Slashdot Mirror

damiam writes "GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 3 has been released. Changes include new versions of Nautilus, Yelp, and the control center, as well as bugfixes all around. Download it from gnome.org or one of the mirrors." Jeff Waugh adds: "The possibility of a complete beer freeze at GUADEC has inspired another kickarse release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop. It's awesome stuff, definitely worth trying out. You should find GARNOME handy if there are no packages available for your distro."

jpsc was kind enough to send in coverage of the Linux Accessibility Conference at CSUN: "There was a flurry of activity in the Linux accessibility world at CSUN 2002, one of the most widely attended, well known, and longest running conferences on technology for the disabled. Accessibility, for those who do not know, is the practice of making software accessible or usable by the disabled (e.g., blind or low vision); under United States law, software, including Linux, must be accessible for it to be used by the government. Similar laws exist in other countries. " Coverage continues... On Thursday, March 21st, Sun Microsystems presented the UNIX Accessibility sessions, which ranged in subject matter from panel discussions about the general importance and state of UNIX accessibility, to overviews of the structure of GNOME 2 and the GNOME Accessibility Architecture, to presentations about new Assistive Technology (AT) for the platform. Most notable were demonstrations of Gnopernicus, a GNOME screen reader, magnifier, and Braille outputer and GOK, the Gnome Onscreen Keyboard. Sun also announced that a team of engineers in China is working on making Mozilla accessible through the GNOME Accessibility Architecture and that several engineers are doing the same for Nautilis. Overall, Thursday?s sessions were representative of the great progress made in the last year in the Linux and UNIX accessibility world, specifically in the GNOME, GTK+, and X Windows arenas.

The next day the 2nd Linux Accessibility Conference, also at CSUN 2002, served as the stage for more in-depth and technical material as well as group discussions about the community?s direction. Presentations were given on subjects such accessibility checklists and guides for application developers, modifying the Linux kernel to speech-enable console applications, and Linux accessibility in the United States government. Among the most prominent parts of the conference was a roundtable on interoperability and collaboration, which lead to the formation of lengthy and detailed TODO list. As with the 1st Linux Accessibility Conference, this year?s meeting allowed developers to share their work and plans for the coming months and hopefully better coordinate them.

Overall, in two days at CSUN, UNIX, Solaris, and Linux showed themselves to be increasingly capable platforms for disabled users. The Linux accessibility community continues to grow and is looking, now more than ever, for new developers and volunteers. E-mail JP Schnapper-Casteras and with your skills and experience (experience with accessibility not required) and he will put you in contact with the appropriate people and projects.

URLs:

• TODO items
• Notes from the conference
• Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group (FDAWG)
• GNOME Accessibility Project (GAP)
• Gnopernicus - An integrated screen reader and magnifier for Gnome
• Gnome Onscreen Keyboard - Aims to enable users to control Gnome without a standard keyboard (with alternate input devices).
• Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS)

"

jpsc was kind enough to send in coverage of the Linux Accessibility Conference at CSUN: "There was a flurry of activity in the Linux accessibility world at CSUN 2002, one of the most widely attended, well known, and longest running conferences on technology for the disabled. Accessibility, for those who do not know, is the practice of making software accessible or usable by the disabled (e.g., blind or low vision); under United States law, software, including Linux, must be accessible for it to be used by the government. Similar laws exist in other countries. " Coverage continues... On Thursday, March 21st, Sun Microsystems presented the UNIX Accessibility sessions, which ranged in subject matter from panel discussions about the general importance and state of UNIX accessibility, to overviews of the structure of GNOME 2 and the GNOME Accessibility Architecture, to presentations about new Assistive Technology (AT) for the platform. Most notable were demonstrations of Gnopernicus, a GNOME screen reader, magnifier, and Braille outputer and GOK, the Gnome Onscreen Keyboard. Sun also announced that a team of engineers in China is working on making Mozilla accessible through the GNOME Accessibility Architecture and that several engineers are doing the same for Nautilis. Overall, Thursday?s sessions were representative of the great progress made in the last year in the Linux and UNIX accessibility world, specifically in the GNOME, GTK+, and X Windows arenas.

The next day the 2nd Linux Accessibility Conference, also at CSUN 2002, served as the stage for more in-depth and technical material as well as group discussions about the community?s direction. Presentations were given on subjects such accessibility checklists and guides for application developers, modifying the Linux kernel to speech-enable console applications, and Linux accessibility in the United States government. Among the most prominent parts of the conference was a roundtable on interoperability and collaboration, which lead to the formation of lengthy and detailed TODO list. As with the 1st Linux Accessibility Conference, this year?s meeting allowed developers to share their work and plans for the coming months and hopefully better coordinate them.

Overall, in two days at CSUN, UNIX, Solaris, and Linux showed themselves to be increasingly capable platforms for disabled users. The Linux accessibility community continues to grow and is looking, now more than ever, for new developers and volunteers. E-mail JP Schnapper-Casteras and with your skills and experience (experience with accessibility not required) and he will put you in contact with the appropriate people and projects.

URLs:

• TODO items
• Notes from the conference
• Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group (FDAWG)
• GNOME Accessibility Project (GAP)
• Gnopernicus - An integrated screen reader and magnifier for Gnome
• Gnome Onscreen Keyboard - Aims to enable users to control Gnome without a standard keyboard (with alternate input devices).
• Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS)

"

jpsc was kind enough to send in coverage of the Linux Accessibility Conference at CSUN: "There was a flurry of activity in the Linux accessibility world at CSUN 2002, one of the most widely attended, well known, and longest running conferences on technology for the disabled. Accessibility, for those who do not know, is the practice of making software accessible or usable by the disabled (e.g., blind or low vision); under United States law, software, including Linux, must be accessible for it to be used by the government. Similar laws exist in other countries. " Coverage continues... On Thursday, March 21st, Sun Microsystems presented the UNIX Accessibility sessions, which ranged in subject matter from panel discussions about the general importance and state of UNIX accessibility, to overviews of the structure of GNOME 2 and the GNOME Accessibility Architecture, to presentations about new Assistive Technology (AT) for the platform. Most notable were demonstrations of Gnopernicus, a GNOME screen reader, magnifier, and Braille outputer and GOK, the Gnome Onscreen Keyboard. Sun also announced that a team of engineers in China is working on making Mozilla accessible through the GNOME Accessibility Architecture and that several engineers are doing the same for Nautilis. Overall, Thursday?s sessions were representative of the great progress made in the last year in the Linux and UNIX accessibility world, specifically in the GNOME, GTK+, and X Windows arenas.

The next day the 2nd Linux Accessibility Conference, also at CSUN 2002, served as the stage for more in-depth and technical material as well as group discussions about the community?s direction. Presentations were given on subjects such accessibility checklists and guides for application developers, modifying the Linux kernel to speech-enable console applications, and Linux accessibility in the United States government. Among the most prominent parts of the conference was a roundtable on interoperability and collaboration, which lead to the formation of lengthy and detailed TODO list. As with the 1st Linux Accessibility Conference, this year?s meeting allowed developers to share their work and plans for the coming months and hopefully better coordinate them.

Overall, in two days at CSUN, UNIX, Solaris, and Linux showed themselves to be increasingly capable platforms for disabled users. The Linux accessibility community continues to grow and is looking, now more than ever, for new developers and volunteers. E-mail JP Schnapper-Casteras and with your skills and experience (experience with accessibility not required) and he will put you in contact with the appropriate people and projects.

URLs:

• TODO items
• Notes from the conference
• Free Desktop Accessibility Working Group (FDAWG)
• GNOME Accessibility Project (GAP)
• Gnopernicus - An integrated screen reader and magnifier for Gnome
• Gnome Onscreen Keyboard - Aims to enable users to control Gnome without a standard keyboard (with alternate input devices).
• Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS)

"

plastercast writes: "Following the release of GTK2, the second beta of gnome 2.0 is available. There are also release notes here. From Gnotices: 'The GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface.'"

plastercast writes: "Following the release of GTK2, the second beta of gnome 2.0 is available. There are also release notes here. From Gnotices: 'The GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface.'"

Some random reader sent in: "Gtk.org all of a sudden (?) says version 2.0 is available. There is a FAQ for 2.0. Here is a mail from the gtk-devel-list with some 'pre-release release-notes' :)."

Some random reader sent in: "Gtk.org all of a sudden (?) says version 2.0 is available. There is a FAQ for 2.0. Here is a mail from the gtk-devel-list with some 'pre-release release-notes' :)."

Dina's Dream points out two interesting articles currently running on LinuxPower, and linked from Gnotices (GNOME news site) as well. "The first article is a really good summary of the current state of affairs of video under Linux and the direction we should take. Questions are bounced back between a few very knowledgeable people, including GStreamer developers, SGI people and Alan Cox. The second article is a set of lessons learned by Chris Pirazzi while working at SGI. Chris was involved in a lot of Video API programming at Silicon Graphics, and raises a few very good points based on his experience. All people even remotely working on video drivers or software should read these points and take them to heart."

Ur@eus writes "Mark McLoughlin of Sun mailed the gnome-hackers mailing-list today announcing the deal between Sun, Ximian and Wipro. The deal means that Wipro will assign up to 50 people to work on GNOME including hackers, QA people, documenters and more. These hackers come in addition to the Sun hackers already working on GNOME at their Desktop Division in Ireland. The official announcement from Sun will come in a few days."

xer.xes writes: "The first public beta release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is ready for your testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download here. Please read the release notes first! Due for general consumption in March, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface." LinuxToday or gnome-announce have the announcement. I don't see release notes anywhere - post a link in the comments if you find them. GNOME is having a bug day today.

xer.xes writes: "The first public beta release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is ready for your testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download here. Please read the release notes first! Due for general consumption in March, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface." LinuxToday or gnome-announce have the announcement. I don't see release notes anywhere - post a link in the comments if you find them. GNOME is having a bug day today.

xer.xes writes: "The first public beta release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is ready for your testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download here. Please read the release notes first! Due for general consumption in March, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface." LinuxToday or gnome-announce have the announcement. I don't see release notes anywhere - post a link in the comments if you find them. GNOME is having a bug day today.

Karma Sucks writes: "For the first time that I remember, RMS is encouraging collaboration between the GNOME and KDE projects. He offers a concrete idea: Unifying the themes between KDE and GNOME. Matthias Ettrich once went far enough to propose a default unified 'Linux' theme that both Qt and GTK+ could support."

Karma Sucks writes "Check out this summary of a keynote at Linux.conf.au by Michi Henning of CORBA fame. It really hits the nail on several points. I especially liked the point about people constantly rewriting letters in these modern times, as opposed to say 1945 where it just wasn't worth the pain of re-typing a letter. The only point that didn't made sense in this summary was the one about "source code being useless"."

miguel writes: "Here is my reply to the various questions on Mono, the future of GNOME and the Register statements." Linux Today has a copy of the email as well.

xer.xes writes: "The first public testing release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop, 'Rolig Liten Hattgubbe,' is ready for your testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download here. Please read the release notes first! Due for general consumption in March, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface."

xer.xes writes: "The first public testing release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop, 'Rolig Liten Hattgubbe,' is ready for your testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download here. Please read the release notes first! Due for general consumption in March, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface."

plastercast writes: "Gnumeric 1.0 is now out, which makes the Gnome desktop even more 1.0-tastic, with the recent milestones of Galeon and Evolution. ... For those that do not know, Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program with the ability to include all sorts of neat bonobo objects, and also can create graphs through guppi, the Gnome graping program. Enjoy!" Update: 12/31 20:08 GMT by T : That's "graphing." Graping is for the stroke of twelve. Update: 12/31 21:01 GMT by T : Jody Goldberg writes "You folks posted the story a touch too quickly. The release announcement just went out 5 minutes ago."

plastercast writes: "Gnumeric 1.0 is now out, which makes the Gnome desktop even more 1.0-tastic, with the recent milestones of Galeon and Evolution. ... For those that do not know, Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program with the ability to include all sorts of neat bonobo objects, and also can create graphs through guppi, the Gnome graping program. Enjoy!" Update: 12/31 20:08 GMT by T : That's "graphing." Graping is for the stroke of twelve. Update: 12/31 21:01 GMT by T : Jody Goldberg writes "You folks posted the story a touch too quickly. The release announcement just went out 5 minutes ago."

plastercast writes: "Gnumeric 1.0 is now out, which makes the Gnome desktop even more 1.0-tastic, with the recent milestones of Galeon and Evolution. ... For those that do not know, Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program with the ability to include all sorts of neat bonobo objects, and also can create graphs through guppi, the Gnome graping program. Enjoy!" Update: 12/31 20:08 GMT by T : That's "graphing." Graping is for the stroke of twelve. Update: 12/31 21:01 GMT by T : Jody Goldberg writes "You folks posted the story a touch too quickly. The release announcement just went out 5 minutes ago."

ambrosius27 writes: "To quote from Jeff Waugh's announcement: "The API frozen Developer Platform Beta, 'Everyone's Excited and Confused', is ready for your porting pleasure!" You can find the full announcement on Gnotices. The GNOME developers have been hard at work. Feel free to download, create/port applications, and, most of all, send in nicely detailed bug reports!"

drkich writes: "According to an article on The Register (by our very own roblimo). Many 'gurus' teaching new users about Linux make it look harder than it needs to be, and apparently fail to explain that yes, you can make PowerPoint-style presentations in Linux, you can view Web Pages that use Flash animation and other "glitz" features, and that you can manage all your files though simple "point, click, drag and drop" visual interfaces. Could the biggest problem with Linux usability be that most of the people teaching newbies to use Linux are too smart and know too much?"

makapuf writes "First results of Gnome Board elections have been issued. They include some well known gnome hackers, Miguel & others, along with Tesla Gwyne, but RMS has not been elected. Remember this is only temporary and see the results on Gnotices. You can see RMS' responses of the application form."

bcrowell asks: "We have an old Intel machine (166 Mhz pentium, 32 Mb), previously used only for playing Civilization, on which I've now got Mandrake running. The problem is, it doesn't seem possible to run KDE in this amount of memory. I've heard about Linux being a good way to run serious software gracefully on older hardware, but not having a GUI is pretty limiting, unless you just want a server. Has anyone used a more lightweight window manager that they could recommend? Are there ways of configuring X, KDE, or GNOME so as to cut down on the memory requirements?" Yes, a simple browse of Freshmeat will net you loads of answers, but I'm sure the submittor would appreciate some of your experiences with the numerous choices of WMs, out there.

Motor writes: "The list of candidates for the forthcoming GNOME foundation election is now available. And yes, RMS is on there..." Note for voters, the email will be sent out the 13th. Please note the Election Rules and Director Overview Good luck to all the candidates!

Motor writes: "The list of candidates for the forthcoming GNOME foundation election is now available. And yes, RMS is on there..." Note for voters, the email will be sent out the 13th. Please note the Election Rules and Director Overview Good luck to all the candidates!

Motor writes: "The list of candidates for the forthcoming GNOME foundation election is now available. And yes, RMS is on there..." Note for voters, the email will be sent out the 13th. Please note the Election Rules and Director Overview Good luck to all the candidates!

Welcome to Slashback for 20011018 -- read below for an update on Code Red (is Red Dead?), RAND patents in Web standards (some semi-good news on that front), the sad death of some MIDI software, and an upgrade for Thailand.

Please write your elected W3C representative. haplo21112 writes "The W3C has posted a next-steps comment on the mailing list for the Patent Policy Frame Work proposal.

It announces among other things that two Open Source People have been added to the working group as Invited experts, Eben Moglen (General Counsel, Free Software Foundation) and Bruce Perens (Co-Founder of the Open Source Initiative). They have also announced a home page for the Working Group at: http://www.w3.org/2001/ppwg/

Especially interesting is the Second Objection noted on the page from IBM, where basically they are revealed as one of the drivers of the proposal. They grumble about RF and pretty much say they would vastly prefer RAND."

You'd like to think so, eh? ColaMan writes: "Is CodeRed finally dead? I've had a counter on my webserver (yay apache!) that tracks attempts, but since the start of the month only 1 lone attempt has been logged on our permanent IP dialup connection (and that was just overnight). This compares to 2490 attempts for August and 931 for September. Nimda still seems to be plodding along though - I've had 159 unique ip's so far this month and 466 for September. Knowing that my IP address is in some bandwidth-forsaken backwater of the internet, I was wondering how things were going CodeRed-wise in the Real Internet?"

I forget -- does the M stand for "Microsoft," or "Macintosh"? An Anonymous Coward writes: "Remember this story from last Tuesday asking about audio applications on linux? Today the Jazz++ mailinglist declared jazz++ dead (find the message here). While not the perfect midi sequencer, jazz++ is robust and GPL'd. Since jazz++ only appeared twice in the postings (each moderated at +1 ...) related to the earlier story, it would seem this fine product has low visibility among the /. crowd. The only viable GNU/Linux midi solution died the same week ./ had a call for audio solutions on Linux. Gotta love irony..."

From Bundesrat to Bangkok Germany may be considering it, but Thailand is doing them one better. TheMMaster writes "According to this article on newsbytes, the Thai government will switch to open-source software, linux on the desktop, StarOffice. This is a nice example of OSS, and probably why a lot of people contribute, to help people (OK and for fun)"

As usual, the actual developers float high above the flames on their behalf. Yep, KDE is 5 years old -- and fm6 writes: "A nice contrast to the usual GNOME-versus-KDE flamage: the users of news.gnome.org wish KDE a happy 5th birthday." Remember, the flame wars you see about these two projects have little to do with the fact that both have already created killer desktops, and are continuing to do so faster than human beings should be allowed to travel.

Tetard asks: "Long live the pipe! Since the `|' was invented by Doug McIlroy in 1973, has there ever been a more effective way of reusing tools and connecting data ? The mouse is a device of the Beatles era; Rather than try and provoke nostalgia in the older ones among us, I'm asking myself, as are others: when we don't try to reinvent the wheel, or at least improve it, why must we try and copy it every time ? Xerox PARC exposed us to WIMPs and we haven't done better: some innovation, some plastic surgery -- but no "paradigm shift" -- where's the creative destruction that will take us further ? Graphical component programming is turning us into click-happy bonobos^H^H^Hchimpanzees, as we fail to find new ways to manage and connect richer data streams. My web designer friends are damaged for life because of mice, and yet we persist... Where do we go from here ? If we ever invent the graphical pipe, let if have keyboard shortcuts." Yes, you've probably seen a similar question to this run by Ask Slashdot before, but this time I'm wondering if maybe we need new input devices before the WIMP paradigm is replaced with something better. Might any of you have ideas on what form these input devices might take?

For those interested, here are the previous stories that have handled this type of question:

• GUI Research - Is it Still Being Done?
• Pipes In GUI's?
• Pipes in GUI's? (Redux)

So what it will take to break us out of the WIMP box (or prison, depending on your bias), maybe new input devices would do it, but quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if a 3D interface might be another route (it would possibly spark interest in designing a new input device that would work better with 3D interfaces, or maybe data-gloves could serve this purpose?). Going on a limb, maybe this guy might just be the ticket.

Dave H writes "The first pre-release of the GNOME 2 platform is now available! Find it at you can grab it from FTP.gnome.org It is of course a technology preview; note that it can't be installed alongside GNOME 1.x." There's some more information information posted on LinuxToday.

Thanks to Dare Obasanjo for conducting this interview with [Miguel De Icaza], and sending it on to me. I've posted the interview below here - interesting answers, and very thorough. Well done, Dare.

Interview With Miguel de Icaza Bringing a component architecture to the UNIX platform

Summary
In this interview, Miguel de Icaza, the founder of GNOME and Ximian, talks about UNIX components, Bonobo, Mono and .NET.

By Dare (Carnage4Life) Obasanjo

Dare Obasanjo: You have recently been in the press due to Ximian's announcement that it shall create an Open Source implementation of Microsoft's .NET development platform. Before the recent furor you've been notable for the work you've done with GNOME and Bonobo. Can you give a brief overview of your involvement in Free Software from your earlier projects up to Mono?

Miguel de Icaza: I have been working for the past four years on the GNOME project in various areas: organization of it, libraries and applications. Before that I used to work on the Linux kernel, I worked for a long time on the SPARC port, then on the software raid and some on the Linux/SGI effort. Before that I had written the Midnight Commander file manager.

Dare Obasanjo: In your Let's Make Unix Not Suck series you mention that UNIX development has long been hampered by a lack of code reuse. You specifically mention Brad Cox's concept of Software Integrated Circuits, where software is built primarily by combining reusable components, as a vision of how code reuse should occur. Many have countered your arguments by stating that UNIX is built on the concept of using reusable components to build programs by connecting the output of smaller programs with pipes. What are your opinions of this counter-argument?

Miguel de Icaza: Well, the paper addresses that question in detail. A `pipe' is hardly a complete component system. It is a transport mechanism that is used with some well known protocols (lines, characters, buffers) to process information. The protocol only has a flow of information.

Details are on the paper:
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/bongo-bong.html [Dare -- check the section entitled "Unix Components: Small is Beautiful"]

Dare Obasanjo: Bonobo was your attempt to create a UNIX component architecture using CORBA as the underlying base. What are the reasons you have decided to focus on Mono instead?

Miguel de Icaza: The GNOME project goal was to bring missing technologies to Unix and make it competitive in the current market place for desktop applications. We also realized early on that language independence was important, and that is why GNOME APIs were coded using a standard that allowed the APIs to be easily wrapped for other languages. Our APIs are available to most programming languages on Unix (Perl, Python, Scheme, C++, Objective-C, Ada).

Later on we decided to use better methods for encapsulating our APIs, and we started to use CORBA to define interfaces to components. We complemented it with policy and a set of standard GNOME interfaces for easily creating reusable, language independent components, controls and compound documents. This technology is known as Bonobo. Interfaces to Bonobo exist for C, Perl, Python, and Java.

CORBA is good when you define coarse interfaces, and most Bonobo interfaces are coarse. The only problem is that Bonobo/CORBA interfaces are not good for small interfaces. For example, an XML parsing Bonobo/CORBA component would be inefficient compared to a C API.

I also wrote at some point:

My interest in .NET comes from the attempts that we have made before in the GNOME project to achieve some of the things .NET does:

• APIs that are exposed to multiple languages.
  
• Cross-language integration.
  
• Contract/interface based programming.
  

And on top of things, I always loved various things about Java. I just did not love the Java combo that you were supposed to give or take.

APIs exposed to many languages we tried by having a common object base (GtkObject) and then following an API contract and a format that would allow others to wrap the APIs easily for their programming language. We even have a Scheme-based definition of the API that is used to generate wrappers on the fly. This solution is suboptimal for many reasons.

The Cross-language integration we have been doing with CORBA, sort of like COM, but with an imposed marshalling penalty. It works pretty well for non inProc components. But for inProc components the story is pretty bad: since there was no CORBA ABI that we could use, the result is so horrible, that I have no words to describe it.

On top of this problem, we have a proliferation of libraries. Most of them follow our coding conventions pretty accurately. Every once in a while they either wont or we would adopt a library written by someone else. This had lead to a mix of libraries that although powerful in result implement multiple programming models, sometimes different allocation and ownership policies and after a while you are dealing with 5 different kind of "ref/unref" behaviours (CORBA local references, CORBA object references on Unknown objects, reference count on object wrappers) and this was turning into a gigantic mess.

We have of course been trying to fix all these issues, and things are looking better (the GNOME 2.x platform does solve many of these issues, but still).

.NET seemed to me like an upgrade for Win32 developers: they had the same problems we had when dealing with APIs that have been designed over many years, a great deal of inconsistency. So I want to have some of this new "fresh air" available for building my own applications.

Dare Obasanjo: Bonobo is slightly based on COM and OLE2 as can be gleaned from the fact that Bonobo interfaces are all based on the Bonobo::Unknown interface which provides two basic services: object lifetime management and object functionality-discovery and only contains three methods:

 
        module Bonobo {
                interface Unknown {
                        void ref ();
                        void unref ();
                        Object query_interface (in string repoid);
                };
        };

 

which is very similar to Microsoft's COM IUnknown interface which has the following methods

 
HRESULT QueryInterface(REFIID riid, void **ppvObject);
ULONG AddRef();
ULONG Release();
 

Does the fact that .NET seems to spell the impending death of COM mean that Mono will spell the end of of Bonobo? Similarly considering that .NET plans to have semi-transparent COM/.NET interoperability, is there a similar plan for Mono and Bonobo?

Miguel de Icaza: Definetly. Mono will have to interoperate with a number of systems out there including Bonobo on GNOME.

Dare Obasanjo: A number of parties have claimed that Microsoft's NET platform is a poor clone of the Java(TM) platform. If this is the case why hasn't Ximian decided to clone or use the Java platform instead of cloning Microsoft's .NET platform?

Miguel de Icaza: We were interested in the CLR because it solves a problem that we face every day. The Java VM did not solve this problem.

Dare Obasanjo: On the Mono Rationale page it is pointed out that Microsoft's .NET strategy encompasses many efforts including

• The .NET development platform, a new platform for writing software.
• Web services.
• Microsoft Server Applications.
• New tools that use the new development platform.
• Hailstorm, the Passport centralized single-signon system that is being integrated into Windows XP.

and you point out that Mono is merely an implementation of of the .NET development platform. Is there any plan by Ximian to implement other parts of the .NET strategy?

Miguel de Icaza: Not at this point. We have a commitment to develop currently:

• A CLI runtime with a JITer for x86 CPUs.
• A C# compiler.
• A class library

All of the above with the help of external contributors. You have to understand that this is a big undertaking and that without the various people who have donated their time, expertise and code to the project we would not even have a chance of delivering a complete product any time soon.

We are doing this for selfish reasons: we want a better way of developing Linux and Unix applications ourselves and we see the CLI as such a thing.

That being said, Ximian being in the services and support business would not mind extending its effort towards making the Mono project tackle other things like porting to new platforms, or improving the JIT engine, or focusing on a particular area of Mono.

But other than this, we do not have plans at this point to go beyond the three basic announcements that we have made.

Dare Obasanjo: There are a number of other projects that are implementing other parts of .NET on Free platforms that seem to be have friction with the Mono project. Section 7.2 of Portable.NET's FAQ seems to indicate they have had conflict with the Mono project as does the banning of Martin Coxall from the dotGNU mailing list. What are your thoughts on this?

Miguel de Icaza: I did not pay attention to the actual details of the banning of Martin from the DotGNU mailing lists. Usenet and Internet mailing lists are a culture of their own and I think this is just another instance of what usually happens on the net. It is definitely sad.

The focus of Mono and .NET is slightly different: we are writing as much as we can in a high level language like C#, and writing reusable pieces of software out of it. Portable.NET is being written in C.

Dare Obasanjo: There have been conflicting reports about Ximian's relationship with Microsoft. On one hand there are reports that seem to indicate that there may be licensing problems between the license that will govern .NET and the GPL. On the other hand there is an indication that some within Microsoft are enthusiastic about Mono. So exactly what is Ximian's current relationship is with Microsoft and what will be done to ensure that Mono does not violate Microsoft's licenses on .NET if they turn out to be restrictive?

Miguel de Icaza: Well, for one we are writing everything from scratch.

We are trying to stay on the safe side regarding patents. That means that we implement things in a way that has been used in the past and we are not doing tremendously elaborate or efficient things in Mono yet. We are still very far from that. But just using existing technologies and techniques.

Dare Obasanjo: It has been pointed out that Sun retracted Java(TM) from standards processes at least twice, will the Mono project continue if .NET stops being an open standard for any reason?

Miguel de Icaza: The upgrade on our development platform has a value independently of whether it is a standard or not. The fact that Microsoft has submitted its specifications to a standards body has helped, since people who know about these problems have looked at the problem and can pin point problems for interoperability.

Dare Obasanjo: Similarly what happens if Dan Kusnetzky's prediction comes true and Microsoft changes the .NET APIs in the future? Will the Mono project play catchup or will it become an incompatible implementation of .NET on UNIX platforms?

Miguel de Icaza: Microsoft is remarkably good at keeping their APIs backwards compatible (and this is one of the reasons I think they have had so much success as a platform vendor). So I think that this would not be a problem.

Now, even if this was a problem, it is always possible to have multiple implementations of the same APIs and use the correct one by choosing at runtime the proper "assembly". Assemblies are a new way of dealing with software bundles and the files that are part of an assembly can be cryptographically checksummed and their APIs programmatically tested for compatibility. [Dare -- Description of Assemblies from MSDN gloassary]

So even if they deviate from the initial release, it would be possible to provide assemblies that are backwards compatible (we can both do that: Microsoft and ourselves)

Dare Obasanjo: Looking at the Mono class status page I noticed that a large number of .NET class libraries are not being implemented in Mono such as WinForms, ADO.NET, Web Services, XML schemas, reflection and a number of others. This means that it is very likely that when Mono and .NET are finally released apps written for .NET will not be portable to Mono. Is there any plan to rectify this in the future or is creating a portable .NET platform not a goal of the Mono project? Similarly what are the short and long term goals of the Mono project?

Miguel de Icaza: The status web page reflects the classes that people have "requested" to work on. The status web page is just a way of saying `Hey, I am working on this class as of this date' to avoid code duplication. If someone registers their interest in working on something and they do not do something after some period of time, then we can reclaim the class.

We are on the very early stages of the project, so you do see more work going on the foundational classes than on the end user classes.

I was not even expecting so many great and talented programmers to contribute so early in the project. My original prediction is that we would spend the first three months hacking on our own in public with no external contributions, but I have been proved wrong.

You have to realize that the goals of the Mono project are not only the goals of Ximian. Ximian has a set of goals, but every contributor to the project has his own goals: some people want to learn, some people like working on C#, some people want full .NET compatibility on Linux, some people want language independence, some people like to optimize code, some people like low level programming and some people want to compete with Microsoft, some people like the way .NET services work.

So the direction of the project is steered by those that contribute to it. Many people are very interested in having a compatible .NET implementation for non-Windows platforms, and they are contributing towards filling those gaps.

Dare Obasanjo: How does Ximian plan to pay for the costs of developing Mono especially after the failure of a number of recent venture funded, Free Software-based companies like Indrema, Eazel and Great Bridge and the fact that a sizable percentage of the remaining Free Software based companies are on the ropes? Specifically how does Ximian plan to make money at Free Software in general and Mono in particular?

Miguel de Icaza:Ximian provides support and services. We announced a few of our services recently, and more products and services have been on the pipeline for quite a while and would be announced during the next six months.

Those we announced recently are:

• Red Carpet Express: a subscription service for those who want a reliable high speed access to the Red Carpet servers.
• Red Carpet Corporate Connect: We modified our Red Carpet updater technology to help people manage networks of Linux workstations easily and to deploy and maintain custom software packages.
• Support and services for the GNOME desktop and Evolution: Our latest boxed products are our way of selling support services for the various products we ship.

We have also been providing professional services and support for people integrating free software based solutions.

The particular case of Mono is interesting. We are working on Mono to reduce our development costs. A very nice foundation has been laid and submitted to ECMA. Now, with the help of other interested parties that also realize the power of it, we are developing the Mono runtime and development tools to help us improve our productivity.

Indeed, the team working on Mono at Ximian is the same team that provided infrastructural help to the rest of the company in the past.

Dare Obasanjo: It is probably little known in some corners that you once interviewed with Microsoft to work on the SPARC port of Internet Explorer. Considering the impact you have had on the Free Software community since then, have you ever wondered what your life would have been like if you had become a Microsoft employee?

Miguel de Icaza: I have not given it a lot of thought, no. But I did ask everyone I interviewed at Microsoft to open source Internet Explorer, way before Netscape Communicator was Open Sourced ;-)

Timothy has compiled a good list of links related to this morning's terrorist attacks around America. Many photos and video clips. There's a lot of good links there and I highly recommend that you read them. And thanks to the Slashteam for keeping the servers up through this. Its not easy dealing with 3x the traffic. I apologize to readers that have been inconvenienced.

Two major news updates: the plane downed near Pittsburgh is reported not to have been shot down. A fifth plane which had been feared hijacked, this one a Korean Air jetliner, was forced down by Canadian Air Force planes over the Yukon. However, this plane is reported not to have been hijacked -- instead, its emergency beacon was triggered by a low-fuel indicator.

Importantly -- remember, blood is in demand. The Red Cross' site is mobbed, but here's the blood donation information on a the cached page at google.

More details of the attack and its aftermath: a report at at gnome.org, and a photo at indymedia.org. pajama links to NYC Police scanner traffic (winamp) streamed online, and an anonymous reader also points to another scanner feed.

Shadowwalker Delaforge writes "Hey guys: I'm submitting my web site to yours to get the word out. I've been compiling web sites, and info on the U.S. Attack. These sites are ones that work, and arent' swamped out of existence. I'm also adding new data about where people can donate money, blood, and other things dealing with this.

soccerdad writes "Due to the activities of today, the internet/networking experts at my firm have been asked by some of our clients to be on standby in case anything untoward occurs. They've been monitoring backbone activity, etc., in a "just in case" mode. They've described the activity they're seeing as somewhat strange. The backbone is, according to them, at about 80% utilization -- they've never seen it above 40% before. However, the main portal sites such as Yahoo aren't having substantively higher than normal traffic. They're working on doing some traffic analysis but haven't completed that effort yet."

A small piece of that bandwidth may be saved if you go to the link Kalak suggests: "William Shunn is collecting short notes from people in the terrorist affected areas so you can see who is OK." Look here (or post your name here if you're in an affected city) before tying up a phone connection. Alex Fabrikant submitted another personal information site at Berkeley

Thapthim writes "http://cbc.ca/ has all sorts of information, even in our own city buildings are being shutdown, all air traffic has been suspended. However Canadian Airports are taking in international flights heading into US so the air ports there are free for emergencies."

sn0wcrsh wrote to say that a "short blurb on Channel 7 Boston that the CTO of Akamai was on the fateful plane that hit the trade center" confirms the earlier reports that he was on board.

And ectrix writes: "The CFO of my company, Netegrity was on United Airlines Flight 175, which has been confirmed to us by United Airlines to have hit tower two of the WTC.

WAVY NBC - Norfolk, VA (among other local TV stations I'm sure) is reporting on the air the Threatcon levels at the area Naval, Air Force, and Army bases. They are all at Threatcon Delta. Their website currently only lists their status as of the beginning of the attacks, which was Threatcon Charlie. Norfolk, VA is the home port for the US Atlantic Fleet. Local TV stations also are showing armed (M16s, shotguns) guards patrolling the base grounds and perimeters."

There are updated photos and videos here, and CarbonFusion wrote with another good link to photos and videos.. eddiem writes: "http://www.flightexplorer.com/ will soon let you view the flight path of the planes." Explanations of airport security at How Stuff Works and Cryptome are an interesting read under the circumstances as well.

Bard, Andrew wrote with some updates as well:

"Just to let you know:

1. I heard a woman who was on the 92nd floor of the first WTC building when the plane hit it. She was able to escape and so was everyone "in her company" so it is assumed that virtually everyone from the 92nd floor down was evacuated successfully - an estimated 20,000 people of the 25,000 in the building.
2. the plane that went down in PA had a woman onboard who locked herself in the bathroom with her cellular phone - she was telling authorities about the hijacking when the plane crashed and killed her - that is the only way the authorities knew for sure what plane went down in PA so quickly, she gave her flight number
3. the Mexican border is completely closed and the Canadian border is still open - all International flights have been redirected to Northern Canada
4. the planes from Boston were presumably chosen because they were going on long flights (to LA) which would make them larger than average airliners with full tanks of gas
5. when the first WTC building crashed (which was the 2nd one to be hit), 125 firemen were down below fighting the fire on the first building to be hit... none of them have been heard from yet - 10,000 emergency personnel in NYC responded to the first WTC getting hit... it is unknown how many of those were crushed in the two collapsed buildings."

McVeigh revels in this posting at Gnotices site which reads: "GDKFXT transparently adds anti-aliased font support to GTK+-1.2. Once you have installed it, you can run any (well, nearly any) existing GTK+ binary and see anti-aliased fonts in the GTK widgets. You don't need to recompile GTK+ or your application.'" He adds "I'm running it now -- it it looks great!!"

McVeigh revels in this posting at Gnotices site which reads: "GDKFXT transparently adds anti-aliased font support to GTK+-1.2. Once you have installed it, you can run any (well, nearly any) existing GTK+ binary and see anti-aliased fonts in the GTK widgets. You don't need to recompile GTK+ or your application.'" He adds "I'm running it now -- it it looks great!!"

Cowculator writes: "Sun Microsystems will release the beta version of StarOffice 6.0 in October, with the development version already available. This ZDNet article has some more details, including a link to the development version..." Other submitters sent in notes about Gobe Productive and Hancom Office 2.0, not to mention KOffice and the Gnome office applications. As far as I know all of these are lacking the single most important thing, a robust and complete set of import filters for Word, Wordperfect, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.

Ur@eus writes: "Ever since Sun joined the GNOME Foundation people have been wondering exactly what they have been working on. To solve this we have done an interview with some of the people Sun have working on GNOME. The topics discussed include the background for Sun choosing GNOME, Accessibility, Useability and more. You find the interview at Linuxpower.org."

Ur@eus writes: "Ever since Sun joined the GNOME Foundation people have been wondering exactly what they have been working on. To solve this we have done an interview with some of the people Sun have working on GNOME. The topics discussed include the background for Sun choosing GNOME, Accessibility, Useability and more. You find the interview at Linuxpower.org."

Leslie Proctor writes: "The GNOME Foundation announced today that they have hired Timothy Ney as Executive Director. Tim is well known in the Free software community for his work with the FSF. More details at www.gnome.org." The actual press release is online, as well as Gnome news. Having worked/talked with Tim before, this is great news for The Gnome Foundation -- Tim's an incredible guy.

Leslie Proctor writes: "The GNOME Foundation announced today that they have hired Timothy Ney as Executive Director. Tim is well known in the Free software community for his work with the FSF. More details at www.gnome.org." The actual press release is online, as well as Gnome news. Having worked/talked with Tim before, this is great news for The Gnome Foundation -- Tim's an incredible guy.

battery841 writes: "Evolution 1.0 Beta 1 has been released. An announcement has been released. The RPMs and tarballs can be downloaded from Ximian. This is the first beta release, and a major step to the much awaited 1.0 release." The last time I tried Evolution it was very buggy, but that was a long time ago - time to give it another try.

pdiaz writes: "Here is a report made by Sun Microsystems people about GNOME usability. They collected a bunch of professionals (lawyers, engineers, Graphic Designers, etc..) and put them in front of a Gnome desktop. They were asked to perform some tasks and tell what some icons, menus, etc., do. Some quotes are really funny, like when they asked what does the terminal emulator icon launch." Very interesting stuff, and this approach is necessary because once you've gotten accustomed to the system it's no longer possible for you to evaluate how it appears to an inexperienced user.

metalhed77 writes: "A new version of the Nautilus file manager (1.0.4) has made its way out to the gnome ftps. here's the article on linuxtoday. It includes various improvements which are described on linux today, these primarily consisted of bug fixes and speed ups." Good to see that the effort that went into making Nautilus friendly wasn't wasted. But if you want to browse more than your hard drive, HeUnique points out another interesting project which is not distributed with the official KDE package. It's called: KDENOX ("KDE No X" -- you can use it with X or with framebuffer and QT Embedded: here's a screenshot). The gain? You get Konqueror without KDE, with SSL, cookies, proxy, bookmarks, fonts, and without KDE itself. The executable is small (4MB), doesn't take much RAM, and it works very nicely on low end machines ... (grab it from KDE CVS). Update: 07/08 01:17 AM by T : Here's a screenshot elsewhere; first person to mirror gets a lollipop.

Tonight, Slashback brings you good news on the Gnome Front, news that's either sobering or annoying on the Passport patrol, and a very useful checklist for those caught outside, simulating space travel, and pretty much alone.

Reconciliation among comics and gnomes. CaptainCarrot writes: "In today's Penny Arcade newspost, Tycho continues the discussion on Scott McCloud's piece on micropayments. He has moderated his tone considerably from his original rant on the subject, and offered his apologies for, as he puts it, having misjudged McCloud. During their phone conversations, the two apparently came to some meeting of the minds. Here's yesterdays Slashback on the topic, and the two prior relevant discussions."

On a similar note, in response to the recent story on Gnome losing its 2.0 package maintainer, an Anonymous Coward wrote:"Here's the first chapter in the rest of the story. In short, the guy who quit, returned."

Perhaps they'll be offering student visas. Mike Schiraldi writes: "MSDN users aren't the only ones who have to use Passport. When i bought a Dell computer this January, it came with a "free" (i.e. included in the price of the machine) year of MSN. I went to set up POP, and found out that MSN no longer supports POP for new subscribers. We have to use a secret Passport protocol that only the new Outlook Express can speak. I fought with customer service, and spoke with many levels of tech support, and believe me, they're not budging."

Is this because a Real Doll would be too heavy? Hanford writes: "Looks like this checklist for a simulated Mars mission includes a few comforts from Earth. Check out the last two items. Remember this is from nasa.gov :)"

And since you won't be on camera nearly as much as the astronauts in the various earth-orbiting devices are, this might be more practical than aloft. Remember those vinyl patches, too.

jacobito writes "Perhaps this hasn't been posted because it could ignite a flame war, but here goes: The gnome-hackers list has been the center of some high drama lately. Martin Baulig, the Gnome 2.0 release coordinator, resigned this weekend due to disagreements over the use of bonobo-conf versus gconf and his license to implement architectural changes more or less unilaterally. Through the ensuing melee, fingers have been pointed both at individuals and at corporations, harsh language has been used, and at one point Miguel de Icaza made the memorable proclamation "You can now flame me, I am full of love." Really, though, neither the bickering nor the technical details are what make this affair newsworthy--what is exciting about this is watching a decentered, non-hierarchical, mostly-cooperative group of talents work through the process of getting along with each other and settling disputes, all without resorting to imposing a single dictatorial will upon the group (so far). To that end, Havoc Pennington has posted a draft of a Gnome Enhancement Procedure to provide a structured change process which will hopefully prevent future flamefests. Good reading."

jacobito writes "Perhaps this hasn't been posted because it could ignite a flame war, but here goes: The gnome-hackers list has been the center of some high drama lately. Martin Baulig, the Gnome 2.0 release coordinator, resigned this weekend due to disagreements over the use of bonobo-conf versus gconf and his license to implement architectural changes more or less unilaterally. Through the ensuing melee, fingers have been pointed both at individuals and at corporations, harsh language has been used, and at one point Miguel de Icaza made the memorable proclamation "You can now flame me, I am full of love." Really, though, neither the bickering nor the technical details are what make this affair newsworthy--what is exciting about this is watching a decentered, non-hierarchical, mostly-cooperative group of talents work through the process of getting along with each other and settling disputes, all without resorting to imposing a single dictatorial will upon the group (so far). To that end, Havoc Pennington has posted a draft of a Gnome Enhancement Procedure to provide a structured change process which will hopefully prevent future flamefests. Good reading."

jacobito writes "Perhaps this hasn't been posted because it could ignite a flame war, but here goes: The gnome-hackers list has been the center of some high drama lately. Martin Baulig, the Gnome 2.0 release coordinator, resigned this weekend due to disagreements over the use of bonobo-conf versus gconf and his license to implement architectural changes more or less unilaterally. Through the ensuing melee, fingers have been pointed both at individuals and at corporations, harsh language has been used, and at one point Miguel de Icaza made the memorable proclamation "You can now flame me, I am full of love." Really, though, neither the bickering nor the technical details are what make this affair newsworthy--what is exciting about this is watching a decentered, non-hierarchical, mostly-cooperative group of talents work through the process of getting along with each other and settling disputes, all without resorting to imposing a single dictatorial will upon the group (so far). To that end, Havoc Pennington has posted a draft of a Gnome Enhancement Procedure to provide a structured change process which will hopefully prevent future flamefests. Good reading."

We've run several stories about Eazel, and recently posted word on its recent financial troubles and likely shutdown. Gramps writes "Eazel is indeed shutting down but the good news is that Nautilus development will continue. It's all in Bart Decrem's email to the gnome-hackers mailing list. It's been a great ride. Thanks, folks." (Read more.)

1010011010 pointed out this follow-up email from Darin Adler about the future of various projects maintained by former Eazel employees, including Nautilus, gnome-vfs, and various libraries, as well as bugtracking and other necessities.

Shutting down is never a happy event, but it's gratifying to see email from Andy Hertzfeld (also on the gnome-hackers list) in which he says: "I just want to reaffirm my personal commitment to the continuing development of Nautilus, the GNOME platform and free software in general. I plan to keep working hard to make free software easier to use and I'm still optimistic that our work can make a big difference to millions of users."

rexlam indicates this story from cnet on the shutdown as well. Best of luck to everyone at Eazel.

We've run several stories about Eazel, and recently posted word on its recent financial troubles and likely shutdown. Gramps writes "Eazel is indeed shutting down but the good news is that Nautilus development will continue. It's all in Bart Decrem's email to the gnome-hackers mailing list. It's been a great ride. Thanks, folks." (Read more.)

1010011010 pointed out this follow-up email from Darin Adler about the future of various projects maintained by former Eazel employees, including Nautilus, gnome-vfs, and various libraries, as well as bugtracking and other necessities.

Shutting down is never a happy event, but it's gratifying to see email from Andy Hertzfeld (also on the gnome-hackers list) in which he says: "I just want to reaffirm my personal commitment to the continuing development of Nautilus, the GNOME platform and free software in general. I plan to keep working hard to make free software easier to use and I'm still optimistic that our work can make a big difference to millions of users."

rexlam indicates this story from cnet on the shutdown as well. Best of luck to everyone at Eazel.

We've run several stories about Eazel, and recently posted word on its recent financial troubles and likely shutdown. Gramps writes "Eazel is indeed shutting down but the good news is that Nautilus development will continue. It's all in Bart Decrem's email to the gnome-hackers mailing list. It's been a great ride. Thanks, folks." (Read more.)

1010011010 pointed out this follow-up email from Darin Adler about the future of various projects maintained by former Eazel employees, including Nautilus, gnome-vfs, and various libraries, as well as bugtracking and other necessities.

Shutting down is never a happy event, but it's gratifying to see email from Andy Hertzfeld (also on the gnome-hackers list) in which he says: "I just want to reaffirm my personal commitment to the continuing development of Nautilus, the GNOME platform and free software in general. I plan to keep working hard to make free software easier to use and I'm still optimistic that our work can make a big difference to millions of users."

rexlam indicates this story from cnet on the shutdown as well. Best of luck to everyone at Eazel.