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."

Comments

Re:Did someone say "Windows 2000"?

[selectspec]

Top 10 Reasons to Move to Windows 2000 Professional

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.

What's the big deal on this?

[jcoleman]

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.

losing browser war

[KevinMS]

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

Rant about GNOME

[danfarrell]

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

Re:Rant about GNOME

[fejjie]

GtkHTML2 is not a web-browser replacement. We currently use GtkHTML in Evolution and it renders HTML fine, but has no support for CSS. GtkHTML2 will support that but it will still be a lightweight HTML rendering widget and not a full-blown web-browser ready engine. At least as far as I know - contact Anders Carlsson to find out for sure.

As far as achtung, it hasn't been abandoned - Joe Shaw is still hacking away at it in his spare time.

OpenOffice I believe itends to be fully GNOMEified, but I dunno for sure.

Re:Rant about GNOME

[_|()|\|]

here is the rant: I HATE CROSS PLATFORM APPS!!!!!!!!! AGH!!!

Okay, here's my rant: I HATE PLATFORM-DEPENDENT APPS!!!!!!!!! AGH!!!

The first thing the GNOME and KDE clowns do is start developing an office suite from scratch. The Mozilla clowns, realizing they have to be cross platform, essentially develop a new platform, in the form of XUL.

Sure, develop an ICQ client for one platform. (Of course, it won't be complete until it reads email.) If you're developing anything worth a damn, don't depend on any one platform. Don't know how to write a (Win|Mac|CDE|KDE) app.? Fine, but please separate the user interface from the rest of the app. so that someone who knows and cares can.

The point is, an app. (proprietary or free) is nothing without users. Targeting one platform alienates the users of all the other platforms. Foo 3.2 for the Amiga looks pretty quaint right now. In five years, Bar 2.1 for GNOME will probably look just as quaint. People have criticized Donald Knuth for using an imaginary assembly language to illustrate the algorithms in The Art of Computer Programming . Why not FORTRAN, Pascal, C, C++, or Java? The question almost answers itself: "New algebraic languages go in and out of fashion every five years or so, while I am trying to emphasize concepts that are timeless."

Wintel whore #1 takes a stake in Eazel?!

[_|()|\|]

Sounds like a non-story to me.

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.

Bigotry obviously runs high!

[Christopher B. Brown]

From my certainly-biased perspective, it's nowhere near as evident where manifest superiority lies:

• Is Debian superior, because it doesn't suffer from the RHAT thing of releasing weird customized versions of kernels and compilers, or is it inferior because it took longer to get The XFree86 4.0.1 release out?
• I no longer use RHAT these days, using Debian instead; the long times between Debian "stable" releases is legitimately a pain against which the questionable robustness of RHAT "dot 0" releases must be balanced.
• On Debian, I've had a whopping lot more success running GNOME applications than I have had with KDE applications; your "clearly superior" code has tended to suffer badly from segmentation faults. I've never gotten any of the prepackaged KOffice stuff running.
• I tend to prefer the architecture of GNOME to that of KDE, particularly because information about it is actually published and available.

  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.

• I could argue that KDE, by largely forcing developers to program in C++, this represents its own "denial of passion for excellence."

  After all:

  "C++ is more of a rube-goldberg type thing full of high-voltages, large chain-driven gears, sharp edges, exploding widgets, and spots to get your fingers crushed. And because of it's complexity many (if not most) of it's users don't know how it works, and can't tell ahead of time what's going to cause them to lose an arm." -- Grant Edwards

  :-)

  GNOME, by being agnostic about what language you are expected to use, does not force you into

  "Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS." -- Alan Kay

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.

I looked at the press release...

[SIGFPE]

...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?
--

Re:How could this happen in the open source commun

[Chuck Chunder]

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.

You still seem to be under the impression that 'Free' and 'Commercial' are two incompatible concepts. Have you not been paying attention?
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.