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You've got it all wrong, mandrake didn't die it surrendered to the axis of evil. So long Mandrake we barely gnu ye.

There would be amazing advantages to doing it differently though - for more discussion on this see XOpenWin

although nothing has yet been accomplished through this project. The key things to do which would make this possible are:

• separate out the Wine GDI and x11drv dlls (see this message)
• port these dlls to cygwin
• persuade windows to use them in place of the normal gdi

There would be amazing advantages to doing it differently though - for more discussion on this see XOpenWin

although nothing has yet been accomplished through this project. The key things to do which would make this possible are:

• separate out the Wine GDI and x11drv dlls (see this message)
• port these dlls to cygwin
• persuade windows to use them in place of the normal gdi

I'm sorry, I know this is a little offtopic, however, it needs to be said.

Quit it with the DAMNED cheerleading. It seems that every chance anyone ever gets to mention a distro they like or they think is superior in any way shape or form they must at all cost mention in any obscur way. Slashdot's advertisements aren't as effective as these comments. People actually read these comments and mod them up thinking "Wow what an ingenious . . ." whoa, hold on a second that's an advertisement for another Linux distro--GEEZ!

By the way visit redhat.com

Cheers!

No Java, no JSP man. Simply use PHP for web development.
Forget Java man and go to PHP!

PHP is 4 times faster than Java technology 'JSP' (Java server pages).
This tallies because compiled "C" program is 4 times faster than Java.

Moreover, PHP is getting the object oriented features of Java language.

The real usefulness of Java is 'Java applets' which run on client browsers but on the server side you simply use PHP.

PHP is a very lightening fast object oriented scripting language. PHP is 100% written in "C" and there is no virtual machine as in Java. Nothing can beat "C" language ("C" is a language which never dies!!)

(Java is just another language. The PHP project needs millions of Java programmers who can add the Java's language features like inner classes, static, private, protected and others to PHP. PHP already has some of java' features).
Java programmers will really "LOVE" PHP as PHP class is identical to Java's class keyword.

Read the benchmars of Java JSP and PHP. PHP tops in the speed!!

Read the doc here and mirrors at [1], [2], [3], [4].

Symantec.

The same Symantec who's Norton Anti-virus product is prominently featured in a rash of spams in my inbox?

The same Symantec who claims to follow up on reports of this to spamwatch@symantec.com? That never seems to lead to any sort of actions?

The same Symantec who just changed their auto-renewal to cost people more money IN THE MIDDLE OF THE RENEWAL CYCLE?

Huh, who'd'a thunk it?

Glad I use somebody else's anit-virus software.

I believe RHAS is already certifies "Red Hat Achieves Defense Department COE Certification" .

http://www.redhat.com/training/rhce/courses/ ... you don't have to be in soviet russia for Redhat to certify you..

Well, I think the solution here is obvious.

Sorry, couldn't resist. :-)

Comparing that to Solaris, I have no idea where you pulled out the 11.5 year life cycle. According to Sun's web page, it's 5 years from last ship date. Reference this page: http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/fcc/lifecycle .html

I will admit that 5 years from last ship is greater than 5 years from initial ship, but there's no way in hell it's an 8.5 year delta like you're trying to claim.

Ya know, "gobs of system management tools" and "a kernel many tricks up it's[sic] sleeve" don't exactly add to much of a review :-). I believe I can honestly claim that Red Hat Linux Advanced Server has "gobs of system management tools" and "a kernel with many tricks up its sleeve". Of course, this claim holds true for Windows too.

How you got moderated to 2 on your post is beyond me...

IANAL, so take your own read of the EULA:

http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhlas_us.html

It looks like each copy of RHAS installs with proprietary client to the RedHat network. This client is not GPL. It is "RedHat Intellectual Property". That's apparently what's licensed.

Many Microsoft products don't make that info available, you're right -- sounds like a bad business practice and one that is likely to cost them customers. So don't buy from them. I typed the following into google:

linux license agreement
apple license agreement
windows XP license agreement (XP added to eliminate all the windows 95 references)

I found an OS developer or two who published theirs: RedHat Agreement and Apple OS agreement (PDF). I guess they seem like better companies to buy from.

Simple, really. If you don't like the RIAA and it politics, don't buy Sony CDs. If you don't like Microsoft or Symantec's ham-handed EULA management, don't buy their products. Nothing will break their backs quicker. This silly lawsuit won't do it. The best this lawsuit can hope for, beyond a teeny weeny settlement, is to heighten people's awareness that non-exposed EULAs are dangerous so you should consider other software. If Microsoft doesn't change their practice they will lose business -- it's all about competition.

The only reason to sue them is because they have harmed or wronged you in some way. In this instance they did not harm or wrong anyone who read and even remotely understood the damn box!! Yes, just the box -- I've clarified that to death. That is my ultimate point and the one that will likely win in the courts. A great win would be that the EULA ENCLOSED label will be in big red letters and a copy will be available at the counter, be 25 pages long, and take you a half an hour to understand so you'll compulsion buy anyways to save time. The open box/ no-return policy will likely still stand.

I sent an email to piracy@microsoft.com asking about getting a copy of the EULA. You are exactly right about it not being obvious (if at all) on their web site. After poking around the common email address was that piracy one so I tried that. We'll see...

How I took HP and Microsoft to court and still got no refund. (not wholly applicable, but an interesting read)

Yes there is a way to get a test version.

It's called Advanced Server Developer Edition.

--

The Linux kernel you can download from here, the Red Hat distrubution here.

Hmmm, good question. A reasonable place to start: Red Hat.

Read the RH press release here.

I'm sure all the other major Linux businesses have similar archives.

Please refer to this quote from Red Hat's website for clarification:

Advanced Server is sold through a one-year subscription and it does have a licensing agreement. But before you mention the "p"-word ("proprietary"), understand that the code is open and protected by the GPL license. It's not proprietary. We're licensing the services, not the software. The source code files can be downloaded by anyone, and you still have the right to use the software after the license and services expire.

Thank you. Please drive through.

Well, you could always submit some photos to Am I Evil Or Not? Meanwhile, here is a handy reference chart:

• Apple divisions:
• Hardware: Not Evil. Sexy, generally support standards, but don't allow clones.
• MacOS: Mostly Not Evil. Open source kernel, proprietary GUI, sometimes antagonistic to developers.
• Software: Mostly Not Evil. Free stuff often made at the expense of loyal Mac developers (SoundJam, Watson, etc), but lots of open source as well.
• Legal: Very Evil. Send cease&desist letters at the drop of a jellybean, and threaten the DMCA.
• Steve Jobs: Chaotic Neutral. As an insane liberal genius, he disdains your quaint notions of human ethics.

• Microsoft divisions:
• Windows: Evil. Monopoly abuse, swiss cheese security, embrace/extend/extinguish.
• Office: Necessary Evil. Would be much less evil as an independent company.
• Explorer: Mostly Evil. Proprietary muscle to push Windows monopoly, but support web standards.
• Legal: Evil. Submits fake evidence, colludes with DoJ.
• Games: Partly Evil. Tool to maintain Windows monopoly, but decent products.
• XBox: Partly Evil. Burning MS slush fund in attempt to capture a console monopoly, but it's a decent rig.
• Hardware: Not Evil. MS Mouse & Keyboard are nice.
• MSN: Mostly Evil. Plays abusive games to screw up MS competitors.
• Hotmail: Partly Evil. Spies on your clicks in email links, but supports anti-spam filtering
• Bill Gates: Lawful Evil. Very Exactly Lawful Evil.

• IBM:
• Not Evil. Formerly Big Brother, now #1 Linux advocate and possible savior of Apple.

• Red Hat:
• Not Evil. Would love to kill off all the other Linux distributors, but you can't really hate anyone who gives away their main product.

Flaw weakens Linux security

Programmers have found a vulnerability in Linux (news - web sites) that could allow protective firewall software to grant malicious computer users access to protected networks.

The flaw, which affects versions 2.4.14 through 2.4.18-pre9 of the Linux kernel, is in a component of the Netfilter firewall software. The component is involved when two computer users chat directly with each other using the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) system.

Information sent across the Internet is broken up into tiny "packets," each with "from" and "to" addresses, indicating who's sent the information and where it's intended to go. So-called firewall software transmits or screens out these packets based on the address of the sender.

Netfilter, among the new aspects of the 2.4 version of the Linux kernel, is software that runs within the kernel to filter out unwanted packets. But its IRC helper component configures firewall settings too broadly, potentially allowing communication from IP (Internet Protocol) addresses that should be blocked.

Programmers working on the Netfilter firewall software project reported the problem Monday.

Versions 7.1 and 7.2 of leading Linux seller Red Hat's product are vulnerable. The Durham, N.C.-based company issued a patch Thursday that corrects the problem. The flawed software isn't installed by default on the Red Hat versions, the company said, but some users may have added it.

Security is a nagging concern for the computer industry, which must juggle new features with the risk that they open up new problems. While the firewall problem the Netfilter programmers discovered is limited to a few versions of Linux, a more serious problem emerged earlier this month affecting numerous operating systems using standard network management software.

Troll 56 of 208 from the annals of the Troll Library .

No Java, no JSP man. Simply use PHP for web development.
Forget Java man and go to PHP!

PHP is 4 times faster than Java technology 'JSP' (Java server pages).
This tallies because compiled "C" program is 4 times faster than Java.

Moreover, PHP is getting the object oriented features of Java language.

The real usefulness of Java is 'Java applets' which run on client browsers but on the server side you simply use PHP.

PHP is a very lightening fast object oriented scripting language. PHP is 100% written in "C" and there is no virtual machine as in Java. Nothing can beat "C" language ("C" is a language which never dies!!)

(Java is just another language. The PHP project needs millions of Java programmers who can add the Java's language features like inner classes, static, private, protected and others to PHP. PHP already has some of java' features).
Java programmers will really "LOVE" PHP as PHP class is identical to Java's class keyword.

Read the benchmars of Java JSP and PHP. PHP tops in the speed!!

Read the doc here and mirrors at [1], [2], [3], [4].

• "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"

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

That oughta get the zealots cheering.

Theres an interesting comaprison between the benfefits that Red Hat perceives that can be gained through taking their course and Microsofts idea of the benefits you get for its MCSE.

Its an interesting contrast of philosophys, Red Hat stresses its IT benefits, whereas Microsoft seems to stress the special offers that come free with the course.

Apparently you get a free badge with the Microsoft cereal, I think I know which one I'm going to be buying.

Dude, don't tell the BSA, but I know where you can download an OS for free & run it on cheap x86 hardware. Click here to download. (Our secret, ok?)

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

RedHat recently released a bugfix for one of their packages. The name of the package wasn't available at press time, but you'll be sure to find it on the errata page.

Oh I forgot, I did:
A Google Search: "How do I change the resolution in Red Hat 7.3"

And got:
Configuring X (Red Hat Docs)
And
Change of screen resolution by toggling (solution found)- Red Hat mailing list

So, in short, no. I don't see where your complaint is coming from. You should have been able to change it in 5 minutes, even if you hunt and peck x-c-o-n-f-i-g-u-r-a-t-o-r.

Oh I forgot, I did:
A Google Search: "How do I change the resolution in Red Hat 7.3"

And got:
Configuring X (Red Hat Docs)
And
Change of screen resolution by toggling (solution found)- Red Hat mailing list

So, in short, no. I don't see where your complaint is coming from. You should have been able to change it in 5 minutes, even if you hunt and peck x-c-o-n-f-i-g-u-r-a-t-o-r.

My main fear is that KMail and Konquerer won't be good Evolution/Galeon replacements.

No worries. Just keep Evolution and Galeon. I switched from GNOME2 around KDE 3.1RC2 and haven't looked back. If you're worried about consistent look (feel is another story) then you have a couple of options.
You could get the Geramik theme for gtk 1.x and 2.x this will match the default Keramik theme in KDE, and even inherit any color changes made in the kde control center! This is what I did, and now the GIMP, GAIM, and Pan (and mozilla/phoenix) all match my KDE desktop perfectly.
You could also try the Wonderland theme (called BlueCurve in RedHat) from the RedHat Artwork package. It will theme gtk 1.x/2.x and kde consistently.
Another more difficult option would be to use the Liquid theme for kde, and dig up some Aqua[Graphite] themes for gtk. Since Aqua-ish themes exist for everything that is skinnable, you get a reasonably homogenous desktop.

With a little effort, you can have a beautiful and consistent Unix desktop, regardless of which apps you need to run or which desktop you choose.

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!

But they have included a KDE 3.1 snapshot in the latest beta ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/phoebe/ . Tagged as '3.1-0.11 Red Hat'.

> Well, no RedHat packages, which is not surprising considering the 'treatment' that KDE was subjected to by RH.

Yes, the availability of Red Hat packages for KDE 3.1 is really shameful.

Fucking KDE crybabies.

--

I've been using apt-rpm from Fresh RPMS for a while now, which doesn't have these problems. Apt-rpm provides a free solution, with an open back end (so that you can publish your own packages - for example gstreamer use apt-rpm in this way) and works really well. The alternatives, up2date and red-carpet, have closed back ends, you have to get redhat or ximian to publish your package for you.

Perhap we should go to Red Hat Bugzilla and raise enhancment requests for then to support this?

What miffs me (a little) is that they haven't made an installation guide available to non-paying customers since 7.2.

You don't "have to" get recertified ever.

From their RHCE program site:

RHCE certifications on 5.2, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0 are all considered current by Red Hat, Inc. RHCT certifications commence with 8.0. Red Hat has no plans to de-list RHCEs, however, RHCE and RHCT certification will only be "current" for 2 full releases after the release on which the Exam was taken. Re-certification is a matter of choice by professionals and their employers.

That said, is it such a bad thing for people to be encouraged to keep up to date certs every two years or so?

I suspect that's why they are releasing Advanced Workstation

RedHat was founded in 1994.

Maybe that's because you don't have to admin anything important. An annual upgrade treadmill is a huge burden on IT staffs [..]

Then maybe you should consider Red Hat Advanced Server. That's what we're doing. The lifespan for that product is a lot longer ... Advanced Server releases will occur approximately every 12-18 months. I don't know the EOL for a particular version (we're looking into it) but AL should help ease the pain of keeping our servers up to date.

Of course, you do pay more for it. But if you run other production systems (UNIX, Windows, ...) the price isn't out of line with other platforms. We're planning on Base support for dev and test systems, and higher-level support for our production.

-jh

Maybe that's because you don't have to admin anything important. An annual upgrade treadmill is a huge burden on IT staffs [..]

Then maybe you should consider Red Hat Advanced Server. That's what we're doing. The lifespan for that product is a lot longer ... Advanced Server releases will occur approximately every 12-18 months. I don't know the EOL for a particular version (we're looking into it) but AL should help ease the pain of keeping our servers up to date.

Of course, you do pay more for it. But if you run other production systems (UNIX, Windows, ...) the price isn't out of line with other platforms. We're planning on Base support for dev and test systems, and higher-level support for our production.

-jh

Won't you feel silly if they actually ever do find one? Or rather, an Identified FO--one that can be verified as being alien in origin. (I'm a hard scientist, if you're wondering--physical chemistry, with segues into medical physics and tissue optics.)

Sure, I see UFO hunting as something that people can pursue as a hobby rather than as a "real" job, but then, a lot of important astronomical discoveries are made by amateurs.

Hunting UFOs is sort of like Linux (calm down--it's a very loose analogy). There are zealots, skeptics, and people in between. There are groups that try to make money from the phenomenon, and people that just report on it. There are people that contribute a little bit to the community now and than, there are those that view it with a benign disinterest--and there are those that pour hours into it with singleminded determination with no expectation of reward.

Me, I love the (real, useful, unmassaged) SOHO imagery, and I think we should be putting tons of funding into materials science so we can build a space elevator. I'd also like to build a big space-based visual/near IR interferometer so we can do spectroscopy of planetary atmospheres around other stars.

Meanwhile, I run a SETI@Home unit every so often, and I don't begrudge them the cycles. I also am waiting patiently to see good evidence of a genuinely unidentified flying object--not Venus--and I will weigh any claims on their merits. I mean, sure the SOHO data are exciting, but wouldn't evidence of extraterrestrial life tickle you, too?

Ehm, could you explain to us what kind of leverage IBM has over open source projects? If I were the administrator of an open source project and IBM would come by and tell me to switch databases I'd tell them to go mind their own business, thank you. And according to the Bugzilla installation manual it uses MySQL, not Postgres or DB/2. Also, Red Hat still maintains Red Hat Database as evidenced by the README on their ftp and you can still download it from the same place. And if you look at the SRPMs of Advanced Server 2.1 you'll note that Red Hat ships Postgres with AS2.1.

So, care to give us some supporting evidence?

I think that redhat is still supporting Postgresql. You might checkout this link

From the discussions that I have been following on the hackers list they are still paying developers. You might check again.

Well, Red Hat is using PostgreSQL for their Red Hat Database package and presumably would provide support for it. You can also find support partners for PGSQL at http://www.pgsql.com/partnerlinks/.

...that this is an OPINION piece. No matter how much you might violently disagree with what JZW said, none of what he uttered is fact. It's all his opinion.

I am a happy user of MPlayer as it is the best all around media player for Linux in my opinion. With one of the simpler skins, the program operates about 98% perfectly. And if you are one of the people (like me) who is stubborn enough to make use of RedHat 8, it works just fine. The part about not being able to bring the display window to the top may be his fault since he has more than likely chosen a crappy window manager. Metacity in Gnome 2.0 easily allows me to bring MPlayer to the front. The behavior doesn't seem any different than running Windows Media player in Windows and minimizing of maximizing.

As far as the comment about the "horror" of Gnome 2.0. The only thing I can think of that he is referring to is the tendency for certain apps to leak memory. There is a fix for that, and I wish RH would publish it quickly. But for those of you how LOVE Gnome 2.0 as I do and want to keep RH8 on their systems without the memory leak problems, go here:

Fix in RPM format

Grab the appropriate RPMs. To see the bug report, go here:

Bugzilla listing for 76219

The only thing I will agree with that I think he MIGHT have been trying to say, but said poorly was this: Joe user will have a hard time trying to get a video to play back on any distro of Linux at this time. That IS true and that is something that needs to be worked on. I kind of wish RedHat would choose a media player to bundle with their distro that handles all the standard audio and video formats. Hopefully, they will choose MPlayer as it seems to be the best player around at the moment.

However, these are all my opinions. I'm just more open to admitting that.

If you liked what I said then befriend me. If you do, I'll befreind you back.

Trolling4Dollars - Part time troll, part time arbiter of wisdom and taste. (Taking a hint from Rush "Blimpboy" Limbaugh's playbook. Brag with no justification)

...that this is an OPINION piece. No matter how much you might violently disagree with what JZW said, none of what he uttered is fact. It's all his opinion.

I am a happy user of MPlayer as it is the best all around media player for Linux in my opinion. With one of the simpler skins, the program operates about 98% perfectly. And if you are one of the people (like me) who is stubborn enough to make use of RedHat 8, it works just fine. The part about not being able to bring the display window to the top may be his fault since he has more than likely chosen a crappy window manager. Metacity in Gnome 2.0 easily allows me to bring MPlayer to the front. The behavior doesn't seem any different than running Windows Media player in Windows and minimizing of maximizing.

As far as the comment about the "horror" of Gnome 2.0. The only thing I can think of that he is referring to is the tendency for certain apps to leak memory. There is a fix for that, and I wish RH would publish it quickly. But for those of you how LOVE Gnome 2.0 as I do and want to keep RH8 on their systems without the memory leak problems, go here:

Fix in RPM format

Grab the appropriate RPMs. To see the bug report, go here:

Bugzilla listing for 76219

The only thing I will agree with that I think he MIGHT have been trying to say, but said poorly was this: Joe user will have a hard time trying to get a video to play back on any distro of Linux at this time. That IS true and that is something that needs to be worked on. I kind of wish RedHat would choose a media player to bundle with their distro that handles all the standard audio and video formats. Hopefully, they will choose MPlayer as it seems to be the best player around at the moment.

However, these are all my opinions. I'm just more open to admitting that.

If you liked what I said then befriend me. If you do, I'll befreind you back.

Trolling4Dollars - Part time troll, part time arbiter of wisdom and taste. (Taking a hint from Rush "Blimpboy" Limbaugh's playbook. Brag with no justification)

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