Slashdot Mirror
Sun Drops Sawfish for Metacity
Cardhore writes: "According to this article, Sun's and Wipro's developers are now working on Metacity, instead of Sawfish. Metacity and Sawfish are two window managers for the GNOME desktop, and Sun has decided to use Metacity over Sawfish for GNOME 2. This decision has been based on issues such as accessibility, maintainability of the code [1], documentation, multi-head support and a general eagerness from the community to commit to Metacity in the future." Here's a brief description of Garret LeSage's experience with Metacity, which is described here as a "boring window manager for the adult in you." Anyone with Metacity screenshots, please post below :)
Trolls are the best. When Logged in.
The
sand niggers suck.
Sun will be dead before BSD. McNealy can blow my cat. The only good thing about them is they're anti-microsoft zealots.
Could someone please detail the current status of the Enlightenment window manager?
A couple years ago, it was infinitely superior to the alternatives, but the intervening time has changed that...
From what I understand, progress on e17 had stopped altogether a few months ago?
Swing is an extremely high-quality API.. Are they that desperate to have a UI that runs on low-end computers?
Metacity and Sawfish are two window managers for the GNOME desktop
/., where potentially-unfamiliar terms are defined. Time after time I've encountered some unexplained reference in an article and wondered, "Am I the only person who doesn't know what this is?"
Thanks for explaining, and I hope this is the start of a new policy on
apt-get install metacity
(It doesn't seem to have a web page yet.)
I do like the way metacity places dialog boxes though. They are placed horizontally centered and just below the top of their parent window, somewhat like a MacOS X dialog.
Metacity is written from the ground up in GTK+ 2 and is FAST. Sawfish was both bloated and unmaintainable and dealing with GTK+ 1 and 2 makes it rough around the edges.
A shot of the Gnome 2.0 Desktop
w w.gnome.org/~gman/GNOME2-apps.png
http://www.gnome.org/~gman/GNOME2.png
http://w
I just grokked this off of the gnome mailing list here.
> Btw: Why there has not been any updates for sawfish lately?
Rumor has it that John was employed by Apple and that as part of the employment contract he's no longer allowed to develop sawfish.
So there you have it! Before you start flaming back and forth about what's better, think about the logistics behind using a WM that's no longer being maintained.
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
It will be interesting to see which wins out, Metacity or Sawfish. Because this brings up a major issue. With all the corporate support in Linux these days, who carries a bigger voice in development, corporate sponsers with teams of programers or OS hackers with "carismatic" leaders?
I say given Sun's mixed history in OS they probably won't be able to sway GNOME development and will eventually switch back to the mainstream.
(then again, some say Miguel is easily swayed)
I would rather be ashes than dust!
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwillcox/desktop.png
thats a good decission. no seriously sawfish is pure broken crap in gnome2 its saver and more serious to use metacity.
You are reading what the submitter wrote, not what one of the Slashdot editors put in. If you want some definitions, you might try something like this: Sawfish@Everything2.com.
I started using metacity two weeks ago or so, and I'm fairly pleased. I really liked sawfish, but felt it was time to try something new.
Pro: easy to set up (not a whole lot of options to choose from, really), fast (much speedier than sawfish), and largely with sensible defaults for everything.
Con: I miss a few settings, like the ability to remember window size and position. Also, lazy focus only changes focus and does not raise the newly focused window.
On the whole, a good, solid windowmanager that really feels lean and efficient.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
There's a couple screenshots here: http://www.lucidus.uklinux.net/metacity/
Found at http://www.sunshineinabag.co.uk/
--sean
Sun will be using multiple AMD's 64bit K8 (Opterons) in a new range of Cobalt servers instead of their sparcs.
Also they have decided to preinstall these computers with Linux reather than Solaris.
Is Sun going to become a reseller and drop its last products?
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Don't forget to upgrade inittool.
I want to be able to do almost nothing, but FAST!
You are not the customer.
According to the garnome site, it's pronounced matacity like "opacity". That's cool.
"...They killed Garret's homepage!" "YOU BASTARDS!"
Google had the following cached:
I have left Sawfish in the dust. Having recently switched to Metacity, I have found that I am actually loving it.
It's great! Metacity has the least amount of crack of any usable window manager I've seen. It works; it's fast; and it uses GTK+. However, not everything is roses right now -- for instance, there is no graphical configuration unless you count using gconf-editor. The window manager is new and currently in development, so what do you expect? *smile* Still, I find that either passing a command line to change a variable or to use gconf-editor is easier than editing a text file in some esoteric format or hunting down one option with a funny name amongst 5,327 others also strangely (and inconsistantly) named.
For what it's worth, other people (hi Trae!) are switching away from Sawfish too.
Personally, I like the fact that it works right, "out of the box", supports some keybinding modification, has the ability to change to sloppy focus mode, and has all the advantages of using GTK+2 (internationalized and anti-aliased fonts, double-buffering, et cetera).
Anyway, it's a promising window manager and I think I like where it's going (and it's usable for me right now, too!). It's not on all my computers yet, but it's also development software at the moment (lumped in there with the Gnome2 stuff, which is also really nifty).
I heard Enlightenment was being dicussed as the windows manager for Gnome. Apparently the uk tech group thought that Gnome would be better served by another windows manager.
Sun will be using multiple AMD's 64bit K8 (Opterons) in a new range of Cobalt servers instead of their sparcs.
Also they have decided to preinstall these computers with Linux reather than Solaris.
Is Sun going to become a reseller and drop its last products?
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Odd, isn't that what many people said about sawfish when it first came out and they were comparing it to Enlightenment?
Nathan's blog
Check out those icons!!
security through obscurity = modding down anti-linux posts so maybe noone will see them
Especially after Hallie Berry showed her knockers in it.
We often use this open source stuff without thanking the people that made it all happen. These people work tirelessly making advanced technology available to the community. I think they should be lauded as heros.
I have used sawfish for a good year now and i can't really complain about anything. Stable and it gets the job done. It's fairly customizable also. So my question is, why metacity? (i have read very little about metacity, so perhaps some links would be nice also. )
so it can't be because of the speed of Swing on contemporary computers.
Okay, I know the Linux/slashbot response to this is, "how dare they?" and "I want my eye candy!" Well, I was right with you for a while.
But now I'm thinking: for Linux and OSS to succeed on the desktop and in a high-impact profit-oriented enterprise environment, we need a sober, powerful, stable desktop.
I'm an admin at a Fortune 500 company in the gourmet cereals industry. We have a daily need for responsive and robust desktop software, and Metacity has repeatedly stepped up to the plate and delivered where inferior technology such as Gnome and Sawfish could not.
Metacity saved our business. Maybe it will save slashdot, too.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Metacity is just a better lightweight fit for the heavy lifting GNOME system. It is to sawfish what sawmill was to enlightenment back in the pre GNOME 1.0 days. Not as flashy but still sexy looking. The problem with Sawfish was that it was basicly a scheme interpreter. All the theme files were scheme scripts which is not bad if you know and like functional languages but is a pain in the ass when all you want to do is move the close button a centmeter to left. Metacity on the other hand is written in very clean C code and has little in the way of configurability, which is great because GNOME handles most of what needs to be configured. Those who want more customization can still use Sawfish but since GNOME is starting to cater to those who don't want to have to administer their desktop Metacity is a step in the right direction. The only thing is that most of Metacity is not complete. Hopfully this will push Metacity development even faster.
I was just beginning to like Sawfish + Gnome + Solaris + VMware.....
:)
Well 1.4 was never officially supported anyway but it looks like they have done a great job so far. In fact. Its nice to play games on solaris
pwm beats the crap out of both metacity and sawfish
A New Kind of Science Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 21 09 45AM cybrpnk2 writes The story is one of epic proportions Boy genius gets PhD from Cal Tech at age 20 is the youngest recipient ever of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant writes the Mathematica simulation software used by millions of people makes millions of dollars in the process becomes enticed by the seductive lure of the Game of Life and goes into a decade of seclusion to discover the secrets of the universe You can catch up on the resulting speculation and hype here The years of anticipation and publication delays came to an end Tuesday May 14 2002 with Stephan Wolfram s release of his opus A New Kind of Science Read on for cybrpnk2 s review of Wolfram s much heralded work A New Kind Of Science author Stephen Wolfram pages 1197 plus 62 page index publisher Wolfram Media Inc rating 10 reviewer cybrpnk2 ISBN 1 57955 008 8 summary A long awaited treatise that cellular automations not mathematics holds the key to understanding reality First things first have I read this book Hell no and if anybody else says THEY have in the next year they re lying thru their teeth This book is so dense that if Wolfram had added a single additional page the whole thing would have imploded into a black hole That s got to be the only reason he quit writing and finally went to press I ve been waiting for years for ANKOS to come out I ordered my copy Tuesday when it was released got it on Thursday and I ve been skimming it like mad since To give you some idea of how engrossing this book is I was reading it Friday morning at 4 AM in the bathroom of a Motel 6 curled up in a bedspread on the tile floor to keep from disturbing my wife and stepdaughter during a trip to my stepson s graduation I ve got four college degrees one in math and two from MIT and bottom line this sucker s gonna take a while to digest However it s theoretically straightforward enough that anybody with a high enough level of obsession and a few years to stay glued to it can follow it in its entirety In ANKOS Wolfram certainly comes across as arrogantly cocky but in the final analysis is he a crank or a revolutionary genius Who knows but it s going to be a new nerd pastime for the next decade to argue that point ANKOS is 1250 pages divided into 850 pages of breezy exposition followed by 350 pages of fine print notes The exposition is composed of 12 chapters and the notes have about a paragraph per page of topic and name dropping technobabble to let you know where to go next for more details on whichever of Wolfram s tangents strike your fancy Topping the whole thing off is a 60 page index with thousands of entries in even smaller typeface than the notes Despite its length ANKOS is not a rigorous mathematical proof of anything as much as it is a superficial survey of a vast new intellectual landscape And what a landscape Wolfram has laid before us It s all about cellular automations which have traditionally been relegated to the realm of mathematical recreations Start with a black square in the center grid square cell on the top line of a sheet of graph paper Think up a few rules about whether a square gets colored black or white on the next line down depending on the colors of its neighbors Apply these rules to the squares on the next line of the sheet of graph paper Repeat Watch what happens Sounds simple It isn t The first short chapter outlines Wolfram s central thesis That three hundred years of mathematics based on the equals sign have failed to provide true insight into various complex systems in nature and that algorithms based on the DO loop can succeed in this endeavor where mathematics has failed The reason claims Wolfram is that deceptively simple algorithms can produce heretofore undreamed of levels of complexity He claims that while frontier intellectual efforts such as chaos theory fractals AI cybernetics and so forth have hinted at this concept for years his decade of isolation studying cellular automata has taken the idea of simple algorithms or rules embodying universal complexity to the level of a new paradigm The second chapter outlines what Wolfram calls his crucial experiment the systematic analysis of the 256 simplest rule sets for the most basic cellular automatons He discovers this universe of rules is sufficient to produce his four so called classes of complex systems order self similar nested patterns structures and most importantly true randomness The first two lead to somewhat familiar checkerboard type patterns and leaf type fractals the last two unforeseen unique shapes and unpredictable sequences Wolfram stresses that the ability of simple iterative algorithms to produce complex and unique non fractal shapes as well as truly random sequences of output is in fact a revolutionary new discovery with subtle and profound implications The third chapter expands his initial 256 rule set universe of simple algorithms with many others Wolfram has researched for years in the dead of night while others slept Rule sets involving multiple colors beyond black and white rule sets that update only one grid square instead of a whole row rule sets that embody full blown Turing machines rule sets that substitute entire sets of patterned blocks into single grid cells that tag end point grid squares with new patterns that implement registers and symbols Wolfram has examined them all in excruciating detail And no matter how complex the rule set is he explores it ends up generating still more and more unexpected complex behavior with many notable features as the rule sets are implemented This ever escalating spiral of complexity leads Wolfram to believe that cellular automatons are a viable alternative to mathematics in modeling in fact embodying the inherent complexity of the natural world In chapter four he begins this process by linking cellular automatons to the natural world concept of numbers Automatons that multiply and divide that calculate prime numbers and generate universal constants like pi that calculate square roots and even more complex numerical functions like partial differential equations Wolfram details them all Who needs conscious human minds like those of Pythagoras or Newton to laboriously work out over thousands of years the details of things like trigonometry or calculus Set up dominos in just the right way flip the first one and stand back nature can do such calculations automatically efficiently and mindlessly Chapter five broadens the natural scope of cellular automations from one dimensional numbers to multi dimensional entities Simple X Y Cartesian coordinates are left behind as Wolfram defines networks and constraints as the canvas on which updated cellular automatons flourish always generating the ever higher levels of complexity More Turing machines and fractals such as snowflakes and biological cells forming organs spontaneously spring forth So far we ve seen some really neat sleight of hand that Martin Gardner or Michael Barnsley might have written But we re only on page 200 of 850 with seven chapters to go and Wolfram is just now getting warmed up Chapter six is where Wolfram begins to lay the foundation for what he believes is so special about his insights and discoveries Instead of using rigid and fixed initial conditions as the starting points for the cellular automations he has described he now explores what happens using random and unknown initial conditions in each of his previously defined four classes of systems He finds that while previously explored checkerboard Class 1 and fractal Class 2 systems yield few surprises his newly discovered unique Class 3 and random Class 4 cellular automaton systems generate still higher levels of complexity and begin to exhibit behavior that can simulate any of the four classes a telltale hint of universality Furthermore their behavior starts to be influenced by attractors that guide them to structure and self organization With the scent of universality and self organization in the air Wolfram begins in chapter seven to compare and contrast his cellular automations to various real world topics of interest Billiards taffy making Brownian motion casino games the three body problem pachinko machines randomness is obviously a factor in all of these Yet Wolfram notes while randomness is embedded in the initiation and influences the outcomes of each of these processes none of them actually generate true randomness in the course of running the process itself The cellular automations he has catalogued particularly his beloved Rule 30 do The realization that cellular automations can uniquely serve as an initiator or generator of true randomness is a crucial insight leading to the difference between continuity and discreteness and ultimately to the origins of simple behaviors How you ask Hey Wolfram takes most of the chapter to lay it out in a manner that I m still trying to follow no way can I summarize it in a sentence or two By chapter eight Wolfram believes he has laid out sufficient rationale for why you me and everybody else should think cellular automations are indeed the mirror we should be looking in to find true reflections of the world around us Forget the Navier Stokes equations if you want to understand fluid flow you have to think of it as a cellular automation process Ditto for crystal growth Ditto for fracture mechanics Ditto for Wall Street Most definitely ditto for biological systems like leaf growth seashell growth and pigmentation patterns This is very convincing stuff tables of Mathematica generated cellular automation shapes side by side with the photos of corresponding leaves or seashells or pigment patterns found in nature Yes you ve seen this before in all of the fractals textbooks The difference between fractals and cellular automations fractals are a way to mathematically catalog the points that make up the object while cellular automations are a way to actually physically create the object via a growth process It s a somewhat subtle difference and a key Wolfram point Having established some credibility for his ideas Wolfram stretches that credibility to the limit in chapter nine where he applies his cellular automation ideas to fundamental physics It was practically inevitable he would do this his first published paper as a teenager was on particle physics and that s the field he got his PhD in from Cal Tech at age 20 before going on to write the Mathematica software program and make his millions as a young businessman Despite his solid background in physics this seems at first blush to be pretty speculative stuff He shifts his focus on the cellular automations from randomness to reversibility and describes several rule sets that both lead to complexity and are reversible This behavior is an apparent violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics From Wolfram s way of thinking if the universe is indeed some kind of ongoing cellular automation then it may well be reversible and the Second Law must not be the whole story so there must be something more we have yet to learn about the nature of the universe itself He continues extensive speculations on what this may be and how space time gravity relativity and quantum mechanics must all be manifestations of this underlying Universal Cellular Automation The rule set for this ultimate automation which Wolfram believes might ultimately be expressed as only a few lines of code in Mathematica takes the place of a mathematically defined unified field theory in Wolfram s world This is mind blowing stuff but ultimately boils down to Wolfram s opinion I have great difficulty in comprehending space and time and matter and energy as mere manifestations of some cellular automation if so what is left to be the system on which the automation itself is running I m reduced to one of Clarke s Laws The universe is not only stranger than we imagine it is stranger than we CAN imagine Wolfram shifts from Kubrick style religion back to mere philosophy in chapter ten where he explores how cellular automations are perceived by the human mind Visual image perception the human perception of complexity and randomness cryptography data compression statistical analysis and the nature of mathematics as a mental artifact are all explored The chapter ends on a discussion of language and the mechanics of thinking itself Wolfram reaches no real concrete conclusions on any of these except that once again cellular automation is a revolutionary new tool to use in achieving new insights on all of these topics Chapter eleven jumps from the human mind to the machine mind by exploring not the nature of consciousness but the nature of computation instead He goes here into somewhat deeper detail on ideas he has introduced earlier about how cellular automations can perform mathematical calculations emulate other computational systems and act as universal Turing machines He focuses on the implications of randomness in Class 4 systems and the universality embodied in systems like that of his Rule 110 His arguments lead up to a closing realization what he does not call but may one day be named Wolfram s Law The final chapter chapter twelve discusses what all of Wolfram s years of isolation and work have led him to conclude He calls it the Principle of Computational Equivalence What follows is an unavoidably oversimplified distillation of Wolfram s thoughts on the PCE If indeed cellular automations are somehow at the heart of the universe around us then the human effort to reduce the universe to understandable models and formulas and simulations is ultimately doomed to failure Because of the nature of cellular automation computation there is no way to come up with a shortcut method that will deduce the final outcome of a system in advance of it actually running to completion We can currently compute a rocket trajectory or a lens shape or a skyscraper framework in advance using mathematics merely because these are ridiculously simple human efforts New technologies based not on mathematics but instead on cellular automations like wind tunnel simulators and nanobot devices will be exciting technological advances but will not lead to a fundamentally new understanding of nature Issues that humans define as undecidability and intractability will always limit the level of understanding we will ultimately achieve and will always have impacts on philosophical questions such as predestination and free will To conclude with Wolfram s own final paragraph in the book And indeed in the end the PCE encapsulates both the ultimate power and the ultimate weakness of science For it implies that all the wonders of the universe can in effect be captured by simple rules yet it shows that there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold As noted above 350 pages of notes follow this exposition and trust me there s no way they can be summarized To mention one nugget I found amusing as I envisioned Wolfram working towards endless dawns on ANKOS he thinks sleep has no purpose except to allow removal of built up brain wastes that cannot be removed while conscious So much for dreaming So what is the bottom line on ANKOS It is a towering piece of work and an enduring monument to what a focused and disciplined intellect can achieve It is very thought provoking It will definitely lead to new work and progress on cellular automation theory and some interesting technological applications we should all look forward to with anticipation But is it the next Principia the herald of a new scientific revolution Read and decide for yourself Only time and a lot of it will tell Book Reviews Slashdot s book review section is brimming with reader submitted commentary on interesting books Here s a sampling of recent reviews read below for how you can add yours to the list For programmers check out reviews of the Zope Bible Programming Jabber and other specialized books If you re just trying to manage programmers grumpy s review of Managing Einsteins might be just what you re looking for Meanwhile keep the company afloat with lessons learned from The MouseDriver Chronicles and The Bombast Transcripts Science buff Read Tal Cohen s reaction to Rare Earth and Peter Wayner on Digital Biology Don t forget the grain of salt in Voodoo Science either His Dark Materials is one of the many Science Fiction titles that Slashdot readers have praised or panned for your pleasure And somewhere between Sci Fi and reality are books like Flesh and Machines reporting from the intersection of yesterday s fiction and current technology It s easy to submit your own reviews for consideration too Just read the Slashdot book review guidelines and then use the web submission form Update 20020427 12 50 by timothy
Widening Pages for the good of all mankind.
Serving the Slashdot community since 2002.
I'm still waiting for a window manager (besides FVWM and OLVWM) to include a FVWM-style virtual desktop switcher (or "Pager"). I have my desktop set up with a 3x3 virtual desktop switcher. I can use Ctrl+an_arrow_key to switch between desktops (two-dimensionally; I can go up, down, left, or right) without using the mouse. If I put xterms in the same spot in each desktop, I can switch between them very quickly, using only the keyboard. It sure would be nice to see this elsewhere.
Chris
here
for simplistic UIs the speed isn't that bad... but add a whole bunch of objects and performance goes to hell even on wicked fast machines...
Plus swing is still ugly as can be.
The world needs one full-assed solution, not 400 half-assed solutions. That's the eternal problem with free software / open source development. Quit bickering about which one is better and which one to use; pick one, stick with it, and get it done. Christ.
A New Kind of Science Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 21 09 45AM cybrpnk2 writes The story is one of epic proportions Boy genius gets PhD from Cal Tech at age 20 is the youngest recipient ever of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant writes the Mathematica simulation software used by millions of people makes millions of dollars in the process becomes enticed by the seductive lure of the Game of Life and goes into a decade of seclusion to discover the secrets of the universe You can catch up on the resulting speculation and hype here The years of anticipation and publication delays came to an end Tuesday May 14 2002 with Stephan Wolfram s release of his opus A New Kind of Science Read on for cybrpnk2 s review of Wolfram s much heralded work A New Kind Of Science author Stephen Wolfram pages 1197 plus 62 page index publisher Wolfram Media Inc rating 10 reviewer cybrpnk2 ISBN 1 57955 008 8 summary A long awaited treatise that cellular automations not mathematics holds the key to understanding reality First things first have I read this book Hell no and if anybody else says THEY have in the next year they re lying thru their teeth This book is so dense that if Wolfram had added a single additional page the whole thing would have imploded into a black hole That s got to be the only reason he quit writing and finally went to press I ve been waiting for years for ANKOS to come out I ordered my copy Tuesday when it was released got it on Thursday and I ve been skimming it like mad since To give you some idea of how engrossing this book is I was reading it Friday morning at 4 AM in the bathroom of a Motel 6 curled up in a bedspread on the tile floor to keep from disturbing my wife and stepdaughter during a trip to my stepson s graduation I ve got four college degrees one in math and two from MIT and bottom line this sucker s gonna take a while to digest However it s theoretically straightforward enough that anybody with a high enough level of obsession and a few years to stay glued to it can follow it in its entirety In ANKOS Wolfram certainly comes across as arrogantly cocky but in the final analysis is he a crank or a revolutionary genius Who knows but it s going to be a new nerd pastime for the next decade to argue that point ANKOS is 1250 pages divided into 850 pages of breezy exposition followed by 350 pages of fine print notes The exposition is composed of 12 chapters and the notes have about a paragraph per page of topic and name dropping technobabble to let you know where to go next for more details on whichever of Wolfram s tangents strike your fancy Topping the whole thing off is a 60 page index with thousands of entries in even smaller typeface than the notes Despite its length ANKOS is not a rigorous mathematical proof of anything as much as it is a superficial survey of a vast new intellectual landscape And what a landscape Wolfram has laid before us It s all about cellular automations which have traditionally been relegated to the realm of mathematical recreations Start with a black square in the center grid square cell on the top line of a sheet of graph paper Think up a few rules about whether a square gets colored black or white on the next line down depending on the colors of its neighbors Apply these rules to the squares on the next line of the sheet of graph paper Repeat Watch what happens Sounds simple It isn t The first short chapter outlines Wolfram s central thesis That three hundred years of mathematics based on the equals sign have failed to provide true insight into various complex systems in nature and that algorithms based on the DO loop can succeed in this endeavor where mathematics has failed The reason claims Wolfram is that deceptively simple algorithms can produce heretofore undreamed of levels of complexity He claims that while frontier intellectual efforts such as chaos theory fractals AI cybernetics and so forth have hinted at this concept for years his decade of isolation studying cellular automata has taken the idea of simple algorithms or rules embodying universal complexity to the level of a new paradigm The second chapter outlines what Wolfram calls his crucial experiment the systematic analysis of the 256 simplest rule sets for the most basic cellular automatons He discovers this universe of rules is sufficient to produce his four so called classes of complex systems order self similar nested patterns structures and most importantly true randomness The first two lead to somewhat familiar checkerboard type patterns and leaf type fractals the last two unforeseen unique shapes and unpredictable sequences Wolfram stresses that the ability of simple iterative algorithms to produce complex and unique non fractal shapes as well as truly random sequences of output is in fact a revolutionary new discovery with subtle and profound implications The third chapter expands his initial 256 rule set universe of simple algorithms with many others Wolfram has researched for years in the dead of night while others slept Rule sets involving multiple colors beyond black and white rule sets that update only one grid square instead of a whole row rule sets that embody full blown Turing machines rule sets that substitute entire sets of patterned blocks into single grid cells that tag end point grid squares with new patterns that implement registers and symbols Wolfram has examined them all in excruciating detail And no matter how complex the rule set is he explores it ends up generating still more and more unexpected complex behavior with many notable features as the rule sets are implemented This ever escalating spiral of complexity leads Wolfram to believe that cellular automatons are a viable alternative to mathematics in modeling in fact embodying the inherent complexity of the natural world In chapter four he begins this process by linking cellular automatons to the natural world concept of numbers Automatons that multiply and divide that calculate prime numbers and generate universal constants like pi that calculate square roots and even more complex numerical functions like partial differential equations Wolfram details them all Who needs conscious human minds like those of Pythagoras or Newton to laboriously work out over thousands of years the details of things like trigonometry or calculus Set up dominos in just the right way flip the first one and stand back nature can do such calculations automatically efficiently and mindlessly Chapter five broadens the natural scope of cellular automations from one dimensional numbers to multi dimensional entities Simple X Y Cartesian coordinates are left behind as Wolfram defines networks and constraints as the canvas on which updated cellular automatons flourish always generating the ever higher levels of complexity More Turing machines and fractals such as snowflakes and biological cells forming organs spontaneously spring forth So far we ve seen some really neat sleight of hand that Martin Gardner or Michael Barnsley might have written But we re only on page 200 of 850 with seven chapters to go and Wolfram is just now getting warmed up Chapter six is where Wolfram begins to lay the foundation for what he believes is so special about his insights and discoveries Instead of using rigid and fixed initial conditions as the starting points for the cellular automations he has described he now explores what happens using random and unknown initial conditions in each of his previously defined four classes of systems He finds that while previously explored checkerboard Class 1 and fractal Class 2 systems yield few surprises his newly discovered unique Class 3 and random Class 4 cellular automaton systems generate still higher levels of complexity and begin to exhibit behavior that can simulate any of the four classes a telltale hint of universality Furthermore their behavior starts to be influenced by attractors that guide them to structure and self organization With the scent of universality and self organization in the air Wolfram begins in chapter seven to compare and contrast his cellular automations to various real world topics of interest Billiards taffy making Brownian motion casino games the three body problem pachinko machines randomness is obviously a factor in all of these Yet Wolfram notes while randomness is embedded in the initiation and influences the outcomes of each of these processes none of them actually generate true randomness in the course of running the process itself The cellular automations he has catalogued particularly his beloved Rule 30 do The realization that cellular automations can uniquely serve as an initiator or generator of true randomness is a crucial insight leading to the difference between continuity and discreteness and ultimately to the origins of simple behaviors How you ask Hey Wolfram takes most of the chapter to lay it out in a manner that I m still trying to follow no way can I summarize it in a sentence or two By chapter eight Wolfram believes he has laid out sufficient rationale for why you me and everybody else should think cellular automations are indeed the mirror we should be looking in to find true reflections of the world around us Forget the Navier Stokes equations if you want to understand fluid flow you have to think of it as a cellular automation process Ditto for crystal growth Ditto for fracture mechanics Ditto for Wall Street Most definitely ditto for biological systems like leaf growth seashell growth and pigmentation patterns This is very convincing stuff tables of Mathematica generated cellular automation shapes side by side with the photos of corresponding leaves or seashells or pigment patterns found in nature Yes you ve seen this before in all of the fractals textbooks The difference between fractals and cellular automations fractals are a way to mathematically catalog the points that make up the object while cellular automations are a way to actually physically create the object via a growth process It s a somewhat subtle difference and a key Wolfram point Having established some credibility for his ideas Wolfram stretches that credibility to the limit in chapter nine where he applies his cellular automation ideas to fundamental physics It was practically inevitable he would do this his first published paper as a teenager was on particle physics and that s the field he got his PhD in from Cal Tech at age 20 before going on to write the Mathematica software program and make his millions as a young businessman Despite his solid background in physics this seems at first blush to be pretty speculative stuff He shifts his focus on the cellular automations from randomness to reversibility and describes several rule sets that both lead to complexity and are reversible This behavior is an apparent violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics From Wolfram s way of thinking if the universe is indeed some kind of ongoing cellular automation then it may well be reversible and the Second Law must not be the whole story so there must be something more we have yet to learn about the nature of the universe itself He continues extensive speculations on what this may be and how space time gravity relativity and quantum mechanics must all be manifestations of this underlying Universal Cellular Automation The rule set for this ultimate automation which Wolfram believes might ultimately be expressed as only a few lines of code in Mathematica takes the place of a mathematically defined unified field theory in Wolfram s world This is mind blowing stuff but ultimately boils down to Wolfram s opinion I have great difficulty in comprehending space and time and matter and energy as mere manifestations of some cellular automation if so what is left to be the system on which the automation itself is running I m reduced to one of Clarke s Laws The universe is not only stranger than we imagine it is stranger than we CAN imagine Wolfram shifts from Kubrick style religion back to mere philosophy in chapter ten where he explores how cellular automations are perceived by the human mind Visual image perception the human perception of complexity and randomness cryptography data compression statistical analysis and the nature of mathematics as a mental artifact are all explored The chapter ends on a discussion of language and the mechanics of thinking itself Wolfram reaches no real concrete conclusions on any of these except that once again cellular automation is a revolutionary new tool to use in achieving new insights on all of these topics Chapter eleven jumps from the human mind to the machine mind by exploring not the nature of consciousness but the nature of computation instead He goes here into somewhat deeper detail on ideas he has introduced earlier about how cellular automations can perform mathematical calculations emulate other computational systems and act as universal Turing machines He focuses on the implications of randomness in Class 4 systems and the universality embodied in systems like that of his Rule 110 His arguments lead up to a closing realization what he does not call but may one day be named Wolfram s Law The final chapter chapter twelve discusses what all of Wolfram s years of isolation and work have led him to conclude He calls it the Principle of Computational Equivalence What follows is an unavoidably oversimplified distillation of Wolfram s thoughts on the PCE If indeed cellular automations are somehow at the heart of the universe around us then the human effort to reduce the universe to understandable models and formulas and simulations is ultimately doomed to failure Because of the nature of cellular automation computation there is no way to come up with a shortcut method that will deduce the final outcome of a system in advance of it actually running to completion We can currently compute a rocket trajectory or a lens shape or a skyscraper framework in advance using mathematics merely because these are ridiculously simple human efforts New technologies based not on mathematics but instead on cellular automations like wind tunnel simulators and nanobot devices will be exciting technological advances but will not lead to a fundamentally new understanding of nature Issues that humans define as undecidability and intractability will always limit the level of understanding we will ultimately achieve and will always have impacts on philosophical questions such as predestination and free will To conclude with Wolfram s own final paragraph in the book And indeed in the end the PCE encapsulates both the ultimate power and the ultimate weakness of science For it implies that all the wonders of the universe can in effect be captured by simple rules yet it shows that there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold As noted above 350 pages of notes follow this exposition and trust me there s no way they can be summarized To mention one nugget I found amusing as I envisioned Wolfram working towards endless dawns on ANKOS he thinks sleep has no purpose except to allow removal of built up brain wastes that cannot be removed while conscious So much for dreaming So what is the bottom line on ANKOS It is a towering piece of work and an enduring monument to what a focused and disciplined intellect can achieve It is very thought provoking It will definitely lead to new work and progress on cellular automation theory and some interesting technological applications we should all look forward to with anticipation But is it the next Principia the herald of a new scientific revolution Read and decide for yourself Only time and a lot of it will tell Book Reviews Slashdot s book review section is brimming with reader submitted commentary on interesting books Here s a sampling of recent reviews read below for how you can add yours to the list For programmers check out reviews of the Zope Bible Programming Jabber and other specialized books If you re just trying to manage programmers grumpy s review of Managing Einsteins might be just what you re looking for Meanwhile keep the company afloat with lessons learned from The MouseDriver Chronicles and The Bombast Transcripts Science buff Read Tal Cohen s reaction to Rare Earth and Peter Wayner on Digital Biology Don t forget the grain of salt in Voodoo Science either His Dark Materials is one of the many Science Fiction titles that Slashdot readers have praised or panned for your pleasure And somewhere between Sci Fi and reality are books like Flesh and Machines reporting from the intersection of yesterday s fiction and current technology It s easy to submit your own reviews for consideration too Just read the Slashdot book review guidelines and then use the web submission form Update 20020427 12 50 by timothy
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BS troll!
was the best windows manager EVER!!!
security through obscurity = modding down anti-linux posts so maybe noone will see them
On the topic, and with the complaints of no GUI tool to configure Metacity, I just though I would point everyone to a piece of software that I wrote called Metacity-Setup. Im currently working on getting it a little more friendly (its flawed to be sure) but it does basic stuff nicely.
i ty -setup/
http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/metac
What does this mean for Ximian, what with their contract with Sun?
Let's string him up for failing to mention the other very important wm that runs with Gnome.
What is your Slash Rating?
I have used both window managers frequently for about 4 or 5 months now (sawfish2 and metacity that is) and find both of them fast, stable, and great products overall from a user perspective.
.. until then sawfish rulez!
Configurability is easily in favor of sawfish right now but that is only because there is not a gui configurator for metacity currently afaik. However, i knew how to make the modifications I wanted and everything works identically to sawfish so no big worries there.
Port over Crux to metacity and you will have another convert
The BIGGEST factor keeping me from using metacity full time is that the Crux theme has not been ported over to it and I cannot figure out how to make metacity themes (or sawfish themes for that matter) and I really hate the look of the default metacity theme when combined with the Crux gtk and gtk2 themes.
Damnit, man, at least make your trolls nearly sane.
Having your business saved by a window manager... well, it's just a bit much. Yes, you had me going up to the second paragraph -- but that's where it just fell apart.
Heck, if your business depended on having something "sober, powerful and stable", that's why twm's been there for years. Characterizing Gnome as inferior rather than complementery technology was an even bigger giveaway -- and a Fortune 500 company could afford to buy the hardware to make Sawfish run at speeds where the performance difference from Metacity is trivial.
I remember downloading Metacity from Havoc Pennington's homepage awhile ago when I wanted to learn how XLib works. I emailed him with a couple idiot questions and to my suprise, almost immediately got friendly, helpful replies. I remember he mentioned that it was really just a learning project for him at the time and possibly not the best thing for someone like me to learn from.
KDE's window manager is not very flashy. A lot of people say it reminds them too much of MS Windows.
Perhaps they feel a more conservative-style window manager would help drive business use of GNOME?
What's wrong with Sawfish? It's light. It's configurable. It's themable. It gets the job done without bells and whistles. Let's face it: this is a window manager; this is not a killer app. Sawfish has good placement algorithms, good community support, good stability, so what's the @!$#ing point of starting over from scratch with a whole new development process? The people Sun's paying to do this stuff are some of the few paid people working on the GNOME project. Their labor is best used to progress the project, not to drop back to ground zero and start over.
http://starboard.flowtheory.net/
I'm actually surprised that they ever went with Sawfish, since it has all sorts of nifty extras (differently themed windows, for example). From the two screenshots I was able to find of Metacity, it looked like a bland Gnome. Given that Sun was a major purveyor of CDE and olwm, I'm not the least bit surprised that they've switched to a tamer wm. I still think they're missing out, but I guess the philosophy behind the decision is "these machines are made for work, not glitz." Not for me...I use Gnome + E .16 at work....single monitor (makes me wish for my dual-head box at home...) with the same desktop look and feel as my home desktop (see more recent shots).
What is your Slash Rating?
Is Mandrake and Raster.
And I love it. I have a 5x5 pager at 1600x1200, and it is so much more convinient to CTRL-arrowkey to move around, than the other window managers that have more of a virtual desktop concept.
It's probably the main reason I have stayed with afterstep. [That, and I like to remove all the toggle buttons from the title bar and replace then with CTRL-Fkey sequences. Example: CTRL-F3 institutes window-move, CTRL-F2 is window-lower]
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
the image linked
Is Sun going to become a reseller and drop its last products?
Um... at last count, sun is selling at least 17 (!) models of Sparc-based servers, and four different Sparc-based workstations. They have six products in the Cobalt line. I don't think you're quite right when you refer to Sun's Sparc-based systems as "its last products."
In other words, no.
..horrible idea by Sun. WTF? Are these guys addicted to losing monay or something???
People are going to be fired again. Doh.
I know that Slashbots hated Java, but not enough to moderate a comment about Java down, just because it's about Java...
Could programming language ignorance or bigotry be at least partially at the root of this? Probably not, but one wonders anyway.
It would really be nice if Red Hat would start
shipping some new themes. I'm getting really
bored with the defaults and Themes.org sucks
these days.
(Don't mod this up. Its just here for someone who might want more details.)
I have run my woody system multiheaded for quite some time. I like to keep a bunch of monitoring type programs running on one display and work on the other.
I do not use xinerama because I do not want the gnome panel to act like it is on one big monitor, thats just a PITA. (plus it had problems with opengl, some of my monitoring uses it heavily.)
It worked ok, except that the gnome session manager would 'gain' applications. All the stuff from the 2nd montor would get started on the first monitor at login time. This machine also has a firewire induced crashing problem, and after a crash even more applications would get started at the next login. Very ugly.
Also, running a panel on each monitor works ok, but the panels get confused about configuration. Maybe there is a way to specify an alternate config file for one of them.
All in all, it worked, but the gnome session and panel developers really need to have two monitors and feel the pain. So, if you can show to me that you are 'the' gnome session or panel developer and you need a PCI video card in order to have two monitors, get in touch with me. I'll give you my old one.
At my former place of employment, some of my coworkers spent more time trying to get their shiny new window managers and SPARC versions of Linux going than they did doing anything else.
That's one reason I stuck with boring old SPARC Solaris and CDE (not that CDE isn't SCREAMING to be replaced).
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
I like the KDE/Win32 style alt-tab window list (small window pops up with all available windows listed; alt-tab selects between them).
Very user friendly and very quick to pop between a large collection of windows. No need to mess up your stacking order plowing through umpteen windows to find the one you're looking for.
Why wasn't such a feature implemented in Sawfish? General unpopularity with the feature? Too similar to Windows?
Does Metacity have a similar window list? Or does it use the annoying Sawfish style?
Click here
Video Game cheats, hints a
Excuse me while I crack up.
Has anybody actually considered how useless a screenshot of a window manager is these days? Upon looking at that image, anyone familiar with X window managers should realize that the only parts of the shot drawn by the window manager are just the frames around the two windows. Assuming (I'm guessing) the window manager supports themes in some manner, it's basically a Gnome screenshot. Nautilus, the panel, etc.
While we're all addicted to screenshots, in the case of window managers, a comprehensive feature list would've been infinitely more useful than anything a picture can show.
Next thing you know, people will be asking for screenshots of DBMS's.
from the sawfish-works-nicely-though dept.
HA! Two *serious* reasons why Sawfish doesn't really "work nicely":
1) I won't link directly, because in this case, it's a Bad Thing(TM), but go check Bugzilla for Sawfish... it's a nasty sight.
2) Ever looked at the configuration dialogs for that beast!? They're INSANE. Let me give you an example. This is an actual preference in Sawfish: "Offset (%) from left window edge when warping pointer" Pardon my shouting, but WHO THE FSCK WANTS TO CONFIGURE THAT?! What's so wrong about just setting a sane default and leaving it at that? (ie: the way Metacity does it)
That said, for day to day use, Sawfish is ok, but it's got huge issues and it needs to *go*. While it'll throw things into some turmoil, I have to admit I'm pretty happy that Sun made this decision.
The Free desktop that Just Works
When they say "unmaintainability", this is code-word for "Programmed in Lisp", rather than "Programmed in a sloppy messy spaghetti-like fashion", or "The primary developer is no longer working on it". Most likely, the Wipro programmers don't have much experience with lisp/scheme/rep, and a decision was made to dump it for Metacity, which happens to be written in a language they speak (c, that is).
If you read the metacity source code, at least on earlier releases, Havoc had written things like "I won't implement idea X, because it is crackrock. Tough luck." Things like making metacity play nicely with XMMS. Of course, this was when it was his pet project and not being considered by Sun/Wipro. One wonders if there will be a Sun fork of the project, or if Havoc will turn over development or make compromises that Sun will inevitably require.
While I think metacity is a pretty cool project, Sun's decision is probably one of these management mistakes that have been talked about in all the sociology of software development books. Think of all the little bugs that have been sorted out over the years in Sawfish that will have to be solved again. Things like maintaining focus of window when changing desktops using keybindings; or dual-head setups that have different monitor resolutions while using multiple workspaces and desktops. These things will all have to be sorted out again.
Enjoy.
Metacity Screenshots.... Yawn.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
rhythmbox.
IAAL,BIANLY
I really liked sawfish for having so much configuration possibilities.
But metacity ist really fast. One thing that keeps me from using it: Clicking into a window raises it. I can't with this. I want a window to be raised, when I tell it so (clicking on the title bar with the right mouse button).
Is it me or does metacity look (in visual means and in features), just like kde's window manager, kwin? thanks , but no thanks, I'll stick to fluxbox without gnome or kde (although kde3 is kinda nice).
I think there's some missing the point going on here. From Sun's perspective (indeed, from a sysadmin's perspective), the lack of its own setup tools, relying on a command interface to change settings is a plus.
Metacity gives GNOME a chance to address one of its manageability flaws, the confilct between a desktop environment and the window manager. Which controls wallpaper? Screensavers? Why are there separate themes and theme settings interfaces for window chrome and the window contents?
It's because some power users high up in GNOME and window manager development--who usually aren't responsible for any machines beyond their own personal ones--like the flexibility of mixing and matching, and like pushing the bounds of what each component of their system can do. So overlapping--and conflicting--features get built.
This isn't the end of the world, but it does make a GNOME system more unwieldy than it has to be. KDE can run with several window managers, but it comes with one of its own that leaves configuration matters to KDE. GNOME hasn't had this yet. Enlightenment, sawmill and sawfish have been progressively better fits, but Sun and others who are moving to Metacity probably see it as a simpler route to getting a decent (GTK+ 2, anti-aliasing, multihead, accessibility-enabled) window manager seamlessly tied into GNOME than revamping Sawfish--and subsuming all of its configuration into GNOME--would be.
GNOME with Sawfish is a much tougher sell to a simplicity-minded CDE administrator than GNOME with Metacity will be, I suspect.
I recently got tired of sawfish too, so I switched to fluxbox, which is a new fork of blackbox with some nice features. One of its new features is that the user can change the button order! So I have the close button on one side and the minimize and maximize buttons on the other side, as they should be.
So how many windows managers _are_ there now? 134? Not to put down freedom of choice, but do we really need YAWM (yet another window manager) ? Oh, _this_ one is lean and unbloated (don't they all start out this way?).
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
That's what everything was designed to handle. I'm surprised they don't tout it as much, considering it was Rob and Hemo's pet project from a while back...
I admit I had never heard of Metacity. Here's a link to and quote from the Debian package.
:)
"Many window managers are like Marshmallow Froot Loops; Metacity is like Cheerios".
Hmm. OK, I guess I'll stick with IceWM. I like Froot Loops better.
lol. You know you are correct. I just checked the themes folder of the latest install of it and sure enough Crux did somehow make it in there. This is a classic example of why it needs a better gui configuration tools so that people like me who do not pay attention to the directory structures can actually realize it when new themes come up.
They should at least throw the metacity-theme-viewer in the preferences folder by default like they do with all the other gnome theming tools.
The window management in Windows is better than anything I've seen in Linux. I'm sorry, but it's true. I don't care if you can make windows "roll up" into the title bar and you think it looks cool - what problem does that solve that wouldn't be handled better by minimising the window and showing it in the taskbar? Really, I'd be interested if someone could tell me the advantage.
I'd like to see a better way to handle multiple windows, but sadly it seems we are stuck with things that look cool rather than anything useful.
These are the problems that need to be solved, I reckon:
no thats not the reason .hehe quality mod this as funny.
Ill give you billy G is a good strategist thats good at screwing partners.
but quality aint it.
copying KDE since 2002
im sure you are describing the kludge that is microsoft
What are you doing holding one company in gourmet cereals? You should be in the Lapper Upman GCI (Gourmet Cereals Index).
While I'm on it, what the hell is a gourmet cereals company doing in the Fortune 500?
I'm hopeful that this is good news. I finally gave up WindowMaker for Sawfish a few weeks ago because they appear to have ground to a virtual halt and they seem to have only a passing interest in playing nicely with GNOME.
I'm happy with it's relatively light weight, but it still seems somewhat hackish and rough around the edges. I don't need different frames for every window. Just give me a fast, light window manager that integrates with GNOME and provides reasonable themeability and I'll be happy.
Oh, and icons instead of task bars.
i havent tryed metacity, sawfish sucks so bad that i prefer KDE, i know you can switch Gnomes default WM from sawfish to twm but they both suck, i would like to see if metacity will save gnome, but if you ask me Gnome is headed to the graveyard of abandonware if somebody does not revive it...
I really wish I could get someone from Sun and IBM and all other vendors who use CDE to look at XFce. XFce is better, stronger and faster than GNOME (and KDE, for that matter) and can easily look and feel just like CDE for those who want that. It can also look and feel like nothing else out there. The Muntihead capabilities are better than anything on the market (to include WinXX and OS X). The speed of this thing can only be matched by things like twm or IceWM get it is a full, complete desktop environment. It just seems like a complete waste of time and effort to try and build something that will, at best, only be a shadow of something that is already here.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
see what a bad girl you are? :}
What is your Slash Rating?
Damn! Swing is *U*G*L*Y*
Sun should go to Microsoft or Apple to get some lessons in UI design.
The other guy was right. If you re-read the discussion you reference in _Stranger_, you will notice that Mike says the literal translation of grok *IS* "to drink."
All that other stuff is connotation, implied by the greater significance of drinking in Martian culture.
That's nice that you'll raise your own windows, and I heartily concur you should not have the UI force you into a behaviour you don't want. Similarly, the other poster should probably have his/her prefered method of window navigation also supported. That's the whole point about choice and configurability isn't it?
Unless of course you'd like to install the interface suggested in Dilbert that "hurts the users".....me, I think I like choice.
As an example of anti-choice: In Win2K, I can launch a command prompt from StartBar|Run. So, I start this window... what are the odds I want to do something with it? Pretty good. What does the UI not seem to do? Apply focus to the newly spawned window. Kind of annoying... and then some. But I haven't found a way around this behaviour yet. This illustrates my thought that users are much happier if you give them choice....
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I installed the Ximian Gnome 2 snapshots on a PII 333 machine w/ 64 MB RAM. I know it sounds like suicide, but when I used metacity instead of sawfish and didn't use nautilus to draw the desktop (I don't use desktop icons anyway) it ran pretty snappy.
Well, first I killed nautilus (duh!), noted it was still a little slow, and decided to try out Metacity. I use blackbox normally on my other slow machine, but I wanted something Gnome complaint. Metacity fit the bill perfectly since it uses the same libs as everything else. I've been using the thinice theme for Gnome2 as well.
Oh, and you can find metacity themes at sunshine in a bag.
I don't see metacity in /usr/ports/x11-wm is there a FreeBSD build?
nah, swing (metal) is cute.
GNOME on Solaris
Sun decides Sawfish is out
Metacity's in
Check http://www.merlin.org/sawfish/, option to remove crappy Sawfish default and make it look OK.
maintainability of the code [1]
Huh? What does the [1] refer to?
deus does not exist but if he does
I know this is vaugely off topic, but...
How exactly does sawfish and / or metacity relate to Gnome? I'm having a hard time differentiating desktops vs. windows managers vs. windowing systems...
%^)
Chris
So is this metacity a real functional pleasent to use Window manager? Sawfish was always a total load of crap (did not really seem ot have the classic Xwindows features, like flipping the fucking desktop at the edge of the screen). Yes, I ran all the config programs. They just seemsed to only configure unimportent stuff or stuff which was so totally brain dead. Indeed, sawfishs default behavir is click to focus?!? What kind on a idiot uses click to focus.
If you are running a Sun server chances are you won't have any of this shit running - well at least if you have a clue. Why use system resources and have services running, and also providing the machine with more ways to be compromised if it is a server?
If I am running a production server, there won't be shit for a GUI on there. Who needs it...
--Jon
Heyo there one second!
E is built with one thought in mind: EXTREME customizability.
As it is now, you can make E take up less memory than the shell from which you invoked it. It's all in the theme.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
"Undoing moderation to Comment #3561138"
I posted ANONYMOUSLY. IMHO, this shouldn't undo moderation, as I could have logged out and posted anonymously with no change in the moderation.
While I prefer its sloppy focus behaviour (wouldn't take offense at it being configurable, thouhg), it's not possible to maximize vertically. Can't live without that, I'm afraid.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Everybody has the source, and it is apparently quite usable since many people sue it.
If you use Open Source software, who do you sue?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
When are people going to learn that Apple is just as bad as Microsoft? I can hear all the Apple zealots out there now, getting ready to hit the reply button and refute my "madness". Don't bother. I've heard it all before. I AM a Mac admin. I wouldn't be surprised at all that Apple is quashing efforts that are trying to compete with their market. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't done something similar, considering all the cash they have in the bank.
Oh, and this might be something to think about the next time someone says that macs have the best or most intuitive GUI around: even Apple knew that there existed something better and it had to be stopped quick.
Nathan's blog
For a more powerful system Enlightenment is the best way to go. Nothing can match it's flexability and it's powerful themeing engine. Just checked out my desktop. I find having a pretty desktop just makes makes using my box all more enloyable. Check out my screen shot http://home.cogeco.ca/~entity/snap1.jpg
Although not a seasoned Unix user, Ive kept an amateurish Linux usage since recent years. Many things captivated me... one of them is that Unix "doing just one thing and doing well" idea, mainly when can combine several things that does it.
I noticed not all programs have been following it. Maybe its not a good idea when you must attain a high environment integration, such as in Gnome or KDE.
To be ontopic, Id like to praise two programs that abide by it: the late Oroborus window manager (whose site disappeared) and the Rox desktop (albeit it must follow RISC OS philosophy, arguably).
Oroborus used independent parts: it handled windows, there was a menu add-on, a keyboard-shortcuts add-on and a tasklist mini-panel add-on (actually a third-party program, fspanel).
Rox offers an Unix-style usage, by which simple rules apply to a few kinds of windows (a root window, a panel and folder/file manager windows). Its logic and easy usage show quick response even in a modest machine like mine.
Other wms get near this: Blackbox is great but has an unremovable slit and menus (it seems someone did this, look for Hackedbox), Icewm is great but also does a number of things.
Sawfish, Im sorry, is totally out of this idea. Simpler than Enlightenment, its still very feature-loaded.
Didnt try this Metacity (its there at xwinman.org, but no screenshots, so I wont try yet). From the pics linked here, Id say its very much like alloywm (which is very neat, too).
You're totally right about the stupidity of putting the "danger" button right next to buttons that do other stuff. Unfortunately both desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) bought totally into this bad design that has been criticized by many UI design guru's. Yet one more reason why I feel so justified in creating a GNOME fork.
Incidently, you can change the button order in sawfish. In fact, I created a theme that does precisely this. However the key word here is "create a theme". You have to mess with sawfish's quirky, poorly designed "Sawfish Themer" program in order to do this. Or you could code it in rep if you're really a masochist. The point is that you can change the button order in sawfish, but it requires way more work than should be necessary.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Mine is here: http://shakti.tky.hut.fi/desktop.xml
Crux is ported. I'm currently using it. Works great, looks nice. This Metacity is compiled from source obtained from GNOME CVS, I'm not sure if the latest released tarball includes any themes, though. In Meta city CVS repository there're 8 different themes.
One gripe I have about Sawfish is the lack of documentation. For
... the syntax of for loops? If I were at Sun, I'd
instance, many of the functions that can be assigned as shortcuts
are undocumented. I complained to the Gnome foundation as well
as to Ximian about this when Gnome 1.4 was released. It boggles
my mind that these functions have remained undocumented for the
last year.
Put yourself in Sun's place. How can you expect them to trust
the future of their GUI to the kind of coders who don't
understand the need for documentation. If a coder doesn't even
understand that, what exactly is it they know about software
development,
probably be just as eager to find a project lead by developers
with a higher skill level.
By the way, does anyone here know what exactly is going through
the mind of a coder who works for years on something that is used
by hundreds of thousands (or perhaps millions) of users, but who
fails to document it properly? This is quite a mystery to me, so
let me take a survey.
Failure to properly document software is due to
a. lack of computer science education
b. inexperience
c. disregard for the user
d. verbal deficits
e. learning disabilities
f. low IQ
g. villainy
h. "Hey, it's free. What do you expect?"
i. all of the above
???
I recently on a whim tried out the Oroborus window manager and was pleasantly surprised to find that it is a "boring" wm that does nothing but manage windows, has no menu, icons, pager, or anything. It's also Gnome compliant. It looks really cool by default with a green window border somewhat reminiscent of the qnx gui.
The thing that bugs me about Gnome is that it doesn't have its Very Own window manager. Well actually, it seems like it doesn't have a lot of things of its own, like a file manager, to name one. Everything is someone else's project. Gnome will adopt Metacity, and then, like with Enlightenment and Sawfish before it, the developer will head in some other direction, leaving Gnome in search of a new one.
You've got Gnome with gmc, you've got Gnome with Nautilus. Which one is the real Gnome? Why doesn't the Gnome project unify and maintain its own components? To me it seems that they're really lacking in this area. I like how organized KDE is. The wm and file manager are built as part of the kdebase tarball. All one neat package.
This is not meant to fan any kind of KDE vs. Gnome flames, however. I think Gnome is pretty neat, but I just keep waiting...and waiting...for it to "get there".
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
N/T
After so much talk about the adequacy of Linux to the mass market, i.e. the desktop, don't you think it is time to standardize on some Window Manager (at least as a minimum) and stop launching more and more new pet-projects on WMs?.
Another WM thread is not what Linux needs by now. We just need a good one, not thousand half-finished, IMHO.
As an aside note, could this be part of some clever strategy by Sun to delay the wide adoption of Linux on the desktop?
I'm no expert at this, so i'm going out on a limb here, but i think they only 'stole' the interface.
The underlaying (is that an English word?) multimedia platform (gstreamer) seems to be very original and innovative and something we will probably hear more about in the future.
Sure, it looks like iTunes, but under the hood it's a completely different thing. In my opinion the inteface is just a thin layer on the surface.
It just depends on how you define 'stealing'. It's a blurry discussion. iTunes isn't the first audio player so you could say they stole the idea from earlier audio software.
Every spreadsheet and wordprocessor looks alike. But that's far from saying that they stole from each other or that they are the same.
Furthermore rythmbox is not a finished product so who knows. Maybe it will be skinnable in the future.
just my two cents.
Actually it's rather more likely that Sun are adopting Metacity *because* of Havoc's "no crackrock" approach. I don't know about the particulars of the XMMS case (though I do know that its refusal to cooperate with Sawfish is a pain in the arse), but I'll bet that 99% of the things that Havoc terms "crackrock" are things which would make Metacity more difficult for most of GNOME's users to use (including those of us who are programmers).
I don't think Sun are going to require compromises with Havoc's approach. If anything they would have had to make compromises with Sawfish. I really can't imagine Sun being too pleased about Sawfish's immensely complex config dialog.
--colin (who has taken to posting on /. about GNOME rather than doing anything to improve it)
...so mine will be square.
Innovation for innovations sake is called a waste of time. If something is done really well, why do it differently? There is always a Better Way (tm).
I'm not swimming with nerds, you just want an excuse to see me in my speedos.
retard moderator
2002-05-13 John Harper * sawfish/wm/gnome/integration.jl: admit defeat and go back to loading xterm module all the time
Nah, Sun just wants to avoid the complexity of the project and get a WM that does the basics (and just the basics, cos Sawfish does too, but is also highly expandable, so can do more than the basics). Sawfish is also famous for crappy defaults and configuration strings, both of which can be fixed if people agree a bit instead of pushing unconsistency and weird phrasing.
For example, until recently eveyone complained that the menu was slow too appear... cos Harper took ages to accept that the var that keeps the menu running always should default to on, and leave those with few RAM set it to a timeout.
Dialogs (cycle window, quote event, etc) are crappy, but there are improvements (search Merlin and Sawfish in Google, or search for the Sawfish Wiki)... maybe next century they will be accepted in core.
We don't need multihead: users often lack even one.
I'm not that legendary developer, but my solution is to run gnome on my "main" monitor (:0.1), and afterstep on my second one. I tend not to want all the special stuff in my second monitor anyway (well, really, I tend not to really want any special stuff either way...).
Afterstep's pretty easy to get configured with a minimal setup (correct number of workspaces, control-arrow workspace switching, a few rxvt key bindings), and then you never have to touch it again. Unlike gnome... And also unlike gnome, it's not a resource hog: Since my last login, _just_ the deskguide in gnome has accumulated 32H of CPU time, whereas all of afterstep only has 5 minutes, and its equiv. of the deskguide (Pager) has a total of 23 seconds of CPU time...
I generally just kill everything off before I log off, and have scripts which fill my screens in an appropriate way with rxvts.
That was kinda my point...Sawfish and E, as I understand, are both independent wm's that /usually/run with Gnome (though not necessarily)...therefor, if we are going to mention one or more wm's that work with Gnome, let's not leave out the best of them all :)
What is your Slash Rating?
So, when will there actually be some agreement on a default, stable, user friendly desktop for Linux ?
.coms ?
At the rate things are happening and judging by this article, Never.
Perhaps, sometimes, open source eats itself - it starts to defeat the object of it's very existence due to it's 'open' nature.
We need a 'facist' microsoft method to finally get a standardised, stable and useable desktop for Linux.
In my opinion (and screw the humble bit), desktops for Linux still suck badly - no matter which one - they all suck in thier own special way.
There's just no consistency between the desktop developers and software developers.
For christ sake, if you can't cut'n'paste from one app to another (which is a big problem with Linux desktops), there's a problem.
I still have faith, god knows why.
If Linux can repeat the success it's had on the webserver level with the desktop, well, there's finally an alternative to the much maligned win32.
So what are all you Linux developers doing out there ? - squabbling ?
So much for open source then - there needs to be a leader to push, heck, FORCE acceptance of a standard.
Microsoft know this and exploits it, to a lesser extent, Apple do the same.
For a desktop to succeed on Linux, it is going to have to be mostly 'closed source' 'propriety' software - that much is very clear to me.
And it's also going to have to be commercial.
I pay for many things and I'm prepared to pay for an alternative to M$
Are you ? - or are you still living in a dreamland that bombed the
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Because it has the "sane" defaults that help Mac/Win users migrate from Windows/Mac to Linux.
So why Metacity? IceWM is older, has the features that some people here crow for, and also has sane defaults. When I migratet to Linux from OS/2, I found that IceWM did a nice job of replicating the OS/2 PM/Win32 WM keyboard accelerators (which is very important, not just because it helps you use the computer faster, but because you have muscle memory for that action).
Did Sun even consider IceWM? It's fully Gnome compliant; I've used it since forever with Gnome.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
All I can see is that there is lot of diversity. This is what I already believed to find here and why I can't agree with "visionaries" who want to smaller the possiblities and stick to the "real" solution. From my point of view they just lost overview and gave up (another possibility is that they got paranoid).
;)
The best thing on sawfish is that it already offers it all. Negative points are the language used and some different opinions about managing windows between the gnome and sawfish projects. This is natural, happens everywhere in free source universe, and will not be solved by faschistic methods, like defining a stringent small wm or focussing on only grandmas etc.
The point is that we can only find a better way if we include all that is wished. Thatfor we need a consequently configurable wm (like sawfish) which follows some general rules (discussed agreements -- no "faschistic" company needed). This wm should be programmed as libraries to have better access to its functionalities. Then, too, bindings are possible. The configurability is the key to three ways of "working" with the wm:
1. default way, standardized for gnome
2. "themes": default settings are offered for grandmas, admins, iconophobics etc.
3. free configuration.
These three strategies must not be selected or configured in the same dialog, nor even in the same program. The admin mode could be realized with a kind of "gconf-edit". The grandma mode is default and can only be changed if you click on the "advanced" button in the general configuration dialog (if somebody used the admin product then this is interpreted as if the button was clicked). After clicking the button, other options (themes) are shown. You can click on a button for a protocoll of already done settings.
As you can see, It is all a matter of organization. Questioning if a wm should be dumb or bloated is not useful. A wm should be able to do it all. And you, as the user, should be able to select the way of configuring the wm.
If you just switch from sawfish to metacity then you swithc from bloated to dumb. Please explain where you see the "advantage". I only see a change!
And, please, stop nautilus from overtaking the desktop and making icons uneraseable. the management of windows (as X defines them) is not the task of a filemanager (and nautilus never was more than a bloated kind of that). The desktop is not a filesystem -- even if you define it as desktop-filesystem (deskfs). Handling the size and place of objects, and the preferences (not to forget) is not to be done by a filesystem. If you want to have a filesystem that supports layout options then ask linus torvalds if he agrees to this idea