GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 3 Released

damiam writes "GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 3 has been released. Changes include new versions of Nautilus, Yelp, and the control center, as well as bugfixes all around. Download it from gnome.org or one of the mirrors." Jeff Waugh adds: "The possibility of a complete beer freeze at GUADEC has inspired another kickarse release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop. It's awesome stuff, definitely worth trying out. You should find GARNOME handy if there are no packages available for your distro."

Comments

The name of the release

[Nachtfalke]

This release is codenamed "La lluvia en Sevilla es una maravilla", which babelfish translates to "Rain in Seville is a wonder". Any spanish speakers here that can tell us, what it really means? :-)

Re:The name of the release

[changos]

The rain in Seville it's wonderfull. Although maravilla can also be interpreted as "a sight to see"

Re:The name of the release

[Charles Kerr]

The mention of Seville in the release title is a reference to the upcoming GUADEC (Gnome Users and Developers European Conference) in Seville, Spain on April 4-6.

Re:The name of the release

[ElMiguel]

It means "the rain in Seville is wonderful". It has been taken from the Spanish translation of the film "My Fair Lady". I think the original English sentence was "in Spain the rain falls always in the plain", or something like that, but the translators adapted it so the translation would also repeat a difficult phoneme ("ai" in the original, "ll" in the translation).

Re:The name of the release

[luisdom]

(I'm from Spain) The complete sentences says: "La lluvia en sevilla es una pura maravilla", and yes, it's from my fair lady, (original: "The rain in spain stays mainly in the plains") as said above. 'll' is not pronounced as 'y', not exactly... is more "liquid"; so the phrase gets a curious rythm and sound. Why did they translate it so and what does it really mean... it is a mistery for me. I suppose you have to see my fair lady to know it.

GARNOME . . .

[uberjon]

GARNOME seems like a pretty sweet deal, should give people running less mainstream versions of linux or other *n*x's a chance to run Gnome. Has anyone tried this, i'm interested in the results, very interested.

Re:GARNOME . . .

[nickm]

I wrote the gnu make libraries that it uses, and the system is getting more and more robust as time goes on.

Of course, GAR is in itself a sort of packaging system, so the GARNOME tree is only as good as the dependencies it provides. You'll still have to install all of the other software.

GAR was designed originally with the idea that slackware users could just "make install" to upgrade to a newer tree of packages, but that was before I discovered that backing up your data and installing Debian was much quicker.

That said, GAR's main purpose is to build the complete filesystem tree for the LNX-BBC CD-ROM image. Ultimately we hope to have a complete GNU system packaged within it.

Re:GARNOME . . .

[reaper20]

I just finished getting the GARNOME package and installing it this morning.

I did this on Debian unstable, so ymmv depending on your distro. I apt-getted the necessary packages as listed on the garnome page. (Forgot to get flex, but someone pointed that out to me on the irc channel).

There was a small bug in .8.5, but .8.6 is on the ftp site now. I wasn't timing it, but my guess is that it took about 2.5 hours on my 800 Tbird w/384MB RAM.

After I got the tarball, I just did a "make install" and it installed the gnome2 distro right in my home directory. I haven't used anything with GAR before, but this package is definately a welcome addition to my box.

Gnome2 impressions - Nautilus is f*cking FAST. Real fast. As in, I will finally use it. Kudos to the hackers that improved this thing.

The fonts - very nice, look good. It even used my ms ttf fonts that I had previously installed. I don't know if that was intentional or something that "just happened".

The bad - not too many apps ported yet, but I'm sure that will change.

I usually wait for packages for major things like desktops and the such, but garnome really really makes it easy. The guys in #garnome on irc.gnome.org are really helpful too.

Re:If there are no packages for your distro...

[groman]

Well, not entirely true. Ever try compiling Gnome for Sparc64? [grin] I wish somebody would make a package... an "all-in-one" one... I would, but I really would miss the 3 weeks of my life, plus how many people on sparc64 besides me want Gnome anyways?

Screenshots!

[awptic]

Wow, I'm impressed nobody has posted links to screenshots yet!
Here you go: http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/images/

question

[vectus]

I'm pretty new to Linux (I've ran it since January as a primary OS.. before I had it installed but only dicked around with it once and awhile) and I've been trying to figure this out for awhile.

What are the main differences between Gnome and KDE?

I use KDE because it seems a lot more natural for me, with a lot more tools to change stuff around with. I go over to Gnome sometimes, and I wonder what difference there is between KDE and Gnome. They look the same, they have a similar 'feel'.. I personally don't see the difference.

(note; this is not a troll, this is something I am legitimately wondering about)

Re:question

[ArsonSmith]

The main diffrence isn't even user level it is

KDE is based in C++
Gnome is based in C

both have language bindings for other languages but they still are partial to the language they are based in.

other wise there really isn't much diffrence. Not even a vi vs. emacs diffrent. More like a vim vs elvis type thing.

They feed off each other to improve them selves, and do quite a good job of it.

just my 2cents

Re:question

[cuyler]

...oh, and don't forget Enlightenment.
but some of us just son't have the horsepower to run it ;)

I'm impressed that people are still saying that. I remember having a usable Enlightenment enviroment working on a P150. Not all the features were turned though (okay, most of them weren't). I moved from that up to a K6-2 350 and Enlightenment ran just fine on it (not as fast as KDE though but much prettier).

Enlightenment is one of my favourite window managers it's really unfortunate that it hasn't made any progress for a long time (can't wait for 17.0 though).

Obligatory Apple comment: I really must admit my all time favourite UI is Aqua.

Re:question

[infiniti99]

They look the same, feel the same, and their goal is the same. GNOME and KDE are both trying to be good desktop environments.

A desktop environment (or "DE") is more than just a window manager, it is the integration of applications. Before DE's, most X applications had their own individual look and feel, did not interact very much with other applications, and there was very little code sharing. KDE sought to solve this, by building a group of libraries (now known as kdelibs) for all desktop apps to utilize. Before KDE, there was CDE, but it was not nearly as ambitious. KDE was to be the ultimate unix desktop. GNOME came around about a year later, as a result of the GNU folks unhappy with the Qt license (KDE uses the C++ Qt library as a foundation). Now Qt is GPL, but back then it was not. This leaves us today with two desktop environment efforts.

From a user (or UI) standpoint, there is very little difference between the two. You'll find that most of the differences are internal. GNOME uses CORBA and Bonobo to integrate applications, while KDE uses DCOP and KParts.

In my opinion (note: I am a KDE user), KDE is more stable and complete because it is based around a featureful and commercialized foundation toolkit: Qt. This means that the KDE team can focus soley on the DE, while a dedicated company, Trolltech, works on their foundation. GNOME, on the other hand, uses (and maintains) gtk as a foundation toolkit, an offshoot of the GIMP. This is a tremendous effort on the part of the GNOME folks, because they have to develop both the foundation toolkit _and_ DE. gtk1 is not on par with Qt, and I don't think gtk2 will be either (Qt just simply has way too many years over gtk), but perhaps someday...

Anyhow, I say just choose the one you feel most comfortable with. They both have a large selection of applications, and excited userbases. I don't think one will ever win over the other, but maybe they will slowly merge together in some respects. I use KDE because I like the look/feel/behavior, as well as the programming style and organization. Also, DCOP from the commandline is just too cool.

Re:Screenshots!

[mbyte]

Anyone know if there are any themes allready ported to gtk2? the default theme does not look very .... impressive. Now if someone would have ported the xeno* theme engine to gtk2 ... hmmm ;)

Btw, what you can't see on the screenshots that some screen updates have been undergone a major overhaul in gtk2. For example take gtop, the process monitor. With gtk1.x it would flicker so much you can't use it. (Basicly the whole screen is redrawn each refresh, and u can watch the redraw :)

With gtk2 this is MUCH better, i guess due to double buffering. you only see the numbers change :) very cool !

Re:Fonts...

[Junta]

Yeah, the fonts pretty much suck, I use fonts from Windows, but better hinting in the fonts wont help much for most people's default freetype installations, as the proper bytecode interpreter by default is disabled, and the crappy auto-hinter is enabled by default. But don't blame the freetype people for this, blame Apple's patent. I would think by merely shipping freetype with the bytecode interpreter, enabled or not, is a big risk. Anyway, enabling proper hinting takes a recompile, the include file include/freetype/config/ftoption.h has the option specified on line 435 or thereabouts..

Re:Fonts...

[mmusn]

I'm looking at these screenshots on my Titanium PowerBook G4, and I just glance back and forth between the screenshots and Aqua, and I laugh.

Funny, I'm looking at it from my Titanium PowerBook G4 as well, and I see nothing wrong with most of the fonts in the screenshots. Some people picked what I would consider ugly fonts in some screenshots, but that's their right. OSX, in comparison, for better or worse, gives people very little choice.

I see plenty wrong with your attitude, however. Apple has only been able to spend that much time and money on graphic design because they got much of the nitty-gritty work done for them by open source folks. If it weren't for open source, OSX wouldn't be here and Apple would likely be out of business soon.

And maybe Apple should spend some time on their own font rendering as well, because, frankly, Apple's anti-aliasing on PowerBooks sucks.

I just have trouble believing that in the year 2002 you guys still don't have nice hinted fonts shipping and in-use by default with X.

In part, that's Apple's fault, actually. Their software patents on the particular hinting methods used in TrueType have held back the development of open source renderers for TrueType.

And X11 actually has had good hinting technology for years, but because Apple and Microsoft managed to push their own, new, proprietary font standards, the X11 folks had to start from scratch.

So, be nice. Apple has plenty of bad history to make up for with the open source community, and they need all the help they can get.

Re:Fonts...

[deadmeat]

Take a look at this screenshot and compare it to your Aqua desktop again :)

Re:Screenshots!

[Syberghost]

Amazingly it looks just like gnome 1.4.

And we all know a windowing environment isn't "good" unless the look and feel changes with every release, right?

Re:Precompiled binaries/RPMs for Mandrake?

[jdub!]

Build space is always huge, and you have to remember that the binaries are unstripped and built with full debugging symbols so that the bugs reported are actually useful for developers. It's quite a bit smaller when you build without debugging and strip the binaries (but please, don't do this until it's released).

Additionally, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop *replaces* the GNOME 1.4 desktop components, so most RPMs will not "coexist nicely".

Re:Fonts...

[mmusn]

If it weren't for Apple and MS pushing TrueType and releasing fonts for free, we would still be stuck with eight-bit encoded fonts that are not hinted at all

That's an absolutely ridiculous statement. There were hinted outline fonts available before TrueType even came along; we didn't need Apple or Microsoft to create the TrueType format. And TrueType fonts are a huge pain to create in the first place.

Some standard would have come along no matter what. This particular standard happens to come with patent strings attached, and that's not particularly nice.

Re:Screenshots!

[Skeezix]

Some recent shots of beta3 I made:

http://www.gnome.org/~jamin/screenshots/beta3/