GNOME 1.4 Beta 2 is Out

Maciej Stachowiak writes: "The GNOME 1.4 Release Team is proud to announce GNOME 1.4 Beta 2 "Hit Me Baby, One More Time". This is only a beta and there may be problems with compiling and running. However, if you are adventurous and would like to help with testing, get it from your favorite GNOME mirror site in /pub/gnome/stable/betas/gnome-1.4beta2. We would also like to announce the GNOME Fifth Toe 1.4 Beta 2 release, a collection of additional packages that are not part of the core desktop but designed to work well with GNOME. This should also be available on gnome mirrors in /pub/gnome/stable/betas/gnome-fifth-toe-1.4beta2. Bug reports for most packages should go in one of the following, depending on the module: GNOME Bugzilla, Eazel Bugzilla or Ximian Bugzilla."

Comments

Re:You know why they released it

[snoman]

Exactly what I was about to respond with.. This seems like a MS Marketing ploy to me.

And what the hell is slashdot doing posting a Beta release as news?!

how big is GNOME 1.4?

[ikekrull]

does anyone know - ballpark figure, how many megabytes of crap i would have to download to upgrade my current GNOME (gnome-config tells me i have gnome-libs 1.0.54, shipped with Mandrake 7.0) to this new one?

Re:how big is GNOME 1.4?

[Anonymous Coward]

du -s in my directory with all the rpm's from the first beta says its 94 megs... but that includes all the devel packages too without the devel packages, its 50 megs

Re:how big is GNOME 1.4?

[be-fan]

50MB? What's in there! Seriously, one has to admit 50MB is getting pretty hefty for a system. The entire BeOS core directory is about 30MB of binaries (including drivers and the whole bit). This isn't a plug for BeOS, just a point of reference. What is GNOME stuffing in there?

Re:how big is GNOME 1.4?

[1010011010]

Games, spreadsheets, word processors, web browser, two shells (gmc and nautilus), digital camera utilities, image editors, cd players, mp3 players, mp3 rippers, development tools, GUI design tools, profiling tools, calendars, address books, palm pilot utilities, text editors, finance manager, mail clients, irc clients, IM clients, ftp clients, system config tools, themes, window manager, panels, applets, as well as the gnome and gtk+glib libraries.

- - - - -

nautilus up for the job

[Anonymous Coward]

I must first say that while I'm impressed with the look, feel, and features of Nautilus, it's very slow. Should such slow or bloated software really be a part of gnome? I almost feel like I'm being forced to use old gnome versions along with Window Maker to keep reasonable speeds. However, please don't take my statement as negative but more as constructive criticism. Can we expect to see speed improvements in GTK and Nautlius down the road?

Re:nautilus up for the job

[Anonymous Coward]

while Nautilus is very cool, it's almost like they forgot about the issue of speed. It doesn't seem as if they are staying within the normal computers means. However, despite the users cpu speed, nautilus is way too slow. I certainly don't see gmc, anything from kde, or explorer in windows act and respond so slowly. Part of the fault is Nautlius being too bloated, perhaps some design, and maybe even GTK. In general, GTK is slow as shit while QT seems to be very fast. It's almost a shame that GTK became more widespread over QT simply from license issues. GTK certainly needs to get it's ass in gear or it needs to be dropped for QT.

Re:nautilus up for the job

[frantzdb]

The issue here is that GTK isn't double buffered. GTK 2.0 will be, thus there will be no flickery redraw issues.

--Ben

Re:nautilus up for the job

[Skeezix]

I don't know which version of Nautilus you tested most recently, but from my experience with running the hourly builds, I have to say Nautilus has become a lot faster. The Nautilus hackers are certainly addressing performance issues. A lot of the major performance tuning will probably have to come post-1.0, but expect Nautilus 1.0 to certainly be usable in terms of performance. Some of the major bottlenecks right now involve gnome-vfs and bonobo, two rapidly developing, yet new technologies. As these frameworks mature, look to see applications such as Nautilus that use them also improve. You can think of Gnome 1.4 as sort of a stepping stone to Gnome 2.0. Gnome 1.4 introduces some new technologies such as Bonobo, gnome-vfs, and the Nautilus architecture. During the development of Gnome 2.0 applications will be ported to the new GTK+ 2.0 toolkit, Bonobo, gnome-vfs, Nautilus, et. al. will be improved upon, and more applications will make use of these new technologies. This means more testing, more patches from more people and a better environment from which to work. If Nautilus is just too slow for you, you can still use gmc--we've included it in the Gnome Fifth Toe as a deprecated, but still available application. Keep trying out the builds of Nautilus, though--It's improving very quickly!
----

Time to upgrade.

[be-fan]

Damn, this PII is getting slow. Is GNOME getting slower by the day, or does Intel build timers into its chips that halves the clock-rate very year?

Re:Time to upgrade.

[zerocool^]

I noticed the Intel Chip Clock-speed Decrease a long time ago.
Recently i emailed an intel rep about it...

TO:support@intel.com
FROM:**email address omitted**
REPLYTO:**email address omitted**
DATE:JAN12 2001
SUBJECT:Slowing processors

Dear Sir or Madam.
I have had problems with my intel chip - every year it seems to become slower, even though i have not done anything to the chip its self. Are you familiar with any problems in relation to this phenomonon? I am quite baffeled. Please write me back at **email address omitted**.
Thank you in advance, ~Will.

//end of letter

TO:**email address omitted**
FROM:support@intel.com
REPLYTO:support@intel.com
DATE:JAN13 2001
SUBJECT:RE:Slowing processors.

DEAR WILL:
HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN?
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.

INTEL SUPPORT.

//end of letter

~zero


insert clever line here

how to get this working if the installer dumps

[margulies]

if the installer cores on you, try the following:

cd to /var/cache/red-carpet/packages
then issue "rpm -Uvh *"

works for me on RH7.0 (even on fisher).

i believe the installer dumps right before or during the final call to rpm. not sure why it works from the command line and not from within red-carpet.

Re:how to get this working if the installer dumps

[trevorcor]

I've always thought the install failure has something to do with using newer versions of RPM v4.x, such as that shipped with fisher or that included in the install of Nautilus PR3 for RH7. These later versions break up2date and helix-update as well.

Re:how to get this working if the installer dumps

[fosh]

This used to happen to me all the time in helix-update, red-carpet and up2date. After much pain and suffering, I discovered it was just a slightly broken RPM database. To fix it, just issue the following command:

rpm --rebuilddb

Good Luck
--Alex

Broken Mirrors

[Cassivs]

Some of these mirrors are mighty broken:
230- ftp.cybertrails.com
230-Due to limited disk space at the moment,
230-we have had to discontinue our gnome.org
230-mirror for a month or so.

can't find epoch.res.cmu.edu: Non-existent host/domain

gnomeftp.blue-labs.org doesn't have beta up yet...

Well, i think you get the picture, lots of broken mirrors.

Re:Broken Mirrors

[Cassivs]

ftp.snoopy.net:
ftp> cd pub/gnome/stable/betas/gnome-1.4beta2
550 pub/gnome/stable/betas/gnome-1.4beta2: No such file or directory

ftp> open slave.opensource.captech.com
ftp: slave.opensource.captech.com: Host name lookup failure

download.sourceforge.net (ftp) doesn't have beta2 yet either, just the first. And rpmfind has too many users already. :)

So, good luck finding a mirror :)

please don't flame me over this...

[Ensign Nemo]

I always thought KDE looked neater and more 'professional' than GNOME. But with the recent screenshots of both it appears to me that GNOME has taken the edge.
GOD I lOVE competitive cooperation! This just means on the next release KDE will look better. then GNOME, then KDE. ;>
How do they run comparatively? I ask out of ignorance since I haven't used either in almost 8 months now. I hear a lot of people moaning about Nautilus. Can anyone give me unbiased (if there is such a thing.) information backed up with numbers and examples?
In any event. To everyone involved in both KDE and GNOME: Keep up the good work!! your hard work is paying off.

Re:please don't flame me over this...

[q000921]

Too bad that all the desktops are competing over which one looks visually most appealing/modern/styled.

What about competing on which one is easiest to program for? Which one has the smallest learning curve for programmers? Which one has the lowest footprint and still provides full functionality? Which one is the easiest to use?

Re:please don't flame me over this...

[dbarclay10]

Hahahaha :) Don't flame you over that?

No offense or anything, but that's just drivel.

KDE makes great pains to be easy to program for.

GNOME has a small learning curve for a number of programmers, as it's C-based.

GNOME has the lowest footprint and provides the most functionality.

KDE is easiest to learn(but not to use; the longer something takes to learn, the more complex it is. Generally, the more complex an app is, the easier it is to get work done. Ease of use is directly related to how easy it is to get work done).

And both projects tout those aspects :)

So, indeed, I will flame you, karma whore :)

Consider yourself flamed.

Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)

Re:please don't flame me over this...

[q000921]

My mother uses Windows and doesn't care about KDE. I use UNIX because I do, and KDE doesn't do much for me (neither does Gnome).

Compiling on "odd" platforms

[yerricde]

IMO, if a build process is difficult or buggy, especially if it is an open source product that most people are expected to compile, then it reflects very badly on the quality of the code.

GNOME is designed for POSIX conforming systems with an X11 server. However, some systems that claim to conform don't in practice (such as AIX and Pains).

But IMO, there is NO EXCUSE for difficulty compiling a desktop.

Unless you're trying to compile it on a "weird" platform or a platform whose unit price is out of the typical consumer PC price range (that is, anything that's not built around a single PowerPC or x86).

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Re:Compiling on "odd" platforms

[yerricde]

Don't agree. AIX is as standard as it gets

Sorry, bad example. I haven't followed AIX recently.

Fix it, don't invent excuses

That's a bit hard when you don't have $10,000 on hand to purchase the target system that somebody is bitching to you about in an email.

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Re:Too bad linux kernel 2.4.x breaks the installer

[be-fan]

That's debatable. NT's service packs have never broken anything for me, but upgrading glibc (2.2.2-pre -> 2.2.2-final) once broke 'ls' of all things!

changed to KDE after years with GNOME

[HomerJ]

Nice to see the gnome team respond with a quick 2nd beta. What I'm about to say isn't flamebait, just my opinion.

That first beta trashed my system. Installed nautilus, which kinda took over everything that gmc did, but with about 1/2 the useable functionality. And not to mention that the mozilla intergration didn't work(yeah, I had all the correct packages). And it was just a slow expierience over all. Saw the promise in what 1.4 and 2.0 could be. But as of now, it's not nearly there.

Decided to see what all the fuss over KDE 2.1 was about. A simple "apt-get install task-kde" had it installed in a few moments. What a differnece in night and day this was when I first started it up.

First off, I noticed the AA Fonts. And then just the overall speedup compared to even the stable 1.2 gnome. I did think what most people think of kde though, it just being an improved Windows interface. A simple change in a theme made it nothing that looked like it's former self.

Then I checked out Konqurer. I didn't expect much. However, after using it for a couple days, I don't see how ANYONE can not use this. In useablitly, speed, and stability, it's between IE4 and IE5. Not to mention features such as killing popup windows, that IE will never have. And not to mention speed. I clicked the desktop icon, and it displayed the start page. Pages loaded and rendered faster then any mozilla optimized build that I've compiled myself.

But what I don't think most people understand that you don't have to totally pick one over the other. I do like evolution, and I still use it for my e-mail. I still use gaim, and a bunch of other "gnome" programs. If I would have got around to actually trying konqurer, I would have ran it in gnome. Using kde or gnome, doesn't tie you to their aps.

So while you all are trying out this new Gnome 1.4 beta, type an apt-get install task-kde and give the new kde a whirl. I ran gnome since pre 1.0 days, and it made a convert out of me. And if you don't like it, there is always apt-get remove task-kde

Re:changed to KDE after years with GNOME

[JoeBuck]

And if you don't like it, there is always apt-get remove task-kde.

That won't remove KDE from your system; it will only remove a tiny package that depends on the KDE packages, probably freeing up a few hundred bytes.

X marks the spot

[Ukab the Great]

Do many of the things that Eazel does (zooming, playing MP3's in file manager, etc) slow Nautilus down? Certainly. But OS X/Aqua does many of the same things Nautilus does and does it also using unix kernel (albeit BSD) and does it with far more transparent graphics and the whole time doing all of this in a vector based PDF graphics systems. Quartz/Aqua has to have way, way more overhead than Nautilus and X running with the most gaudiest, bloated Gtk theme.

And yet OSX is still doing it faster.

I know comparing two different kernels on two different graphics systems on (typically) two different architectures is like mixing apples and oranges (pun intended). But such a great disparity between the two environments that favors the one that has to do more work strikes me as odd. I may be wrong, but I'm almost positive that this is a problem with X. We really, really need something better than X and we need it now.

Re:X marks the spot

[Anonymous Coward]

well, a lot of it is really just GTK in my opinion. GTK's text widgets are god awful for instance. However, X does play a big part of it along with the drivers for X. The X team keeps X way to generic for modern cards. X really needs more extensions for hardware support. Xrenderer was a good start but now X needs a real accelerated alpha layer in order to do transparencies worth a shit. X also needs more support for other accelerated features and xv needs more support for features too. It's good that XV supports yuv-rgb, hardware scaling, etc... but what about extensions for motion compensation, etc.....? Perhaps X needs more commercial support to get such things done.

Re:X marks the spot

[frantzdb]

Can you say Hardware Video Acceleration? Currently X is doing all it does (generally) with your CPU. If you have hardware accelerated graphics, then the computer can do more with less work. I have heard of some Enlightenment testing with a full alpha canvas with framerates in the hundereds of frames per second for large, complex 2D graphics. The problem is not X.

With regard to Nautilus, the answer I keep hearing is that they arn't done with speedups. Only time will tell, but the people working on it are aware of the issues.

--Ben

Re:X marks the spot

[dbarclay10]

We really, really need something better than X and we need it now.

Okay :) You've got a text editor, you've got a compiler, and you've got source code. Start coding.

No? Why not? Listen, replacing X isn't going to be easy. And unless you're going to do it, shut up and stop whining. Instead, THANK the people who have *given* you a Free implementation of the X Windowing System. Got it? Good.

Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)

Re:X marks the spot

[1010011010]

It's libart. Nautilus uses libart to display everything.

- - - - -

Re:X marks the spot

[johnnyb]

There's a few things to think about.

OSX only works on new-world Macintosh machines. Are you _sure_ the machine you're trying Nautilus on compares equally? If its an x86 box it needs (a)double the megahertz, (b)128MB RAM. In addition, as has been said before, I'm guessing that OSX takes better advantage of hardware accelleration than X does.

Re:X marks the spot

[Stiletto]

What kind of video card do you have? What version of XFree? I find the latest versions of XFree (3.3.x and 4.x) to be very fast.

X isn't as much of a bottleneck as many people would claim. Likely the problem lies with how some of these apps are programmed, and how they use the toolkit.

Having a window manager, toolkitk and desktop heavily themed with huge pixmaps doesn't help either.

Re:X marks the spot

[extrasolar]

Yes, but people need to be more modest in their wording. The guy said, "We need something better than X and we need it now."

Note the words "we" and "now".

There are plenty of people who would take legitament offense at that.

Free Software isn't magic. But some people treat as if it is.

Re:"May be problems with COMPILING"?!

[jirka]

I'm glad you volunteered to help with this and send it bug reports and patches. You see, GNOME is a cooperative effort of volunteers, so you have to volunteer to fix stuff. We aren't excusing ourselves from build troubles.

So ... yes, we are taking patches. That is, if you are willing to get off your whining ass and do something instead of putting down people's work that you just got for free.

Re:Too bad linux kernel 2.4.x breaks the installer

[itp]

It fails on fisher not because of the kernel, but because of the broken version of RPM that is shipped with fisher (and with Nautilus PR3). There are several other posts about this in this article, or you can read up for more information at rpm-list@redhat.com or red-carpet@ximian.com.

Basically your package database is corrupted by using by using RPM 4.0.2, and the corruption causes clients like Red Carpet, up2date, etc to crash.

We're talking to Jeff Johnson, the RPM maintainer, to come up with a solution as quickly as possible.

--
Ian Peters

Re:You know why they released it

[suprax]

It was probably posted so a greater number of people can find it and test it out as it makes its way through the beta stages. Either that or it was a slow day for Slashdot. =)

--
Scott Miga
suprax@linux.com

Then KDE 2.1 isn't news

[molog]

Did you complain about 2.1 being announced. That was just a developement release.
Molog

So Linus, what are we doing tonight?

Re:Then KDE 2.1 isn't news

[Skeezix]

The beta and release candidates are news. /. has a wide viewing audience and a large percentage of ./ users are Gnome or KDE users. All of the KDE betas made it to /. and why not? The more people try it out and report bugs and do testing, the better.
----

Re:sounds grate.. but..

[Skeezix]

If you mean what's new since Beta1, not much. During the Beta cycle we're just fixing bugs, doing QA, and the like. As far as what's new since Gnome 1.2, here you go:

Some of the new features in Gnome 1.4 include:

User level

* Nautilus
* enhanced display manager
* better KDE interoperability
* better support for legacy X applications
* application launch feedback
* improved Panel
* integrated Sawfish window manager
* Improved help browser and help system
* Usability and quality improvements throughout

* Fifth Toe release including a broad collection of apps that run on
GNOME.

Developer level

* gnome-vfs - Virtual file system allowing transparent access to local
and remote files.
* Bonobo component model - technology preview
* xml-i18n-tools - better internationalization and localization tools
* GConf - Advanced configuration/settings system with notification and
pluggable back ends
* Medusa search/indexing system
* Laguage bindings - C++, python, guile, rep

The Fifth Toe is a set of applications that are not part of Gnome proper but work with Gnome. They include office applications, games, a few panel applets, utilities, and chat programs.
----

Off Topic (was Re:OIDIA)

[extrasolar]

Subliminal message in your signature? Does it work? ;-)