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Gnome On Dell's Business PCs
jedipapi writes: "Dell will unveil on Monday that they'll have Gnome preloaded on selected business PCs along with a partnership with Eazel among others. ZDNet has the full story."
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It's a troll because I posted it and I have a reputation for trolling.
The points are valid, it's an important concern but I posted it - so it's a troll.
Wellcome to slashdot.
--Shoeboy
I thought this would have happened sooner.
Also, the company that I work for buys systems based on the price of the system after some minimum requirements have been met. And usually its three different companies competing for the order. This would be great because a linux system should be cheaper. The only downside is that the minimum requirements state that it needs to come with Win NT or Win2k. Doh! Oh well.
-----------------
My company doesn't use linux. Time to look for a new job.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Which polished office suite do you use?
Claris office?
Polished and MS office in the same sentance is
wrong.
> are the UI guidelines?", with a distinct dearth of technical architectural material.
My, what a telling comment. That really sums up for me why gnome is like it is. Everyone involved seems preoccupied with these opendoc/taligent/component architecture wet dreams, TOTALLY ignoring the damn UI.
Just for starters, could someone tell me whether the GNOME people actually understand what the "default ring" around dialog buttons is for? I would estimate that in over 70% of all gnome apps I've used, it does nothing -- hitting return does something else. In fact, I often come across dialog boxes where hitting return selects the non-default button! Is this some kind of cargo-cult thing, where they noticed the circles around buttons on MacOS screenshots, and thought "ooh, we'd better make our dialogs look like that" without actually understanding what they were for?
Moreover I would nominate the gnome control panel applet for worst UI ever. Even the damn login window is hopelessly confusing for newbies -- it silently doesn't work if the cursor is outside the little login window. The KDE alternative is much, much clearer and easier to use. The gnome panel seems to be more about providing every possible option for power users in an endless succession of nested submenus than presenting a nice, simple, clear way of accessing applications and current programs.
And if I never see that damn gnome application crash dialog again in my life, it'll be too soon. I've had far more luck with KDE apps, though admittedly I don't run the full thing regularly because it's too resource intensive.
More and more the whole gnome project is seems to be suffering from too much hype and not enough attention to good solid UI design. Good UI design is damn hard, and it starts with designers setting down good guidelines for app builders to follow. I don't see any sign at all that the gnome people are addressing such a crucial step in anything but a half-hearted manner, and the fact that people like you call it "soft" makes me despair. Why don't you stick with your CLIs?
Andrew
It's a good conspiracy theory, as these things go... But where's the evidence?
The small detail I usually look first when I try a new GUI toolkit is: how easy is it to write text on inclined lines? One often needs that for visualizing data on multi-dimensional graphs. It's not so hard on MFC, very hard on Motif and Gtk, and trivial in Qt.
I got instantly hooked the first time I tried Qt on KDevelop 1.0. I spent all of 15 minutes studying the tutorial and examples, then 15 minutes more to write my first working Qt program, adapted from one of the examples: an analog clock where the numbers are written in the same orientation as the respective hour marks, the hour and minute hands are black, the seconds hand is red. The seconds hand moves smoothly, not jumping each second as quartz watches do. It keeps working smoothly as the window is moved or resized. All in all, the most productive half-hour I ever spent studying any software documentation.
Ok, I'm using it right now, it seems pretty good. Maybe the debugging is slowing it down. Java doesnt work, I must have to ad it to the helper applications. So right there's something to turn off users. I see there are no helper app registered except for text, there's something else to turn people off. Flash doesnt seem to work, and if it could work, how much trouble do I need to go through to make it work? A BIG problem I have with it, and will keep me from starting it up again, is that bookmarks cant be added directly to bookmark folders, only appeneded to the main list, as far as I can see. And why not turn off debugging in the binaries??? Is it to scare some users into thinking that this browser isnt good enough to use?!? Does it import netscape bookmarks? If it doesnt, why not make a new user feel more at home by importing bookmarks, and if it does, why is it not telling me nicely "I can import your bookmarks"? Why not do what the competition does (ms) and give it polish even if its not ready for polishing?
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
If you're using a nightly build, you should be warned that it's built directly from the latest CVS every night, and thus some things may work strangely or not at all (and it's definitely not meant to include Java and Flash out of the box). It's meant for developers that are tracking bugs, and for people that want to see how things are going -- it's not necessarily meant to be polished. This also goes for the milestones, though they're supposed to get better with time.
.mozilla/plugins in your home directory).
And to answer your questions:
* Debugging in the binaries, bookmarks not quite working, no helpers registered: See above about Mozilla's status. If something doesn't work, wait a few days and try a new build, or better yet, report the bug to the developers so it can get fixed.
* Getting Flash and Java working: For now, you have to install these manually. You can get the Java 2 plugin here, and for Flash, just use the existing Netscape 4 plugin (it'll grab it automatically on Windows, for Linux, copy it to
-lee
1. Value You'll pay lots of money for Windows 2000 and MS support and training, increasing the value of your Microsoft stock.
2. Reliability Win2k is almost as reliable as unix now!
3. Mobility Since win2k is completely insecure, anyone can access your computer from anywhere!
4. Manageability Win2k is easier to manage and support, until you find a bug, at which point your completely screwed!
5. Performance Win2k has proven to be faster than Windows 95 (its amazing what you can do in 5 years).
6. Security You'll feel safe knowning that only Microsoft (and some russian maffioso) have ever seen the source code!
7. Internet You can be sure that our software will never comply with any of the internet standards
8. Usability Win2k has provided us with many wizards like that Paper Clip guy to make life so much easier!
9. Data Access By using roaming profiles you can access your data from any workstation, unless its not a win2k box, in which case you'll complelely hose it.
10. Hardware Win2k runs on the same '86 hardware that it always did, forcing the CPU companies to continue that ass backwards compatibility. Also, win2k fixed that NT multi-CPU bug.
Someone you trust is one of us.
You're missing something. GNOME runs fine on other operating systems as well. FreeBSD is an example of one such operating system.
Hey, someone in the know actually responding to me. I was sure I would be written off as a wacko or something. Thanks for responding.
Well, I personally don't think a webbrowser needs to be everything to everyone. I would love working with a lightweight browser that supported: HTML, XHTML, CSS, SSL, Cookies and maybe Javascript. That would be great for me. That should be coming to GNOME in the shape of Encompass with GtkHTML2. How hard would it be to make it embed Bonobo components? Then you could even get Flash or Java Bonobo components(provided someone wrote them) going... Hmmm... I like it. And you can make it be a Bonobo Component itself...
Well, I am very glad to hear Achtung hasn't been abandoned. Looking over the mailing list archives since the announcement of OpenOffice, and checking the ChangeLog in CVS made it look dead. I guess there really isn't a point in posting to a mailing list and doing constant commits if you are the only developer. Go Joe!
And then OpenOffice(and I think most of this applies to AbiWord as well)... All I can see on the mailing lists is that they want to make the apps Bonobo components. Which is great. But, it looked like they aren't going to be using the canvas, maybe not gnome-print(seems to be some discussion, and seem to be leaning away from it), supporting GTK+ only through their own portability layer(which must be done to get as many platforms as they want) and no use of libxml, gconf, and other such GNOME technologies. Portability layers make things big, and slow in development. I would even love it if one of our GNOME companies forked AbiWord or OpenOffice to concentrate on GNOME only.
Anyways... I do thank you for responding, and correcting a couple of things for me.
God Bless,
Dan
those macintosh people were making usable graphical user interfaces. These programmers, along with the rest of the macintosh community, endured cries of 'WIMP' and 'macintoy' and 'idiot box' and lots of other anti-GUI sentiment. And then those hypocrits from old school unix and DOS turned right around and created X and Windows and, in their arrogance and spite for the macintosh, never tried to learn anything from it. They ignored many intelligent, widely appliable usability principles the mac introduced, or did did the exact opposite of those principles, just so they could be different from apple. Tests showed a menubar at the top of the screen can be accessed faster than one on a window, but it didn't matter to Microsoft. Having the cancel button on the left and OK button on the right conforms better to the left-right nature of English than the OK button left/cancel button right we see in windows (and GNOME) dialogs, but that didn't matter to Microsoft, either. And so windows ended up being a legacy to UI stupidity, and GNOME, through their blind emulation of microsoft, ends up being stupid legacy UI. A lot of gnome people (while well meaning) are a bunch of ex-windows people who conveniantly forget about history. Makes you wonder who really deserves to lead to the linux desktop GUI revolution: the people people who led the first GUI revolution, or the people who fought against it.
Why would someone who packaged KDE for Debian on his own for a year before QT went GPL and it got into Debian proper, want to sabotage KDE? For that is who packages KDE for Debian now - Ivan Moore (who ran kde.tydc.com).
There's no conspiracy. There's no one unified Debian opinion on KDE, any more than there's one unified Slashdot opinion on KDE. Yes, there are Debian developers who still harbor grudges towards KDE, but they aren't the ones packaging KDE for Debian.
Err! The source here is not accidentally some M$ marketing literature?
It required me all of a week and some Canon Digital Ixus software installation attempt to make my Win2k(f) installation behave very, very strange.
Thanks god I only need this piece 'o shit to occasionally edit a customer document on my way home and there's this 15Gb Linux partition which assists me in actually getting work done.
Oh my! You have been sarcastic...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Now I've seen it all!
---
Appended to the end of comments I post? 120 chars?!
If moderation had occured, you'd see the reasons next to the score. The score came from the karma he has managed to obtain so far.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I always use LAPACK for solving equation systems. It not only is as quick as it can be, but it has been tried and tested for decades, it should be FULLY debugged by now.
But this 95% time running LAPACK is not true for most cases. I recently ran into a program where, according to top, the system was 11% of the time running LAPACK and 39% of the time running the GUI. There's a lot of number crunching in rotate/shear/translate/scale the data for visualization as well.
BTW, the last time I coded in Fortran was in 1985, for a PDP-11/70 running RSX. I will use the old, time-tested Fortran libraries forever, but I'll stick to C/C++ until a better language is invented.
There probably was a time when I wished for IE on Linux, but now I have Konqueror. It's very IE-like, in that it renders pages good, it's fast, and is a good file manager.
Konqueror lacks things like ActiveX, but who needed that in the first place? It also is much more stable than IE (and isn't that the reason we're using Linux in the first place?).
I'm not quite sure what you're whining about. I'd much rather use Konqueror than IE. So... where is this lost war you speak of?
-Justin
RedHat I believe...
I bought a Dell *HOME* computer in April and it came loaded with *gasp* RedHat 6.0, Enlightenment, Windowmaker, Gnome, and KDE. Sounds like a non-story to me.
There's a lot more information on this deal available on zdnet here: http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011 ,2659657,00.html
While it's a good thing that Dell is taking this step, isn't it a little worrisome how Eazel seems to be hyping itself over GNOME and Free Software?
Some quotes from this longer article that are interesting are:
"Dell will also start shipping Eazel's network user environment with all its Linux-based desktop and notebook products starting early next year."
Umm, Eazel's network user environment? GNOME?
"Eazel Services include its Software Catalog, which allows one-click installation of certified applications from a comprehensive Linux software library..."
I tried the Nautilus preview, and their installer was pretty bad. It definitely wasn't one click. HelixCode has been installing and upgrading GNOME for a lot longer.
"But customer needs are always paramount, so while Eazel will be the default desktop..."
Once again, is it the Eazel Desktop(TM) now?
I'd rather see a company of Free Software people (Helix GNOME) do this than a company of ex-Macintosh people who seem to forget about the rest of us conveniently enough in press releases.
As a daily user of Debian's Gnu/Linux with the Gnome desktop on a Dell OptiPlex GX110, I can tell you how happy this news makes me.
It took two full weeks to get X configured properly for my desktop; having Dell's support for this hardware would have made things so much easier.
I hope that Dell begins full support for their laptop models soon, also. That would be sweet.
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
Linux is really well suited for businesses. At home, there's the installation and configuration problems to cope with. The typical home user is either too computer ignorant and unwilling to solve many of the small problems that arise, or always wanting to run the latest hardware for which there's no Linux support yet.
In the enterprise, on the other hand, they run standardized systems; solve the installation problems for one box and the others will follow. There are professionals to take care of that. Once the standard Linux system is running, there will be no more time wasted on the M$ cycle of crash, reboot, crash, reboot, crash, reboot...
Businesses want applications to work for them. Work, as in, accomplish. Text based apps have been "working" for years. Gnome apps can "work" for your business and achieve GUI heaven for your PHB types.
Basically I am quite impressed by Konqueror, which is IMHO a first class browser. While Mozilla is nice, too, I do think you miss the point:
It is not about the browsers, which at least try to behave in a compatible way, its about the plugins and extension beyong html and xml.
i386-Konqueror and i386-Mozilla can use i386-Netscape-Plugins but it is sometimes a big headache to get all the nice stuff running. With IE/win32 and Netscape/win32 I click two buttons and get a browser, java, manymany plugins and many more stuff.
And as soon as you use a non-i386-plattform you are totaly doomed... I am using m68k-Linux and really would like to use a Linux-PDA with some StrongARM. Even when you can get sources it most likely will be no easy task to get thing done.
This should be a primary target for Konqueror and Mozilla: Integrate more stuff into the sourcetree and make it a Internet-Suite instead of a Browser.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Fuck off.
Most of you KDE lovers seem to assume that all the people who don't choose KDE are FSF worshipping Troll Tech haters who can't get over the now-defunct license issues. When in fact, there are a lot of people like me who *have* gotten over the license issues and/or never did think the issues were a big deal in the first place. KDE is not the be-all, end-all of desktop environments.
People have a lot of different reasons why they don't like KDE. Personally, as a C++ developer, if I were working on Linux applications I would probably prefer KDE. But I'm not. I'm just a Linux user. From a user's point of view, there are a lot of things I don't like about KDE. First of all, KDE is an asthetic dissapointment IMHO. GNOME has some artistic people contributing themes, icons, etc. and it shows. Second, GNOME is both WM agnostic and language agnostic. As a C++ developer, I don't care too much about the latter, but I do care about the former. Yes, you can run KDE apps without KWM, but there are more alternative WMs that are GNOME compliant than KDE compliant. Third, GNOME is definately more flexible and customizable than KDE.
I also have to question your assertion that Debian is clearly superior. Debian is aggressively hyped on slashdot as well as a lot of other forums (k5hin, IRC, etc.), but I've been less than impressed. The Debian install process is just brain dead. My attempts at installing Debian only seem to go smoothly on the most benign hardware configurations. And even when it does go smoothly, there is absolutely no justification for first installing a "base" system before proceeding to the real installation. It isn't necessary and should have been removed several versions ago. Debian is by leaps and bounds the *worst* distribution when it comes to installation. By comparison, Slackware and Stampede are like installing MacOS. Also, another problem with Debian is the pace of development. The frequency of releases is way, way, way too slow. Every Debian user I happen to know is almost always running the unstable release.
WOW... the sarcasm is running really deep in this thread.
Funny stuff!
"Being alive is a crock of shit." --Kilgore Trout
The title says
Gnome On Dell's Business PCs
Dear flame warriors,
I am sorry but this definitely is good news!
Being a KDE enthusiast myself I cannot but accept the fact that there is now a large PC seller declaring they'll have Linux preloaded on (no, not all but at least some of) their business PCs.
Why is this good news to a KDE fan?
Because it is good news to a Linux fan!
I might be wrong but this could well be the beginning of a new area where at the end people will have to ask for Windows -- in the rare case they insist in buying a copy of it with their new PC.
That's my dream and I step by step see it become true:
Of course if it were KDE to be preinstalled I'ld smile even more. But the most important fact in my opinion is - that it is Linux!
I am looking forward to the day when I can go to any computer shop to get some new machines and they kindly ask me:
"Would you like us to put the new KDE on the disks or do you prefer running GNOME. (Of course we could also give you just X with the windowmanager of your choice...)"
Those of you prefering to fight against 'the others', please consider having a short look at this page:
http://home.snafu.de/khz/Sonne/A_contra_B.html
I thank you for reading my comment.
Karl-Heinz
--
"Why do we have to hide from the police, Daddy?"
"Why do we have to hide from the police, Daddy?"
"Because we use vi, son. They use emacs." Dave Fischer, 1995/06/19
I realize the act of installing OSs/software is a hassle especially for a large deployment but I would rather create my own image and blast it on then using someone else's standards.
Hey ma look, my first post since getting re-instated YAHOOOOO!!!
Now all Dell needs is some AMD chipsets and they'll be all set.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Real competition
(thanks Dell - good move...)
--------
* Sigh *
I've got 11 machines from Dell (10 Optiplexes, 1 PowerEdge Server) that came preloaded with RedHat 6.2 That I've had for 3 months. This IS a non-story.
Now that they have gnome computers maybe they'll put elves and dwarves on some too.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
GNOME was started because KDE originally depended on a non-open library (QT). Its kinda hard to have an truely opensource desktop when a private company has your UI toolkit by the balls and its far from being open.
If it wasn't for GNOME and the pressure from competition with it, we'd be stuck with a pitiful windows clone that still depended on closed source QT.
And who are you to say something doesn't have the right to exist? Perhaps it would have occured to you that people picked gnome or KDE for different reasons? Your showing your a complete clueless fuck if you can't admit that one has advantages the other doesn't have and dismiss it as being worthless.
Whats the matter of choice? Your limited intellect make it impossible for you to evaluate each and pick the one that makes the best sense for you?
--- polarbear
There is at least some chance that AOL will eventually switch to Mozilla as their AOL client browser. That single action would almost certainly turn the browser war back into a horse race.
Al Gore was heard to comment that the use of GNOME for the voters in Florida would be too confusing, leading many to think that they had KDE on their desktops instead.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
because if Dell sells it my boss will buy it for me and I'll be able to strip whatever they put on it put Debian on it he won't know the diff and I won't have winders anymore. Thank you Dell.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
(Unfortunately, Netcraft doesn't have uptime graphs for Mandrake). If the Microsoft webmasters themselves can't get anything better than that, how could I expect to do better myself?
BTW, my personal record is 8 months for a Slackware system running on a 486-DX80 box. It was turned off to be moved to a different room. If I wasn't away at vacations at the time, I would have insisted on moving it plugged to the UPS, just for the pleasure of seeing the uptime rolling over to 0 at the 497th day! :)
Yeah cause keeping the benefits of Linux in your parent's basement has worked wonders so far? Have you ever met a regular ole user and shown them Linux? Ever notice they usually mis-pronounce it the first time? Anything that helps get Linux into the mainstream where more people can interact with it would be a good thing. The bickering between GUI formats or distros is silly. It's like women's basketball having two leagues and trying to compete against the NBA. One is clearly the market leader, rather then splitting their resources and draw the community should try to unite around one distro and make it a bad ass.
Linux-based computers take up 5% of the computer population in the U.S. right now. With Dell starting to sell linux computers, this number will undoughtedly rise dramatically. The percentege could reach double didgets. This would mean that Billy's operating systems would only be in the 80s. Isn't a monopoly a company that prevents other companies from competing?
Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back!
Why aren't users downloading multiple products and comparing them anymore?
Normal people (ie: not students, and not geeks) have better things to do than to play with OSes.
I'm starting to realize that linux is in real danger in the desktop arena before its even a real contender. What concerns me is web browsers. Netscape looks like it will not keep pace with IE and I'm sure MS realizes this. Mozilla looks like its going to remain a "hobby" for a while now, and konqueror is wasting its time with desktop integration eventhough desktop integration was just a way for MS to try to avoid anti-trust arguments. Maybe opera will help, but could they be moving any slower? MS knows that linux is screwed because of browser-envy, that is probably the main reason why they stopped their porting of IE at solaris and OSX. The linux office apps will be good enough very soon, people will realize they dont need talking paperclips, but when they cant see the webpages or the plugin media they want to they arent going to be happy
Sneakemail is to spam filters what an ounce of prevention is to a pound of cure.
i agree with you. thats why i said that you need to educate the public about options. i work in a research group, and not using microsoft products was one of the caveats to joining this group. this worked out really well with my advisor since he had planned on using linux on all of the computers except the $2000 word/excel/powerpoint viewer in the corner.
other students in the group had never used linux until they joined. i take every advantage i can to help them with linux and point out it's strengths and weeknesses. i believe it's my responsibility to pimp linux off on any one i can.
the revolution will start small, and it will start with individuals like you and i. it will be a better victory if we win without the courts.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
So what? Just because they ship the product, it doesn't mean that people will buy it in droves. Companies make unsuccessful products every day.
I couldn't disagree more. I believe it shows that each and every board of directors for every corporation in the world should be replace by efficient, highly advanced computers. Preferably, by just one computer, which will lead us all into the age of the machine. Long live our digital masters!
I'm just tired of seeing an article about GNOME or KDE (with the article not even bringing up the topic of the other) and seeing 1,000,000 posts about how the other is better, etc.
Instead of discussing that "wow, a mainstream hardware company is bundling linux with desktop machines preconfigured now!" people are saying "bleh. GNOME sucks... its too corporate.. GNOME sold their souls". I guess its a crime for a company to sell an opensource based product. Better call up all the distro makers and support companies and tell him.
I remember the slashdot articles dealing with the Gnome Foundation and how most of the posts were KDE users and advocates complaining about it all the while the KDE developers were playing catchup in that regard. Hypocracy?
--- polarbear
A good point... I did find that somewhat annoying when using Galleon, that the scrollbars looked and felt different from everything else. However, M18 is kind of different... With the Classic interface, the entire browser takes a lot of cues from my GTK+ theme. Which is nice, as I'm one of those wierd people who cannot use a dark-on-light interface for long periods of time. And the form widgets (independent of theme) now seem to be GTK widgets, or at least feel a lot like them. At first it felt kind of odd, but now I think its a nice touch. Not everything is totally GTK, but the integration seems fairly good.
(Unfortunately, there were a few bugs with the theme integration... Most of which are fixed now, IIRC)
I agree with you that a GNOME web browser would be best, though. If there was a good one, I'd switch to it from Mozilla in a heartbeat. But there (unfortunately) isn't, and I don't have nearly the time or skills needed to write one. :-( Then again, GNOME is still very much an under-development platform, so we can hope...
-RickHunter
Everyone is shouting about linux's 5% of the computer market. How many of the users running those computers actually KNOWS enough about linux support it? Knowing to run "./configure;make;make install" or 'rpm --install' doesn't cut it. As a tech support person, I still want windows on the desktop because I know windows better than linux. Lets be honest, many other tech support managers and employees who like linux will say the same thing.
Sure, some companies will buy these machines. But with the extremely small pool of knowledgeable linux users, I don't see this happening for the same reason there is a tech worker shortage: not enough good people.
Saving money on the OS or other software won't make a difference when you have to pay for training.
Linux on Laptops is a good resource for laptop configuration tweaking and driver support. They might have information about an open source driver for your audio chipset.
MacOS, Windows, BeOS, GNOME, KDE: they're all just Xerox copies
For a web browser, check out Galeon. Its based around the Mozilla engine, but has a totally GTK+ interface. There's GNOME office projects too, IIRC.
-RickHunter
I was looking for a place to rant about GNOME, and then this was posted, which gives me my opportunity.
First let me say I am an avid GNOME user, use it all the time, love it, etc, etc, etc... I wish I had the programming skill/desire to help out.
Anyways, here is the rant: I HATE CROSS PLATFORM APPS!!!!!!!!! AGH!!! I have been reading mailing list archives lately, trying to find a good place to be able to contribute. In my opinion the things holding GNOME back are lack of a couple of key apps: Word Processor, Presenter, and Web Browser. Every GNOME company(who have the best programmers) seems content to accept XP apps for these. OpenOffice is not gonna be the GNOME Office I want, it's way too bloated and XP centered. Follow Gnumeric's lead! Make very good totally GNOME based apps! AbiWord, OpenOffice and Mozilla are not what I want! They all sacrifice what could be, and can't make the best use of what is available in the GNOME platform. I have been looking at Codefactory's gtkhtml2, which could be the webbrowser base needed, but Achtung has been abandoned... and where oh where is a good word processor! Okay, I think that's the end of it... I need to learn GUI programming better so I can make it happen, I know... I'm working on it...
Alright...
Peace out...
Dan
What happens when that one company with billions of dollars to spend makes the consumers unaware that there is anything to BE unhappy about.
- No, your cars are SUPPOSED to leak fluids, get horrible gas milage and randomly lose control and possibly harm you or bystanders.
Those other cars that don't do this?
Oh, they're either lying or being run by a bunch of wierd people.
WE know what's best for you. Trust US.
- OK, sounds good.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Yeah, FLTK is definitely cool. Imagine if the GIMP would have used FLTK in the beginning --> no horrible C based gtk+ API :)
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
Guys, Why do we care if Dell is bundling Gnome on some of its business pc's? Most of us will just build our own box, won't we? It's lots cheaper and guess what, we get to choose what we want on it! Gee, what a great idea.
I don't get it. I've already made two purchase orders for Dell machines here at work in the past, and they came pre-installed with Redhat, and Gnome as the default environment. How is this anything new? They already do this. I don't understand how there is any difference between their "business", "education", and "home" deals. Why not just offer all the models with sets of pre-installed software and not bother calling them "business" or "home" models. There really isn't any important difference - you can take a "home" model and add and subtract options to make it just like a "business" model, and visa versa. I don't understand their categories.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
(BTW, is this Grant Edwards the same Eddie Grant who wrote "I Don't Wanna Dance"? I loved that song!:)
I was stunned when Dell started preloading Red Hat on Dimensions. At first I was surprised when it charged the same for Red Hat as for Windows. I shouldn't have been.
Two things make this a story. The ZDNet link says Dell is now loading on "business PCs"; i.e., OptiPlex, Dimension, and possibly Latitude notebooks. Second, the eWeek article says that Dell "has taken a significant stake in Linux software developer Eazel."
Gateway introduced the AMD-based Select line in response to Intel supply problems, then dropped it, then reintroduced it as the Athlon surpassed the Pentium III in clock speed. Now, even as everyone else has introduced Athlon systems, Dell has stuck with Intel. Likewise, it has been a big Microsoft partner in bundling Windows and Office. Dell is a PC powerhouse because its deals with Intel and Microsoft cut expenses. Now, in the wake of the anti-trust trial, Dell preloads Linux. The investment in Eazel is a vote of confidence on the potential of Linux on the desktop.
this is a load of bullshit. have you opened up a laptop lately ? all the stuff is integrated and pushed to the max. if i can sell you a laptop for $500 versus the competition at $600 with the same features why wouldnt i do so ? i'd sell more units that way. conspiracy theory aside, if this was true someone (like me) would pull the laptop apart and reflash it. ive pulled mine apart and i can see all the components are integrated and used to the max. it doesnt make economic sense to cripple the parts and let the comptetition walk over you.
Ten bucks says the distro of choice will be RedHat. Reasons why: (correct me if I'm wrong)
1:)Doesn't Dell allready sell Boxen with Linux(RedHat) pre-installed??
2:)Isn't a lot of Gnome Development done in RHAD? (used to be, not so sure anymore)
3:)Micheal Dell and Bob Young have been looking for ways to subvert Bill anyway they can.
A "user friendly" distro, coupled with a "user friendly" Desktop, makes a "user friendly" something something (*cough cough*). Ahem. yeah. someone pay me my 10 bucks....
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Society has traditionally always tried to find scapegoats for its problems. Well, here I am.
BTW, Red Hat isn't the sales leader anymore, Mandrake seems to have overtaken them. Myself, I use Conectiva, the best for me.
(PS: when I say me I mean myself, not the later version of a half-witted so-called "operating system")
Netware.
john
Most of the documentation about KDE development seems to focus on the "soft" matter of "What are the UI guidelines?", with a distinct dearth of technical architectural material.
After all:
GNOME, by being agnostic about what language you are expected to use, does not force you into
The notion that GNOME is necessarily terribly awful and that to use it means denying any notion of "passion for excellence" seems to me to be a ludicrously unfair way of characterizing it.
At one time, GNOME wasn't much more than a counterreaction to KDE's adoption of the then-rather-more-proprietary Qt toolkit; that is certainly no longer true.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Not necessarily. It can run on other Unixlike OSes, too, which is part of the reason that major vendors like Sun and HP are backing the Gnome Foundation. You can certainly run it with Free/Open/NetBSD. FWIW, I think that Dell is actually shipping RedHat, but there certainly wouldn't be anything to stop them from shipping some other *nix with Gnome if they felt like it.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I will say that KDE and GNOME average out in speed, ever a period of many months.
KDE- takes longer to boot into, and slower response time in some cases.
GNOME- takes hours and hours to configure to work how you want it too, and not look like crap.
EverCode
Not only that, but i'm considerably less impresed with the stability of win2k now that i've had to low-level reformat my hard drive after the most complete and spectacular series of system crashes. admittedly, they were probably started by a video driver that wasn't "signed" by microsoft, though in common use. the end of the series of crashes was that i could no longer boot into the os, not in safe mode, not in command line mode, even trying to reinstall from the cd resulted in an ntfs bsod. annoying. at least i have my linux partition to retrieve the data on my win2k drive before reformatting it. (sigh, these reformats take a long time)
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
I must admit, I like Gnome, but then I find myself going into the KDE menu, and digging out what I need. I like having both for it is the tools that are important.
photosMy Photostream
And because of your personal opinions (which are just fine, of course) Dell should've chosen KDE instead? Doubt it.
Besides, whaddya mean with And it (KDE) has better development tools for generating applications? Have you tried to program a KDE app with Perl for instance? Well, I've with Perl and Gtk. It's damn easy and quick to create good-looking GUI-apps with Perl/Gtk with just a few lines. And besides the usual C, C++ and Perl you could also choose Python, Scheme, Lisp, Objective-C, Ocaml, ADA95, Pike or Pascal (did I miss something?). Impressive list, eh? With KDE you're pretty much bound to C++.
Which development tools are you talking about? KDevelop maybe? It's cool if you like IDEs but who needs'em when you have vim or emacs or + a couple of xterms? It's the same compiler behind the binaries anyway.
Well I admit that last one was quite a troll but so was the whole post I tried to reply.
Excuse me? Where did the article mention KDE? Why do KDE people always have to attack GNOME? I, as a gnome user, don't waste my time attacking KDE whenever they have good news, etc. I'm glad the average KDE advocate hasn't dropped the "We can never do wrong, anything that isn't C++ sucks, screw being moral and respecting the traditions of the opensource community" BS that drove many people to program for GNOME in the first place.
(And for people who say KDE is faster, hah. KDE is noticably slower for me then GNOME with a pixmap gtk theme on my 1ghz athlon)
--- polarbear
But there's still hope. I've read that SuSE 7 has built-in support for this chip. Maybe we'll get the same support on other distros yet.
It's called the invisible hand. It has two failings: Monopolies, and Externalities. The first is the only one relevant here.
Wow, we've identified a system created by humans that doesn't perfectly accomplish its design goals all the time, even when working within the design specifications. This is not a problem unique to capitalism. The Invisible Hand does work, provided that the government takes action to prevent the formation of monopolies and to internalize externalities. In other words, laissez-faire sucks just as much as pure communism. That's why it greatly pleases me to hear many of the world's more powerful countries referred to as modern socialist rather than democratic. Balance between ideals gives to the people the power that would otherwise be concentrated in either the left-wing or the right-wing elites.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Ok, i'll bite.
"Gnome has a lot of positive points, but I like KDE better. It's a bit faster, for one thing. And it has better development tools for generating applications."
Ahh, there's nothing I like better than anecdotal arguments for one over the other. Exactly how is KDE faster? The window manager? The file manager? The application libraries? There's so many variables here I don't know how anyone could say one is faster than the other. Perhaps you meant "Qt is faster than Gtk+" (which is probably true)?.
And how does it have better development tools? Both are pretty developer friendly in my opinion (though I'm pretty biased towards Gnome development). Gnome had glade/libglade a long time before Qt designer came along. KDevelop is a moot point since many prefer not to use it, and KDevelop supports Gnome anyways (or so it says, I haven't verified this myself unfortunately).
For what it's worth, I'd say that Gnome is more popular with developers than KDE.
<useless statistics>
Freshmeat software map:
KDE projects: 359
Gnome projects: 398
Sourceforge software map:
KDE projects: 80
Gnome projects: 129
</useless statistics>
What does this mean? Not much, except that you probably can't say KDE is more developer friendly than Gnome (unless the developer is strongly C++ or C biased).
BTW, what "small details" are you referring to with Gtk+ programming? Gtk+ may look intimidating at first, but once you get the glib/gtk+ philosophy it makes sense and you'll find yourself predicting the APIs.
Take for example the built in ethernet. You have the option of buying 10Base-t or 100Base-T. On the built in modem, you have the option of a regular modem or a modem with voice mail. A 33.6 modem or a 56K modem. You have many choices and options.
All your choices affect the price of the laptop, but all laptops have the SAME HARDWARE. Manufacturers hide this knowledge from us.
The hardware is configured for cheap or full powered mode at the factory and these settings are flashed into the parts. And to software queries the hardware makes itself "look" different. If anyone knew the specs for the HW they could buy a crippled laptop for cheap and flash it up to a full performance laptop. This is why laptop hardware is secret.
It's like demoware with a "key" to unlock the software and make it fully functional. They do the same with laptops.
No. I may be prejudiced, but I view Perl as a "better bash", which makes writing Perl programs "housekeeping", not "development" for me.
Yes, I use KDevelop mostly. The reason I like Qt and KDevelop is because I write a lot of numeric analysis, digital signal processing, and real-time process control software. I really need the high number-crunching performance only C or C++ can give me, but I don't want to waste a lot of time coding the user interface. I have found KDevelop and Qt are the ideal combination for that.
You mention several languages that are popular for quickly written one-of-a-kind programs, but when one writes commercial software, one has to watch simultaneously for two factors: the software must not be late for the market and it must be a fast performer. Under these conditions, one's pretty much bound to C/C++ anyway.
well also a fedral judge declared it was so untill that ruling is overturned then it is a monopoly for all legal purposes
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
gg dell
Would someone please tell me how it is - if the best code wins in open source - that Red Hat and Gnome are running rings around the clearly superior KDE and Debian?
As a long time linux user, I'm a bit afraid that marketing is all that matters for non-profit dev efforts too.
How can this be?
Why aren't users downloading multiple products and comparing them anymore?
Has the passion for excellence left the linux community?
--Shoeboy
This just proves that we need to have people on the boards of directors of every corporation in America to represent the interests of the people. This is just one company; what about all the others? It is definitely in the people's interest to break the Microsoft stranglehold on the industry. But that's never going to happen as long as we have greedy industrialists in charge of the country.
Every board of directors of every corporation should have an overseer representative of the people, with full veto power over any decision that is not in the best interests of the public. All these companies should (and eventually will) be nationalized, but this is a good first step.
Clearly corporatism only has its own greedy profits in mind when it makes decisions. We need to have people in control that represent OUR interests.
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From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
comercial software, and the problems associated with it, are what most of us are trying to avoid.
When GNOME had the old site layout, its logo was still the footprint, but the mascot was David the Gnome (who could be seen in the Bonsai section). Who's KDE's mascot? Logo: gear ... mechanical ... android robot ... Mega Man! No, that's TM & © Capcom. Make a few modifications, make him cuter... voila! Player 2 in GNOME vs. KDE: Battle of the Desktops.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It wouldn't take much porting to get the GNOME desktop and GNOME applications to work on the Windows 2000 system, seeing as how the Cygwin POSIX layer, the XFree86 server, and GDK/GTK+/Glib are already ported.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The development tools is one point where Microsoft tried very hard to make really good products. Maybe this wasn't a company policy, but just a natural attitude from the people who did the coding there, who knows, but in MSVC 4 they had a great C/C++ development system.
Now this is a point where Gnome is lacking, in my opinion. Even if the users demand Gnome, I would still develop code using the KDElibs. There's too much bothering with the small details in Gtk programming.
BTW, have any of you tried the FLTK library? I have done some tests on it, both in Linux and M$-Windows, and it seems pretty cool to me, although it could have better fonts handling (no writing text on inclined lines, for example).
Red Hat & Gnome are sacrificing their ideals for the sake of a quick buck. You can't get into bed with the Commercial Devil and not die a little. The Gnome people are always Whoring themselves in front of Sun, Red Hat & IBM - especially over the last year.
IMO, the true inheritors of the FSF's open source ideals is KDE & the European distros, now that Troll Tech has GPL'ed the Qt libraries.
Gnome & KDE are swapping their traditional positions.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
I run the IS side for a small software company. We've been buying some of our PC's, and all of our engineering laptops from Dell for a while now.
We made the mistake of ordering a desktop system with Linux pre-installed by Dell a while back...nice thought, but the RedHat was down-rev from what we used elsewhere, and it included some Dell-monkeyed drivers for the video card.
So now we order the most bang for the buck (used to be that places like Dell had the fastest Intel chips available before other systems shops we use, such as swt.com), install the OS tweaked the way we want it via an NFS image, and bang, we've got more CPU cycles for our hungry software.
This is how the Win-based shops I've run have worked as well: Dunno whether the users like the 45 desktop icons each hardware manufacturer feels compelled to add, but as IS fascists, we never did. So we'd build one system the way it should be, and then cookie-cutter it out using disk cloning, scripting, or SMS (assuming we had the resources to make SMS work).
So don't ask me how many business users will end up with the Dell-configured desktop in actual use...if you're counting my place, it's none. Well, I might try it for a while.
Come to think of it, nearly every user in this office prefers fvwm2. Ugly, but good.
Maybe opera will help, but could they be moving any slower?
sure. they could move the people from the macintosh port over to the *nix one.
okay, okay, i'll stop bitching...
--saint----
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
...but I couldn't find where to click to find a stock quote for GNOME or LINUX. What the hell kind of news story is that?
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>Red Hat & Gnome are sacrificing their ideals >for ?the sake of a quick buck. You can't get >into bed with the Commercial Devil and not die a >little. The Gnome people are always Whoring >themselves in front of Sun, Red Hat & IBM - >especially over the last year.
:-) They definately have *free software* ideals though...
>IMO, the true inheritors of the FSF's open >source ideals is KDE & the European distros, now >that Troll Tech has GPL'ed the Qt libraries.
Do you have any evidence for that? Or are you just trolling??
In case you haven't noticed, there are just as many commercial companies on the KDE League as on the Gnome Foundation. I don't think this is a bad thing for either desktop. As long as the source is GPL'd...
BTW. The FSF has definately never had any "open source" ideals...
Hrm.
>IT'S THE LAPTOP'S STUPID!!
The laptop's stupid *what*? Pathetic battery? Keyboard? Expensive screen? You've implied that there's something stupid about the laptop, but haven't told us what it is.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
There is nothing wrong with Dell computers. They are reliable, designed well, and priced competitively. Their service and customer satisfaction are above average.
The problem I can't transgress lies with the Dell's morals as a company. I find their morals equal to the morals of a cheap prostitute. Expensive prostitute (and non-prostitute) will choose with which client/men to deal and which ones to reject. Dell will not just go after every niche, they will also yelp louder than everyone about the greatness of this niche.
Just remember recent times when licking Micro$oft butt was a necessary condition for surviving in the PC busyness. IBM was growling and roaring while doing it; Compaq was doing it with a squeamish "everyone does it" look on their collective face; HP had an attitude of "we don't care". Dell was the only one doing it joyfully; it was a cheerleader of licking M$ Butt (tm), and they were testifying for the MS at the anti-trust trial willfully and honestly.
Look at the situation now. Windows is still 95-99% of Dell's busyness, but they newertheless try not just to pay their lip service to Linux, but sound like a bigger proponent of Linux than Linus himself! It might be good for Linux at this point, but I care about integrity more than about Linux.
Or look how they bleat at such a genuine technological company like Sun while being a marketing-driven screwdriver technology outlet themselves!
So, YMMV, but I won't get Dell if I need a computer.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Am i missing something or isnt GNU/Linux required to run GNOME? And as such, what distro is Dell going to shill?
Lets not put the applecart before the ox as they say...
While for the time being I'm forced to use winders on my desktop most of the servers I'm responsible for have Linux now what you need to keep in mind is up untill just a bit ago I used Gnome because I did not like KDE's license (yes I am a license snob) That may change but for the moment I'm too lazy and don't see any real benefits in switching. Now about RH vs. Debian RH makes people like my boss feel good these are people to whom having someone to sign contracts with and send money too is important (I don't get it myself) I run ~5 servers doing various things if you ask my boss they are all running that RH 7.0 cd he spent too much money on and the RH techs are in a state of cat like readiness to help me should I need it :) Let's just put it this way what he does not know won't hurt him and the Debian community helps me out very well thank you very much. Just like these desktop machines Dell puts Linux on a box he will buy for me he does not care if it is RH or not it will be RH for about as long as it takes to fdisk that bad boy after I get it he won't know and to all the little surveys he will continue to say he has 6 RH machines. Doesn't matter to me. I think this is a common situation.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I downloaded the Flash plugin for Windows Netscape 4, and it works fine with Mozilla M18.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So you want a Word Processor, Presenter and web browser that's tightly integrated with the desktop. I have just the solution for you .. it's called KDE !! It's everything you're asking for, so you're sure to love it ;-)
Macka
It's nice to know that GNOME has now obviously become it's own operating system since Dell as chosen not to put BSD or Linux or anything else on there with it to alow it to run...i wonder if i could get EMACS to do this too...
>Any company planning on releasing non-GPL (ie proprietary or an alternative Open Source licence) would be insane to tie themselves to the future licencing whims of Trolltech.
If you download the GPL version of QT then they can't change the license for you.
If you want to develope close source applications using QT you can buy a different license from them and do that.
There is no problem here except when people want Free Software but are not willing to make their own software free.
(on the other hand I do wish the Windows version of QT was GPL because then I would use it in a GPL program I'm writing for both Windows and Linux. Porting the GPL version of QT would probably not be too hard but would not be a popular action)
Sigh, good point of course -- but I never claimed the statistics to be meaningful, which is why I said they were useless. What I DID take from it was that neither was overwhelmingly more popular than the other.
I hate having to defend myself when I was careful in how I said things in the first place.
The only reason that Dell is doing this is to gain favor in the linux community, nothing more, and nothing less. Since linux is free (beer), Dell can stick it on as many computers as it wants and all it costs them is the time it takes them to install. I'm guessing costs are further reduced since a lot of these computers would be standardized, and it should be possible to copy a disk image over, like some computer shops do with windows and Norton Ghost (great program btw).
The general impression that I get from the linux community is that most true computer geeks out there are going to format the hard drive and install their own flavor of linux with the packages they want. How many of you would use a computer with a linux installation that you didn't do?
A more meaningful gesture would be to release computers with nothing on the hard drive and include on a CD or two your choice of distro (with Dell promising that all the distro's they offer have been tested and will run on their machines.)
"the high number-crunching performance only C or C++ can give" you? Whatever happened to Fortran? One is not bound to C/C++ in those situations - Fortran or Ada also perform quickly and are decent languages to write in. In fact, if you're doing some types of heavy number-crunching on a PC, Perl or Python work great - the speed of interpreter is not an issue when 95% of the CPU time is spent running LAPACK routines written in highly-tuned Fortran.
Part of the reason that the big commercial companies were attracted to the GNOME Foundation was the Freedom provided by GNOME's underlying widget set, GTK+. A Freedom which wasn't available from QT at the time
If you want to talk about Open Source for a second then QT is incompatible with the majority of Open Source licences as it is GPL, rather than LGPL.
If the FSF acknowledged the need for the LGPL and created it then why don't Trolltech use it for their QT libraries? The reason is simple, Trolltech's goal was to silence the most vocal (and extreme) Open Source type (ie Free Software proponents) while maintaing the same degree of usage control over their libraries. Any company planning on releasing non-GPL (ie proprietary or an alternative Open Source licence) would be insane to tie themselves to the future licencing whims of Trolltech.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
With this announcement, maybe a few more vendors will be motivated to ship Linux machines, with or without GNOME or KDE.
Anyone know what distribution they're shipping?