Ximian Gnome 1.4 released

A zillion people took time out of their busy day to submit that Ximian 1.4 is out. Now it includes nautilus (which I continue to be lukewarm on. It likes to barf on huge directories, and I prefer efm's integrated command line) as well as Mozilla (which is good to see included with the distribution although again, I think I prefer konqueror). But the Ximian desktop is super solid and great for beginners, and includes lots of useful stuff. I'll be apt-get'ing the latest revision asap.

Comments

Re:What "apt-get"?

[itp]

The new apt source is:

http://red-carpet.ximian.com/debian potato main

--
Ian Peters

Re:Feel of the linux desktop

[rhavyn]

Another method of making X seem more responsive that doesn't involve playing with the scheduler (which is not something that Ximian or anyone else should be suggesting) is to run X with a -10 nice value. Renicing X to -10, however, should only be done on a desktop system, on a server it will starve the background stuff from CPU time.

That's what I do on my desktop machine and it really does make X feel more responsive.

Feel of the linux desktop

[z4ce]

Recently, I was writing an application in Java that used small Thread.sleep(). It was appearing to sleep _way_ too long though. Thread.sleep(0,1) (one nanosecond) would sleep the same as Thread.sleep(10) (10 milliseconds). I began to think of why this might be.. and then it hit me.. it's the context switching. So I looked around and found some sites talking about real-time audio and changing the context switching speed.

I found if you change the /usr/src/linux/include/asm-i386/param.h file to #define HZ 1000 rather than #define HZ 100 everything GUI was _much_ _much_ faster. The GIMP seems to load in literally 1/5 the time.

Why don't distribuations like Ximian suggest this change? With heavily multi-threaded gui applications it seems to me it's an absolute must. Everything seems to run better to me with the faster context switching. (well, except for remote X, with the fast switching it seems to update a lot faster, and thus clog the connection and make it seem slow).

Anyone know why this is not more heavily publicized?

Ian

Re:Slackware

[chetohevia]

For the umpteenth time, Ximian doesn't hate Slackware, and is not biased against Slackware.
There are two major reasons Ximian GNOME isn't build for Slackware:

1) Slackware does not support internal dependency checking or management, and the rpm bolt-on is not sufficient for Red Carpet. We have spoken with the Slackware maintainers and they feel that users should know their own dependency trees and maintain them. Any user who cannot sort out library versions for him or herself does not deserve root privs, they say.

2) Slackware users are not the Ximian GNOME target market. Slackware users are frequently console users, compilers-from-scratch, and knowers of their own dependency trees.This is excellent for them. They don't need Ximian GNOME, so we're not really there for them.

If you want Ximian GNOME in Slackware, talk to the Slack maintainers and ask them to port it.
You can see a longer explanation, and install tips, at my unofficial Ximian GNOME on Slack page at http://primates.ximian.com/~aaron/slack.html

Sincerely,
Aaron Weber
Technical Writer
Ximian, Inc.

Hardware configuration utilities

[proxima]

I just wish that GNOME and KDE would include XFree86 configuration utilities (like DrakConf for Mandrake does, only a bit cleaner). In addition, they should make a bigger deal of the latest version of linuxconf, which seems to be the most comprehensive hardware and service control. I still use netcfg by RedHat sometimes to set up Gateway and DNS info.

My point here is, these application sets (KDE and GNOME) have been focusing almost entirely on configuration utilities for the GUI. The GNOME and KDE control-panels are useful only for changing simple things like backgrounds, themes, and keyboard shortcuts. If I were new to Linux, I'd be looking to these control panels to modify my screen resolution, set up my network (and network hardware), set up my sound card (I still use sndconfig sometimes), and other devices. A new user expects all system configuration to be in one place, like the Windows control panel. This was my experience when I first started using Linux about two years ago, and I had to do a fair amount of searching to find all of these little useful utilities (as well as editing config files manually) - like netcfg, sndconfig, Xconfigurator, linuxconf, etc. If nothing else, GNOME and KDE should include links and info about how and what to use to do these things.

I may be incorrect on a few points and simply missed how KDE and/or GNOME handle a feature - in that case, I'd like to know. However, it's been my experience that GNOME and KDE can't be truly newbie-friendly without the ability to easily change hardware (and service) settings.