Slashdot Mirror

The do have one. It's called Konstuct.

I agree. Check out the Light Styles (2 and 3) in KDE, looks like that is where Ximian good the inspiration for their "Mist", which means crap in German btw. :-) Check it out!

The new features guide seems to be full of references on how better will be in the next release.

Do not worry about finding a list of mirrors. download.kde.org will automatically forward you to an open mirror.

For a direct link to the packages, here are:

• source packages
• binary packages

Note that you need a version of Qt >= 3.1.0. There are additional requirementsfor 3.1 you may want to know.

Do not worry about finding a list of mirrors. download.kde.org will automatically forward you to an open mirror.

For a direct link to the packages, here are:

• source packages
• binary packages

Note that you need a version of Qt >= 3.1.0. There are additional requirementsfor 3.1 you may want to know.

Do not worry about finding a list of mirrors. download.kde.org will automatically forward you to an open mirror.

For a direct link to the packages, here are:

• source packages
• binary packages

Note that you need a version of Qt >= 3.1.0. There are additional requirementsfor 3.1 you may want to know.

Once again, I am absolutely amazed at what this little thing called Open Source can do.

Just six years ago, an ambitious proposal was made to the world by a German university student named Matthias Ettrich. The goal of the project was to create a user-friendly, open source desktop environment similar to CDE, the Common Desktop Environment. CDE, at the time, was popular on Solaris and many proprietary Unix platforms. However, CDE's code base was closed and the Linux community was searching for a suitable replacement. Enough support built up that dozens of developers came together to create an entire desktop environment out of nothing. Over 20 months later, KDE 1.0 was released to the public. And there was much rejoicing.

Taking on Sun was an ambitious enough goal. But who would have imagined that Microsoft (Word document) (Google cache) would ever specifically name KDE as a viable competitor to Windows?

Microsoft may even start to get a little hotter under the collar if recent events are to show anything: Wal-Mart's on-line shopping site quickly ran out of their PC's built with a Linux distribution using KDE for its interface; most of the government computers in Largo, FL run KDE; and Apple implements a new Web browser based on KDE's KHTML library.

And if there is nothing else that the release of KDE 3.1 proves, it is that the naysayers are wrong again. All too often, there are those who try to suggest that there is some sort of heated conflict between the GNOME and KDE projects. Nothing could be further from reality. For example, on the Xdg mailing list prominent developers from both the GNOME and KDE projects work together in forming a consistent .desktop file standard. The people that actually make GNOME and KDE have nothing but the highest respect for one another's projects. There is none of the hostility that so many trolls would like others to believe.

It has just been wonderful seeing this release happen. I have been watching the KDE developer's mailing lists since July and I find it fascinating how the whole thing has come together. The graphics designers, the documentation writers, the translators, the event organizers, and, of course, the coders. All of these groups have been equally important in making KDE the enormous success it has become.

So, I just want to say thank you to everyone who made it happen. I just have to wonder what the next six years will bring!

The developers of KDE have been discussing the subject of UI enhancements lately. This discussion was caused by the jumpstart of a project (slicker)) which tries to radically change the UI, which so many people are used to.

In time, I guess you will see less and less feature copying and more and more innovation. And if something innovative is good enough for mainstream, will it be accepted?

The promotion guide in one nice page. BTW, the default desktop is pretty clean.

Also, a pretty release guide is available here Can't wait to try the new S/MIME support in Kmail. I'm so stoked!

Here . It's amazing... Some people are complaining that they didn't use AA fonts for the screenshots, and that's a bad PR decision. More on Osnews

screenshot 1

screenshot 2

screenshot 3

screenshot 4

Don't know how the lameness filter got involved, but here's what I'm doing about it.

screenshot 1

screenshot 2

screenshot 3

screenshot 4

Don't know how the lameness filter got involved, but here's what I'm doing about it.

screenshot 1

screenshot 2

screenshot 3

screenshot 4

Don't know how the lameness filter got involved, but here's what I'm doing about it.

screenshot 1

screenshot 2

screenshot 3

screenshot 4

Don't know how the lameness filter got involved, but here's what I'm doing about it.

HAHA, us SuSE users get KDE3.1 early, while you have to wait. Even DEBIAN has released early packages, we get them before the great slashdotting!

Source, SuSE, Conectiva, TurboLinux, Debian and Yoper pacakges, none for shithat, i dont care if you

Really, I think the posting on /. should wait untill it is announced. The release-schedule says that it is going to be uploaded a bit before the announcement.

Me, I'm downloading! ;-)

GO KDE. Suck this gnomers.

Actually, see the women of KDE here. About half of them are worth a look...

Giving to schools is a fine thing and needn't be exclusive to helping out KDE. In fact if every active KDE core developer were given a new computer, this at most might be enough for one school. In this case, there are probably about 20-ish (or less) core developers that could use upgrades. We're not talking about big numbers here.

Now lets say that one school switches to KDE / Open Source from MS desktops. The cost savings in that alone outweigh the cost of diverting machines which might have gone to schools to KDE developers. In fact there have been a good handful of schools switch to KDE based desktops -- dragging an Open Source envirionment with all of its Free tools and such behind it.

Remember the ideal is for people pushing technology in schools to keep in mind both hardware and software concerns; this is a partnership, not a competition. When you send in your hardware donation I'll even be glad to direct it to a KDE Edu developer. :-)

DEAR FUCKING GOD, that just turned me GAY.

(*shudder*)

Can I give my adoption back? please

You might want to check out the Woman of KDE Website. Not quite what you were looking for but I guess you are ugly and beggars can't be choosers right?

From the Relevant Page:

KDE developers put their computers through a lot of work. Building KDE on my modern desktop (1.4 GHz Athlon, 512 MB RAM) takes 6-8 hours. Many developers are working on systems which cannot fully build KDE in under 24 hours, and many KDE developers do so several times a week. Profiling and debugging tools for optimizing code are very processor and memory intensive. Hardware often is a bottleneck to KDE developers' productivity.

So keep this in mind before you ask why they're requesting this. Thanks :).

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is"
• "the user don't know what themes are"
• "the user don't know what a homedir is"
• "the user can't compile a kernel"
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is"
• "the user don't know what themes are"
• "the user don't know what a homedir is"
• "the user can't compile a kernel"
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly

Java programs aren't cross-platform. Otherwise I could download a single package to run on whatever OS I have.

Java is a platform, or at least Sun calls it that. Following that reasoning leads to absurdities like claiming Super Mario Brothers or StarCraft are cross-platform, since they work in emulators. You could say I'm being pedantic, that "running on a platform on platform A" is practically equivalent to "running on platform A", but that's not so.

To the point, suggesting the use of Swing imposes serious limitations on the project- mainly that it has to be written in Java and run on a JVM. The performance penalties are appreciable. (It is possible to use Swing to display a non-Java program, but ugly and impractical).

The other GUI toolkits that got good recommendations generally have multiple language bindings for them

PersonalJava is sold on devices with 64 megabytes of RAM, or even more.

It looks to me from the pictures as it the machines is running Trolltech's QTopia palmtop environment, just like the Sharp Zaurus. This is good from at least two points of view. Firstly it means it's easy to port the existing software for the Zaurus, and relatively easy to port KDE and other Qt based apps; and secondly because it means that people producing software for Linux palmtop devices get a wider market with a consistent UI look-and-feel.

"My sources say yes".

It looks like Qt does native widgets everywhere. I haven't coded with it, but source compatibility bewteen Windows, OS X, X11, and Qt/Embedded seems pretty promising. But personally, I'm still using the tried and true cross platform GUI toolkit known as HTML :)

This story at kde.dot.org tells about an effort to translate KDE into all seven official languages in South Africa. No way any commercial program (like windows) is going to go through that effort.

But open source software allows you to do it yourself. KDE is a nice one in that regard because they have good tools for translations and a good process for dealing with it. Before a big release is made, there's plenty of time for the translators to do their job. There is a "string freeze" to allow every translation to get completed.

(Other big projects probably 've got something similar, KDE is just an example where I know it worked).

So: You want the functionality badly? You pay for it (with time or money) and there is nothing to stop you from getting it! Nice, that open source software.

Reinout

KDE 3.0.x still lists the shred option somewhere.

In Konqueror, select a file or directory and press [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Del]. There, you have invoked shred.

Control Panel : File Browsing : File Manager : Trash

[in Konqueror] : Settings : Configure Konqueror : File Manager : Trash

You see 'Ask Confirmation for:/ Move to Trash/ Delete/ Shred'

You can add it to the right-click menu with by associating the program with all filetypes. If you want, use the wipe wipe program. Some people prefer it over shred. (Neither make use of the nice status bar provided by the [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Del] combination.)

Add a file named shred (or wipe) to $KDEDIR/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/

$KDEDIR/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/shred

[Desktop Entry]
ServiceTypes=allfiles
Actions=shred (or wipe)

[Desktop Action shred (or wipe)]
Name=Shred File
Icon=editshred
Exec=shred -zu %u (or wipe %u)


From kde-bugs-dist:
The context menu is meant to contain a few, very frequently used items. It has
much too much clutter already, and "Shred" was purposely removed. As you noted,
you can add a service entry if you really want the functionality.

KDE 3.0.x still lists the shred option somewhere.

In Konqueror, select a file or directory and press [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Del]. There, you have invoked shred.

Control Panel : File Browsing : File Manager : Trash

[in Konqueror] : Settings : Configure Konqueror : File Manager : Trash

You see 'Ask Confirmation for:/ Move to Trash/ Delete/ Shred'

You can add it to the right-click menu with by associating the program with all filetypes. If you want, use the wipe wipe program. Some people prefer it over shred. (Neither make use of the nice status bar provided by the [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [Del] combination.)

Add a file named shred (or wipe) to $KDEDIR/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/

$KDEDIR/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/shred

[Desktop Entry]
ServiceTypes=allfiles
Actions=shred (or wipe)

[Desktop Action shred (or wipe)]
Name=Shred File
Icon=editshred
Exec=shred -zu %u (or wipe %u)


From kde-bugs-dist:
The context menu is meant to contain a few, very frequently used items. It has
much too much clutter already, and "Shred" was purposely removed. As you noted,
you can add a service entry if you really want the functionality.

They're using KDE, and KDE allready has a pretty good idea what to do, so the ideal solution would be to use the KDE file associations in Mozilla.

I've had that question in my journal for a while and eventually I asked on kde-linux. Nobody had anything.

Anybody have any better solutions here?

The obvious thing to do is to write a script to parse KDE's config and create Mozilla's mimeTypes.rdf, but I haven't time to do that...

Anybody else done that?

Bull shit.

In theory, it is a good idea, but it is only "widely accepted" (pronounced: "anticipated") by programmers who have been talking trash about Flash usability and want to play with vector art without losing face.

SVG has wide usability and even popularity in tasks far beyond Flash's ability. For instance SVG is the standard display format for geographical applications. SVG is used for some scalable KDE icons. SVG can be natively produced using open source software on open source operating systems. SVG is going to be embedded in the next generation of cell phones. SVG is going to be embedded in upcoming printers as a page description language. It is possible to print to SVG as you might print to Postscript or PDF. It is also possible to directly render PDF to SVG. And you will soon be able to output Visio diagrams as SVG. I've even heard of an SVG front-end for NetHack.

The point is that SVG can achieve popularity much greater than Flash's without displacing a single Flash animation. And once it has done that, it will be a small additional step to wipe Macromedia's proprietary, binary crap off of the face of the earth. ;)

By all means, use Flash for the time being. It is the best tool for many jobs. But don't think that SVG is a "theory." It is used by thousands of people in practice, in both commercial and open source projects. There are many businesses dedicated to building SVG tools, and whole industries being re-imagined around SVG. Its recent growth curve is amazing and I'm convinced it will be remembered as being as important as other major W3C specs such as XML and HTML before it.

Well, there are some libraries that are LGPL in KDE, too: KHTML and KJS (ECMA/JavaScript), for one. Apple chose KHTML and KJS for their Safari browser, and were able to do so exactly because it is LGPL'd.

Well, as someone who's spent a fair amount of time on the KDE usability list, I should take some umbrage at this, but I have to admit it's mostly true.
The reasons for this are largely consistent with what Shawn had to say about KDE: it is rather passive. I think this is a consequence of being extremely open - it's very easy to get involved with KDE, at almost any level because people will listen to you, but they will not stop and wait for you, but just keep going about their business of building stuff for KDE.

And to be fair, you have to give some credit to how difficult a truly open-source usability effort like this is. Usability is mostly about polish: consistency, intuitiveness, ease of learning for behavior, so it's best done by sitting down and going through the whole shebang at once, which is anathema to OSS and especially KDE's development process. The usability folks are now working to collect the usability reviews people have done into a database so developers can refer to them. With luck and some effort to get developers to interact more with the usability project, we can get more broadly involved.

If you want better usability in KDE, help us!

I think there might be a grain of truth in the fact that KDE has very hard time winning the desktop. Gnome has the huge advantage of licensing (LGPL vs. GPL). It doesn't matter how much smoother or better the technology underlying KDE or KDE applications is.

You're right KDE can't win, if you're going to keep shifting the goal posts like that. As long as KDE was not GPL, all you heard was 'Unclean! Unclean!' . Now that KDE is GPL, that isn't good enough either? For heaven's sake make your mind up.

As for preferring KHTML over Mozilla components, I think Apple pointed out last week exactly what a good decision that was. Gecko is a good component, fair enough - but KHTML is at least as good and very much smaller.

Is COM anything like DCOP from the KDE guys? I've honestly not used either, so I can't tell. But's design is to send messages to GUI programs, so it seems similiar.

This is not some sort of mind-numbing disaster. This is just basic economic reality. When you take a valuable and limited resource (investors' money, employees' time) and produce something which the free market finds less valuable than what you started with, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" strikes. This is one of the benefits of a free market- it discourages losing enterprises and thus helps to ensure economic health. Other distros are doing just fine commercially (RedHat, SuSE, Slackware) or are nonprofit organizations (Debian). With RedHat targeting the desktop with recent releases and the releases of Lycoris, Xandros, and Lindows, Mandrake has failed to give people a compelling reason to use it.

If you want to see Linux on the desktop survive and have some cash you want to use for that purpose, don't throw it onto a sinking ship. Invest in a company which holds some promise. Or you could donate to XFree, Gnome, or KDE, all of which are nonprofits (though only Gnome is currently recognized by the IRS as a nonprofit).

Not yet but see this thread where someone has started porting the Webcore to Windows.

-chris

Safari weighs in at 7.2 megs, Mozilla is 38.3 megs.

How in the hell did this get modded insightful? Seeing past that none of these figures are correct, i.e. Safari is NOT 7.2MB but closer to 3MB and Mozilla is nowhere near 38.3MB, it actually compares two completely different applications. This guy might as well have compared both of these figures to OpenOffice or Microsoft Office.

Besides all the replies that have mentioned that obviously Mozilla not only contains the Gecko engine, provides an e-mail client, newsreader, chat client, addressbook, authoring tool, numerous debuggers, its own full graphical user interface, feedback agent, it should also be mentioned that it provides a platform for application development that can be used not only for above tasks but for virtually anything else. Take all of these applications, put them in one package, and you are guaranteed to have an 11-15MB install at least (which is Mozilla's actual size).

A more fair comparison would have been one between Gecko and KHTML (just like Apple did). But even then it doesn't do complete justice. Why? Because it depends on the use. KHTML is designed for and is good at rendering (X)HTML, CSS and Javascript. Beyond and above this, Gecko does client-side XML/XSLT rendering, XUL rendering, and so much more. And, does all of the above in a more standards-compliant way than KHTML.

I don't mean to bash KHTML but I don't believe there's any reason to take shots at Mozilla or Gecko, like many posts already did. Apple didn't mean it that way in their e-mail. If you read it (rather than the ZDcrap article) you will see that they meant to praise KHTML and describe how well suited it was to their specific needs.

here

Snippets:
Jobs said the browser was "based on standards", "works with any Web site", has much-improved performance over IE (page-loading speed is "three times faster", JavaScript performs twice as fast and it launches "40% faster" - comparisons to Netscape 7.0 shows similar performance gains on the Macintosh platform)

Apple [...] has today sent all changes, along with a detailed changelog, to the KHTML developers.

Also:
Mail from Safari team to KHTML devs
and Dirk Muellers response

-- With more than 200 comments this is apparently a big thing to the KDE community

here

Snippets:
Jobs said the browser was "based on standards", "works with any Web site", has much-improved performance over IE (page-loading speed is "three times faster", JavaScript performs twice as fast and it launches "40% faster" - comparisons to Netscape 7.0 shows similar performance gains on the Macintosh platform)

Apple [...] has today sent all changes, along with a detailed changelog, to the KHTML developers.

Also:
Mail from Safari team to KHTML devs
and Dirk Muellers response

-- With more than 200 comments this is apparently a big thing to the KDE community

here

Snippets:
Jobs said the browser was "based on standards", "works with any Web site", has much-improved performance over IE (page-loading speed is "three times faster", JavaScript performs twice as fast and it launches "40% faster" - comparisons to Netscape 7.0 shows similar performance gains on the Macintosh platform)

Apple [...] has today sent all changes, along with a detailed changelog, to the KHTML developers.

Also:
Mail from Safari team to KHTML devs
and Dirk Muellers response

-- With more than 200 comments this is apparently a big thing to the KDE community

This is a rather old debate...please see link for related debate.
KDE Office Beta

Above is an old thread regarding KDE office beta and the confusion caused by alpha, beta, etc. and different people's expectations.

I think that a good general rule of thumb is to say that:

pre-alpha/alpha software all bets are off.

Beta - We've worked out all the major computer destroying bugs but there's still lots of little annoying ones.

Pre-Release candidate - Hey, we got this thing to work pretty well and now we need people to try and break it so that when we actually release we can

Honestly, I'd be pretty pissed if someone released a beta and it did something nasty like erase my ~ directory. We're not talking about CS 101 students releasing the Hello World Browser.

Apple is giving away something they haven't started themselves. The Safari engine is a forked KHTML engine from the KDE project. Read Apple's e-mail about this.

I'm very pleased to see that the KHTML rendering engine is being used on Apple and even better, that Apple is behaving as a good citizen and is publishing their modifications of the KHTML GPL-ed code. The modifications seem to be pretty good. Here's to hoping that KDE and Apple will start working on a common codebase for the engine.

Apple is giving away something they haven't started themselves. The Safari engine is a forked KHTML engine from the KDE project. Read Apple's e-mail about this.

I'm very pleased to see that the KHTML rendering engine is being used on Apple and even better, that Apple is behaving as a good citizen and is publishing their modifications of the KHTML GPL-ed code. The modifications seem to be pretty good. Here's to hoping that KDE and Apple will start working on a common codebase for the engine.

The code is LGPL, not GPL. Plus, they are thanking the KDE project:

(fwd) Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer
Fwd: Our changes to KHTML and KJS

The code is LGPL, not GPL. Plus, they are thanking the KDE project:

(fwd) Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer
Fwd: Our changes to KHTML and KJS