can be found here, where the admin of warped systems notes that the web poll is being spammed by a user with the same IP address as Craig. Craig has also posted several other comments in the current thread, including Here and here, and a reply to the "anonymous coward" post that links to the second poll he spammed.
So, if you've had enough of Craig, send him a little note telling him how annoying and counter-productive he is being. Tell him how he's giving a bad name to KDE users, the Navy, Backpackers, and Virginians in general. And tell him if he is going to indiscriminantly rig polls and spam web boards, he should hide his tracks better.
Phew, at least I did something productive today.
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Polarisation
...everybody who is not Intel should be busying aligning with anyone who is also not Intel.Is polarisation always in everyone's best interests? Let's suppose we have one Big And Scary player in a field, and lots of little guys. The little guys decide to band together in order to be a match for Big And Scary, and what have we got? Two big and scary players instead of one, and a lot less diversity of choice. (Think of how often you've heard people say that Gnome and KDE should unify, because if they combined efforts they'd be able to be a strong contender against Windows: an attempt to increase consumer choice by killing off diversity.)
And I know "aligning" with someone, as Transmeta are doing with AMD, doesn't make you exactly the same as them. And I'm not saying standards are evil. I'm just saying that "them and us" thinking leads nowhere but multiple "them"s.
my plan -
Sun did some usability testing
. . .
But I don't get this. . .
From Slide 13 :
"Participant Profiles Next generation GNOME users - Business, Scientific, and Creative Professionals Computer Literate and Savvy
- 3 - 15 years' experience of GUI desktops 25% of time spent writing code"
Is how they describe their testers.
But this is what happens. . .
From Slide 16 :
'Icon Design and Tooltips 11 out of 12 users misundersood the logout icon, thinking it was for:
- "power saving"
- "use less energy"
- "set a screensaver"
- "monitor settings"
- "put the monitor to sleep"'
Am I missing something here? Have I not been using a GUI for long enough?
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Sun did some usability testing
. . .
But I don't get this. . .
From Slide 13 :
"Participant Profiles Next generation GNOME users - Business, Scientific, and Creative Professionals Computer Literate and Savvy
- 3 - 15 years' experience of GUI desktops 25% of time spent writing code"
Is how they describe their testers.
But this is what happens. . .
From Slide 16 :
'Icon Design and Tooltips 11 out of 12 users misundersood the logout icon, thinking it was for:
- "power saving"
- "use less energy"
- "set a screensaver"
- "monitor settings"
- "put the monitor to sleep"'
Am I missing something here? Have I not been using a GUI for long enough?
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Re:Sun did Gnome usability testing
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Re:Sun did Gnome usability testing
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Re:Sun did Gnome usability testing
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Possible license problems in the futureThere is a possible license problem in the future when GPLed programs from GNOME are distributed with the major components (compiler, kernel, system libraries and so on) of Solaris.
The system library exception of the GPL does not hold "when that component itself accompanies the executable". Which means that the propriatary system components of Solaris would have to be released as source when GNOME is bundled with a future Solaris release.
There is more discussion on this topic on the Gnotices GNOME news site
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GNU Visual Basic compiler
Where is the Gnu/VB compiler?
They're working on it. Or you can use Glade to design your GTK+ program's interface layout. Besides, VB sucks for real projects.
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Fountain is spraying FUD about GTK / QT i18n
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Re:Good riddance to yet another bad business model
QT is not the best way to go for some people. QT is GPL on Linux doesn't make it the preferable platform. Poor people want to develop commercial products and sell them. They can't do it with QT, and not everybody is willing to spend their liife writing GPL programs.
They can't do it with Gnome, because Gnome is GPL and only GPL, and stuff you develop using GPL licensed libraries has to be GPL. They can do it with QT, because the nice people at Trolltech will happily sell them a commercial license.
Or are you one of the people who think you should be able to take the Trolltech people's work and make money out of it, without giving any of the money back?
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Re:Trolltech does this...could perhaps make an XML parser that could translate this into classes for an interpreted language like Python
Do you mean Glade plus libglade with the Python bindings in gnome-python?
Glade, other than generating C source for the GTK+ GUI you design, saves the file describing the GUI in an XML format which can be read via libglade. Then, it's only a matter of linking it in and calling a function which reads the XML file and builds the widget tree. The task of registering your handlers for the various events (i.e. a certain button pressed) can also be performed automatically by libglade, i.e. by looking at the executable symbol table for languages like C, or using the introspection features of the interpreter in the case of Python.
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Re:Trolltech does this...could perhaps make an XML parser that could translate this into classes for an interpreted language like Python
Do you mean Glade plus libglade with the Python bindings in gnome-python?
Glade, other than generating C source for the GTK+ GUI you design, saves the file describing the GUI in an XML format which can be read via libglade. Then, it's only a matter of linking it in and calling a function which reads the XML file and builds the widget tree. The task of registering your handlers for the various events (i.e. a certain button pressed) can also be performed automatically by libglade, i.e. by looking at the executable symbol table for languages like C, or using the introspection features of the interpreter in the case of Python.
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Re:Discoveries are not the same as consumer goods
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For those who don't like "corporate" GNOME...there's the newly started GNOME Packaging Project here.
The project intends to provide binaries for most platforms so that you don't have to compile them yourself. Its binaries will also be un-branded--there will be no Eazel or Ximian logos, features, etc.
Also, just because someone can compile GNOME himself, it doesn't mean that he wants to. In fact, on moderate hardware it will take about two days to compile this. Experienced power users don't necessarily have time to waste on this.
From the article:
..where information wants to be free so long as it's other people's information.Do people who believe this agree with it when their personal information is free?
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Gnome uses lisp heavily -- over 10,000 lines
The Gnome default window manager, sawfish, uses Lisp as its extension language, via the librep package.
On my RedHat system, the lisp code is in /usr/share/sawfish/0.36/lisp.There's over 8000 lines of Lisp in the default implementation, plus another 2500 or so in the themes. People customize it heavily as well.
A visually impaired colleage, for example, can now use X Windows because he customizes it with Lisp to have audio cues.
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Re:Gnome 1.4> you will relize that gnome 1.4 was released after mandrake 8
Not so:
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Pssst!
For semi-adventurous Red Hatters, I notice that there are lots of new GNOME RPMs at ftp://rawhide.redhat.com/, though you're on your own at getting everything installed correctly on your system.
One hint would be to look at the GNOME site to see what components/versions of various things you need to fetch.
Use at your own risk.
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Old News; IBM favoring KDE?This is seriously old news. Especially when you consider that we've already been through the IBM fixes oopsies on KDE themes contest a week ago.
To me, the real story here is that IBM has decided to promote KDE. Why? Is it:
- That KDE has a reputation for being a pretty easy transition from Windows?
- KDE needs themes?
- GNOME still has a too far to go before meta-themeing makes us all weep tears of joy?
- IBM is leaning toward KDE for some other reason?
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Re:hmm nice.. now get some work done... right now!
That's part of why there is an incitive to start the GNOME Packaging Project. That way there can be official GNOME binary packages. Read the link for more info.
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Re:I think he means 1.0.1
It says so on his webpage that:
* Released bonobo-1.0.1 if only POTFILES.in was checked by make distcheck.
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About Bonobo...
For those of you who don't already know what Bonobo is:
Introduction to Bonobo -
Re:the IM or filesharing clients...
I haven't seen the KDE dialogs recently, but all of your suggestions sound good to me, especially the bookmarks. Also, I believe that GNOME and non-GNOME gtk apps use the same file dialog, though I may be wrong.
If the original poster is interested in this sort of thing, I think this would be a great place to start. Kind of a small project to get your feet wet, and one that would be appreciated by many, many people. There is a gnome-gui mailing list with archives available at http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-gui-list/ where one could probably get more information on how to start a project like this.
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"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it." -
First Java, then XUL, then .NET, then Reef...Now Curl.
Yesterday, Eazel just announced Reef, yet another attempt to do the same thing Microsoft announced with
.NET which is similar to Dave Hyatt's XUL (+CSS+JS) for the Mozilla project which promised to do what Java was supposed to do.All this so I can subscribe to my word processor on a monthly basis?
Kinda depressing.
Seriously, can't we all get together and decide on a single system without everyone going off doing their own thing?
Answer: No.
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We still have a LOT of WORK to do!
An operating system is not only the kernel and a bunch of device drivers! We didn't even start the most important project of them all: consolidating our manpower and our technologies. We could really use a component object model. The good news is: we have that technology. The bad news is we are working on more than one.. XPCom part of the Mozilla web browser project and ORBit part of the Gnome Desktop project. Speaking of desktops, like Doug said, we are working on two competing projects, Gnome and KDE. We already have all the technologies Doug thinks put Microsoft ahead in the game. Mainframe / AS400 connectivity? Linux-SNA. A kick-ass web browser? Mozilla vs. Internet Explorer. Word processor, spread-sheet, Business presentations? Star-Office. I could go on and on but I guess you get the picture. What we have to do now is to consolidate all that into a coherent system.. I want to be able to manipulate Star-Office spread-sheets using a system-wide scripting language (how about perl? python?..?).. I want to be able to embed that spread-sheet into any application, not only into Star-Office's word processor (XPCom? ORBit?) I want to be able to use the same printer driver from Star-Office and any other application on the system (anybody working on a printing subsystem for X? Or do we put it into GTK's GDK?).. There's still a lot of work for us to do before we can really kick their asses on the desktop. I'm looking forward to both.
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Re:Updating GnomeWell, you can always try the sources. Just remember to add the --prefix=/usr when running the
./configure.If you really really want the slackware packages, wait for it on LinuxMafia.
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Re:Free karma, anyone?1. Try download.gnome.org. They have set up a server with links to their mirrors.
2. That's something I don't know.
3. Gnome is the desktop environment and Helixcode is a packaging company, AFAIK. Also, they are now know as Ximian.
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Wrong download link
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Re:Not really...No, you're wrong - this really is the actual release. It confused me at first as well because of
- the stupid way they bungled the release (put out a press release saying it's out, then putting out another one saying they were having problems, and then finally getting the release out)
- ftp.gnome.org not being updated before other mirror sites.
If you connect to the sites listed at http://download.gnome.org , (well, certainly to ftp://gnome.eazel.com/pub/GNOME/ , which is the one I used), you'll see that Gnome 1.4 really has been released. Note that 1.4 is still based around Gtk 1.2, and so is really just an updated Gnome 1.2 -- apart from the addition of Nautilus which I am compiling as I write.
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Issues w/Nautilus and GNOMEBe sure to also read "GNOME 1.4 Release Candidate 1 available" over on the Gnotices site, and see all the issues that are arising because of Nautilus' inclusion in the next GNOME.
There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed like instability, inability to compile on various platforms, bloat and other things.
Be careful before you rush in to embrace it.
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Issues w/Nautilus and GNOMEBe sure to also read "GNOME 1.4 Release Candidate 1 available" over on the Gnotices site, and see all the issues that are arising because of Nautilus' inclusion in the next GNOME.
There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed like instability, inability to compile on various platforms, bloat and other things.
Be careful before you rush in to embrace it.
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Re:rootness and capabilities
* Security in *nix sucks
I'm hoping that you mean Linux security, since this isn't true at all for many other UNIX OSes. For Linux, I think the security is good enough for what it is, when it is used right. The problem is that many applications and servers don't use it right. POSIX.1e-style capabilities (see Linux-privs - POSIX.1e Capabilities for Linux, http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/linux-privs/) are probably the answer. A more legitimate qualm with the *nix model is that it is coarse-grained. I think at least a handful of UNIX OS's have responded with support for Access Control Lists, which provide more fine-grained file access (see Extended Attributes and Access Control Lists for Linux, http://acl.bestbits.at).
* X Windows sucks
The X Window System catches a lot of criticism, some of it well-deserved. Most of it, however, is purely inane. It works very well, all things considered. Most of the technological deficiencies (i.e., mainly rendering technology) are resolved with modern extensions. Naturally, there are better ways to do it. We could have a much better architecture. But that's all hindsight. What we're looking at is not a transition that would be based on advantages, but on disadvantages. Until the limitations of the X Window System outstrip the convenience of using what's already there and well-supported, we have X. But Xfree86 is good enough for now. There might be alternatives in the future (Berlin, http://www.berlin-consortium.org/).
* the xterm gui-cli interface sucks
I'm stumped. You determine that you need the CLI for some task while you're in the GUI. What better interface can you get than actually getting the CLI in the GUI? (Which is what Xterm does for you.)
* all the shells suck
...They seem to have everything I need and want, and more. Filename completion (with cycling through potential matches), redirection (especially with file descriptors, as in bash), good line editing, conditions and looping, scripting,
... Maybe I'm thinking inside the box, but I can't think of anything that I've needed to do that hasn't been made easy (if not trivial) by some shell.* file system in *nix sucks
Well, it's not as if every UNIX uses the same file system. I don't understand this claim, really. Are you arguing against heirarchical file systems or against the file systems themselves?
* netscape in *nix sucks
It performs very well for me, as do Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org) and Konqueror (Konqueuror). There's a lot of hype around Opera (Opera), but I've never tried it. There are particular deficiencies in each of these, of course, but most of them perform the task of web browsing well enough. Not to forget, of course, Lynx (Lynx).
Anyway, there are legitimate issues. Standardized package management on Linux would be nice, ACLs/Capabilities would be nice... And I'm always up for a new Window Manager or Desktop Environment. I use Sawfish/GNOME (Sawfish, http://sawmill.sourceforge.net/; GNOME, http://www.gnome.org/). But, eh, keep complaining: anything that gets me new toys to play with can't be too bad.
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Re:This is what Linux should be all about
You know, I started out getting upset about your response, but I have to admit that this is exactly the kind of feedback we need. Linux in the classroom is a reality. Mexico is converting wholesale, and much of the rest of the world will follow. In countries like ours, where we can afford to buy software, we assume that we should.
Your comments are fair, though skewed by a lot of advertising. I think your kids are smarter than you give them credit for (check out this article about a 16-year-old who's heavily involved in one of the most revolutionary movements in UNIX history). We can't move to using Linux in the classroom all at once, but certainly your computer courses deserve more than Microsoft Visual Studio. Linux offers 20 or so languages out-of-the-box, development tools for just about anything and the environment that businesses use.
Also, if you're going to plunk a system into the library to be nothing but a Web browser, why run anything but Linux on it? The school's fileserver can be Linux. Educational software delivered by Web browser is just as easily accessed on a Linux box as Windows or MacOS.
I think using Macs for younger kids is great. Using Windows PCs to show people how to use office makes sense. I just don't think Linux should be excluded from the educational experience, it's too important.
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Re:Enforced contributions...The Linux kernel, glibc, gcc, RPM, GNOME, KDE, Linuxconf, newt, popt, GTK+, Inti, PAM, pwdb, procps, GtkHTML, Pango, Piranha, ORBit, Mozilla, eCos, Cygwin, gcj, gdb, Insight, Source-Navigator, autobook, autoconf, automake, binutils, bzip2, CGEN, docbook-tools, GNATS, GSL, Guile, libffi, libstdc++, Mauve, newlib, PSIM, pthreads-win32, SID, Win32-X11, Xconq, libxml
...I could make that list even longer with many more projects that Red Hat either funds, maintains, develops or contributes to, but I think I've already proven my point.
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Re:Enforced contributions...The Linux kernel, glibc, gcc, RPM, GNOME, KDE, Linuxconf, newt, popt, GTK+, Inti, PAM, pwdb, procps, GtkHTML, Pango, Piranha, ORBit, Mozilla, eCos, Cygwin, gcj, gdb, Insight, Source-Navigator, autobook, autoconf, automake, binutils, bzip2, CGEN, docbook-tools, GNATS, GSL, Guile, libffi, libstdc++, Mauve, newlib, PSIM, pthreads-win32, SID, Win32-X11, Xconq, libxml
...I could make that list even longer with many more projects that Red Hat either funds, maintains, develops or contributes to, but I think I've already proven my point.
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To Go Offtopic, But To Talk To GNOME.
What do people think of Nautilus? I have been reading GNOTICES very closely and it seems many people hate Nautilus and don't want to see it go into GNOME! What will happen?
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You're welcome.
Hi,
Nautilus is a all-in-one explorer (files, web, etc.).
It requires Gnome 1.2.
The closest linux alternative is Konqueror which requires at least kde 2.0.
Go to Eazel's web site for some screenshots.
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Ok...fair enough...
You want it , you got it buddy !:=)
With the calibre of people you see working on the Eazel project - when they say GNOME is userfriendly, can you deny it? These guys have been doing graphics since Bill was in his diapers.
The GNOME foundation includes some of the top computing companies in the world. That simply verifies what I said earlier - you seem to want to be aggresive, yet I am not making aggressive gestures, just pointing out facts.If you've read any of my posts at all, you will realize too, that I stated that Microsoft DOES have a place in the software world, even in the server world, for low-end servers. So please, be civilized, and let's try and have a rational discussion (note I stopped sticking out my tongue:P)
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Some suggestions
The author of this article(in german) compared some of the available tools with the Windows program "Reference Manager". His conclusion: There are no absolutely recommendable programs, but Sixpack, Pybliographer (and XEmacs in the bibtex mode) are strong candidates.
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Re:KDE: one of the most successful OSS projects
KDE comes with so many other good programs as well, like KNode (News reader) and KMail (lightweight email program)... Does GNOME have any comparable programs?
Errr... yes! Pan is probably the best free newsreader for any platform, Evolution is an incredibly well-integrated mail, calender and addressbook program, and Balsa is a very decent more lightweight mail reader. For office programs, Gnumeric is way more advanced than KSpread, Guppi (still in CVS) is one of the only serious free graphical data analysis tools, GnuCash is very polished, and Dia rocks. Graphically, Sodipodi is shaping up very nicely, gPhoto rules, and the GIMP integrates better with a GNOME environment than with KDE. And then there's XMMS (the best mp3/ogg/mpeg/divx Linux player), Grip (the best CD player/ripper combo) and GStreamer for multemedia; there's GnomeICU, Gabber, Gaim and X-Chat for messaging; there's Gnapster for file-sharing; and there's more useful utilities (e.g. Bug Buddy), system utilities (e.g. Red Carpet), and panel applets than you could shake a stick at. And I know I've missed out quite a few more (Gnome-DB, Oregano and Dr. Genius have just spring to mind - and, yes, Galeon, which rocks and is now my primary browser). In other words, GNOME is hardly short on applications.
If anything, I've often found it to be the other way round. While Konqueror rules, and KWord is much better featured than AbiWord (though I personally dislike the interface), I think where KDE usually excels is in the underlying desktop core, rather than the applications. But that's just my opinion.
PS Sorry for ranting. -
Re:KDE: one of the most successful OSS projects
KDE comes with so many other good programs as well, like KNode (News reader) and KMail (lightweight email program)... Does GNOME have any comparable programs?
Errr... yes! Pan is probably the best free newsreader for any platform, Evolution is an incredibly well-integrated mail, calender and addressbook program, and Balsa is a very decent more lightweight mail reader. For office programs, Gnumeric is way more advanced than KSpread, Guppi (still in CVS) is one of the only serious free graphical data analysis tools, GnuCash is very polished, and Dia rocks. Graphically, Sodipodi is shaping up very nicely, gPhoto rules, and the GIMP integrates better with a GNOME environment than with KDE. And then there's XMMS (the best mp3/ogg/mpeg/divx Linux player), Grip (the best CD player/ripper combo) and GStreamer for multemedia; there's GnomeICU, Gabber, Gaim and X-Chat for messaging; there's Gnapster for file-sharing; and there's more useful utilities (e.g. Bug Buddy), system utilities (e.g. Red Carpet), and panel applets than you could shake a stick at. And I know I've missed out quite a few more (Gnome-DB, Oregano and Dr. Genius have just spring to mind - and, yes, Galeon, which rocks and is now my primary browser). In other words, GNOME is hardly short on applications.
If anything, I've often found it to be the other way round. While Konqueror rules, and KWord is much better featured than AbiWord (though I personally dislike the interface), I think where KDE usually excels is in the underlying desktop core, rather than the applications. But that's just my opinion.
PS Sorry for ranting. -
Re:Prior art...
Yes, there is definitely prior art.
gtk-themes beat them out by at least two months. If you look at the GNOME CVS log for gtkthemes.c, you'll see that it was first checked in in March of 1998, which is before that May of 1998 application date for Apple's patent.
Of course, Enlightenment also beat the Apple patent (by an even larger margin), however, IIRC, Enlightenment use pixmaps and scripts to do its work, while gtkthemes uses plugins (one of which can load arbitrary pixmap themese, but others, like Notif and Redmond95 are full-blown shared objects).
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The Hotmail addres is my decoy account. I read it approximately once per year. -
Re:State of the GNOME project?No, the situation is not as you picture it. I think you should have also put links to the various follow-up articles, in which we explain what is going on in GNOME.
The following links might be interesting to read:
Nautilus --which has a large set of developers and a lot of work going towards it-- is really one of the core components of the desktop. I am sorry for Alan if there are not too many hackers working on new IRC clients, or on new color selectors, I think that overall, we are more focused on the problems of users than we were in the past.
Components like Evolution contain some killer features that will help a lot of people transition to Linux, and the kind of work and effort required to develop an application of this size is not trivial. Just supporting every feature correctly for IMAP and broken IMAP servers is a daunting task. Having the best syncronizing tool for PalmPilots and for syncing multiple devices is also an important feature not available anywhere else (not to mention vFolders, quick searches, great user interfaces and more).
Both applications (Nautilus and Evolution) rely on very new technologies that are at the core of GNOME
Also, look at things like the Ximian Setup Tools, which are just a set of GNOME applications (branded by my company, to get some credit for the work we are putting on it) that addresses the major problem of having a user-friendly unified system configuration for Unix (here)
Our work on the Bonobo foundation is unparalleled. Once we started deploying it, many new ideas came out (like Monikers) that have enabled extremely powerful mechanisms to be created.
We sadly do not have white-papers for all of our technologies, but we are working towards documenting them. If you are interested in helping, get in touch with me.
A few things we have recently done and are shipping as part of GNOME 1.4:
- Bonobo 1.0 Ready to ship with GNOME 1.4
- GtkHTML: An HTML editor and rendering engine.
- EBrowser: A Bonobo component to do web browsing
- Gnome Spell: A Bonobo component for doing spelling, suggestions, and dictionary lookups. All available to any application that supports Bonobo.
- Gnome VFS: Access any resources on the network transparently.
Other things like Gtk from frame buffers and Pango are developed at the RHAD Labs (http://www.labs.redhat.com) and constitute part of the core technologies in GNOME 2.0
Miguel.
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Re:State of the GNOME project?No, the situation is not as you picture it. I think you should have also put links to the various follow-up articles, in which we explain what is going on in GNOME.
The following links might be interesting to read:
Nautilus --which has a large set of developers and a lot of work going towards it-- is really one of the core components of the desktop. I am sorry for Alan if there are not too many hackers working on new IRC clients, or on new color selectors, I think that overall, we are more focused on the problems of users than we were in the past.
Components like Evolution contain some killer features that will help a lot of people transition to Linux, and the kind of work and effort required to develop an application of this size is not trivial. Just supporting every feature correctly for IMAP and broken IMAP servers is a daunting task. Having the best syncronizing tool for PalmPilots and for syncing multiple devices is also an important feature not available anywhere else (not to mention vFolders, quick searches, great user interfaces and more).
Both applications (Nautilus and Evolution) rely on very new technologies that are at the core of GNOME
Also, look at things like the Ximian Setup Tools, which are just a set of GNOME applications (branded by my company, to get some credit for the work we are putting on it) that addresses the major problem of having a user-friendly unified system configuration for Unix (here)
Our work on the Bonobo foundation is unparalleled. Once we started deploying it, many new ideas came out (like Monikers) that have enabled extremely powerful mechanisms to be created.
We sadly do not have white-papers for all of our technologies, but we are working towards documenting them. If you are interested in helping, get in touch with me.
A few things we have recently done and are shipping as part of GNOME 1.4:
- Bonobo 1.0 Ready to ship with GNOME 1.4
- GtkHTML: An HTML editor and rendering engine.
- EBrowser: A Bonobo component to do web browsing
- Gnome Spell: A Bonobo component for doing spelling, suggestions, and dictionary lookups. All available to any application that supports Bonobo.
- Gnome VFS: Access any resources on the network transparently.
Other things like Gtk from frame buffers and Pango are developed at the RHAD Labs (http://www.labs.redhat.com) and constitute part of the core technologies in GNOME 2.0
Miguel.
-
Re:State of the GNOME project?No, the situation is not as you picture it. I think you should have also put links to the various follow-up articles, in which we explain what is going on in GNOME.
The following links might be interesting to read:
Nautilus --which has a large set of developers and a lot of work going towards it-- is really one of the core components of the desktop. I am sorry for Alan if there are not too many hackers working on new IRC clients, or on new color selectors, I think that overall, we are more focused on the problems of users than we were in the past.
Components like Evolution contain some killer features that will help a lot of people transition to Linux, and the kind of work and effort required to develop an application of this size is not trivial. Just supporting every feature correctly for IMAP and broken IMAP servers is a daunting task. Having the best syncronizing tool for PalmPilots and for syncing multiple devices is also an important feature not available anywhere else (not to mention vFolders, quick searches, great user interfaces and more).
Both applications (Nautilus and Evolution) rely on very new technologies that are at the core of GNOME
Also, look at things like the Ximian Setup Tools, which are just a set of GNOME applications (branded by my company, to get some credit for the work we are putting on it) that addresses the major problem of having a user-friendly unified system configuration for Unix (here)
Our work on the Bonobo foundation is unparalleled. Once we started deploying it, many new ideas came out (like Monikers) that have enabled extremely powerful mechanisms to be created.
We sadly do not have white-papers for all of our technologies, but we are working towards documenting them. If you are interested in helping, get in touch with me.
A few things we have recently done and are shipping as part of GNOME 1.4:
- Bonobo 1.0 Ready to ship with GNOME 1.4
- GtkHTML: An HTML editor and rendering engine.
- EBrowser: A Bonobo component to do web browsing
- Gnome Spell: A Bonobo component for doing spelling, suggestions, and dictionary lookups. All available to any application that supports Bonobo.
- Gnome VFS: Access any resources on the network transparently.
Other things like Gtk from frame buffers and Pango are developed at the RHAD Labs (http://www.labs.redhat.com) and constitute part of the core technologies in GNOME 2.0
Miguel.