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GNOME 2.0 Desktop Alpha
xer.xes writes: "The first public testing release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop, 'Rolig Liten Hattgubbe,' is ready for your testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download here. Please read the release notes first! Due for general consumption in March, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface."
"Rolig liten hattgubbe" is Swedish and translates to "Funny little hat-man" (yes, it sounds ridiculous in my language too).
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
Persian poetry on GNOME.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There's a few up on the dotplan website:
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/.
There doesn't seem to be an excessive amount of new eyecandy, but that's no surprise since Gnome 2 is supposed to be more a change to the libraries and backend. I'm sure new and updated apps that take advantage of this will follow soon after the actual release.
It's only software!
Obviously you haven't tried a recent release of Galeon!
Please all keep in mind, that this is a very much alpha style release.
;-)
.rpm's of the packages, before you jump into the deep and start testing. The Gnome Packaging project is working hard on these, so i'm sure they will be along soon.
This means a couple of base packages don't compile without any manual labor, and a few packages won't compile unless you become a leet gnome hacker and fix the source on the fly
It's a great way to get a first preview of the platform,but for general consumption or testing, this platform just int it yet.
If you prefer not hacking to much source, it might be worth wile to wait for the
Feet are generally ugly, but GNOME's foot is pretty. And you can always change the icon. Just right-click on the foot and goto Properties and the Icon tab.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Note: this is not a troll.
:). I want to be able to run Gnome and KDE on my 266MHz Cyrix as well, not just my 800MHz Duron. Until that time there's Blackbox I guess, which screams on anything.
My one big complaint about Gtk+/Gnome applications is with the file select dialog. When I click on a directory, it erases the filename that was already typed in! This is lame. If they can improve the file selection dialog, I will be happy.
That said, if my biggest complaint is something so small, I think things are going quite well. Oh, and it needs to be faster too
A solution to the problem with music today
OS-X fonts look good to some people because, in general, Quartz renders the desktop quite softly. In reality, OS-X's font subsystem is rather low tech, it lacks hinting, gamma correction, etc. You can read all about it on the XRender mailing list. Personally, I don't like OS-X's fonts, but that's just me.
Linux fonts are great! If you take the high quality TrueType fonts from your Windows partition, Freetype2 renders the text extremely sharply. The only renderer I've seen that is better than FT2 is BitStream's FontFusion (found in QNX RtP) and the only reason I like it better is because it is less heavy-handed with the anti-aliasing. Certainly, FT2 blows away Windows' font rendering. Compare Arial in FT2 to Arial in XP, and you'll notice that FT2 renders the text visibly more clearly.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I hate all these dumb posts that say: "this pointless competition between GNOME and KDE is only holding LINUX back."
Funny, because competition between GNOME and KDE is *EXACTLY* what has made both GNOME and KDE so mature and stable.
Why don't you send this kind of messages to gnome-devel-list or kde-devel-list?
I'm sure you'll hear a lot of things you don't expect (such as that the GNOME vs KDE war does not exist).
those are quite old alpha screenshots. You know it's people like you that cause developers to say, "screw this, no screenshots till it's done." The focus of GNOME 2 hasn't been all on the look and feel, a lot of the work has been about the underlying libraries. For instance those antialiased foreign fonts in the first shot. That's a big big deal, but it's not fruity colors so you overlook it.
The numbers/version game is NOT a good indicator of how good/nice/developed the two desktop systems are. I am a KDE user - I LIKE KDE and eagerly await KDE 3.0 but I certainly do not consider the still pending release of Gnome 2.0 to mean that Gnome is automatically behind KDE 2.0.
The version numbers are meaningful mainly within the development tree, not external to it. Gnome 2.x is not equivalent to KDE 2.x, it is simply a full version beyond Gnome 1.0 and thus it should include bug fixes, improvements, and new features relative to the previous version, that's all.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Backwards compatibility and the code required is one of the things that has screwed Windows up so badly. That being said, Windows had backwards compatibility in the same way GTK/GNOME will.
Not only do they have to support Win32 in Win95, but they also have to support Win16, which was different, and DOS, which was radically different. How did they do it? New libraries. 32-bit libs, 16-bit libs, and the DOS crud. 16-bit apps don't load the 32-bit libs Win95/98/etc. use.
Thus, it is similar to GNOME/GTK. You can't compile a GTK1.2 app against the GTK2.0 libs, but you can compile it against GTK1.2, and they can coexist (or at least, they did on my box when I was testing GTK1.3, the GTK2 test version).
All it means is that you will have to have GTK1.x libs installed, and GTK2.x libs installed if you want to use both. GTK3.x will require a new set of libs.
Maintaining source/binary compatibility would cause too many problems, since the GLib/GDK/GTK/Pango/blahblah scenario is being totally redone. It's easier to let old apps use old libs, and write new apps (or rewrite old apps) with new libs.
--Dan
http://erik.bagfors.nu/gnome/languages.html
http://developer.kde.org/language-bindings/
This is why it makes sense to write the Desktop Environment in C. Of course, apps are a different story.
There's a nice little script included in XFree86 4.x tools called fetchmsttfonts (type that in carefully :-) ) that will (legally, believe it or not) download and install MS's true type fonts. Try it out, you'll get good Arial, Times New Roman, etc.
BTW, it sends MS's EULA through your pager, press q to exit it to go to the next step.
We've thought about this in detail, that's why GNOME does compat exactly like Windows; instead of breaking old libs, we make new libs with a different name that install next to the old libs. See http://pobox.com/~hp/parallel.html. So no app has to port until they feel like it.