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Gnome 2.0 Beta 2 Released
plastercast writes: "Following the release of GTK2, the second beta of gnome 2.0 is available. There are also release notes here. From Gnotices: '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.'"
does anyone know if gnome2.0 beta can be installed via red-carpet?
For those of you who aren't too keen on manually downloading all the individual packages and their dependencies, you may wish to try garnome (http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/garnome/).
It behaves a bit like the BSD ports tree as it'll download and install all the necessary packages. Even better, it'll install them in an out-of-the-way place so you can keep running gnome1.2!
Cheers Koz
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.
:-)
Thanks for that info, it's not like we didn't read exactly that same blurb when beta 1 was released...
I bastun bor vi allihopa = we all live in the sauna (it's swedish)
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
If there was a way for me to grab one tarball and ./configure; make install, then I'd actually check it out this. I simply don't have the time (ok I have the time, but there's other things I should be doing) to do that to 20 different packages.
:/ Or is there a way to ./configure; make debs?
Oh and even if I did configure 20, ok now that I look at it again, 30+ packages, what's uninstallation like to clean up if I decide to go back to plain old wmaker? I've always how hated linux spreads it's files all over the place
I know, there this page which simplifies compiling a lot for stable sources, but I can't find a page like this for gnome 2 beta 2.
I just wish they'd work more on interoperability
Then I am hosting the same page here: http://65.35.12.207:8080
linux:windows :: coyote:road runner
Gnome needs full install RPMs. I'm on broadband and i refuse to download a file in 200 diffrent peices.
I want a 150meg RPM of Gnome2 and then i'll try it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
A potentially unstable beta? Never!
Seriously, it's too hot and crowded with all those packages. My plain Sawfish is working just fine, and a lot cooler.
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
At the end of the announcement, there is the phrase:
*bounce*bounce*bounce*
Apparently the GNOME developers are bouncing with joy. I hope that is what it is, at least.
Everything is mainstream now.
"I bastun bor vi allihopa = we all live in the sauna (it's swedish)"
Damn. You mean it's not "I'm cuckoo for cocoa puffs"?
All my hopes for this release are dashed.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
funny, but your line word-wrapped in my browser and both vim and Gnome appeared all the way to the left.
This is the sort of thing that will make open source software broad and popular. You get a dedicated audience who (literally) depends on the product, and the social brownie points racked up by catering to the disabled improves the image of GNOME in broader tech and policy circles.
Goat sex free since 2001
Dont forget none of your programs will work either. I dont think Gnome too will be standard until maybe 6 months to a year from now.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Uh.... no.
Gnome 1 programs will run FINE on a Gnome 2 desktop. Ever tried running a KDE app on Gnome, or vice-versa? It works fine. Gnome 1 apps on Gnome 2 desktop is just like that.
BTW, this is like your 3rd quasi-troll post on this thead. How exactly do you post with a +1 bonus?!
The Free desktop that Just Works
Or did they finally release an anti-alias process for fonts that doesn't make them look fugly? :)
-f-
Don't you think that is their internationalization was so good, it would have changed that 's' into a 'z' for those of us in the US.
Clue 1: Linux IS ready for the desktop.
Clue 2: You cannot predict the future.
Myth: Open-source is a viable business strategy.
Fact: No it isn't. [yahoo.com]
Clue 1: Open source is a development model, not a business anything.
Clue 2: Citing a company's stock performance is pretty much entirely irrelevant to open source.
Clue 3: Allow me to cite a stock: Microsoft. Huge stock value, huge bank accounts. You know whose money that used to be? Software USERS' money. Open source is first and foremost good for software USERS - including companies who are not in the business of selling software. You know it. I know it. Microsoft knows it. They're scared shitless.
Myth: Slashdot is a nice place to go for intelligent conversation about technology and political issues.
Fact: Slashdot is full of 14 year-old fanboys who toe the party line for the "approval" of people they will never meet and fascist Janitors who resort to low minded trickery and censorship to further their narrow world-view and agenda. If you want to read posts that are Insightful and Funny, read at -1.
Both the myth and fact have elements of truth. And please continue to piss off the 14-year-olds. After all, they're the decision-makers and software customers of the future, and a healthy ingrained dislike for Microsoft toadies inculcated at an early age can only be good.
Myth: Information wants to be free.
Fact: Musicians want to be paid.
Clue 1: Musicians want to be paid ...almost as much as I want non-crippled consumer electronics that don't assume I'm a thieving scumbag.
Clue 2:
Myth: Constantly putting down popular music and culture shows your uber-intelligence and good taste.
Fact: Constantly putting down popular music and culture shows you are a stuck-up fuckwit with no friends.
Clue 1: Popular music and popular culture are a sickly green phlem whose only two purposes are 1) to stick to and remove money from the purses and wallets of naive prepubescent idiots and no-nothing wage-slaves who labor only to enrich their nakedly contempuous corporate masters, and 2) make the veins on my forehead throb as I ponder the worth of continuing to live.
Clue 2: I'm a stuck-up fuckwit with no friends.
Myth: The government is taking away our rights. WAAAAH!!
Fact: While you're busy complaining and stuffing your fat face with pork rinds and cheese puffs, the government is busy keeping you, and the American way of life, safe from harm.
Another misuse of the either-or proposition. They're both true - paradoxical.
Myth: Libertarianism is a good solution to our problems.
Fact: Libertarianism would result in a worse country than the USSR, with political and economic instability, horrific human rights violations, and exploitation of workers of a scale not seen since slavery was outlawed.
Libertarianism is good because it strives to control the concentration of power in goverment. It sucks because it does nothing to control the power of wealth.
Myth: Microsoft is an evil monopoly bent on world domination.
Yes they are, just like any corporation, whose only reason for existence is to enrich its shareholders. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but let's recognize and admit the obvious.
Fact: Microsoft is a software company based in Redmond, WA,
Well, you got that right.
that produces fine software
Depending on which definition of the word "fine" you're using, I could agree or disagree with you.
and believes that programmers should get paid for their work.
Well, I'm all for getting paid. I'd just rather get paid to write software that is open, standards-compliant, and is friendly with other open standards-compliant software. Microsoft, on the other hand, does absolutely everything in its power to make choosing Microsoft software a one-way proposition. Basically it's a big Labrea Tarpit-like Roach Motel for unsuspecting software developers and users - you can check in, but you can't check out.
Have I missed any?
Well, you were all over the map with sporadic accuracy and no real focus aside from your own personal frustrations and feelings of inadequacy, so it's kind of hard to say.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I agree. Unfortunately, every time I mention this to someone, they point out that I'm running on slow hardware and should upgrade. I don't want to upgrade a computer just to speed up windowing code. My PII266mhz/96MB/Voodoo3 runs Win98 just fine, so why should it take so long for KDE/GNOME apps to load up, and why should I see so many artifacts when I simply move a window?
:) I hope the final releases of both KDE and GNOME see some much-needed speedups, because I really do enjoy using them. It's just that the slowness is very annoying.
It's been my experience that mentioning the slowness of KDE or GNOME has no effect, as it is always pointed to as the fault of something else, such as hardware, or something you did to misconfigure it, or drivers, and so forth. Nobody wants to admit anything!
Having said all that, I greatly appreciate the work put into both of these projects. In fact, I'd like to check out the source myself and see if I can help out with any optimizations.
Have you ever noticed how, on Windows, after the desktop appears it still takes a good thirty seconds to a minute until your computer actually starts responding to what you want to do? (for me the time seems to increase proportional to how many programs you have uninstalled)
The issue is not that IE takes less time to load than say, Konqueror or Netscape, it's that it loads at startup, whether you want it to or not.
Here's a question I don't know the answer to - what happens when Internet Explorer crashes? Does it get completely unloaded from memory, like any crashes program should, or does partially remain?
An unrelated point (as in that I never thought about the relation between the two until now) but I realise that at any point that Internet Explorer has ever crashed on me before, I've had to reboot Windows before my computer "feels" stable again, and I'm the kind of person who picks up on the warning signs when a computer/program are about to crash...
Anyway, that's (some of) the reasons I use KDE on linux...
YEs, many KDE and Gnome apps _are_ slow on old hardware. All software is written for a target architecture, and plainly, these desktops (and especially their apps) are aiming for beefier stuff than you have. That said, I occasionally run Gnome on my p133/32Mb laptop and it's acceptable as long as I don't try to run a modern browser and a number of other memory-intensive stuff at the same time.
What I _do_ run instead is XFce. It's quite fast even on that humble machine - and I can still use gnome apps on it as usual. Others speak warmly about Blackbox or WindowMaker. Remember, just because you're not using the desktop itself, it doesn't mean you can't use all the apps and other stuff.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
All it would take is to preload all of your apps the way windows does, but that would increase instability.
For example here is a preload application for openoffice with the preload app openoffice starts in 1 second. The same thing can easily be done for mozilla etc. Galeon starts for me in 1.5 seconds. If gnome is so slow why can I record a CD at my cd-recorders max speed listen to wolf fm, edit a report, browse the web, and do so many diffrent things at once without fear.
Get a free ipod.
I want to have a nice looking, easy to use desktop. With a nice file manager, good web browser, extensive control panel, something that rivals windows.
Considered Mac OS X?
__
Choose mnemonic identifiers. If you can't remember what mnemonic means, you've got a problem. - Larry Wall
This is exagerration for sure. Yes, GNOME and KDE can be quite bloated. But I've run both satisfactorily on hardware that XP won't even try to run on.
You probably are trying to use some really fancy themes if you're having a problem at that level. Solution is easy, get rid of the big pixmap-heavy themes and put something simple up. If you're using GNOME use a lightweight WM - one of the best things about GNOME is it is WM agnostic.
If I can run GNOME/WindowMaker and GNOME/IceWM on a k6-233 with 32 MB RAM at a reasonable speed I know you can run it on anything that XP would run on, easily. And yes, Windows*95* definitely feels a little faster on the same hardware. It runs all the graphics routines at privilege, of course it's going to be faster. It's also unstable as all hell - that's the price you pay.
However if you want to compare XP, well, good luck getting XP to even boot up on that box.
IE is loading itself during the boot sequence. You can have Konq or Netscape do the same thing if you fiddle with your x init routines.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
If you're not willing to go to any effort, why should the Gnome project worry about you?
Perhaps if you dowloaded all the rpms yourself and formed them into 1, then setup a ftp server for other like-minded people, you'd be more help.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Should we create a new obfuscated English contest?
I did an informal test a while back. At work I have a Win2K machine (PIV 1.4Ghz) which I converted to a dual boot FreeBSD machine. Having to reboot into Windows on occasion caused me no end of aggravation, one of which was the sucky speed. So I started timing stuff.
From power on to IExplorer showing my homepage, Win2K takes 90 seconds. From power on to Konqueror showing my homepage, FreeBSD/KDE takes 65 seconds.
I don't want the simplest windows manager available so I can get similar performace to XP running on the same hardware.
I've never used XP, but the window manager for 95/98/2K sucks! It is the simplest window manager available! Maybe I've just gotten used to X window manager, but I find the Windows GUI to be horribly awkward. If you have a window obscuring another one, you have to minimize it because there's no way to send it to the back (that I've found). There's no snap to edges or other windows. No rollups. No vertical or horizontal maximizes. And the automatic placement of windows is downright primitive. Frankly, it feels like it designed for users that only have one window open at a time.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
"Q. How do I use anti-aliased fonts?
A. Set the GDK_USE_XFT environment variable. eg.: export GDK_USE_XFT=1"
and in windows I just click this button here...
Slipping Away...
Wow, that is one of the most insightfful responses I've ever seen regarding open source and corporatism. You consistently dodged his straw men and demonstrated the fundamental difference in mindset between people who just want your money and people who want to make products that help.
Thanks!
Gee, I know, almost as head-shakingly perturbing as a Microsoft toadie.
Here you are talking about brainwashing innocent children into thinking bad things about a software company
Did you learn to write watching Barney or something?
And yes, I think it's a good idea for young people to question the role Microsoft has assumed in their lives. Christ, the kids coming on-line today can't even conceive of a world without Microsoft. They don't stop to consider the implications of using closed software, or how their operating systems and software products treat them like milkable cow-teats. That sounds EXTREMELY unhealthy to me, and EXTREMELY profitable and positive for Microsoft.
but when Microsoft tries to give software to schools you rant and scream like it's the end of the world.
Ok, you're clearly trolling for fun and profit now, but I'll bite. Just re-read the previous paragraph and append the usual canned (but valid) paragraph regarding "monopoly".
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Here's a question I don't know the answer to - what happens when Internet Explorer crashes? Does it get completely unloaded from memory, like any crashes program should, or does partially remain?
Explorer.exe and IExplore.exe are just regular processes. Why would they "partially remain" after they crash? Here's a Windows experiment. CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to open your Windows Task Manager and kill Explorer.exe. Your computer does not crash, but your shell just disappeared. From the Windows Task Manager, File \ New Task Run explorer.exe and your shell just came back.
cpeterso
This is what happens when someone uses a gui while logged in as root to their brains... yikes.
Windows XP SP2 told me to install third-party software that prevents viruses and protects stability... I chose Ubuntu
Yes, but newbies can't tell truth from trollery, so sometimes you do a good deed by wasting a few precious minutes of your time responding to it.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
kcalc has the biggest footprint I've ever seen for a calculator
I have a suspicion this is to do with the C++ linker problem. In a nutshell, GCC"s handling of relocating libraries when they address collide sucks. It's slow. Really slow. The KDE team have been attempting to get over this by creating one process that loads most of the libraries - kdeinit, then forking the process to be the individual applications. The long and the short of this is the libraries remain loaded at the same address, don't have to reload and relocate, and all the processes can share the same code pages since they're copy on write.
Don't worry, they know it's a hack too.
There's a lot of work going into making it such that the GCC linker can build libraries to different default virtual memory addresses, hence stopping the loader from having to relocate libraries. When this happens the individual distros can be built with non colliding libraries, the kdeinit hack can go away and all will be at peace in KDE land. Personally, I'd delay 3.0 until the situation is sorted, but it's not my project.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
This is kind of hacky, but do a
ps afx
and look for your X window process. Then do a
renice -20 PIDOFYOURXPROCESS
Doing the same on the panel and window manager also helps. I'm not sure why the GUI-based dists don't do this by default.
You will be able to see a difference immediately.
Engineering and the Ultimate
KDE not only compiles, it runs! Too bad that it depends on a mass of sound software, even if you don't own a sound card.
what is with these people and dependencies?
Ok, it doesn't work on my system, but what he's trying to do is to find out whichever Mozilla you are using, and see how long it takes to read it, piping the output to /dev/null so that you don't see it.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work - the mozilla found on my system is a tiny script which calls the _real_ mozilla. This script is only about 5K in size and therefore minimal
i, for one, am excited about the evolution of GNOME, not so much as a desktop platform but as a pleasantly competitive basis for designing GUI apps on *nix. i think the desktop thing should be a matter of preference, and while some interoperability between GNOME and KDE would be swell, they're two very different project right now. as far as people wanting a quick-fix easy desktop on linux, well.. *nix has never been friendly, but i think the people who can get by with a few terminal windows, a couple GTK/QT apps, their gkrellm, and their window manager of choice are right at home. why be all-or-nothing about this stuff? choice is a wonderful thing.
I have to agree with a couple of posts here. One, yes I personally can't stand the slower speed of GNOME, but as of right now, that's the only thing keeping me on KDE. KDE is faster, but GNOME has the programming tools to make more exciting programs on it. Speed up GNOME, and KDE has a worthy challenger.
Either way, keep the competition going, choice is a great thing, hell, lets get a third project started here!
And to imagine M$ actually releases propaganda that says having a choice of desktops is a bad thing... heh.
-Archan
Blah to the skins and Blah to the punks and Blah to the world and everybody sucks.
That is factually incorrect.
Why don't you just raise your threshold
For what?
and stop doubling all of the noise around here, or better yet, go back to AOL.
Some people define noise as "that which I do not want to hear".
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
GARNOME has not been updated for the beta 2 release, but you can download the latest GARNOME (0.7.5) for the 20020225 snapshot and manually change the version info for the latest packages and their checksums, and then it will work just as normal :)
HTH,
Michel Salim
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Good theory. But false. I DO use ECC and still have that problem in windows, not in Linux, on the same box.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
My PII266mhz/96MB/Voodoo3 runs Win98 just fine
Win98 was released in 1998, and so was designed for the hardware that was around then. This is 2002, 4 years later, so you should expect an OS/desktop shell (like Gnome and KDE) to be designed for the hardware that is commonplace now.
Taking into account Moore's Law, PCs are roughly 5 times the speed they were in '98, so to run an OS released this year "just fine", you'd want a machine around 1.33GHz (5 times the speed of your laptop). That's probably about the average that consumers are being told is the right speed for surfing the web at the moment...
Yes, it does suck that old hardware sometimes struggles with the latest software, but that's just the way it is. Owning a computer is like owning a car - you never stop spending money on it.
That said, I do feel your pain - my work machine is desperately slow, and it can be extremely frustrating.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Agreed. That discription dose not sound like something you attach to a BETA.
A BETA is software that the developers think might actualy be ready for the general public so they put it out on the street to let the general public prove them wrong.
This quote is something you attach to ALPHA software.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Well, the fact that the typical computer is faster nowadays doesn't mean that programmers should make inefficient code and algorithms.
It would be a good project to do real profiling on gtk/gnome apps to find out where the time is really being wasted.
--Jeff
ipv6 is my vpn
That's all true, but I had always appreciated the "selling point" that Linux and its respective apps didn't necessarily require the latest hardware specs to run--they were supposed to be efficient and speedy enough to get the job done on lower-end hardware.
:)
By the way, I'm running Windows XP as I type this--with full effects, visual styles, etc.--and it is smoother and faster than KDE. Windows XP actually runs faster than Windows 98 did on this same hardware configuration, so I don't agree with the argument that KDE/GNOME should generally be run on the hardware of the current time, because if that's true, does that mean Windows XP is more optimized since it runs better on older hardware?
It's not as though I'm doing anything particularly processor-intensive. If it takes 10 seconds for KDE to load up a listing of my home directory--even on my PII266--there's a problem, IMO.
From my personal experience, GNOME or KDE seems to lag compared to windows XX. The apps themselves are often faster and more responsive, but the mous pointer, dragging of windows, etc. always lag. By lag I mean there is a delay much more perceptible on XFree86 than Windows.
I am very sensitive to delays and skips in visuals, this kind of stuff annoys me, as a screen with lower refresh than 85 hz annoys me. Some people won't notice the difference.
. void
well not with this handy little gadget.
/ gnome-2.0-desktop-beta2/*bz2
wget -c --retr-symlinks ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/pre-gnome2/releases
Good point. Is it a coincidence that Linus the Great is a native speaker of Swedish (although a Finnish national)? Methinks not.
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Windows 2K Server takes about an hour to install. However, it comes with a paucity of useful software...c'mon...Wordpad? Pinball? IE? LookOut Express? Paint? Also there's the time it takes to patch. That takes MUCH longer than the install.
I installed Red Hat 7.2 today. Again, it took me an hour. But I now have tons of useful software and even some of my favorite timesink games. Yeah, I know there's patching to do here too. But most of the patches don't require rebooting.
Don't get me wrong...I like Windows 2000. It's way better than 9x and arguably better than XP. And unlike Win2K I still have a lot to learn about Linux. But as far as tweak factors, installing Linux and installing 2K are about even. And Linux just plain gives you more good stuff to play with.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Libertanariasm (as in the political party of that name in the US, not the general philosophy) is based on the idea that the ideal form of government for Gilligan's Island scales up to entire countries.
Umm...I use W2K Pro all the time with 128MB of RAM at work and it's just fine, thank you very much. No disk churn, no swap-o-rama...it's fine.
Now if you were talking XP with 128MB RAM...that's a whole different kettle of fish. XP likes 256MB at minimum to keep it happy, and only truly takes off with 512MB.
KDE 2.2 is very nimble compared to previous versions. I think the work that The Kompany has been doing on embedded KDE/Qt has perhaps encouraged tighter, leaner, faster code. There is no such impetus on Gnome's side. I like it.
And if you are tight on RAM there's always IceWM or BlackBox as an alternative. IceWM is immediately recognizable and usable for Windows refugees, and BlackBox is actually kinda fun once you get the hang of it.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I know what you're talking about. I'm the same way with lower than 85Hz. refresh, visual glitches, etc. There are several possible causes for this and likewise a number of possible solutions:
1.) Your mouse sampling rate is set too low. This would cause even a very fast system to seem sluggish at dragging windows whilst displaying their contents because the system simply doesn't even try to update any faster. You could edit your XF86Config under the section "InputDevice" and add a line something like:
Option "SampleRate" "100"
## I think the maximum is 200 and default 50.
2.) Your video card is not fully accelerated by the XFree86 driver you're using. You'll have to read the docs to find out what is and isn't. Make sure you're using the latest X release. New versions often have improved drivers. If you're using an NVidia board, you might need to get their proprietary drivers for full performance. (lame!)
3.) Bitmapped titlebars, widgets, etc. always slow things down a little. That goes for KDE's various 'gradient' themes too. Disable these on a slow machine. Win95-2k didn't use them either so no fair comparing apples and oranges.
4.) Depending on what else you're running, you might want to give X itself a higher priority. Set it's nice value to -10 or something.
5.) Windows builds the GDI right into the OS kernel, thereby sacrificing stability and wasting resources if a GUI is unneeded. This, on the other hand, improves responsiveness somewhat. XFree86 sits on top of the kernel like any other app. If X dies, your system doesn't. Modular design allows more flexibility too. And X is far more feature rich than the Windows GDI to begin with.
Everybody here had better learn to admit this is a problem.
The solution should also be looked at, and it is a killer: get rid of the "window manager". Most people seem to think this means that the window manager must be built into X, like Windows. But that only eliminates 1/2 the slow communication, and has the unfortunate effect of completely freezing window management design, which is a problem Windows is having relative to Linux right now (read the above comments!)
What I mean is "window managment" (meaning the positioning, decoration, moving, resizing, etc) of windows, should be part of the toolkit. The window border is no different than a button or anything elss. All sane people (there are some exceptions here) know that the drawing of the button should be up to the appliation or the shared libraries it decides to load, so why not the window borders?
But all the window borders will look different! Yes, they will. That is because it is impossible to have "consistency" and at the same time have "innovation". Think about it. And all those people who worry about "consistent user interface" should go and talk to some real users and they will find out that "consistency" is way overrated. Why aren't games "consistent"? Because they want to advance the state of the art. And I'm sure somebody will say "hey I was confused by the inconsistent Linux GUI", but think about it: what you really were confused by was two different interfaces, one a "stupid" design and one a (possibly) "smart" design. You were not confused by the inconsistency, you were confused because one of the interfaces was stupid. Also, look at the toolkits, with no requirements that they share code, they are pretty damn consistent, because they copy the working ideas from each other! If X had envorced "consistency" we would all be using the Athena widget set right now and trying to brag to Windows users that we can swap white and black in our preferences.
When we get rid of the window manager you will probably see some real innovation, like windows without borders (you move/raise them by grabbing any inactive area), and intellegent window stacking and ordering by programs that know exactly what window is important right now.
There will have to be a "task manager" (go ahead and take the Windows term, it won't bite). It would be like the "panel" in Gnome and programs would indicate they are running and respond to messages saying "appear" and "disappear" (or they can ignore the messages just to cause trouble, but it should be allowed).
Ok enough ranting on Slashdot.
First off, the window manager has nothing to do with where the mouse is. Secondly, on a local display, the communication involved between these various programs is so damn close to instantaneous that no human is going to be able to tell (note: this is on a fairly recent machine, I have no recent experience with a 486). The most likely culprit in any percieved slowness is going to be some sort of pixmap-using theme, so that for every refresh a whole bunch of pictures need to be drawn.
Anyhow, to address what you said, moving the window borders and such into the application is pure insanity. Do you really want to not be able to move, minimize, or kill an application which has frozen or is taking a long time to respond? Windows does this and it frustrates the hell out of anyone used to unix who has to use windows.
Moreover, who on earth wants to reimplement all of this every time you write an X program? It would be a bloody waste of time with no practical benefits and only problems such as someone forget to implement window shading in some particular application that you like. No, this is one of the times when we should all learn from the billions of dollars in R&D that microsoft apparently hasn't done and run away from this sort of thing like the plague.
I feel that I should note, btw, that what you want already exists. All you have to do as an X app is provide a window manager hint that you want to be an unmanaged window, and the window manager will have nothing to do with you and you're on your own to prove all the appropriate functionality. The only program that I know of that does this is xmms, though I'm sure that there are others.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
I'll give you a good reason: because then all the window manipulations (moving, resizing, max/minimising) is dependent on the applications' process. Better dedicate a thread to handling those events, otherwise the window won't move or anything until the application isn't busy. Oh, and if the process hangs, the window(s) will be stuck on the desktop.
If you've use MS-Windows heavily, you'll have noticed these two problems with it. I know I do. At a previous employer we had to use an application to build documents, with the data files over the network. I'm not sure where the bottle neck was, but it was damn slow - it wasn't taking up much CPU, but the application was bogged down with something (network I/O?) and it would bog down the rest of the GUI waiting for it to get around to respond to events. At least minimizing the window would get it out of the way and allow everything else to operate normally, but it still took around 20 seconds for the window/application to respond to the minimize event.
No thanks, I appreciate the use of a seperate window manager. I think you way overestimate the overhead or inefficiencies of this system and don't understand the advantages it provides.
This is not a Fugazi
Gnome 1.x depends on stable libraries. Gnome 2 is not yet released, so that is the reason why it depends on beta software - It is beta software itself.
I've compiled GNOME 1.4 and prereleases of GNOME 2 myself, so what is your problem here?
Don't quote me on this.
This may not apply to your system, since I don't know all the relevant details, like what kernel you are running, but did you by chance enable dual processor support when you compiled your kernel? If not, Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) might need to be enabled via a recompile to let you take advantage of your dual-proc system. Did you check the bogomips on each processor to see if one is working a lot harder than the other? Here's a link with more info on dual processor systems: http://www.lugu.org/HOWTO/SMP-HOWTO-3.html Marcus
Libertarianism, the general philosophy, is based on the idea that you own yourself and the fruits of your labor, and that you have the right to decide what is best for yourself. A libertarian government would be very small and do very little: it would enforce the laws against fraud and force, and it would enforce contracts, and it would handle national defense. "Victimless" crimes (such as using drugs, or paying for sex) would not be crimes. If you had cancer and wanted to take an experimental drug, there would be no FDA to forbid you to do it. It would still be illegal to hurt people or steal their stuff, or fool people into giving their money to you. Pollution would still be regulated but the mechanisms used might be different from what you see today.
Sadly, while most people would love to live in a libertarian society, almost everyone has some pet feature of government that they like, or else they don't want other people to be fully free, or both. (For example, some people who disapprove of drugs want drugs to be illegal.) Take the union of all the things people want government to do, and you have a large, complex government.
As this is off the main topic, I won't make this much longer, but will close with two final points:
0) libertarians don't, as a rule, want poor people to suffer and die; rather they think private charities would do a better job of helping the poor.
1) Not only do libertarians want to end things like welfare, but they also want tax burdens to be remarkably lower. Right now charities get lots of donations, even though the tax rate is over 50% for most people (add up state and federal income tax, sales and restaurant taxes, car and gas tax, etc. etc. and include things like Social Security "contributions" and you will go over 50% quickly). If the overall tax rate for people went down to 10% or less, charitable contributions would increase.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Does this mean that now I can finally get Chinese/Japanese input methods (*Wnn) working without having to change my entire frickin' GUI (including menus, calendar, etc) over to the target language? ...ie: the way it's supposed to work? ...eg: the way it works in that other OS?
The way it is now (Gnome 1.4, stock RH7.2 install), I had to set up a separate user account, with the LANG variable set to zh_TW, and run a separate X session (all in Chinese) just to get the ability to key-in some text. Wnn won't work without the LANG variable set, but setting it changes the global Gnome environment too. If there's a way around this, nobody I know has been able to figure it out yet...
--jrd
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
There already is one. It's called Enlightenment. That's the new one I'm waitin' for.
I was always under the impression (not certain here, I didn't study CompSci in undergrad), that Alpha state implied that functionality / API / interface, etc., were all in a state of flux, in addition to (sometimes complete) instability.
I always took Beta to mean that functions, etc., were frozen, and that the bugs and performance issues were being ironed out. Hence the need for rigorous testing to insure that all possible use cases were accounted for.
What better a way to do that in an opensource environment than to release it to the public?
This is a really odd argument. You seem to be implying that software must get more bloated and slow as new hardware gets faster.
Wouldn't it make more sense to use new hardware capabilities for actually doing work, rather than doing what the old software did, only slower?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
You might want to take a look at Berlin (http://www.berlin-consortium.org/). We don't have a windowmanager (nor toolkits for that matter;-).
:-)
(Allmost) everything is a graphic that gets generated in the server. So it does not need to talk to clients at all when redrawing, greatly reducing communications between client and server. Of course the whole thing is multithreaded.
Since most graphics are generated by the server there is consistency: You exchange the 'DesktopKit' and all windows change their look and feel. At the same time you can have inovation: Berlin is fully device independent (able to render to a framebuffer, openGL or Postscript, allways making full use of the devices), it is fully 3D capable (allowing for 3D monitors and 3D objects outside of windows, even windows are 3D objects), can handle powerful input devices (like datagloves, etc.) and much more.
The downside: It still needs a lot of work. You are welcome to help
Regards,
Tobias
Regards, Tobias
I run GNOME and KDE on a Pentium 166 with 48 MB RAM, and they almost don't use ANY CPU power at all!
They just use a lot of memory, but ALL modern software use a lot of memory so that doesn't surprise me.
And about Win95 vs GNOME: the Win95 desktop environment isn't nearly as advanced and modular as GNOME (or KDE). More features = more RAM usage (have you used Win98 on that same system yet?).
But minimal environments like IceWM are just as fast as Win95.
No it's not. Ever tried standalone IceWM/WindowMaker/Xfce/Fvwm yet? They run fast as hell.
GTK+ has been pretty good with speed (as far as Linux goes). Does the 2.0 release make it worse or better? I just upgraded to a Athlon 1700+ and KDE-2 finally runs as fast as Win2K did on my PII-300. Some things, like resizing the web browser, are even a bit faster. Not as much as I was expecting for 5X the clock speed, but at least the Konqueror prefs panel opens about as fast as Word used to...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Got no problem running both WIn2K Pro and Mandrake 8 on my 400MHz box with 128MB...
Only reason I would like a faster box would be to get compile times down...
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
This may be a way to evolve X into what I propose. It needs more appliations to do this so that standards are agreed on, and there needs to be an interface so a "task" can announce itself without having to create a (mapped) window.
The current X design is to have all the widgets on the client side except for this one special widget, the "window". That seems wrong to me, everything should be together.
Personally though I think everything should be on the client side. The reason is that any interface to widgets will freeze us into present-day design. You can think the Berlin interface is really cool and customizable, but it probably locks in ideas like "scrollbar" and "text editing field" and "menu" that may be considered archaic in 10 years. I think that if X had done this approach we would all be using Athena widgets in lovely black&white and trying to defend why you need to use the middle mouse button to move the scrollbar, and Linux on the desktop would be a total joke. I don't want to see this happen, which is why I don't think Berlin is the right solution.
> Personally though I think everything should be
> on the client side. The reason is that any
> interface to widgets will freeze us into
> present-day design. You can think the Berlin
> interface is really cool and customizable, but
> it probably locks in ideas like "scrollbar"
> and "text editing field" and "menu" that may be
> considered archaic in 10 years.
A very good point!
We try to address this by minimizing the assumptions for widgets. A Berlin client can request a button and he will get something that executes a client-specified command on a certain event and that incorporates a given graphic soemhow.
The current implementation of the WidgetKit produces a tree of objects that form a motifish looking button (all straight lines, very easy to implement, but ugly) that is drawn 'around' a given graphic (usually a textlabel), reacting to mouseclicks (better: mouse releases).
Of course you could do a diffrent implementation of the WidgetKit interface, using a completly diffrent look (lets say MacOSX-ish or a texture-mapped 3D Mesh) and feel (voice controlled?).
'Minimizing' the assumptions made about Widgets, or better the interface for requesting them, is a very central task in designing Berlin. We think that this very general approach can at least handle anything from a athena-widget-button to those themable button we fancy so much nowadays.
Regards, Tobias
I installed RedHat 7.2 in under 8 minutes on my new computer. It has a Pentium 4 1.7GHz processor and 512 MB RAM. I'm downloading Gnome2 Pre-2 right now using garnome. I'll post back here once I get it all downloaded and running.