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Looking Ahead at GNOME 2
Able writes "This is a good article that will teach you how to use the new and improved libraries available with GNOME 2 so that you can write your own Nautilus view, and panel applets. It also provides you with the understanding to compile a few sample GTK+ 2 programs that will give you a good understanding of GTK+ 2's many improvements over GTK+ 1."
..Geez.. 2.0? Thats no good.. I mean look at windows for instance - Its way past 3.0, past 98.0.. I think its even past version 2000 now! How is linux ever going to competitive with such small version numbers?
air and light and time and space
I am a Gnome user, and athough I am NOT a sky is falling person, KDE seems to be making much more usefull strides, I am also concerned about the Ximian fork, (even though I use it) How long till XImian hack up all the libs to work for their effort and how compatible will it be ?
I have thought about switching to KDE for no other reason than they seem to have a much better, much more focused direction.
Does it seem to anyone else latley Gnome is becoming a throw in everything and if the kitchen sink dosent work its OK, or is it just me.
Admittedly Gnome 2 has some nice stuff but how much will be functional by first release ?
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
This might sound like trolling, but I'd wait a bit until the GTK libraries are settled before beginning to seriously develop for Gnome. One of the big problems with GTK from version 1 to 2 was how certain widgets went through two or three different revisions, namely that very attractive treeview widget. With bonobo architecture on the way, stuff might change even more.
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charlton heston is more of a man than yo
"Yeah, last night I was really tring to get the object-oriented cobol bindings to gtk+ working but then in a fluke there was this gcc bug that caused my userspace code to go wonky and install the wrong x colormap which recursed until the system locked up. It was righteous."
I don't know where open source would be without the fine users of Slashdot and all the wonderful programs they develop.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
Rubbish. XFree86 has supported what Microsoft calls "ClearType" for over a year.
The method, called sub-pixel rendering, is designed to work with LCD panels. This is why Microsoft are pushing for its use on laptops and palmtop devices. On standard CRTs, it holds no advantage over standard greyscale anti-aliasing.
A single pixel of an LCD screen is actually composed of three "sub-pixels": one red, one green, and one blue (R-G-B). Taken together this sub-pixel triplet makes up what we've traditionally thought of as a single pixel. This means that an LCD screen boasting a horizontal resolution of 800 whole pixels is actually composed of 800 red, 800 green, and 800 blue sub-pixels interleaved together (R-G-B-R-G-B-R-G-B
"ClearType" can be enabled in XFree86 versions 4.01 and greater by modifying
match edit rgba = rgb;
An in-depth look into sub-pixel rendering support in XFree86 is available here.
No, the transparent menu effect that Mosfet made for his liquid theme (and will now get added to kde 3.0 builtin themes I think) takes a snapshot of the area behind the menu and uses that image to make a pseudo-translucent effect.
Not a very good way of doing it in my opinion, and this becomes clear when you move through the different menus in a menubar, you can see the ghosts of the menu you had previously opened beneath your current menu.
If there is a better way of doing it, I'm not sure what it is, although I think you can do true translucent effects with Keith Packard's XRender extension.
But it doesn't seem that anyone is using that to do translucency so either its really hard to use or theres problems. I'd love to know which it is if anyone has some more information.
PS - No offense to Mosfet or anyone else using this code to do translucent menus, it's a very good idea and I do use it when I'm in KDE. I just think it'd be cool to have it without the little quirks like seeing things behind the menu that shouldn't be there.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
That is precisly what I am talking about. It should require no user intervention at all. :(
In fact Asian Charecter support in Windows is also easy, just a single EXE file to be downloaded and run. Just select the desired language and spell things out phonicaly in romanized letters, watch the desired charecter appear.
More popular programs like this are needed on Linux, and need to be installed by default. A standard of some sort needs to be set that allows for all programs to easily use these features. Imagine every Gnome/KDE/ program having easy to implement naturalization.
Or a Hiragana flashcard program, or a Kanji flashcard program, or both intermixed with each other with no issues at all. The english letters/word choices being shown at the bottom of the screen.
Now imagine the Kanji charecters also being antialiased. Along with everything else.
All the user would know is that he/she is improving their Japanese skills on a very nice looking display and that it was even easier to get running that the Windows equivilent.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
GNOME team is out of focus. Its development is very very slow. Not much stuff has changed. The differences will be very few.
Like said in a post, it's too little to consider a 10 years work. GNOME is always difficult to install from source. Hundreds of dependencies and packages.
Would be better if they did arrange the packaging in a better way:
gnome2-gui.tar.bz2 (4MB)
gnome2-extra.tar.bz2 (4MB)
gnome2-libs.tar.bz2 (5MB)
gnome2-core.tar.bz2 (9MB)
gnome2-applications.tar.bz2 (9MB)
gnome2-addons.tar.bz2 (3MB)
Hmmm... Looks much more organized. Lots of packages merged into "gui" like gtk+, glib, pango, etc.
In "extra" we have the stuff like esound, audiofile, etc.
And so on... forget the hassle to download all the 60 tarballs. Just download one single tarball, untar/ungzip it and start compiling!
But yet, GNOME as it is, is unorganized for real.
Have you used Star Office 6 beta?
Awesome, aa fonts and all. It may as well be Word, Excel and Powerpoint for Unix.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
What's the problem, exactly? Gnome will get better, KDE will get better, you can use as much of either or both as fits your needs and at worst, you can go on using the current versions.
It's not clear to me where there's a problem. What's the worst that'll happen -- you might be tempted to change desktops to something that works better for you? You can even keep using your GTK themes.
By the way, VFVTHUNTER, you can turn off the launch feedback indicator on the cursor. I'm on a Mac right now, but it's in a pretty obvious place in KControl.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I am currently typing this with a USB keyboard, and will click the 'submit' button with a USB mouse, both of which are plugged into a USB hub on my monitor. If you plug more than one mouse into the computer each gets its own /dev/input/mouseX device.
As for installing font packs, yes it can be that easy. On my system I'd just have to type 'apt-get install kde-i18n-ja', but if you really must have a point and click interface to it, you can install RedCarpet which will make things similarly easy.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Yeah, I am putting a Honda Civic backend into my F50. Oh wait, the backends for both cars are so different that trying to use the same backend for both cars is just silly. You ever wonder why the auto industry doesn't put the same backend into every car?
Yes it could be done, two wrappers around the same backend resulting in QT and GTK. However, such a task would require so much additional coding that it would negate any benefits that it was supposed to have.
I hate to say this, but what will happen, is one of the desktop environments will die out. Its the nature of Open Source Software. Things can't stay splintered forever. Eventually natural forces (user's needs, technical needs, development needs, market needs, etc) will cause the gap between both desktop environments to widen. However, the initial competition that exists when there is still more than one option helps the end user get a better desktop environment sooner.
Now this has nothing to do with other ultra-feather weight desktop environments, which will compete amongst eachother for the bare bones performance niche.
Back to the dying out of one of Gnome or KDE... well, you can give any prediction you want, but the productive thing would be to contribute to the development of the desktop you like the best. Contribute by using the desktop and reporting bugs. Contribute by writing code. Contribute by making art (icons, themes, sounds, wallpaper, etc). Contribute by educating others about the desktop of your choice.
Finally, my point is that the dream of unifying Gnome and KDE is silly. One of them will kill the other, and thats a good thing because it won't happen until one is orders of magnitude better than the other meaning that natural community and technical forces will choose the best desktop for us.
While I can't speak for kernel development, which is easily beyond any programming skill I've ever had, I can say a few comments about other things you cite examples of.
Apache was written in C, either because the programmers were UNIX programmers who are hardcore into C and refuse to use C++, because they had C source to work from, because there were no good C++ compilers out there, or any combination or lack of the above. Same with X-window implementations.
These both would be nice if implemented properly in C++, because the object-orientation features of C++ make a lot of things clearer and easier, and in a lot of cases, mind-numbingly less complex.
The GNU tools (I assume you're referring to things like wget, fileutils, binutils, and so on) are, 99% of the time, pointless to write in C++, because you wouldn't use object-orientation on such a small/limited scale (wget deals with one file at a time, why bother objectifying?).
I do, however, point you to other large projects that DO use C++ - KDE, Mozilla, AtheOS, just to name a few.
Large projects that deal with objects - buttons, windows, controls, lists, etc. - are great when implemented in C++ (if done properly), because it makes the code easier to deal with, less complex, more reusable, and on and on.
C++ isn't for everything, but for something like a graphical user interface, it would sure be nice.
--Dan