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Nautilus 0.5 PR2 Released
bratislav writes: "Eazel just released the 2nd Preview Release for the upcoming GNOME filemanager, browser and general-nice-app Nautilus.
This new release comes with additional features, improved usability and a first look at Eazel Services. " The integrated network file system stuff is
interesting.
Emacs
I must agree. I looked at some of the feature lists for Nautilus, and I thought "Wait a minute... This is a FILE MANAGER?" The Unix philosophy says that a lot of small bits should work together to provide a cohesive whole. Somehow, I don't think having an MP3 player integrated with a file manager integrated with a graphics viewer integrated with who-knows-what else fits into this idea of how software should work. Wasn't that the entire idea of MIME types (Linux) or file associations (Windows)? That the file manager could work out what program could best handle a file and hand things off to it?
-RickHunter
Gorkman
Gorkman
> There isnt a single OSS project, past or present, that isnt simply a reaction to existing commercial software.
This is a strange question as by definition OSS / Free Software is a reaction to commercial closed software.
Anyway, apt could be an example of a trully innovative way to do thing that was not driven by the 'do it like the other guys do'. Or BSD's cvsup way of syncing sources. Another example that come to mind is freenet. Or the various steganographic fs that exists out there. Or the debian concept as a whole.
From a broader point of view,there is very few software that is not 'playing catch up' another one.
IE played catch up with Netscape, so is a reaction. Windows played catch up with Mac OS. MS-DOS played catchup with CP/M. Excel played catch up with 1-2-3, Word with wordstar, etc, etc, ad nauseum. You could argue that emacs played catchup with other text editors, etc, etc.
Even trully innovative software can be considered as catching up in some way. NeXTstep played catch-up with about every other desktop system. ObjC played catch up with Smalltalk, which itself etc, etc, etc.
But there are ideas and concepts that have been succesfull in their public implementation, and not in their private ones (if any). For instance TCP/IP, or IRC, or HTTPds have about no closed-source competitors. IMHO, as usual.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
You're right and wrong...
First, you're VERY right to be cheering about OS/2. The structure of the file manager and how it tied into the rest of the OS was beautiful.
However, I think you need to realize just how BAD gmc was. Miguel has said that he regretted spending time porting it and that his efforts would have been better spent on a solution that worked from day one instead of a kludge. And I don't mind the direction Nautilus is taking. It's pretty, it's slick, it'll integrate well.. Give it time. (Can't comment on Konq, never used it..)
You do make a good point, the field of Linux apps is getting rather bloated, in the sense that there are very many apps to do the same thing, and we may not need lots of superfluous apps.
The way I see it, though, having used Nautilus, it seems to me to be the "Internet Explorer for Linux" that I tend to think the market needs. Mind you, I'm not a Microsoft fan, but part of the reason that IE and MS are so popular is that they offer user-friendly apps that are intuitive for common folk to use, and are very aesthetically pleasing, IMHO. This is something that Linux desperately needs. Nautilus is a sort of Swiss-army knife that can handle a wide variety of media; it's so thoroughly useful, and I have the utmost respect for the programmers working on the project.
One problem I have with the Linux-phenomenon (I use Linux as my primary OS, so I'm part of it too) is that it's too fragmented. Only now are we really seeing centralized efforts putting together serious software products (i.e., Helix Code, Eazel, KDE to an extent), and that is something that Linux desperately needs. If Linux is to be taken seriously as a viable consumer desktop OS, it is going to have to have applications like Nautilus.
I apologize if this post seems redundant or aimless, or if I didn't explain myself well. It's been a long day, so I hope my point is clear.
/* Steve */
"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of"-TMBG
Yes, It seems to me that while GBNOME is promising, KDE is further ahead. KDE could probably use the added help from the GBNOME developers.
However, this post is a little bit off-topic here. Nautilus is actually a file manager for the GNOME project.
signature smigmature
- James
One thing I like is being able to mix and match components from G and K. So has anyone tried running it under KDE?
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
Doesn't it suck when you're not the target of a product? I mean, I could care less about the command line, because that's not how I like to function. I like my pretty pictures and visual clues. I remember when DND3 came out and a friend of mine complained that it completely ruined DND. I just mentioned that just /maybe/ he wasn't in the targetted market, so his opinion was of minimal importance.
The "cp" is easier if you have filename completion. It is *far* easier if that destination directory has not been "opened" yet in the GUI.
What about D&D support?
Everybody should by now realize that the "stupid" Unix middle-button cut/paste is in fact exactly equivalent to D&D, except because you are not holding the mouse button down in the middle of an operation you suddenly realize how limited D&D is and complain that you cannot select the destination location without losing the selection.
I recommend that "middle mouse selection" be merged with D&D (and split from Alt+XCV cut/paste text selection). All "drop targets" should accept a middle-mouse click and should use the clipboard as the URL that is dropped.
Selection of an object anywhere should put the URL into the clipboard. You can then drag & drop like Windoze, or middle-mouse click to drop. Selection of text should allow the text to be dropped, the drop target decides if it should be treated as text or a URL (this will allow URL's to be pulled from email or other text sources)
For CLI there should be a program ("drag"?) that takes it's arguments and puts them all as URLs into the clipboard for dropping, and a program ("drop"?) that prints the URL's (with proper quoting) to stdout. This requires a method for a CLI program to identify the X server, I hope this can be done without too much ugliness.
It would be nice if terminal emulators accepted drops and middle-mouse clicks and caused the URL to be typed, perhaps with delimiting spaces and proper quoting.
While KDE's widget themability support has GREATLY improved with 2.0, it still can't touch that of gtk+/GNOME. (Yes, I know KDE claims to support gtk+ themes. It doesn't do so well - Try the Wireframe theme and see for yourself. Wireframe happens to be my favorite theme, and does a good job showing off KDE's limitations.)
On the whole, KDE typically wins the award for first implementation of something. GNOME is typically a bit behind, but wins the award for the BETTER implementation.
I'm primarily a GNOME user. I love GNOME. But I also love Konqueror as a web browser. It alone is worth having KDE libs installed. (Sadly, I have to keep Netscape around because Konqueror's JS support isn't so hot...)
I still refust to use Konq as my file manager because it's ugly. Even when the current alternative is gmc's braindeadness.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Konqueror is very good. I have played around with it. However, I personally think that Nautilus' architecture is better. If you've never looked closely at the architecture, tak e a peek. Also, in terms of aesthetics, Nautilus does some really sweet things, like the music views, package views, mouse-over sound playing when in icon view, preview of text in icons, zooming in and out, transparent rubber-banded box for icon selection, emblems for icons, notes for any item in the world. Very impressive.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
It would be really nice if fopen("http://www.slashdot.org") worked.
You don't have to pay for the online storage or software catalogue, at least not at this time. It's a free service at this point. I've already signed up and am using it. I haven't and won't pay a dime.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
Here's a Critique of RealCD interface which supports what you just said.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Then again, I really don't know what I'm talking about. libc may actually be doing the entire file system and translating it to disk block read/writes and I would not be able to tell.
Still, I want "open()" (and not "vfs_fopen()") to read these files, as I don't like complicating the interface with new calls.
Gorkman
for FILE in data0??0*.da? ; do sed 's/something/else/' $FILE > $FILE.done ; done
Sure, I like the shell. Yeah, you'll never make a GUI file manager as powerful as the CLI. BUT if we ever want to see Linux (or any *nix) on the desktop of NORMAL users, there needs to be something easier. It's pretty much already been proven that point and click is easier for most people to grasp than shell pipe streams. If we want to see our favorite OS, or any non-MS OS become common place, things like file management must be made easy for the user, not cryptic. This is the same reason why office suites, email clients, and any other GUI app is good. General users just want the computer to do what it does with little hassle, they're generally not looking for that killer CLI. They just want it to work.
The other thing here that is important is choice. Just because it's not your ideal file manager doesn't mean it isn't someone else's. I'd recommend emacs for serious text editing, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to a newbie, I'd probably recommend pico. Or if they have figured out how to get X working gnotepad. But is it bad to have all these editors? No. It gives me a choice to have an extensible programmable editor and people without the need to have an easy to use intuitive editor. Try to tell someone that C-x C-c is more intuitive then clicking 'File -> Exit'.
Most novice users are still figuring out what files are, let alone trying to remember a plethora of commands to attempt to manipulate them. Projects like this are necessary for any "fringe" OS to become commonplace on the desktop.
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
Helix GNOME is a GNOME distribution. Nautilus is a file manager for GNOME. Does that clarify the difference? - Maciej Stachowiak
It uses WebDAV. Arlo does work on a Linux computer. We used Macintosh screenshots to make the point that, once your files are stored using Eazel Storage, you can access them from any platform using a web browser
Why does Nautilus take so long to open new windows? I've been trying nightlies and now PR2 and it takes quite a few seconds to open new windows. I'm on a P2/333 384M RAM, w/SCSI. Everything else is fairly quick.
Don't take this comment the wrong way, Nautilus is awesome, and the latest preview release looks great. Keep up the great work guys!
Simple answer to your predicament:
:)
Click "Sort by MIME type" or whatever its called in the viewer window, then all the gifs are arranged together. Just drag a box around them, and drag 'em all to the right dir.
I'll agree with you that CLIs are better for SOME things, particularly maintenance-type tasks that can be done in bulk, scripted at the command line etc. However GUI file mangaers are great in that it's easy and fast to arbitrarily select things (because most of the time, you are probably concerned with the *content* of the files, not just the file extensions etc.) and to quickly visualise and recognise things by their icons. Maybe there are some people with an amazing ability to trawl through text, but it's much easier for most people to find the things that you're looking for by skimming over the icons. The colours, shapes etc. are all visual cues to help you recognise things, while on a CLI, you have to parse the text yourself because they all look more or less similar.
Also for most people, its much easier to actually work with things in a GUI than it is in a CLI, because of the recall/recognition memory thing. It's much easier to right-click on a floppy disk icon and choose format from the list of options, then choose a few options that are presented to you, than it is to remember the correct syntax for mk2fs and all the command like arguments, and if you forget, then looking up man pages.
You talked about being pretty, keep in mind that 'Graphical' is only 1/3rd of 'Graphical *User Interface*'. It's not just about the pretty pictures
Another question is how easy eazel will make it for third parties to provide competing and alternate services. It would be very nice if something like sourceforge or other ftp repositories could provide simple package install services like eazel's.
It'd be a serious shame if Eazel stays as the only provider of services for Nautilus.
The Nautilus install is similar to the Helix install and runns relatively smoothly (RH6.2)
RH7 is not yet supported. Total install is about 80Mb. It has support for online file space similar to WebDAV. Upload is earlier this evening was approx 128kb and integrates seemlessly into the file manager.
Overall interaction is not exactly zippy, however it does seem much more stable than the last incarnation.
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
First and foremost, The Mutton Kombat Project. To even get started on this, I'm working on an as-yet-unreleased game for Linus/SVGALib; as a way to build my luaC svgalib bindings. Interesting stuff... I just wish I was getting paid for it!!
Glad to hear that at least _someone_ cares about making computers more functional, not just more complicated.
Thanks,
Steve
ftp://ftp.c-60.org/pub/nautilus/ http://www.c-60.org/pub/nautilus/
It seems that Nautilus may be too little too late. Had it been released before KDE 2, then matters might be different.
ftp://ftp.heckard.com/pub/eazel/ go for it!
The software catalog seems more promising, although I don't see users paying for it. They'll need sponsors. It sounds like this line is going directly against Helix Code's business plan, isn't it?
I'm very interested to see how the whole Gnome / Eazel / Helix Code / Sun / Red Hat thing is going to play out. Unfortunately, I suspect it's going to be like Mozilla where we get exciting free projects to use and to draw from without any great benefit to the people who bet their money on it. It's an exciting experiment, though!
Besides that, I would agree that file managers are not particularly useful for command line users. Once you get familiar with your shell and all those cool utilities that you have on Un*x, you just don't even think about switching to a GUI with all its inherent limitations.
Some posts have claimed that many file manager GUIs suck because they're not designed the right way. Well, consider this: in any given amount of time, you can enter much more information with 10 fingers (if you're good at it), then with a mouse. That's why there will probably never be a replacement for the command line, at least for the so-called power users.
gnome-vfs handles HTTP/WebDAV, FTP, and a whole bunch of other access methods. And if something is missing, it's quite easy to write a method and add it.
I'm sorry, but I gotta say that this nautilus thing is so very slick.
Sure, currently its slow and buggy, but everything is falling in to place. PR2 is leaps and bounds ahead of PR1 in these terms, plus lots of extra fun functionality. I'm fairly confident that the eazel guys can take care of performance issues, and get things running like a real application some day soon.
Icons: There's something nice about being able to actually visualize all your files and your contents. No other filemanager I've seen does such a good job of putting a preview of the file in the icon.
Keyboard: This thing actually has working keyboard shortcuts so often missing from alot of gnome programs (namely gmc). Eazel's focus on getting the user experience correct gives me high hopes that I will actually be able to use this thing without too much mouse action. And it has the benefit of the handy gtk/menu quick key reassignment.
Services: Currently the software catalog is somewhat limited, but it was sure nice to go click and install Maelstrom. I love this game, but not enough to go search linuxgames, try to find an rpm or tar file, read the installation instructions, etc. The online storage is something that's being done for other operating systems, but the current purely web based solutions are quite lame. This is a service that probably would never hit linux without eazel.
Will there be a standardized API for making your own services? I don't know if this is something eazel is even thinking about.
gnome-vfs: I'd be interested in comparisons with KDE2's generic filesystem/IO layer.
Metafile: The xml file for storing directory state seems to me like a very good idea. It would even allow a transparent ftp session to layout icons, it survives being put into archive files, it inheriets the multiuser security model when you're browsing other people's directories and its easy for me to see and inspect when I'm in bash/vi mode.
Nautilus shows a whole mess of promise, the only unfortunate thing is its not quite ready to actually use yet.
Since you'll never get equal time on slashdot, here's another filemanager.
It's just a file manager, it doesn't try to be a web browser.
Oh, and it's for KDE.
Disclaimer: I don't use either one, but the Open Zealotry(tm) here is starting to piss me off.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
OK, I tried to resist, but now I just have to respond. If you're sensitive to plugs, stop reading now. ;^) In a rather nifty GTK+ filemanager I happen to know about (avail abl en here, not at the address given in my user block above), selecting all files of a type is as easy as holding down the left alt key while clicking on any file of the desired type. Of course, you can also use the more classic approach of sorting by type and then selecting a sequence of files by clicking the first one, then shift-clicking the last one. Or, you could use the built-in SelectRE command to select using a shell glob pattern or a straight regular expression. OK, and of plug.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
As I learn command line stuff more, I'm finding much less use for stuff like gmc, and the upcomming Nautilus. I mean, I have ls and I have apt-get, what will I need this stuff for? I'm more likely to use the pure and free graphical apt than I am to use the eazel software manager thingie. And Nautilus seems like too much bloat. I would rather see some way to mount ftp sites on a normal filesystem, or even a new network filesystem designed from the ground up would be cool However, new users may find this stuff pretty and shiney. Sorry to be such a party pooper :)
In Gnomes by Huygen and Poortvliet, the 90 cm tall trolls are always trying to catch the 15 cm tall gnomes. Gnomes are portrayed as the good guys; trolls are the bad guys.
If you really want to fight it out, pull out an NES emulator and play GNOME vs. KDE: Battle of the Desktops, a GPL'd NES game.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It troubles me to see first Konqueror, and now Eazel chasing the whole windoze file management nightmare.
KFM was elegant, easy to configure, and every directory or object kept track of its own settings. With konqueror, we lost a lot of that as it became more of an application than a file manager.
Sometimes simplicity is a good thing. Both KDE and Gnome are losing sight of that. Instead of having a slick, elegant filemanager that seamlessly integrates several other parts of the environment, we are ending up with a big ugly mess that isn't an efficient way to work.
Just my former OS/2 WPS view rearing its ugly head again. The developers creating these environments could learn a lot by reading this.