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?

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.

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: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

[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.

"Gnome 2.0 RC2 Asks For Abuse"

[Second_Derivative]

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

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.

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....

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.

Or is it...

[tweakt]

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