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?

[sharkey]

Isn't Gnome abuse a felony in most states?

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

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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

"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!

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.

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.

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;

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.

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?!

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?

[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.

Gnome is Dead

[hey!]

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

Or is it...

[tweakt]

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

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.

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.

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?

Re:A Haiku for you!

[laserjet]

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

where did he go?