Gnome 2.0 RC2 Asks For Abuse

A nameless reader submits: "The GNOME Desktop 2.0 release candidate 2 has been released! Gnome 2.0 should be coming out soon! The release notes have some good information."

Comments

Crime?

[KnightNavro]

Isn't Gnome abuse a felony in most states?

Re:Crime?

[casings]

If not it should be. ;D

Re:Crime?

[(outer-limits)]

Read in the paper today that falling asleep in a coutroom is.

Re:Crime?

[sharkey]

Isn't Gnome abuse a felony in most states?

Possibly, but it might just be Gnome tossing that you're thinking of.

Does anyone know...

[neo8750]

when the final version will be released? I'm looking forward to trying it.

Re:Does anyone know...

[Ami Ganguli]

I don't have any inside information, but if you look here you can see that they've added an unscheduled release candidate and they had planned two weeks between the last release candidate and going gold.

Assuming we don't get another release candidate (which I think is a good bet - I'm running the nightlies and they feel solid) that places 2.0 around July 7.

Re:Does anyone know...

[high]

Many of the configuration settings still exist but you have to use GConf to edit them now.

RC code name

[joeykiller]

For those of you who don't understand swedish too well: This release's code name, "Glad Midsommar", means "Happy midsummer". The swedes love a good mid summer party.

Re:RC code name

[Per Wigren]

The swedes love a good mid summer party.

Yupp, I'm still having a hangover.. :)

Re:RC code name

[rasjani]

Its not just Swedish, its all scandinavians like finns and norskes too. We, finns, are burning huge bonfires to celebrate midsummer and murder/drowning statictics go skyhigh because of the alcohol use.

Re:RC code name

[Anonymous Coward]

Hep, Danes included.
We should all party together.

Re:RC code name

[uncl_bob]

You suck.

Re:RC code name

[MicroBerto]

If there's one good thing that college has taught me, it's the fact that advil + lots of water not only is good treatment for hangover, but is also a good prevention too! Take it before you go to bed -- unless you pass out cold, then you must suffer!

Re:RC code name

[bokmann]

OK, this is off-topic, but relevant to this particular comment.

I know the perfect hangover cure. When I have a hangover, I can't sleep... so, oddly enough, after a heavy night of drinking, I'm up early, curled up in the fetal position on a couch cursing my own existance. (At least, when I used to drink a lot thats what I did... but that was 10 years ago).

OK, here's the cure:
1) 2 or more excederin (with both asprin and tylenol as pain releivers, it is always good at taking the edge off - and it has caffeine - a plus for this crowd)
2) a multivitamin, like centrum.
3) a b-complex vitamin suppliment(a lot of drug stores sell this as something like B-100). Alcohol flushes b complex vitamins from your system, which is one of the reasons you will feel like crap.
4) Gatorade. Swallow all of those pills with a big jug of gatorade... it contains a lot of the electrolytes you need, but pissed out because your kidneys were dumping all the alcohol.
5) a high-carbohydrate breakfast. Something like pancakes.

finally, after doing all of that, melt yourself in a warm shower.

Seriously... Do all this, and you will feel a LOT better.

Re:RC code name

[geekster]

Oh great, we have fucking racist here too.

"I applaud the wise anti-"multicultural" policies"
"I'm white, thus I'm discriminated against"

How does that go together?
You applaud discrimination of black people and then you bitch about being discriminated because you're white?

I always wondered how a racists mind work. Does it make sence to you or do you have a big internal conflict going on?

Strange how you trolls always get your disgusting views into every thread.

Re:RC code name

[robslimo]

Go easy on that Tylenol. It can be mean to your liver, esp. when drinking.

Here is an excerpt from this URL:

However, when taken in excessive quantities or when combined with alcohol, acetaminophen may cause death due to liver failure. In fact, an overdose of acetaminophen is one of the most common causes of liver failure, as well as the most common cause of drug-induced liver disease in the United States.

The best way to avoid a hangover? Don't drink too much.

Re:RC code name

[geekster]

I know, but in his the first sentence he applauds discrimination (anti-multicultural).

Mirrors

[neo8750]

archive.progeny.com (US or Canada)
ftp.twoguys.org (US or Canada)
ftp3.sourceforge.net (US or Canada)
ftp.rpmfind.net (US or Canada)
ftp.sourceforge.net (US or Canada)
ftp.cse.buffalo.edu (US or Canada)
ftp.yggdrasil.com (US or Canada)
planetmirror.com (Australia)
ftp.sunet.se (Europe)
ftp.dataplus.se (Europe)
ftp.easynet.nl (Europe)
ftp.unina.it (Europe)
ftp.belnet.be (Europe)
ftp.codefactory.se (Europe)
ftp.tr.gnome.org (Europe)
fr.rpmfind.net (Europe)
ftp.acc.umu.se (Europe)
ftp.no.gnome.org (Europe)
ftp.dit.upm.es (Europe)
fr2.rpmfind.net (Europe)
linux.cem.itesm.mx (South America)

abuse!

[koekepeer]

hey. if they are asking people to abuse gnome 2.0 rc2, why the hell are all the trolls modded down?

maybe i'm just being stupid, but trolling seems a very appropriate reply to such an ill-formulated headline ;-)

have a nice day!

Garnome

[Spock the Vulcan]

As always, if you want to give the latest Gnome a whirl without messing up your existing system, try Garnome
It takes a while to build (about an hour on my 1.0 GHz PIII), but it doesn't touch your existing install - everything goes into ~/garnome.

Re:Garnome

[AnoniemeLafaard]

I'd love to, but the current version is still 0.11.0, which works with RC1, right? I guess we'll have to be a little more pateint for Jeff to release the garnome version that works with RC2.

Re:Garnome

[d2002xx]

Only a hour!!! How fast compiling gnome is! I took whold day to compile KDE3 on my K6-2-400, and it only includes kdebase and kdelibs......

Re:Garnome

[MicroBerto]

I tried Garnome 0.11.0 after the discussion of the last Gnome release, and I must say how awesome garnome is.

However, Gnome 2.0 gave me mixed reactions. First off, the speed is unbelievable. Nautilus is actually a USABLE utility now (550mhz Athlon, 288ram), and everything runs SO much faster!

On the other hand, I just didn't like the fact that I had to re-do all of my config, and wasn't in the mood to toy with it. So i'll keep testing a bit, but I'll be more excited when mandrake does all their pretty menus for me and I don't have to worry about it :)

Another problem was the fact that I didn't know how to rebuild gaim applet and xmms-gnome for my garnome, and Evolution didn't work. Maybe I needed to re-specify my paths when compiling. I can't live without those 3 applets/programs.

Re:Garnome

[MicroBerto]

One last complaint -- The panel prefs suck - My panel would not span the entire bottom of my screen! Is that fixable? I don't like that half-panel garbage.

Thanks..

Re:Garnome

[MarcoAtWork]

I tried RC1 and hated that the panel at the top was fixed! Since the dawn of time all my desktop environments have had the panel to the *left* of the screen, why is it that in Gnome 2.0 I have to have it stuck at the top ala Mac?

Another *MAJOR* point that will prevent me from 'upgrading' to 2.0 is that there doesn't seem to be any way to have my favorite focus mode: sloppy with 200ms autoraise: there is 'focus follows mouse' but I wasn't able to get autoraise to work (and anyways having half the focus prefs under the gnome config, and half under the sawfish config is kind of lame).

I also had several other problems with RC1 (preferences not saving, gconfd not being stopped when logging out (maybe related to the first)) but they might be related to my config.

Personally these RC1 and RC2 felt more like an alpha than an RC, so if the above are fixed (moveable top panel, sloppy+autoraise) I will probably try gnome 2.2 (or whatever the name of the 'bugfix' release is).

BTW, if there IS a way in RC1/RC2 to get the focus behaviour and to move the panel from the top to the left, I'm all ears!

Re:Garnome

[MicroBerto]

That's not exactly the panel I was talking about. If you right click that menu there, you can add a REAL panel (the ones that you can move around and change the thickness and such). You can also remove the little one up top after that. I don't want Mao OS 9 either.

Re:Garnome

[bzzzt]

It takes 3 hours on my P3/1ghz, so what did you overclock to get it to compile that fast? ;)

Re:Garnome

[Spock the Vulcan]

I wouldn't know - I am using a Compaq Presario 2700T laptop with a 1GHz Mobile P3 processor and 256 MB memory. I just did a complete recompile, with moderate web-browsing etc going on simultaneously, and the total build time, including download time was:

real 84m41.180s
user 49m45.300s
sys 10m22.790s

Maybe you have a slow network connection or something?

Gnome2 problems

[Anonymous Coward]

I always been a gnome user, and i prefer gnome over KDE but i am dissapointed. I have been compiling gnome2 from CVS every 2-3 weeks.
Things I hope they can change in by release day.
Japanese Input is broken in gnome2 applications.
File Chooser is not improved.( I know this is planned for the 2.2 release)
I was expecting a lot more from gnome control center.
Default configurations are bad.

Re:Gnome2 problems

[jfleck]

> Japanese Input is broken in gnome2 applications.

Have you filed a bug report on this? There was a mention of this on the GNOME lists recently, and others have had Japanese input working. The only way to track down an apparently isolated set of cases is to file a bug report and work with the developers.

Re:Gnome2 problems

[fferreres]

"3. The quickest method to do configuration is to modify the configuration file, isn't it? Are you newbie?"

Woah, hold on a bit. That is nonsense. This is desktop enviroment. Doesn't matter if you can grow flowers from the command line, the GUI and specially the control center is really important (though i use the command line for a lot of thing, and specially when the GUI lacks. ex: file manager. I can't use Nautilus).

Missing info at Released note

[sebol]

i've recieve the announcement view gnome announce mailing list. it contained with extra information:-

"Can we have a special TELSABUG category, and everything gets dropped
to fix them first?" - Telsa Gwynne

Looking forward with mixed feelings

[Karora]

I've been playing with Gnome 2 for a while now, and I must admit it is starting to feel like a stable release.

There are a few things that I have mixed feelings about though. The default WM is switching to Metacity, which doesn't have the power and configurability of Sawfish, and that is symptomatic of the general reduction in configurability.

Someone, somewhere has decided that configurability === complexity, and that a bewildering array of choices is too many for a newbie. This appears to have been translated into a general 'dumbing down' of the interface.

I can no longer tell Sawfish to remember my window sizes. The Gnome Panel can no longer swallow applications, so all of those WM applets are now useless to me. I can't run the Afterstep clock applet!

I guess it is the applications job to remember what window size I last used, and to remember it without me telling the WM to do so, but they don't - not even Nautilus2 remembers it's window sizes - every time it opens a new window which is slightly less than 1/4 of my screen size.

Overall, this is probably a good thing. People should be writing their applications to remember UI things, and having the WM remember those probably makes them lazy, but I can see a bit of pain in my future with Gnome 2, until these issues are solved and Gnome 3 is released, perhaps.

At least Gnome 2 does seem somewhat snappier than Gnome 1.4, and the styling is better, especially with anti-aliasing available throughout.

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[Ami Ganguli]

I don't think you have to wait for Gnome 3.0 for this stuff to be fixed. The improvements between 1.0 and 1.4.x were amazing and I would expect the same kind of thing here.

Also, it'll take a while for most applications to be ported over to Gnome 2.0. In that respect I think a lot of users might be disappointed since most of what people think of as "Gnome" is really applications. The release of Gnome 2.0 means the new API and a few basic tools are ready, but the real benefits won't be apparent until Gnumeric, Evolution, and other big apps are ported over.

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[groman]

What I'm interested in is if they fixed that *feature* that didn't allow you to change the shapes of widgets in Gtk.. like Qt lets you.

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[Karora]

Gnome2 will hit Debian unstable fairly soon. In fact it is mostly in there already - there are just a few things in experimental really.

I would say that in your case you probably will be better off with Gnome2, because it does seem snappier than 1.4.

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[Ami Ganguli]

Are you saying that under Qt you can change a text box into an oval or something like that? Is this at the application development level or at the theme level?

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[LionKimbro]

The Gnome Panel can no longer swallow applications, so all of those WM applets are now useless to me. I can't run the Afterstep clock applet!

Wait, does this mean that Wanda no longer fits in the panel?

NOOOoooooooo!!!

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[GauteL]

Nautilus2 remembers window size now. It was just a bug, it has been fixed. RC2 includes the fix. I'm pretty sure RC1 did too, but anyhow..

All the apps I use regularly, Galeon, Nautilus, gnome-terminal etc.. does remember window size.

GNOME 2.0 has tried to decrease the amount of options. This is a Good Thing [tm], because it means that the options that are still there are useful, easy to find and intuitive.

Metacity is NOT the default WM for GNOME 2.0, it is just an option. It will probably be the default WM some day, but it is still not completely ready for that.

Swallowing other applets than GNOME-applets is hardly useful for anyone but a very few. It was a great source of bugs, and nobody really wanted to fix it. It was decided that unless someone really wanted it badly enough to fix it, then it would be dropped. Nobody wanted it badly enough.

The strange thing is that the people that scream about lack of options, are mostly the same that scream about bloat. This is ironic because the huge amount of options it would take to satisfy everyone would lead to an extremely bloated interface both UI-wise, bugwise and probably also memory-wise.

If someone wants an option or a feature this is the way to do it:
- Open up a bug report in bugzilla, and argue carefully for your feature or option request.

There are three issues that need to be addressed before they are accepted:

1. Do they make sense? That is, are they sensible options or options that either fix something broken (in which case the brokeness should just be fixed instead).
2. How useful is it, compared to the cost of increasing complexity both UI-wise and QA-wise?
3. Does someone care enough to code it in?

The swallowed applet was probably ok for point 1, a little on the edge for point 2, and definitely a miss for point 3. If someone does care enough to code, then state your interest on desktop-devel-list@gnome.org, and it might be in GNOME 2.2 or something like that.

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[axxackall]

The strange thing is that the people that scream about lack of options, are mostly the same that scream about bloat.

It's not very strange. It just means that options should be organized/categorized/foldered better.

It might be useful to combine the best experience from M$ Win2k Administrator's console and IBM AIX Smith.

Also, it would be nice to have typical profiles. Hide some (or lot) of options in "non-super-user" profiles.

I hope GNOME 2.1 options will be more smart organized than now. It may take knowledge management patterns but it will worth.

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[Zenithal]

There are a few things that I have mixed feelings about though. The default WM is switching to Metacity, which doesn't have the power and configurability of Sawfish, and that is symptomatic of the general reduction in configurability.

Regardless of the default, they're going to have to pry enlightenment from my cold, dead fingers.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[Menthos]

It's not very strange. It just means that options should be organized/categorized/foldered better.

And this is what people are trying to do. However, it still doesn't make sense to keep every option ever invented in any operating system in, no matter how well organized they are. If hardly noone uses an option or if noone is prepared to maintain it, it's usually just unmaintained code that may have been broken for years and a source for bug reports. Preferences have a cost. Better organization and careful decisions on what to have and what to keep is what's needed, and that's what people are trying to do.

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[Alan]

Swallowing other applets than GNOME-applets is hardly useful for anyone but a very few. It was a great source of bugs, and nobody really wanted to fix it. It was decided that unless someone really wanted it badly enough to fix it, then it would be dropped. Nobody wanted it badly enough.

What about those who wanted it but can't code? Personally the one feature that I wanted it for was for gabber's swallowed applet. This works perfectly in kde3, even though gabber is a gnome app. As I use jabber for all my communication (icq, msn, etc) I really need a decent jabber client that will work in gnome2. If there is one out there, great, but the best I've seen are either PSI (swallowed into the kde dock, as it's a kde app) and gabber (swallowed into the gnome or kde dock, and a gnome app), and it seems that neither of them will work now :(

</bitch>

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[Alan]

Speaking of E, when the hell is there going to be a usable release of e17?? I know they're rewriting it all from scratch again, but it's been years now!

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[StarHeart]

I totally agree with you. I have yet to see a window manager that even comes close to Enlightenment.

Lack of remember settings in Sawfish is a major hit toward my willingness to use it. Metacity is dumbdowncity. All the window managers that only have Send window left or right royally suck. I want to Send to X not repeatedly Send to Left/Right/Up/Down.

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[StarHeart]

That may work in metacity, but other than that metacity is missing even more than Sawfish.

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[nihilogos]

Speaking of E, when the hell is there going to be a usable release of e17?? I know they're rewriting it all from scratch again, but it's been years now!

This question deserves its own story.

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[The Faywood Assassin]

> Regardless of the default, they're going to have
> to pry enlightenment from my cold, dead fingers©

Here, here! I'm using e0©16©5 and still going strong© Unfortunately I have no plans to move to e©017© I don't mean to insult their hard work, but as far as I understand, e0©17 is going to be a desktop shell, not simply a window manager© Enlightenment is basically making us choose between it and Gnome or KDE©

Sorry guys, I choose Gnome ¥with select KDE apps as my default environment©

While we're on the subject, GMC is still my file manager© Much faster, and it does so much more ¥better integration with GNOME than Nautilus©

Beny

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[Prothonotar]

There is a reason these doclets don't work... in fact, with sawfish 2, the reason seems to be that there is no good protocol currently for these doclets or other swallowed apps, so sawfish, which expressly does not have any code designed to support these non-standard protocols, and the panel which is trying to swallow the windows, both end up competing to grab the window first (or maybe last). If you enable and disable the gabber status icon, you'll see it appear in various states (unswallowed with window border, unswallowed with no window border, swallowed into the gnome status dock). Gnome 2 is supposed to be working towards supporting a new, Gnome-centric and window-manager agnostic system tray, based on the protocol being documented at www.freedesktop.org. Hopefully it will be ready when Gnome 2 ships.

Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings

[esarjeant]

The UI has definitely been "dumbed-down", there are very few options that can be configured. For neophite users this will make Gnome much more approachable, but more seasoned users will quickly grow frustrated by the limited configuration options.

It's not stable yet, either. Inside of my first 15 minutes with it this version of Gnome has crashed 3 times. I'll need to use it more to understand what it was that might have made it become unresponsive.

The default config is very Mac-like, but ironically this is after the Mac has already moved on to a new UI. Sun will probably be retisent to adopting anything that remotely resembles OpenWin, so this notalgic Mac look for Gnome 2 is likely to persist.

Everything looks much more professional. Obviously the anti-aliased fonts are a win-win, and the Gnome Panel has been reworked significantly.

I'm not at all happy with Nautilus. In contrast with Konqueror, there are too many basic file operations missing. For example, right-click on any file in Konqueror and you can pick anywhere on your computer to copy / move the file. In Nautilus, you're forced to use the sluggish copy/paste methodology. While certainly much more impressive, I think the Konqueror solution is faster in most cases.

While I enjoy by bubble CPU monitor, I'm not sure this is going to be enough to keep me with Gnome. Version 2.0 isn't looking significantly better, so I may find myself back in KDE soon.

"Gnome 2.0 RC2 Asks For Abuse"

[Second_Derivative]

Sure thing, "Your mother was a hamster..."

Re:"Gnome 2.0 RC2 Asks For Abuse"

[JayAndSilentBob]

and your father smelt of elderberries! I fart in your general direction!

Re:Just anti-aliasing?

[loply]

There are multiple anti-aliasing algorithms available for Gnome/XFree. Search on google for "Xft Hack" for a patch which results in a Microsoft style look.

Also, if you want "ClearType" (technically known as sub-pixel antialiasing) you will have to do a bit of XftConfig`ing.

A Haiku for you!

[HaikuSpank]

Desktop exploded Somebody please kill me now. I was running Gnome. Jesse haiku12.20.beamsplat@spamgourmet.com

Re:A Haiku for you!

[HaikuSpank]

Desktop exploded
Somebody please kill me now.
I was running Gnome.

I should've hit 'Preview', shouldn't I? I'm such a n00b!

Jesse
haiku12.20.beamsplat@spamgourmet.com

Re:A Haiku for you!

[laserjet]

Speaking of Haiku's, has anyone seen any posts from 575 lately?

where did he go?

Agreement, but reserved.

[Inoshiro]

I agree that dumbing down is bad, but I don't agree with your WM point. Why should every GUI program writer write the same support code? You might as well say that they have to make all their apps stateful by hand. It's much simpler to provide one provably correct code path in the WM, than potentially thousands in all the applications in a system.

For those apps which are "special," they could simply send a "NON_STATEFUL" token to the WM when dealing with that window.

No, I think I liked it better the first time.

[Inoshiro]

When this comment was written by Karora.

Moderators of the above comment (+1 style): YHBT. YHL. HTH. HAND.

Re:No, I think I liked it better the first time.

[forged]

AYBABTU ?

Re:No, I think I liked it better the first time.

[Carlos Laviola]

Can you tell me why I'm on your foes list? I don't even know you, dude.

Re:No, I think I liked it better the first time.

[forged]

good point, I don't know you either. you're off the list.

Re:What about KDE?

[JanneM]

Actually, I've seen the opposite effect. From what I've seen, people coming from Windows tend to prefer Gnome over KDE precisely because it's not like the Windows desktop they've left behind. It seems to be a combination of factors. One seems to be a desire to 'make a clean break'; they left Windows for a reason, and do not wish to be reminded of it. Another is likely to be the danger of confusion in using a desktop that's almost - but not quite - like the one they already know. Using a very different desktop there is no longer that danger.

Both Gnome and KDE are good, and Linux is far stronger for having two lively projects (and a lot of small or special-purpose projects as well) in this area.

/Janne

Asking for it

[commodoresloat]

I just can't believe the title. Gnome asks for abuse. Can you believe it? Blaming the victim, as usual. Fscking patriarchy....

Re:What about KDE?

[RPoet]

Very nice reasoning, and quite original, too.

Where's the ChangeLog ?

[loom]

Where is the ChangeLog between RC1 and RC2 ? All the release notes say is that "some bugs were fixed", which isn't really interesting.

Re:Where's the ChangeLog ?

[d2002xx]

It's RC2, not a new version. I think any new featues should not be added, or it may need to release RC3, RC4, RC5, etc.

Re:Where's the ChangeLog ?

[JamesHenstridge]

You can use bugzilla to find this information.

As an example, here is a list of all bugs with the GNOME2 keyword that are in the RESOLVED, VERIFIED or CLOSED state that changed state between the RC1 and RC2 releases. It is not complete, and probably isn't fully accurate (some changes may have been fixed but no new tarball is available yet), but it gives you an idea of what has changed.

Why use either?

[Arker]

Seriously, I run straight WindowMaker even on newer hardware, sure on a fast machine I bring up a gnome panel occassionally to mess around with, but I honestly never really understood why people seem to think they have to have KDE or GNOME on a machine - particularly an older one of course. Install the libs, and whatever applications you have to have, and they'll run just fine without any panels or the like...

Re:Just anti-aliasing?

[JamesHenstridge]

If you are using Xft for font rendering (that is, you set the GDK_USE_XFT environment variable to 1), you can turn on cleartype style rendering. If your LCD panel is in RGB order, you can put the following in your ~/.Xdefaults file:
Xft.rgba: rgb

Or equivalently, in your ~/.xftconfig file:
match edit rgba=rgb;

No Launch-Feedback and Menu-Editor in Gnome 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

They couldn't fix menu editing so they simply dropped it completely. Now they say you have to wait until 2.0.1 for it. Why not delay 2.0? Can't they resist pressure of all the firms like Sun who wants to see it released before Solaris 9?

Re:No Launch-Feedback and Menu-Editor in Gnome 2.0

[SpeedMan]

Umm, Solaris OE 9 was released last month. SpeedMan

Re:No Launch-Feedback and Menu-Editor in Gnome 2.0

[Menthos]

Personally, I'd rather see a release now than delayed forever. Especially since 2.0 brings a good lot of improvements over previous releases.

Re:hi mom!

[d2002xx]

Where do the guys come from? They seem to have burned brains.

Joke?

[d2002xx]

Is it an joke? I thinks it's not like an ad. The guy who wrote the comment seems to know nothing about computer.

Re:Gnome vs. KDE

[__aahlyu4518]

Oh great, just what I need... A gnome with no pants on on my desktop :-b

Not a haiku.

[tunah]

The last line has six syllables. Remember, it's Guh-nome (probably short for GNU/Gnome :P)

Pedantry for the day.

Re:Not a haiku.

[big.ears]

Actually, the reason it was not a haiku is because it is the truth. Help! My desktop exploded. I was running gnome. I don't have a panel and nautilus doesn't work. I got shoved into blackbox. Ugh.

Serves me right for being bleeding edge and all.

Re:Not a haiku.

[laserjet]

this made me think of the word, gnome. I know the correct was to say it is G/nome with two syllables, but I still don't. It just sounds stupid. I even tried to call it that for a month and felt like a retard. So, I just say gnome with a silent 'g' even though I know it's technically wrong.

who's with me?!

fertility rite

[thorgil]

we dance around a big pole...

hmmm... wonder what that stands for..?!!
;)

How can I enable anti-aliasing?

[sshambar]

I haven't played with the gnome2 desktop until now, and to save (gobs) of time pulling/compiling, I just installed the Ximian Gnome2 developer snapshot.

However, I can't seem to find where the preference to enable anti-alias fonts is... I've tried selecting largish fonts, but all the rendering is clearly bitmapped.

Anyone else using the Ximian snapshot having this problem? Are they compiling w/ anti-aliasing off?

Re:How can I enable anti-aliasing?

[drunkahol]

I too am having anti-aliasing problems with the Ximian Gnome2 developer snapshots.

I've still had no definitive answer.

Some have said to set an environment variable, but I don't know which file to put this in. It really should be a standard thing and have a GUI configuration program.

Hey!

[IamTheRealMike]

I seem to recall writing that before. Where the hell do you get off stealing my posts?

/me marks cybermint as a foe

How to enable anti-aliasing?

[JamesHenstridge]

First of all, you must enable Xft support (the new font system for X). This is done by defining the GDK_USE_XFT environment variable before running a program. The best way to turn this on for the entire desktop is by defining it in the X startup script (probably ~/.gnomerc, ~/.Xclients or ~/.xinitrc):

#!/bin/bash
export GDK_USE_XFT=1
# set up $PATH and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH if needed
exec gnome-session

After doing this, you may still not see antialiased fonts. For instance, on Red Hat systems, the default /etc/X11/XftConfig file has the following lines:

match
any size < 14
any size > 8
edit antialias=false;

which turns off antialiasing for fonts with sizes between 8 and 14. By commenting out these lines, AA will be enabled for all fonts. If you have an LCD panel, add a line like the following to /etx/X11/XftConfig or ~/.xftconfig:

match edit rgba=rgb;

This will turn on ClearType style subpixel antialiasing.

Re:How to enable anti-aliasing?

[maeglin]

This is the kind of shit that makes people say linux is hard.

Can't they just put a button somewhere that you click and it automagically works?

I mean ximian's whole point is trying to sell a usable open source desktop that anybody can use...

Sorry but if that's the best they can do, or they think that is "usable by the masses" then ximian has some issues...

Font blurring has nothing to do with usability. Actually it makes stuff even harder to see. So, how does this make "using" Gnome hard? If you want to play with stuff prepare for some challenges.

"I don't see how anyone can claim that windows is easy to use.. I mean, I can't even get it to do virtual desktops and I have to edit the friggin' registry to turn on focus-follows-mouse mode! Windows won't be "ready for the desktop" until there's a simple check box somewhere to turn these on.. how hard could it be? Gnome has had them for YEARS."

Silly, isn't it.

Re:How to enable anti-aliasing?

[BrookHarty]

IF it was only that easy. What about XFS? Do you still use the font server? Do we turn it off? How about enabling TTF fonts? Truetype? Does Xfree 4.2.0 (inital) have the truetype support? Does your distro support it? Do I have to recompile anything?

Man might be nice to have an entire document, for whatever distro, with rpm levels on how to get AA setup. There is too much "turn this on" and it works mumbo-jumbo.

Back to the real world...

Re:How to enable anti-aliasing?

[be-fan]

It's really not that complicated. Most distros don't ship with XFS turned on anymore, since XF 4.x subsumes most of what it did. Freetype is installed by default in all XF 4.x systems, so that's in there. Basically, all you need is to make sure Xft is there, that you're using GTK+ 2.0 or Qt 2.0+ and hit the little checkbox in the control panel.

Re:How to enable anti-aliasing?

[JamesHenstridge]

Xft can handle Type1, TTF and OpenType fonts (and in the version included in CVS XFree86, bitmap PCF fonts as well). Simply add a "dir" line to the XftConfig file for each font directory. No need to create fonts.dir files or anything -- Xft will discover the fonts in that directory itself. One of the nice things you can do is to add ~/fonts to the Xft font path in your local ~/.xftconfig file. Then you can drop fonts in that folder and they become usable to all your Xft using applications.

You should probably still run XFS, so that older applications (such as gtk 1.2 based ones, and most Xt ones) that use core X font rendering still work. Note that the reason most distros are set up to use a font server rather than leaving the X server to render the fonts is that it adds a level of parallelism. If the X server was rendering fonts, it would block while doing so. With the font server rendering fonts, the X server is free to do other stuff while waiting for the fonts to be rendered, which can take a while for CJK fonts, for instance.

Re:How to enable anti-aliasing?

[maeglin]

If gnome's anti-aliasing makes it harder to read then their implementation sucks...

No, font smoothing is a subjectively useful feature at best, for many it's a source of eye fatigue.

Also it's l33t d00d attitudes like yourself that help make sure that linux doesn't get anywhere.

How so? All I was arguing was that having to make an effort to enable a feature that you want but is not enabled by default is not endemic to only Open Source. You completely missed my examples of two features that I find indispensible (unlike font blurring) but is not available to Windows users without third party software or require a registry hack. Is Windows "Not Ready for the Desktop (tm)?"

In ten years when the linux desktop revolution never happened hey you can always post some lame anti-microsoft crap and talk about how everyone's mom should be thrilled to go fucking around in the x config files just to turn on anti-aliased fonts...

This is worse than mucking with the registry, how? Not that I think you'll actually read this time, but FYI there's a big-ass "Enable Font Antialiasing" checkbox in KDE. It'll be there in Gnome soon too. And every whiner like yourself can find something else to harp on about...

Your attitude is silly, yes indeed, it is.

Reading comprehension.. learn it, love it, use it.

Re:How to enable anti-aliasing?

[hejpig]

Even if you have managed to switch on anti-aliasing, you may not see any difference. Many of the fonts used by programmes and the WM are non-aliased types. Many Adobe fonts do not display antialiased for example. You will have to go looking around for configuration options to change fonts. The URW and Xft fonts are good.

Gnome2 since beta5

[daserver]

I've been running Gnome2 since beta5 on gentoo and it's been rock solid. Becoming better and better for every revision. The only major concern I have is that gnome terminal still seems quite buggy - but there's allways Eterm, Xterm and hundreds of others so it's not a major showstopper.

Gnome is Dead

[hey!]

Oh, wait; I'm sorry. You wanted the Abuse department. This is the argument department.

Re:New Button Order

[Nodatadj]

User testing said that the bottom right corner of a dialog box was where peoples eyes were resting when they'd finished reading the text in the dialog. So it followed from there that the OK button should go there. It's been hashed out on various gnome.org mailing lists and it's pretty much the same conclusion that Apple came to with MacOS.

And no, it's never caused me much confusion.

Or is it...

[tweakt]

if you are using Gnome 2.0, you're the one asking for abuse. *ugh*

WindowMaker compatibility?

[greeneggsnspam]

Does anyone know if you can use WindowMaker (0.80) as your default WM with Gnome2?

Isn't running linux abuse enough?

[SensitiveMale]

I think it is.

Re:gnome-panel

[MatrixLab]

Yeah, I have the same problem here... And I can't seem to find the transparency feature either... I loved that one, made the panel look really sexy, imho!

speed?

[bcrowell]

Well, I came to Linux from MacOS, so to me both KDE and Gnome seem too much like Windows :-)

What about speed? I lost interest in Gnome because the version I tried was so insanely slow. Actually it probably wasn't so much Gnome itself that was slow, but Nautilus and Evolution. Anyhow, what is happening on the speed front? In principle, I like the idea that all this stuff is tightly integrated, and I like the Bonobo concept. It all sounds great, but for example, Evolution 1.0 takes 16 seconds to load, which is just way too long. (This is on a brand-spanking-new machine, too!)

I guess I'm just inclined to cynicism because I see how commercial software gets slower and slower with every release -- hope the reverse is happening with Gnome & co. For now, I'm sticking with KDE.

Re:speed?

[Menthos]

I guess I'm just inclined to cynicism because I see how commercial software gets slower and slower with every release -- hope the reverse is happening with Gnome & co.

You won't get disappointed. A lot of people (me included) can testify that it is a lot faster.

Re:speed?

[srn_test]

> Well, I came to Linux from MacOS, so to me both KDE and Gnome seem too much like Windows :-)

Indeed, most of the "useability" stuff that's been going on in Gnome is either:

a) Changes to make it more like Windows, or
b) Removal of useful features that could confuse first time users.

It appears Gnome is increasignly aimed at people with limited short-term memory who have recently changed from Windows.

Sad really, it could have been good.

Re:speed?

[srn_test]

Indeed, I have. I've been pretty thouroughly shouted down, though. I no longer bother.

late?

[Nomad128]

Wasn't the release supposed to be June 21? I thought they were saying all along that they'd be right on time....

http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/schedule/

Re:late?

[StarHeart]

Yes, it was supposed to be June 21st. I heard last night in #gnome that it might be released on June 26th or something like that. But now that RC2 is out I bet it will be at least another two weeks.

Debian...

[7-Vodka]

Now that's some fucking bullshit. I waited for kde3 to be included in debian unstable for months and it's STILL not included. KDE3 is more featurefull, more mature, easy as hell to build and has a LOT of applications. Quite the opposite of gnome2 yet gnome2 is gonna be included first. BOGGLES the mind.

Re:Debian...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because of the debian developers that handles the KDE packages and the debian developers that handle the GNOME packages. It's not some kind of conspiration. The KDE-people have probably worked hard with trying to get KDE 2.2 packages good enough for Woody. The GNOME developers have made other priorities.

Hangover Prevention

[cpeterso]

A hangover is caused by dehydration. To prevent a hangover, you should drink AT LEAST as much water as alcohol before you go to sleep. If you alternate alcohol and water drinks as you are partying, even better. Good luck!

Report of Abuse

[erroneus]

I'm not sure if I was abusing Gnome2 by installing it but here's what I did and tell me if I did that wrong.

I installed redhat 7.3 cleanly. Then I installed all the updates as provided by the redhat tool that comes with it.

When I heard about the Gnome abuse request, I decided to download the RC2. Well, I downloaded the ximian redcarpet utility and told it to upgrade everything using the Gnome2 development channel.

At first everything seemed to go well except that my desktop settings weren't preserved. Now too many things are breaking to keep track of. The screen saver doesn't work either. I think I'll wait a bit longer... 'til like Gnome 2.1.

Re:Report of Abuse

[laserjet]

it's still in release candidate stage, dude. if you download it, you are testing it to see if it works.

if everyone had your attitude, we sure would have some shitty software!

Major problem

[be-fan]

Does anybody else wish bad mojo on the guy who decided to give Pango yet another font configuration system? I mean I just got a hang of dealing with the standard X11, Xft, and ghostscript font configs, and now somebody introduces another one with Pango? Does the clue train just not make stops in GTK-land anymore?

Solaris 9 already released

[lliinnuuxxlover]

Hey, Solaris 9 has already been released. On the other hand, I would have loved to see Gnome 2 in Solaris 9. Anyone know of timeframe when sun would release gnome support in solaris 9