GNOME 2.0 Released

MAXOMENOS writes "The GNOME team has announced the release of GNOME 2.0. You can get more information about the GNOME 2.0 system here." Congratulations to everyone involved. Use the mirrors...

Comments

Oh, this is news and SC2 isn't :)

[Junta]

I'll burn some karma here, but to those who want to know, Star Control 2 is being ported to Linux, Mac, and Windows at long last, see details at this url:
http://www.classicgaming.com/starcontrol/

Get To Those Mirrors!

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME FTP Sites This site is mirrored at:

• United States and Canada

  ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Gnome
  ftp://ftp.rpmfind.net/linux/gnome.org/
  ftp://ftp.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome/
  ftp://ftp.twoguys.org/GNOME
  ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/mirrors/site/ftp.gnome.org / ub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp3.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome
  ftp://archive.progeny.com/GNOME/

• Australia

  ftp://planetmirror.com/pub/gnome

• Europe

  ftp://ftp.easynet.nl/mirror/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.unina.it/pub/linux/GNOME
  ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/gnome.org
  ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME
  ftp://ftp.codefactory.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.dataplus.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.dit.upm.es/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.no.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/X11/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.tr.gnome.org/pub/GNOME

• South America

  ftp://linux.cem.itesm.mx/pub/mirrors/gnome.org

Last updated Wed Jun 26 03:18:01 2002 from our mirror database (webmaster@gnome.org).

I have a mirror here for you people to use

[Saint Aardvark]

It's right here on my VIC-20's tape drive. The URL is --

Cripes, already slashdotted. You bastards!

Re:I have a mirror here for you people to use

[microbob]

Ha! Funny you say that, I just ran across an old pile of VIC-20 tapes the other day. I just laughed....

Re:Sweet!

[georgeb]

tell me about it... well we just have to wait for the next garnome now, because I have a feeling that we'll have wait for Ximian Desktop 2.0 a little longer.

Excellent work all!

[plastercast]

Good work everyone! I've been using gnome2 from cvs for some time now, and I am impressed with, and greatful for, all of your work. It is an excelent desktop, and one that no longer makes linux seem a compromise.

I cant wait..

[NiGHTSFTP]

To see a head-to-head Gnome2 vs. KDE3 showdown!

Yeehaw!

Re:I cant wait..

[daemonc]

How about this one, from a long time KDE supporter?

Re:I cant wait..

[Anonymous Coward]

That article is long on bitching about KDE 3, and short on evaluation of Gnome 2. The author pretty much admits that he'll need to invest some time learning Gnome 2. Once he gains some experience with Gnome perhaps he'll be in a position to write a real comparison. Until then, however, he's just blowing off steam.

Screenshots

[frantzdb]

For the lazy, here are the Screenshots.

Great work to everyone who helped with this. Gnome2 is amazing.

--Ben

Re:Screenshots

[MAXOMENOS]

Yep, slashdotted. The GNOME.org sysadmins are popping the Tums right about now...

Re:Screenshots

[frantzdb]

I'll have those mirrored soon here.

--Ben

Re:Screenshots

[sfraggle]

Here are some screenshots of my own. These arent the exact released version but they are fairly recent; there should be little visible difference:

• Nautilus - being used as a control panel to set the desktop background
  
• EoG and Xbill
  
• The new terminal program, yelp (help system) and the sound recorder - You can see anti aliasing in the yelp window
  
  

Re:Screenshots

[FrostedWheat]

Ever get the feeling these screenshots are more about showing of the backdrops than the actual desktop manager? ;)

gnome and mozilla released in the same month!

[SpanishInquisition]

What's next, Duke Nukem Forever?

Re:gnome and mozilla released in the same month!

[colmore]

Don't forget Neverwinter Nights!!!

When did we first hear about that, '99?

Re:gnome and mozilla released in the same month!

[Fnord]

And Warcraft 3. How many times has that game been completely redesigned?

Re:gnome and mozilla released in the same month!

[Graspee_Leemoor]

"Don't forget Neverwinter Nights!!!"

It's released, dumb-ass- I've been playing it all week.

graspee

Re:gnome and mozilla released in the same month!

[colmore]

exactly my point... think about it... think about it... hurting yourself yet? ok, now to stop the pain, hold a claw hammer backwards in your outstretched arms and pull your hands toward your face as fast as you can.

call me in the morning.

Re:gnome and mozilla released in the same month!

[Graspee_Leemoor]

" hold a claw hammer backwards in your outstretched arms and pull your hands toward your face as fast as you can."

Ok, so I misunderstood you, and called you a dumb-ass, but dude, that was graphic! Couldn't you just have laughed at me for being a dumb-ass and left it at that?

graspee

Re:gnome and mozilla released in the same month!

[RestiffBard]

uh yep these are surely signs of the endtimes. I'm getting back in my y2k bunker.

Re:gnome and mozilla released in the same month!

[colmore]

It wasn't really directed at you. I was just trying to give the people a chuckle. Maybe I need to take my meds...

Re:gnome and mozilla released in the same month!

[Graspee_Leemoor]

No problem. Quite weird how I got +2 just for moaning about it though, isn't it? Oh well.

graspee

Re:gnome and mozilla released in the same month!

[VoiceOfRaisin]

yes off topic. but if you are holding the hammer backwards, why would you specify a claw hammer? the part that would hit you would be the head of the hammer if it were backwards, a ball pean hammer or other kinds would have exactly the same effect..

Re:gnome and mozilla released in the same month!

[Blikkie]

What's next, Duke Nukem Forever?

Who knows, maybe GNU/HURD 1.0?

Yummy

[theEdgeSMAK]

I wonder when gentoo will put it in the portage tree..

Re:Yummy

[cat5]

Yeah.. I have my fingers ready to go for 'emerge gnome2'

Let me at it.... Will be nice to have Gnome 2 and kde 3.0.1 on my laptop.

Re:Yummy

[mudfly]

it is already included in Gentoo, it is just masked out by default. Take a look at the 3.0 version of Gentoo as it includes GCC 3.X that is needed to compile Gnome2. I also can't wait to see what emerge -p gnome will look like (eek).

Re:Sweet!

[akvalentine]

I'm willing to bet that Gentoo will have it ready quite soon. . . Or at least I hope!

the feature I want

[tps12]

Situation: I am browsing the web in Galeon, editting an image in Gimp, or doing something else in some Gnome application.

Now, I decide to save a document. I go to the File menu and select Save..., and am presented with the familiar "save" dialog. The default or current filename is in the text box at the bottom, and the directory navigation boxes are above.

Suppose further that I want to now save the file in a different directory. So I select a new directory, and the filename disappears.

Has this been fixed in 2.0?

Re:the feature I want

[georgeb]

This one's been bugging many people in gnome 1.x for a long time. I remember I have checked and saw that gnome2.x solves this... right?

Re:the feature I want

[akvalentine]

It's been fixed in Ximian Gnome. I can only assume that the fix would make it into Gnome2.

But then, what the hell do I know?

Re:the feature I want

[acroyear]

Oddly enough, that bug's been a "feature" of Motif's FileSelectionBox for over a decade now. I wonder if Lesstif ever did anything about it...

Re:the feature I want

[xkahn]

Interestingly, this has been fixed in Ximian GNOME for several months now.

Re:the feature I want

[Sir Joltalot]

I know what you mean. Especially a pain in the ass when downloading in Galeon. I have different subdirs in my ~/downloads dir -- sources, images, videos, mp3s, etc. So when I download and image, and before that downloaded a tarball, I have to change dirs. And in so doing the filename disappears. I curse it every time it happens...

So thank you, thank you very *very* much whoever is responsible for fixing it. You've made a lot of people happy!

Re:the feature I want

[brandonj]

yes

-Brandon

Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[OmniVector]

What advantages does gnome have? Why would i go with it over KDE 3?
Just a question, not for the sake of argument. i'm a linux desktop newbie.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[georgeb]

I really think it's a matter of taste rather than functionality. Both KDE and GNOME are huge undertakements and both seem to have their userbase... Well, of course I like gnome, but wouldn't mind working in KDE either.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[ralphie98]

As far as I know, the main differences between gnome and KDE are pretty much personal preference. I was a huge gnome fan until I decided to try out KDE 2 one day on a whim...haven't turned back since. It all depends on which interface you like more. I haven't had a chance to try the latest versions of either so it's possible I could change my mind again.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[MeNeXT]

If you have the disk space install them both. Then you can decide for yourself. The diffs aren't much it's just the apps that require certain dependancies. As a metter of fact you can have both installed and choose on login which you would prefer for the day in this way you can also run KDE apps in GNOME and vise versa.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[jaaron]

Personally I think the biggest advantage to GNOME is that you can choose your window manager. Now to a Linux newbie that may not mean much, but for someone who has been using Linux for a little while that can be a very nice feature. KDE is great and it's probably best for someone with a Windows background just starting with Linux. KDE is more of an "all-in-one" package. This means a consistant look and feel. GNOME is more component oriented. I can take out one part of GNOME (like the window manager) and replace it with another. That feature adds some complexity and also the feel that some of the applications don't always belong together, but the flexibility is really nice. You can get all the advantages of a desktop, but run a light-weight windows manager that is specifically tuned for your needs.

At least that's my $0.02

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[snofla]

If you have come from Windows, then you'll probably feel more comfortable with KDE3.
I'm a developer, so I'm prejudiced:
you must be really really really self-confident to decide to write a web browser like Konqueror from scratch.
I don't see anything like that in the GNOME world. (And even gtkhtml was a C port of the KDE khtml library...)

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[DrSkwid]

that's odd
I use kde2 stuff all the time and I use enlightenment

konqueror works just fine

is kde3 different in this respect?

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[tempest303]

This question will always be a matter of personal preference, and the ultimate answer is, "Install them both and see which one you like best!"

But you've heard that already, and it's not what you were looking for. ;-)

What you really wanted was Gnome's advantages over KDE. For me, it comes down to a few things...

1) Seems speedier on my 400mhz workstation. This is subjective, but I think it's pretty apparent. YMMV! On faster machines, this is less of an issue, but I don't have a faster machine, so it is a big deal to me. :-)

2) Application "consistency": I personally find Galeon, Evo, and Gnumeric superior to Konquoror, KMail, and Koffice's spreadsheet, so having those former apps match my desktop is nice. While you can run Gnome/GTK apps in KDE, and vice-versa, having your themes between your desktop and Galeon, Evolution, Gnumeric, etc, is really cool.

3) This is the real kicker for me: Gnome 2 is, IMHO, much easier to configure and work with, and is far more intuitive. One of the Gnome 2 philosophies is that things should "just work", and use intelligent default settings wherever possible, instead of offering "6 equally broken ways to do it, and let[ing] the user pick one."* This means that while Gnome is still configurable, you don't have to wade through a nearly endless sea of preference options just to find that one button you were looking for. *cough*Kontrol center*cough* ;-) The tradeoff is that you might not like the default that's been picked, but I've really found that I haven't missed anything so far. There are a few features I'd like to see (re)added, like the system tray, but that's coming very soon in a future release.

* thanks to Havoc Pennington for the great quote.

Once again, though, the only way to decide is to try for yourself.

Happy GNOMEing!

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[shadow303]

Umm... you can use different window managers with KDE also. I know, because at one point, I accidently ran KDE with twm for a window manager.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[capt.Hij]

Well... KDE is mighty slow and gnome is only really slow.

Gnome 2.0 and KDE 3 seem fine on recent machines with enough memory. (Howz that for vague?) But we have a lab with a bunch of 5 year old machines and 32 mb or ram. We *have* to use icewm on them. It is possible to get gnome running on them but kde just plain won't run on them.

If you've got a recent machine there isn't much difference between the two, except that kde has some different features which are kind of nice. If you do not have a big machine then gnome is much nicer to work on. If you've got an old beater, then your best bet is icewm.

If it weren't for ice we would not have a back door for installing linux. Our argument to the money holders is that linux lets us use older machines and still be efficient. We can't do that with these "modern" window managers. The code bloat has just plain gotten out of hand. Thank goodness for ice! It allows us to sneak linux in the back door which then permeates the system!

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[Teancom]

No. :-P

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[FattMattP]

Personally I think the biggest advantage to GNOME is that you can choose your window manager.

How is that an advantage? KDE let's you choose your window manager, too.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[Arandir]

Personally I think the biggest advantage to GNOME is that you can choose your window manager.

FUD, FUD, FUD, no go away!

GNOME will use any window manager, but prefers those that are GNOME compliant. KDE will use any window manager, but prefers those that are GNOME compliant. The fact that KDE ships with its own window manager is about as irrelevant as the fact that GNOME does as well.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[Khazunga]

My choice for older machines is more along the lines of Windowmaker. Real good usability, no bloat. I don't need anything else.

In fact, it's what I'm using in my brand new 1.4Ghz laptop, so I guess it's also my choice for fast hardware.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[reverius]

Actually, WindowMaker is hugely bloated. Since you say you're running it... check out the RAM usage some time. Then compare that to, say, IceWM. Or Blackbox. ;)

Now it doesn't look so un-bloated, eh? It all depends on what you're comparing it to. Compared to KDE or Gnome, I'll admit, it's far less bloated.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[logout]

One sure advantage of Gnome over KDE is that Gnome is more like, sort of, Mac OSX. The major developers of Eazel, now busted out of the market unfortunately, are mostly from Apple computer. They tried to implement more innovative features that even Apple was hesitating to do. One good thing about Gnome is that it targets both the new users and the experienced users as well; one ideal for Gnome project is the desktop design that both novices and experts can enjoy.

Becaus of this background, Gnome is often appealing to the users with interests in Macintosh desktops than Windows desktop. It is true that both Linux desktops, KDE and Gnome, are really magnificent. No kidding at all. However, KDE's approach is more like Windows alternative rather than designing a desktop with totally different concepts that had never been tried. In my opinion, Gnome can be a alternative to Mac OSX if Gnome can keep its current pace for a few more years. :)

If you prefer the word 'liberal' (or radical, to be frankly) I think Gnome is the Linux desktop choice for you. It is still unstable compared to the rock-solid KDE and its amazing consistency. However, it's more fun to watch the progress of Gnome than KDE. Gnome has some distict attractiveness that other desktops are lacking in.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[oyenstikker]

just do this in your x startup script:

exec someotherwm &
exec startkde

KDE will tell you that another wm is already running, and will let it keep running. (kde3 anyways)

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[SmittyTheBold]

Instead of IceWM, I might suggest Blackbox or Fluxbox.

They're smoooove.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[legis]

Just over 1 meg on my machine. I am not worried.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[0x0d0a]

KDE will use any window manager, but prefers those that are GNOME compliant

Oh it does, does it?

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[BrokenHalo]

I agree. Some time ago, I did some fairly basic benchmarking of both Gnome 1.4 and KDE 2.2, looking at memory footprint, features, stability, ease-of-use and general coolness.

Both used about the same resources (which is to say, lots). Gnome allows you to use multiple window managers (though I can't imagine ever wanting to do so), and both have lots of nifty features.

Where Gnome does it for me, though, is that it's so much nicer to look at on the screen. I know you can tweak icons, etc, but KDE always seemed a bit cluttered to me. And having every utility and app with a name beginning with K just drove me to Kistraction, for some reason much more so than the ubiquitous G in Gnome.

Re:Gnome 2 vs KDE 3

[Kashif Shaikh]

I agree with many points you have brought up. My primary concern with KDE3 is the baffling number of "k" programs that don't really work in my experience. And the ones that do work, well, don't work too well(they are not too stable...Konqueror)

There's Kthis, kthat, etc. And then you got KWord,KPresenter, etc. I mean WTF! Desktop Managers should only focus on the desktop. Let groups who specialize in office-like suites do their job(OpenOffice,StarOffice,etc). Make a few k-style programs, not knote, kjot, kedit, kview...where they all pretty much fuckin' to the same thing. This point is fucking serious.

I guess my main gripe with KDE is that is tries to do too much without being focused. Sure, I love the konsole program, and love the Konqueror with its ability to add a terminal to the bottom pane...but KDE in the end just pisses me off.

Also, kde doesn't have a lot of originality. Meaning it is too much like fucking Windows--but not consisent in that regard. This is open source--there is no freakin' manager trying to say "release! release!". At the very least they should think of new ways of doing things better than windows, simpler than windows. If Apple can do Aqua, so can we.

I liked the design approach of Gnome2, where they actually did usability testing and were looking for new ways to do things and remained focus. This is why I am really looking forward to Gnome2.

YES.

[luge]

Thank god :)

Re:YES.

[doorbot.com]

Thank god

I would wager that an omniscient diety had exactly nothing to do with it.

Otherwise you're suggesting that the Gnome programmers received divine inspiration, and as such the Gnome source code should become a religious text. While one might argue that one can find religion in the Linux kernel source code, extending that analogy to Gnome will merely aggravate the KDE zealots (who believe their desktop environment is the true word of God!)

We have enough religious wars for one planet already...

Themes!

[1010011010]

Okay, Theme People, get busy! :)

... and while you're at it, come up with a way to make GTK1 and GTK2 themes match ...

... and since KDE can import GTK themes, make those match as well ...

:)

Re:Themes!

[markbthomas]

We need Mosfet's Liquid for GTK 1 and 2.

:)

Re:Themes!

[Prior Restraint]

Okay, Theme People, get busy! :)

Speaking of which, is there anything approximating a Themes HOWTO? I'd like to play with making a custom theme, but would rather not stumble through the process of learning via minor tweaks to existing ones (especially since that might not reveal all available options).

Nice...

[Per Wigren]

I'll probably not switch away from KDE 3 anytime soon though.. I tried the last release candidate and wasn't very impressed.. GNOME is nice, but it still feels like everything is glued together instead of nicely integrated.. Maybe in a year or two..

Re:Nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful? This was mod'd as insightful?

Let me try!

Hm. I like Fresca. I don't think I'll stop drinking water and just drink Fresca, though. I tried just drinking Fresca once, and I didn't like it. Water quenches my thirst better than Fresca. Maybe in a year or two I'll try again.

Re:Nice...

[groomed]

Integration versus "glued together" is an eternal holy war. I like the way GNOME works. I think KDE is a bit bulky but I can see how it does a good job of doing what it's supposed to do. KDE as a project definitely has the sharper focus and the clearer goals. I suppose people might find some of that clarity missing from GNOME, but it does not bother me.

As long as GNOME keeps delivering the technology and does not try to compete with KDE in the Windows-lookalike competition too much, I think both will continue to do just fine.

Re:Makes of mockery of the ealier story

[colmore]

I don't know what the submitter/editor was thinking on the Linux Is Dead article, because if you were one of the four people who actually read the article, it said no such thing. (In fact, quite the opposite.)

But yes, this, KDE, Moz, and the ever-improving stability of the 2.4 kernel are quite forceful rebuttals of (real) Linux is Dead claims.

If only BeOS had had the kind of community support that Linux enjoys.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

[microbob]

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Microbob

Blizzard in Hell

[Junta]

Gnome2, Mozilla 1.0, Neverwinter Nights..... Damn cold in hell, is amazon turning a profit?
Duke Nukem Forever and Doom 3 just need to come out, and as a nice touch it would be cool if Star Control 2 would be re-released for Linux, Mac, and windows.... oh wait it is, hell is damn cold.

Now time to watch my karma go down the drain, but at least this time I was *less* offtopic.

Re:Blizzard in Hell

[cjpez]

Jesus Fucking Christ, Star Control 2 is going to be available for LINUX? To hell with Gnome, man, that's fantastic!

(Sorry 'bout the language, if you're offended. If you've wasted as much of your life on SC2 as I have, you'll understand.)

DAMN, but that's cool.

Re:Blizzard in Hell

[codemachine]

Damn cold in hell, is amazon turning a profit?

Well actually...

Re:Blizzard in Hell

[MrResistor]

Star Control 2 would be re-released for Linux, Mac, and windows.... oh wait [classicgaming.com] it is

...and they're even bsing it on the 3DO version, which rocks the world.

I am squeezing the juice!

Re:Blizzard in Hell

[Junta]

Next thing you know they'll do something crazy like release Warcraft III or something...

Re:Blizzard in Hell

[NachtVorst]

Who cares if it's (slightly) offtopic when StarCon is comming to Linux?

Thanks for the link! I'll keep watching the project and see if I can contribute.

NachtVorst

Re:Blizzard in Hell

[Joe Tie.]

Darn! When you mentioned Neverwinter, for a minute there I thought you meant bioware had officially commented on their missing in action Linux software, or even released something. Timing the release to coincide with gnome2 would have made me forgive everything :)

Re:Blizzard in Hell

[Dwonis]

The real question is: when is Linux coming to StarCon?

Re:Blizzard in Hell

[Junta]

July 3rd is the official release, but it has been gold for a while. It was sarcasm :)

GNOME 2 and replacing default window manager?

[hab136]

Any quick guides to replacing Metacity with say, sawfish, or any other windowmanager worth a crap? Especially on Solaris?

Cascade-only window placement, no alt-drag, no alt-tab.. metacity blows.

Re:GNOME 2 and replacing default window manager?

[Nodatadj]

alt drag and alt tab work for me.

Sucks to be you.

Re:GNOME 2 and replacing default window manager?

[frantzdb]

killall metacity; sawfish&

That said, Metacity is working correctly for me. I'm not sure why it's behaving how you describe, but it's great when it works.

--Ben

Using the Debian packages

[Jeffrey Baker]

I am using the packages from Debian's experimental archive, and they are very usable. GTK+ 2 has many improvements. I love the uncluttered new panels, the simplified control panels. Nautilus is as good as ever :) There are still many bugs in GNOME 2.0, but I suggest that people should not be shy about trying it.

Re:Using the Debian packages

[Genom]

Seeing as it's not in sid yet, mind tossing us a bone with your apt source for Gnome2 experimental packages?

Re:Using the Debian packages

[Jeffrey Baker]

deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ ../project/experiment al main

Re:Using the Debian packages

[Bob The Cowboy]

Nautilus is as good as ever

That, my friend, is not saying much.

;o)

j/k, btw... I've heard Nautilus is much improved for 2.0.... I'll just have to give it a try and leave KDE3 for a few days...

Bill

Re:Using the Debian packages

[Genom]

Much thanks!

Re:Using the Debian packages

[dalutong]

except that i can't get libesd0 >= 0.2.27 (debian unstable has .23...)

Re:Using the Debian packages

[OxOx]

...btw... I've heard Nautilus is much improved for 2.0....

It's improved and faster, and I don't like it. I used to be able to get a cuppa joe while it started, and now it starts too fast. At least OOo is still slow-as-molasses.

Re:Using the Debian packages

[frantzdb]

I have this in addition:

deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free

Re:Using the Debian packages

[uhoreg]

man apt_preferences. apt (at least the one in Woody and up) by default does not upgrade already-installed packages to the experimental version. And for good reason too -- you wouldn't want to be locked out of your machine because you accidentally installed an experimental (broken) PAM release. So read the man page, and fix it yourself. If you use experimental, you should expect to have to do some fixing anyways.

Re:Using the Debian packages

[xRizen]

I can't install nautilus. =( libnautilus2 complains that it can't find some gconf2 backend.

Re:Using the Debian packages

[big.ears]

I read that, and couldn't make any sense out of it. You mind sharing briefly what process you use to 'fix it yourself'?

Re:Using the Debian packages

[Sri Lumpa]

Condensed from http://www.hadess.net/idoru.php3:

1)To your /etc/apt/sources.list, add:
deb ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ ../project/experim ental main
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ ../project/experi mental main

2)type:
apt-get install -t experimental nautilus2 gnome-panel2 gnome-applets2 gnome-utils gnome-terminal gnome-control-center2 sawfish

The bit doing the trick is of course the -t experimental.

3)Wait until everything is downloaded and installed.

One reason, and one reason only

[unformed]

Gnomes are hard working little creatures. They are sworn enemies of the Troll race, and it their duty to kill all Trolls upon sight.

Gnomes work hard, fast, and well. What they create not only shows pure power and eliteness, but also their artistic integrity.

KDE on the other hand stands for K00l D3mon1c E133t. The KDE tribe are the "script-kiddies", the "hacks", in the Lunix Empire. They try to look good, and that is their only objective. While they do succeed on some fronts, they fail miserably on others.

All in all, the KDE's are the George Bush's, wheras the Gnomes are the Alfred Hoffmans.

--

That said, it's just a joke, both are truly kickass, but, IMHO, I prefer Gnome (although recently moving to Fluxbox)....

Re:One reason, and one reason only

[*xpenguin*]

You couldn't be closer to the truth.

How to upgrade

[frooyo]

What exactly do I need to do to upgrade from Gnome 1.4 (the base install from RedHat 7.3) to Gnome 2.0?

Thanks

Re:How to upgrade

[mark_lybarger]

you can wait till oct/nov when RH 8.0 gets here. that will be much eaiser.

otherwise you might try the following about 15 times:

$ ./configure && make
$ su
$ make install

Re:How to upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi frooyo,

The 2.0 is a major release and updates the developer platform. It's going to be a big step in the functionality of GNOME for years to come.

Your distributer should give you an upgrade path when they next to a release. An alternative may be to use Ximian (www.ximian.com) which is a packaged version of GNOME for many Linux distributions such as RedHat, Mandrake, Suse & Debian.

You'll be glad to know that the upgrade should be almost seamless and that your current 1.4 applications will run fine under the new environment. When they are ported to it they'll gain from it's new features and speed.

Cheers,

Steve

Re:How to upgrade

[Tepic]

Only 15?!

I've tried garnome (http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/garnome/), and its worked really well for me. (I don't know if its been fixed now, but you may have to copy a glade-convert script - although probably not exactly that name - to a bin directory at some point.)

Incase you are thinking of running metacity...

[plastercast]

Incause some people out there are running the "experimental" metacity WM, here is configuration tool I wrote that is much nicer to use than the command line.

http://plastercast.tzo.com/~plastercast/Projects /

Re:Yes, it has

[kaustik]

" I think we will see a large influx of users coming over from Microsoft"

For this? I can see the headlines now (front page of course):
LINUX FIXES MINOR BUG - WORLD REJOICES
Come on now, get a grip.

Going down hill with Gnome2

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like Gnome's gone the opposite of KDE lately. KDE's interface is much more tweakable than that of Gnome2. The "simpler" user interface should be an option for those who need it, not a requirement for everyone. I'm impressed with what's been acomplished for Gnome2, but for a power user, they are probably going to drive people to KDE because of the greater tweakabilty it has. It's sad.

Re:Going down hill with Gnome2

[littleRedFriend]

Question is: is gnome2 a user-friendly desktop environment, or a power user environment? I think Gnome2 is becoming much more intuitive to use, and is doing what it is suppose to do: make it easier to switch from an alternative OS. Adding more options, does not make something better, just more painful for a normal user. I believe the programmer should make all the tough decisions, by fixing them in the code.

If you want ultimate tweakability, I can suggest to use the command line.

Re:Going down hill with Gnome2

[KeyserDK]

That's just because you are seeing the official screenshots.

Cant quite remember the name it's something like "sumthing"Configurator =)
There are tweaking apps being worked on, for powerusers. Otherwise you can always use gconf-editor which is well... a bit like regedit (~gconf for gnome) for windows =). Just with comments for each setting.

Re:Going down hill with Gnome2

[ReinoutS]

More intuitive to use...

This may be true in a general sense, but still there are some things in GNOME2 that are so unintuitive it's not funny any more. For instance; place your tasklist applet on a vertical panel. Open lots of apps. Observe that your tasklist becomes crowded with very small task buttons without the tasklist expanding vertically. Now try to make the tasklist use more vertical space- you may reply when you've found it... (it is possible)

Also

[PhysicsGenius]

enterprise porn. Sure with Linux you can view jpgs and even the occasional animated gif. But Linux's support for high-end AVIs and and quicktime codecs is sadly lacking.

Re:Also

[Sir Joltalot]

You should really check out xine -- it's a great video player for Linux. It handles lots of avis, mpgs and movs. Just recently Sorenson support was added to it. I reckon that soon the qt support will be near perfect; Sorenson is the first step, all they need now are the sound codecs, which mPlayer has. So since mPlayer and xine are both OSS, it shouldn't be too hard to get the sound codecs into xine.

In any case, video playback in Linux is certainly quite good these days. I enjoy watching DivX encoded Cowboy Bebop episodes in Linux trouble-free, on a 266MHz laptop!

Re:Also

[Zorikin]

I hardly ever see non-mpeg porn these days. What kind of avi files do you have that can't be handled by avifile or by native linux code?

Some questions

[unformed]

I've been kinda following the Gnome2 prereleases, and it's nice. Glad to hear about the save dialog bugfix.

But some others:
1) The old volume control applet was way nicer than the current one, any possibility of it coming back?
2) I know the Gnome2 applet API is not backwards compatible to the old one. How hard would it be to port a Gnome1 applet to a Gnome2 applet, and when will some docs appear? (Specifically looking into porting the Gaim applet, and some others I can't use anymore)

I think that's it for now...

besides that, good f*g job!

Re:Some questions

[StarHeart]

I agree with you the old volume control applet was alot nicer. I won't be switching to Gnome2 till all the Gnome1 applets I require are ported. I might not even switch then as dumbed down as Gnome2 is.

Re:Some questions

[StarHeart]

I have tried multiple betas of Gnome2 and wasn't impressed. So I have given it a whirl. Yes, I understand it is a developer platform.

Time to emerge gnome and play NWN.

[Razorviro]

Now, just reboot to Linux, and type emerge rsync, and then emerge gnome. No more unmasking packages in package.mask for me. I love Gentoo Linux. I'm using Gnome2RC2 right now, I hope metacity isn't the default window manager anymore. I like sawfish much better. I hope they fixed the bug I submitted about sawfish configurator crashing when you change the default frame style, if they didn't I warn you, don't change it to microGUI.
seeya guys.
Time to download and compile Gnome2, and play some Neverwinter Nights, as my Gnome Monk.
If you're playing NWN online, look out for Cooldy.

GNOME 2, "Ser man p�, GNOME tv�!", is released.

[norpan]

There is no Swedish conspiracy.

http://www.se.gnome.org/conspiracy/

Re:GNOME 2, "Ser man p�, GNOME tv�!", is released.

[kirkb]

You fool! The first rule of the swedish gnome conspiracy is 'don't talk about the swedish gnome conspiracy'.

Re:GNOME 2, "Ser man p�, GNOME tv�!", is released.

[Zenithal]

It's all about the sinister looking laugh commented out in the page.

This is a little spooky.

Re:Patch for direct OpenGL rendering

[frooyo]

You have to be joking, it isn't working with TNT2. Myself and may others out there have TNT2 cards - what exactly doesn't work?

Icons

[MConlon]

I watch the thrashing that goes on on kde-artist everytime somebody makes an icon that looks similar to OSX (normally) or Windows.

The "home" icon in Gnome takes liberties on OSX, as does the terminal, and the process viewer. Hell, one of the screenshots features a straight rip-off of the OSX "Internet" globe.

I'm a little puzzled.

MJC

What desktop is for you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Answer all 5 questions

1) Are you?
a) gay
b) not gay

2) Do you like?
a) 833/\1/\6 37337
b) Ease of use

3) What do you want
a) unstable shit
b) stable and reliable

4) Your eyes like
a) Ugly Motif like interface
b) Sexy desktop

5) What would you like to do
a) Configure your desktop all day
b) Get work done

Results
mostly a's?
Gnome is for you
mostly b's?
KDE is for you!

Disclaimer, its only a fun test, please seek professional advice from doctors to find out the right desktop for your needs!

Stupid question????

[Rossalina W Sanchez]

Is there a list of the exact files I need? It's a shame they can't just bundle all the libs and other stuff into one big rpm to download.

Anyways, if someone can point me to a list of everything I need to update my gnome 1.4 to the new 2.0 I would be very grateful.

Best Regards,
Rossalina

Re:Stupid question????

[Rossalina W Sanchez]

GNOME. Not KDE, I've got KDE, I'm looking for info the files needed for the new GNOME release.

Silly.

Gnome is fresh

[Pierre]

Everybody knows that software is like bread and Gnome 2.0 is BRAND new. So it's much fresher than KDE3.0.

KDE3.0 has been out for months - surely it is getting stale by now!

See GNOME in Action!

[jmd!]

The screenshots off of the main gnome.org page, under "See GNOME in Action!", are from December 1999. Yow. Talk about making yourself look bad. I think it's time to update that section guys. Help yourselves out. GNOME 1.x looked like a toy.

Re:See GNOME in Action!

[luge]

Thanks for bringing it up- we've fixed it and are regenning the web site as we speak.

Some things missing?

[Darth Maul]

Perhaps I'm just missing some things, but I can't find:

1) The window manager switcher (I don't want Sawfish)
2) A lot of the cool panel applets from 1.4 (clock)
3) A way to save a session and have it remember window positions (it'll start programs that were "saved", but they all default to the middle of the desktop)

Can anyone fill me in? Thanks.

Re:Some things missing?

[X-ViRGE]

1) There isn't one yet... that was considered "Advanced" functionality and therefore wasn't given priority. Kill your current window manager, start the new one, then save the session.

2) Clock is under Accessories. The rest probably weren't ported.

3) Remembering window positions is up to your window manager.

Re:Some things missing?

[epukinsk]

Off the top of my head:

1) You can switch windows managers in Applications -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Window Manager

2) The alternative clock applets were not ported to GNOME 2 because it was decided that there should be only one clock applet that is flexible. Having many clock applets was a significant source of confusion for users in Sun's usability test.

3) Where responsibility for saving windows states lies is still a topic of debate. There is a discussion of this that began this weekend on the desktop-devel-list. There was also a more technical discussion of this last month on the wm-spec-list.

Erik

Re:Some things missing?

[Darth Maul]

1) No, that's where it used to be. No longer.

2) But why did "they" choose the one, boring clock? ASClock was far superior.

3) I can't even startup the Sawfish config tools, so it looks like that'll remain a problem for me. None of the sawfish tools startup; a rep-gtk issue, I believe.

Overall, I'm *not* impressed with 2.0. I upgraded from 1.4 about two weeks ago, and have been fighting with things ever since. Can't even get anti-aliased fonts working.

Re:Some things missing?

[akeru]

1) sonofa! I've been running GNOME2 snapshots for so long I can't remember exactly how I got this to work; I've been running Metacity almost as long as GNOME2 (some of the earlier snapshots basically refused to run anything other than Sawfish). One way you can change the window manager is with gconf-editor under "/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager" change
"current" (and probably "default") to point to whatever WM you want to use, log out and log back in.

2) I miss ASClock too. I'm sure someone will do some kind of porting eventually, until then I'll just have to suffer (I don't miss it enough to write it myself).

3) Haven't used sawfish in a long while, can't help here.

Re:Some things missing?

[akeru]

oops, forgot to add in my last reply about 3)Metacity does a better job of this than Sawfish and there is a FAQ about Anti-Aliased text, but the short of it is create a .gnomerc file in your home directory, make it executable and add "export GDK_USE_XFT=1" to the top of it. That's it.

Bloody 2 minute slashdot timeout . . .

Re:Some things missing?

[GauteL]

The window manager switcher is AFAIK and hopefully gone.
You can still switch WM by using the gconf-editor, or just kill the current WM and start your own.. it will be saved in the session.

Choosing WM has nothing to do in a complete desktop-environment. Way too potentially harmful, and much better to include the option without it being visible in the GUI.

Re:Some things missing?

[Eil]

But why did "they" choose the one, boring clock? ASClock was far superior.

Agreed. I have ASClock on all of my desktops. It was about the coolest-looking part of gnome 1.4 and would fit right in with gnome 2. If I knew my way around gnome applets, I'd bring it back and also give it an option to shrink to digital-only mode for smaller-sized panels.

Guess I'll have to find out if the applet will still compile and work fine in Gnome 2.

Re:Some things missing?

[menesis]

Guess I'll have to find out if the applet will still compile and work fine in Gnome 2.

No, most of the applet code needs to be rewritten when porting applets to gnome2:

• Applets are bonobo controls now, at least applet-widget was replaced by panel-applet with different API;
• You need to use gconf to store configuration, which means you have to rewrite all configuration management;
• GnomePixmap/GtkPixmap/GtkBitmap were replaced by GtkImage/GdkPixbuf, and in case of themeable applets like asclock, this also means a bit of rewrite.

Unlike in gnome 1.4, there is no built-in clock in menu panel, so you can put any clock you like there. I am sure they will be written, just not distributed with the main gnome-panel.

The current clock will not have themes, though it could have a bit more configurability, i.e. to change font or time format.

I feel proud...

[dalutong]

The guy who's porting SC2 to linux is my buddy chris nelson. I feel especially cool because i'm the one who installed debian unstable on his laptop (toshiba something or other -- stupid not-quite-eepro100 NICs...) and got him into SDL (that took A LOT of pushing)

he was already a brilliant OpenGL programmer (luminescent is his handle on sf.net... he has some cool stuff there) but only delt with windows.

so.. if you like SC2 for linux... thank him, but thank me for getting him into linux too :)

(oh. to his credit.. he only started using linux and SDL a year ago... and loved enlightenment so much that he's stuck to it.. hehe)

Re:I feel proud...

[minus_273]

yeah chris is the man, I saw some of the stuff he did here.. very cool :)
im gonna have to send this thred to him hes gonna love it!!!

P2P - giFT

[NetMasta10bt]

Heres a wild thought.... When major releases like this come out, why don't we use the wonderful OpenFastTrack P2P service? giFT is the really easy to get working, and is super reliable right now. Check it out.

http://gift.sourceforge.net/

Make sure you get the curses front-end (giFTcurs).

Just zip up the tarballs, or RPM's and throw them on the network?

Gnome3

[mr. marbles]

any word on what's planned for Gnome 3 yet? Gnome 2 looks like i'll provide many of the things lacking in Gnome that everyone's been screaming for. But i'm far more interested to see what the Gnome team has in mind now that it's done cleaning up Gnome and are now ready to write Gnome 3. Both Gnome and KDE provides much needed components to the linux desktop but none of the work has really been innovative. The KDE people never aimed to go beyond the current idea of a user desktop, but the Gnome people looks like they're far more motivated to work on something more interesting. Miguel de Icaza seems to be someone who's more interested in pushing the envelope of the desktop.

Re:Gnome3

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi mr_marbles,

Much of the immediate effort will be on the quick release 2.0.1 and 2.2.0 (I guess).

The .0 releases are for updates to the developer platform which is what 2.0 is all about. So the underlying infrastructure and API has been much improved.

The next effort is to take advantage of the developer platform, which will be with us for a few years, to implement more features that users want. So you should see more application development and porting over the coming months.

Even better, you can help GNOME add the features you want. By making feature requests, tracking down bugs and spending a little time on the project a massive impact can be made. If you'd like to help trip over to developer.gnome.org to find out more!

Steve

Christmas in June! Well Done!

[Kaypro]

Just figured out every last thing I could about RC2 and now this. Thank you to everyone who made this possible!

And off I go to "emerge gnome" (thanks gentoo)....

:-)

Mirrors for Gnome2

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME FTP Sites

GNOME FTP Sites This site is mirrored at:

• United States and Canada

  ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Gnome
  ftp://ftp.rpmfind.net/linux/gnome.org/
  ftp://ftp.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome/
  ftp://ftp.twoguys.org/GNOME
  ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/mirrors/site/ftp.gnome.org / ub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp3.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome
  ftp://archive.progeny.com/GNOME/

• Australia

  ftp://planetmirror.com/pub/gnome

• Europe

  ftp://ftp.easynet.nl/mirror/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.unina.it/pub/linux/GNOME
  ftp://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/gnome.org
  ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME
  ftp://ftp.codefactory.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.dataplus.se/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.dit.upm.es/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.no.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/X11/GNOME/
  ftp://ftp.tr.gnome.org/pub/GNOME

• South America

  ftp://linux.cem.itesm.mx/pub/mirrors/gnome.org

Does this mean ???

[pdqlamb]

Does this mean gnome-panel won't crash on half the machines it's installed on any more?

I'm just about ready to leave Redhat over this one. If only KDE weren't such a memory hawg.

vs. kde3

[brsmith4]

This looks a lot better than KDE3. Lets just wait for the themes to start rolling in... ahhhh eye candy!

well.. I guess this means...

[Lu1g1]

..another 10 hours of gargnomeing. I must say I really like Gnome2 even if there is still some more work to do. But 2.1 (or was it 2.2) will fix most pending issues, I hope.

Keep the good stuff coming!

Ximian/Gnome comparison?

[Kickstart70]

Has anyone had a chance to really compare this release of Gnome 2.0 to Ximian Gnome? Has the core Gnome team sought to add the features and functionality that Ximian provided?

Thanks,

Kickstart

CVSGnome 0.2.2 buildscript for TARBALLS and CVS

[Anonymous Coward]

grab that amazing script from

http://www.fh-wilhelmshaven.de/~akcaagaa/

it builds you gnome 2.0.0 from tarballs

1) grab that script
2) change PREFIXDIR="" to point to a location you want to install gnome 2.0.0
3) enter 'world' for CVS build or 'world stable' for gnome 2.0.0 released tarball build.
4) grab popcorn, coke or get out for a fuck no matter what, lay back and enjoy the show.

you dont need to manually download tarballs or something.. all automatically...

ximian gnome

[brsmith4]

Does ximian gnome support the AA fonts yet? Any one know?

Re:ximian gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

GNOME 2.0 - the new release does support AntiAliased fonts. When you get the new platform running you need to add this to your environment:

export GDK_USE_XFT=1

There is also a capplet I believe.

Ximian (www.ximian.com) will make a user release of GNOME 2.0 I am sure. Though as this is a .0 release my guess is that they will take a while to do lots of user and stability testing so that you get the most polished version possible.

As you will see the new platform is a big step forward making applications like Nautilus faster and use less memory - that's got to be a good thing for a new version to use less resources ;-)

Thanks,

Steve

Re:ximian gnome

[drunkahol]

But which file do I add this line to???

I've managed to get AA on one of my user logins, but not the other 3. In other words - I've no idea how I did it.

Can someone tell me which file to edit to put this line in???

And for the next release event ...

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Tomorrow (Jun/27) Miguel de Icaza itself will present Gnome 2.0 in a event promoted by the "Free Software Project", a local state-sponsored initiative in Free Software, here in the south of Brazil (Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)

For those near by, here are some pointers:

Roadshow calendar:
http://www.gnome.org/resources/calendar/roadshow/G NOMEenelSur.html

The local announcement and invitation:
http://www.softwarelivre.rs.gov.br/index.php?menu= mais_noticias2&cod=1024761626&tab=1
(Portuguese only!)

Way to go guys!

features I want (reuse compenents!)

[Cardhore]

What would be even better is a miniature nautilus window for the open / save dialog. I mean, you already have nautilus, why reinvent the wheel with a different open/save dialog box? Using Nautilus would add consistency and functionality. Taking this a step further, "panels" could be used as application toolbars, such that the user can add or remove "applets" (which would be funcitons in the program) to his toolbars to customize them however he likes. Again this would be reusing components. I have submitted these suggestions to both gnome and kde but both did not like them :(

Re:features I want (reuse compenents!)

[mobosplash]

>> What would be even better is a miniature nautilus
>>window for the open / save dialog. I mean, you
>>already have nautilus, why reinvent the wheel with
>>a different open/save dialog box?

This is a weakness in every Gui. Why are the open/save boxes so different than the regular file management view? I use Mac OS 9, OS X and KDE every day and WinNT fairly often and have been wondering this for years.

Re:features I want (reuse compenents!)

[ewoods]

I agree! This is what Windows does and it works awesome! I can cut a file from explorer and paste it into the open/save dialog and then select it from there and open/save it. That is very cool. I can also rename/delete/etc. right in those ddialogs. Not necessary, but very cool!

Re:features I want (reuse compenents!)

[luge]

Yeah. Some people are actually looking at this for gnome2.2, FWIW. It's a non-trivial hack but would be worth doing if it could be done right.

Re:features I want (reuse compenents!)

[Sir Joltalot]

Well, sort of. But in Windows I don't think the file save dialog is actually an Explorer window. It's hooked up with OLE so that cut/copy/paste works but as far as I know it's not an Explorer window. I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong. It sure doesn't look like it embeds Explorer...

Sorry, I have to agree

[LowneWulf]

Sorry mods, the guy is RIGHT!
Star Control 2 ports are FAR more important than Gnome 2.0. Star Control was changing lives before Gnome had even been heard of. This is the news of the century!

Re:Themes are bad UI design.

[tempest303]

So use Metacity for your window manager and Scalable Gorilla for Nautilus. The former can use just XML files for describing a theme in a vector format, and the latter uses SVG for all icons, etc, so it scales up and down flawlessly. As for GTK, there are plenty of fine themes that scale well.

I do agree, though, that I should NOT have to learn how to hack this stuff just to learn to theme. I hope to god someone makes Metacity and GTK theming programs, or we'll never get the same quality themes as Windowblinds, etc.

I'd do it myself, but my codefoo is nonexistant. ;-)

How to use another window manager under KDE?

[neoshmengi]

I want to run enlightenment under KDE, but I don't know how. Under the log in I have the option to use either the default KDE manager OR enlightenment. How do I use both? Please be specific... It's easy to switch under Gnome, but I haven't figured it out for KDE 3.

Re:How to use another window manager under KDE?

[Arandir]

Several ways. Probably the most straightforward if you aren't afraid of editors, is to edit the file "startkde" and replace the line "ksmserver --restore" with "ksmserver --restore --windowmanager enlightenment".

The startkde script really needs to allow the --windowmanager switch to make it easier to switch between various ones. Or better yet, a ksmserver control panel to change the window manager. GNOME (at least 1.x) was definitely easier to switch windowmanagers with.

p.s. Or there's always the Billy Bob method of switching window managers the Arkansas way: bring up an xterm/konsole and put it in the middle of the screen. Kill kwin. Now launch enlightenment form that xterm...

Re:Gnome 2 aimed at developers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

You're absolutely right!

This release is a .0 launch is means that this is an upgrade to the developer platform. This effectively covers the underlying libraries and core setup such as the panel. The idea is that new technology will support the user visible development for years to come.

Originally it was thought there would be very few user visible changes but you can't keep a good Free Software developer down and there are actually loads of improvements! I think if you give GNOME 2.0 a go you will see that there are lots of usability improvements - new clearer icons, better dialogs, more straightforward configuration and more.

The future for GNOME is 2.0.1 and then 2.2.0. These are reserved for application porting and user visible improvements. So you should see lots more goodies in the future.

If you have a moment do give 2.0 a try out - particularly after your distribution has caught up, or use ximian GNOME (www.ximian.com). I think you'll find that the reality is even better than the new reports!

Good Luck,

Steve

Re:I now see why that MSNBC story came out today..

[plugger]

I read the opening of that article, and it looked like someone bashing linux on MSNBC. Scroll down though, and there is a balanced, cautiously upbeat assessment of Linux's strengths and prospects. It looks like the headline writer just wrote something random and trollish, but underneath is a pretty interesting article.

What's new?

[grouchomarxist]

Look here.

Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[wray]

I must object. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I found gnome 2 much harder to configure. The worst is the endless windows registry type settings in GConf (even with the GConf editor.) I tend to want to change things per application, and finding the specific option is nearly impossible under this scheme.

Additionally, I really dislike what has happened with gnome 2 in configurability. Making intelligent defaults is all fine and good, but when you can't get it how you want, frustration ensues. The reason I never used KDE was precisely this lack of configurability. I have heard this same comment from many people and I predict that an outcry of configurability problems will happen.

As an example, there are no virtual desktops in gnome 2, and neither metacity nor sawfish 2 add them. I realize there are only subtle differences, but there are many people who use those differences. Additionally, at least for now, sawfish doesn't even have the infrastructure to bind keys to switching to workspaces in a 2d sense (I can move left or right, but not up or down) Another example is that in metacity, clicking anywhere on a window raises it. This is terrible for me. One of the biggest reasons I use sloppy focus is so that I can have overlapping windows and cut and paste from the window underneath. This is especially useful with overlapping terminals that tend to be smaller and thus just disappear when the larger window raises. According to Havoc, most of these options (unless he uses them) are just "crack-rock." So don't use metacity right? Well, unfortuanately there isn't anything else that fits the bill right now, perhaps sawfish will get back to its usual self -- dunno. And to those who say, "make your own then, that is what open source is all about," I query, "Are you the same folks who wonder why we can't quit duplicating effort?"

My vote still lies in configurability, and my hope is I don't have to turn to enlightenment to get it.

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[tempest303]

Note: nearly all of my responses to you will be directly influenced by this document. I personally consider it a must read for anyone interested in Free/OSS desktops.

Additionally, I really dislike what has happened with gnome 2 in configurability. Making intelligent defaults is all fine and good, but when you can't get it how you want, frustration ensues.

Understandable. As it says in the above link, if you feel that the behavior of a particular program is frustrating, file a bug either suggesting a change to the behavior, or, if it really really must be, requesting a preference to change the behavior. Either way, have a logical arguement ready, though - please be aware that "But I've always done it this way!" probably won't fly. If something is broken, but familiar, it's still broken. Sometimes it's really worth the small pain of learning to change your user habits. Of course, other times, the developers are wrong, and need your help in straigtening it out! :-)

Another example is that in metacity, clicking anywhere on a window raises it.

Read the Metacity README file! This is one of Metacity's precious few user options. If you really want a GUI instead of using GConf to change this stuff, check out Metacity Setup - it's a seperate project from Metacity proper, but it's becoming quite nice!

(incidently, sloppy focus really is total crack, as Havoc also says in the README, but he's letting it slide anyhow *because* of the fact that it's so very useful. The "weight" of the preference is justified in this case. Again, the README is highly informative on this subject.)

Additionally, at least for now, sawfish doesn't even have the infrastructure to bind keys to switching to workspaces in a 2d sense (I can move left or right, but not up or down)

See the release notes: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.0/errors.html#id28297 18

My vote still lies in configurability, and my hope is I don't have to turn to enlightenment to get it.

Well, if you can put up with E's serious bloat, stability, and consistency issues, (that I've always had with E - maybe it's different for you) in exchange for maniacal control over your WM, be my guest. My guess is you'll probably go back to Gnome or KDE after only a few days. ;-)

(My apologies to E users and developers, but my experiences with it have been *terrible*...)

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[uhoreg]

Read the Metacity README file! This is one of Metacity's precious few user options.

This is a different issue. This is raise-on-click -- not sloppy focus. i.e. if you have a window partially obscured by another, and you click on it, it will jump up to the top. This is completely separate from window focus.

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[raistlinne]

incidently, sloppy focus really is total crack, as Havoc also says in the README

Then both you and he are fools. There is no right or wrong way to determine which window recieves focus based on where the mouse is. The mouse is used to tell the computer which window the user wants events to go to. Focus policy simply dictates how the user does this.

What you're saying uses the same reasoning as saying that for people to communicate, it's total crack for them to use chinese, but this is one of those cases where it's just too darn useful. All conventions which are merely convention are equal in value and worth. This is why there are so many preferences, and until everyone is the same, good programs will be stuck with a lot of preferences.

Moreover, I've looked at the metacity readme. Havoc is just plain going off the deep end. This man has gotten to the point where he actually thinks that if there are two or more ways to do something, then one of them is better than the rest. That just isn't the case. Sometimes there are alterntives which are better than others, but in many, many situations there are alternatives where none are superior to the others. Hence options.

Do you people really believe that the last 30 years of software implemented so many options because programmers are just mean at heart? That there has been, all along, one shining path that we've all just ignored because we want to punish users with making them wade through configuration files and dialogs to find it?

If you really believe that, then of all the things here mentioned it's your opinion which is on crack.

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[tempest303]

There is no right or wrong way to determine which window recieves focus based on where the mouse is.

No, but usability testing would probably indicate which method is easiest for certain groups of users, from total newbies, to windows users, to CDE users.

What you're saying uses the same reasoning as saying that for people to communicate, it's total crack for them to use chinese, but this is one of those cases where it's just too darn useful.

Actually, that's exactly what I'm saying. English is crack, too, as are ALL languages, really. The only languages that could ever qualify as crack free are human constructed languages, like Newspeak. Newspeak is flawed in that it doesn't offer a large enough vocabulary, but who can deny that its straight-foward approach and completely uniform grammar are less useful for communicating ideas than the tremendous over-complexity of all non-constructed languages? However, in this case, Chinese, English, et al, are so entrenched that we'll never get rid of them, despite their very real flaws. That, and the fact that language (and depending on who you are, code) has aesthetic value as well as a function - poetry is a perfect example of a using a language's inexactness to spur the imagination, and create something of beauty. Maybe Enlightenment is the software equivilant of this? ;-)


All conventions which are merely convention are equal in value and worth.

I couldn't disagree more. Not all options are equally good. Good usability testing will help reveal what conventions are more intuitive or easier to work with than others. More on this below...

until everyone is the same, good programs will be stuck with a lot of preferences.

While no 2 people are alike, we all (generally) share similarities, too. Most people have two hands, two eyes, hate reading dialog boxes/manuals, and don't like spending half an hour learning how to make feature foo work, when it ought to be (dis)(en)abled by default, and the preference removed. Naturally, you can't please 100% of all people all of the time, but adding lots of preferences can start to alienate more users than would ever be turned off by the lack of a certain preference. I could go on, but I'm guessing it's obvious where I'm going with this, so this "until we're the same" is a fallacy, IMHO - we're already the same in many many ways.

This man has gotten to the point where he actually thinks that if there are two or more ways to do something, then one of them is better than the rest. That just isn't the case.

Again, I disagree. Most of the time, there probably IS a better way between the two. Moreover, even if there are two ways to do something, and they're supposedly equally good, why not pick the one that's easier/less bug prone to implement, and stick with it? If they're equally good, users should be equally happy with either behavior, but delighted that they didn't have to find yet another checkbox to hit to make app foo act consistantly with app bar.

Do you people really believe that the last 30 years of software implemented so many options because programmers are just mean at heart?

Absolutely not. And neither the Metacity README, nor HP's "Free software and good user interfaces" essay, nor my post, say anything of the sort. What IS being said is that preferences have a cost, and that there generally is a correct way to do a certain thing. Of course, this isn't always the case, and that's what preferences are for. The argument being made is that the majority of preferences shouldn't be preferences. Adding band-aid after band-aid on the software only leads to bloated, buggy, hard to maintain/troubleshoot code.

If you add a bunch of "band-aid"/useless/frivolous preferences to an app, and it means you keep 10 users, is it worth it if it means that you lose another 20 because your app behaves inconsistently , or is buggy as hell?

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[dizco]

I'm not going to quote and respond to individual parts of your post, because it all comes down this one bit:

Again, I disagree. Most of the time, there probably IS a better way between the two. Moreover, even if there are two ways to do something, and they're supposedly equally good, why not pick the one that's easier/less bug prone to implement, and stick with it? If they're equally good, users should be equally happy with either behavior, but delighted that they didn't have to find yet another checkbox to hit to make app foo act consistantly with app bar.

Because we're human. Should we let someone else determine which car is best, and what color it should be, and then all line up to drive it? Should we all live in identical houses on identical streets? Hell, if someone has determined one way to be better than the other, shouldn't the user be happy? No need to think for yourself or decide what you like best for yourself.

It's my computer. If your software doesn't do things I want it to do, and some other software does, guess which software I'll use? I have *no* intention to upgrade to gnome2. From what i've read, its horrible. Takes away everything i use gnome for. When/if i "upgrade", i will upgrade to sawfish, without gnome. Or some other WM. Or, maybe gnome2.1 will fix what gnome2 apparently breaks. Not that the gnome folks shouldn't do what they want, its their software and time afterall. But, no thanks, none for me please.

--sean

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[raistlinne]

No, but usability testing would probably indicate which method is easiest for certain groups of users, from total newbies, to windows users, to CDE users.

Ok, I know that this thinking stuff is a bit hard, but the solution when usability testing indicates that each group finds easiest what they're already used to, which one is then the "right" one? Answer: NONE. Each person has their preference, and they are used to it. Claiming that either you or the majority are correct simply because either you are you or the majority have more people than the minority is just plain dumb when there is an alternative. Tyrrany of the majority is not a good form of government (unless you are the majority, I guess).

but who can deny that its straight-foward approach and completely uniform grammar are less useful for communicating ideas than the tremendous over-complexity of all non-constructed languages

There speaks a man who has obviously never used language very much. Language is a mess because reality is a mess and human beings live for limited periods of time and so time is precious. Now of course languages have thier quirks, but you'll never get rid of them, as they'll quickly creep in to a designed language. First off, virtually noone cares about lingual purity. Second, most people don't particularly like to think in great depth about things that aren't of great practical significance. Put those two together and it guarantees that any language which you have will mutate and change. To say that the only way in which a person can think the result good is by using mind-altering substances is just arrogance or stupidity. Natural language has proved quite useful, often because of its quirks as in spite of them.

when it ought to be (dis)(en)abled by default, and the preference removed

Alright, here is my suggestion: we do usability testing where simple majority rules on which features are enabled by default. Then everyone who doesn't like features doesn't look at the preferences dialog boxes. Simple, problem solved. You don't like features? Shut up and go away. There, you didn't have to deal with any of those nasty, scary features. What are you, a rabbit? You run scared of too many features and need to kill them to protect yourself? NOT EVERYONE IS YOU. Many of us, in fact, are rather unlike you. Quite a bit. For example, some of us would rather hit the developer of the window manager rather than use a window manager which has click-to-focus and focus-raises-window behavior. Thankfully, we still have a choice. Havoc Pennington hasn't quite gotten alternative window managers made illegal to avoid user confusion, yet. But just wait. Maybe gnome 4 or 5 will check to see what window manager you're using and delete it if you're not running his featureless preferenceless windowmanager.

Does the remarkable similarity of your philosophy to that of totalitarian dictatorships not worry you, even a little? Doesn't the fact that your arguments would fairly easily support, "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Furor!" make you wonder, just a little?

People are different. Get over your megalomaniacal fantasies that everyone is just a copy of you running around who happens to take different shoe sizes. We're not. And even if you can't get over this egotistical delusion of yours, please at least don't do some research to find out what the "most common" shoe size is and lobby for laws to force all shoes to be made in that size.

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[bluetea]

There is no right or wrong way to determine which window recieves focus based on where the mouse is.

No, but usability testing would probably indicate which method is easiest for certain groups of users, from total newbies, to windows users, to CDE users.

So what? That's irrelevent to the point the parent was making unless you're targeting a specific set of these groups. And at that point you're making a design choice, not a technical choice.

Actually, that's exactly what I'm saying. English is crack, too, as are ALL languages, really. The only languages that could ever qualify as crack free are human constructed languages, like Newspeak. Newspeak is flawed in that it doesn't offer a large enough vocabulary, but who can deny that its straight-foward approach and completely uniform grammar are less useful for communicating ideas than the tremendous over-complexity of all non-constructed languages?

I certainly don't deny that it's less useful. ;-)

Seriously, though, this is silly. I think it's a question of philosophy to a large extent, but your comment about poetry basically negates your point to my mind. The nuances of human language used in poetry do communicate ideas, and in a way that languages that are not "overly complex" can't do. "Aesthetics" as you put it have meaning and value in terms of communication of ideas. We are not computers after all. While I have to admit that I'm not familiar with Newspeak, I can't imagine how an artificial language with a completely uniform grammar and vocabulary could be more expressive than a natural language which all parties involved understand equally well. It may be easier to understand or clearer (in some sense), but I think that's more a function of having a very limited syntax and vocabulary. Besides, as humans, we're innately pretty good at expressing ourselves. It seems likely to me that the evolution of human language over millions of years would select for whatever makes it easiest for people to get their ideas across to each other. I just don't believe that you or anybody else is going to start from scratch and come up with something better than every existing natural language.

As for the rest of your comment, I disagree to some extent, but I think you make some interesting points. I couldn't pass this up, though.

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[tempest303]

Two things:

One, calm down. We're discussing software, not the future of Law.

Two,

your arguments would fairly easily support, "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Furor!

I invoke Godwin's law, you lose. ;)

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[tempest303]

Because we're human. Should we let someone else determine which car is best, and what color it should be, and then all line up to drive it? Should we all live in identical houses on identical streets? Hell, if someone has determined one way to be better than the other, shouldn't the user be happy? No need to think for yourself or decide what you like best for yourself.

You're taking it a bit far, don't you think? However, I'll call your bluff a bit here and say that yeah, there are a lot things about cars and houses that could probably stand to be standardized upon. The more important point is that no one is FORCING anyone to buy a particular car, paint their houses a particular color, or to use GNOME. The idea is that there are more things that can be coded with a nice default than most people would think. It's about smarter software, not fascism. If something really needs a preference, it'll get one.

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[tosderg]

That does nothing to refute any of his points, which isn't particularly surprising, because he's right.

*shrug*

I hate it when people say "calm down" just because someone else visibly cares about what s/he is talking about and has given the subject some thought, rather than just spewing whatever comes to mind into the comment window and clicking "Submit" and moving on.

Godwin's law and its violation aside, I agree with what he was saying, as I suspect many others do as well... thus illustrating his whole point: People are different, and they always will be. Arguing against his assertion that there are many cases where there are multiple options with none being the clear winner is absurd. One might be the clear winner to *you*, but another may be the clear winner to Joe Sixpack, and Mr. Sixpack's reason may well be "Because I just like it better that way..", and if you're a good software developer you're not going to try to force Joe to bend to your wishes unless you *absolutely must do so* (which is almost never the case), because 9 times out of 10 he won't, and he'll just turn for the very next program that gives him the option yours lacks.

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[tempest303]

I hate it when people say "calm down" just because someone else visibly cares about what s/he is talking about and has given the subject some thought

I generally hate it when people say stuff like "calm down" too, but there's a difference between passion and foaming at the mouth. Alluding to political beliefs (especially of the fascist/Nazi variety) because of one's views on the usability and maintainability of software is silly and counterproductive. I wasn't trying to dismiss him, but it got to the point where it wasn't going to go anywhere. I figured it was better to end it than to let it become a flamefest.

However...

Yes, configurable behavior can be nice, but it's a *trade off*. People seem to fail to realize that preferences aren't free. I'd personally prefer software that's more stable and comes to completion quicker rather than having a zillion behavior preferences and being buggy as hell, or taking forever to get to release status, or BOTH! Any time you have two behaviors to choose from, and one isn't obviously better than the other, if they're both ok, why not just make one the default and forget about it? Making it a preference just bloats the code, (a frequent complaint here on /. ), makes it harder to fix, harder to maintain, etc. Is it really worth adding all these little tweaks in the name of "because I like tweaking it"? I would argue that it's not. Anyone else is free to differ, and the "market" (such as it is in the Free Software/OSS community) will hopefully show us the winner, eh? :)

As for Joe Sixpack, I would assert that he'd rather have things work out of the box and ideally be consistant between apps, and he could give a shit about configuring it. If you know anyone who works tech support for an "end user" computer product or service (Which I do - I work for an ISP doing support as part of my job), ask them just how much they think people care about changing the prefs on their computer. In my experience, people are TERRIFIED of it, much less interested in it. They want things to work correctly out of the box, and are only interested in changing their wallpaper and their WinAmp skins. (and even the latter is more rare than one might imagine. It's no small minority, but we are talking about Joe Sixpack here. His computer isn't a hobby, it's a way to write email to his kids at college and to get exotic pr0n from distant lands.)

No, it's not Joe Sixpack or his neighbor Harry Homeowner that likes to play with settings, it's Andy Hacker that wants to tweak everything. This isn't a BAD thing, either, believe me, I'm a tweaker too, but some things shouldn't require a user decision, they should Just Work. The question is determining which things need a preference, as opposed to "it should just work any way I please because I say so and I feel like it." It isn't that the latter isn't valid, rather, it's just a poor way to make quality software, and makes for a miserable user experience for anyone who isn't a l33t h4x0r like you or me. (and don't try to deny it, I saw those picutures of your laptop running Window Maker/*step. ;) I probably try just about every new window manager that comes out, because I like playing around with stuff, but I've found that only a few are worth a damn; I'm so busy tweaking config files that I never get around to actually USING the software!

Ultimately, however, it's a personal decision. What people seem to have been forgetting is that I'm not advocating that we pass laws about software production - I'm merely suggesting a course of design: THINK before you add an option, and MORE PREFS != BETTER SOFTWARE. I never said everyone had to use Gnome and like it, and that it's my way or the highway. If you don't like Gnome, or any other piece of software, you can try to improve it, or you can just not use it! That's part of the point of Free software!

Finally, totally off topic: mad props for the DM quote at the bottom of your web page. :)

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[tal197]

> Another example is that in metacity, clicking anywhere on a window raises it.

Read the Metacity README file! This is one of Metacity's precious few user options.

I've read the README for version 2.3.987 (current Debian/unstable), but I can't see this anywhere. Has it changed in the last few weeks?

Currently, Metacity is placed rather low on ROX-Session's default list of window managers due to this problem :-(

The ability to interact with a window, move and resize it without it jumping in front of other windows is vital in an environment where windows can overlap.

I think RISC OS had the best solution to this: Operations with button-1 would raise the window (Windows style), while button-2 would do the same thing without. No options, no confusion, no annoyance :-)

Re:Gnome 2 is terrible to configure

[tempest303]

As far as I know, this is an option - try Metacity Setup - I swear the option to do just that is included in that program.

My apologies if it doesn't actually show up in the README. *sheepish grin*

Antialiasing

[JCCyC]

From the antialiasing in those screenshots, doesn't it look like the fonts could use some adjusting? Some lines look thinner than others. Doesn't look like a problem from the antialiasing code, but rather from the font data itself.

Product stabilization...

[cartman]

I hope they gave more attention to product stability than to new features. My only difficulty with gnome is that it has tons of irritating bugs and regularly causes X crashes.

Oddly, my linux/gnome box is dramatically less reliable than my Win2000 box. Win2000 is a vast improvement over previous MS operating systems. The linux _kernel_ may be far more reliable, but the desktop certainly is not. It's embarrassing to suck more than Microsoft.

I sometimes get the feeling that the gnome crowd pays too much attention to screenshots, eye candy, themes, and pointless customizability. The vast majority of people want a desktop that just works, ALWAYS. Perhaps gnome 2 will be an improvement, beacause 1.x fell somewhat short of that goal.

With that in mind, I _do_ believe that linux will succeed on the desktop, but not for a couple of years. Microsoft's egregious pricing model will eventually benefit linux on the desktop.

Re:Product stabilization...

[chefren]

Some people are unlucky I guess, I haven't had X crashing for any other reason than GLX through NVidia's driver for over six months. I use Gnome 1.4 on a daily basis.

Re:Christmas in June! Well Done!

[GrenDel Fuego]

And off I go to "emerge gnome" (thanks gentoo)....

Are you using a different server than I am? I don't see gnome2 packages for gentoo yet. Well, not final release ones anyways.

Ximian GNOME 2?

[antdude]

I thought Ximian and GNOME were together? I was hoping to upgrade my GNOME v1.4 from Ximian. Is it safe to use GNOME's or do I need to wait for Ximian's GNOME? I am confused.

Thank you in advance.

Matterhorn Project beat you to it...

[On Lawn]

From "The Gnomes of Zurich" on Muh!

"...The gnomes of Zurich
Make a lot of money
...The gnomes of Zurich
Make a lot of Gold..."

Re:Matterhorn Project beat you to it...

[SirRichardPumpaloaf]

Zurich is in Sweden now? Dammit, why aren't I informed of these things?!

iTunes like app?

[tweder]

Can someone please tell me what this iTunes-looking app is in this screenshot?

Thanks a bunch!

Re:iTunes like app?

[uhoreg]

Heh. It's right in the screenshot's filename. Rhythmbox. Do a Google search for it. (Apparently, though, it is going to become less iTunes-like -- hopefully for the better.)

Re:i wonder how long it'll take

[thonot]

Probably not until the transition to gcc-3.x is finished.

It's easy to change to sawfish.

[Razorviro]

To change to sawfish from metacity, open up a terminal window(for example xterm) and then type the following, killall metacity; sleep 1; sawfish &
If you like sawfish, simply save your session.
I hope this info helped you switch to sawfish.
Happying computing, :)

A little green (sorry) at this Red Hat stuff -- qn

[alumshubby]

If I'm using the Red Hat Update service where I get notifications and use up2date, do they notify for this kind of release? IOW, should I be expecting an email from RH Real Soon Now(tm)?

Re:Christmas in June! Well Done!

[Kaypro]

hehe... noticed that as well... nothing to emerge as of yet. I'm sure Spider is hard at work with the ebuilds... soon I'm sure.

Star Control 2 for Linux

[Jagasian]

Star Control 2 for: Linux, OSX, and Windows
Why isn't this a full Slashdot news article?

Layer the Preferences

[GroundBounce]

I just read the document you referred to, and I do agree with most of it in most cases. There are a few cases where I would disagree, however.

First of all, while I agree that too many preferences can be a usability problem for new or less technically savvy users (e.g., the "too many clocks" problem), you won't get around the fact that a lot of more advanced users want tweakability. In fact, in my own experience, the more I use a particular application, the more I find I want to tweak things here and there. As a result, I disagree with Havoc that the layered preferences approach (beginner, intermediate, advanced) used in Nautilus 1.x is a bad thing. If done properly, and applied on a global scale (all of GNOME, for example), I think this can be a good solution to the problem. The added preferences still add complexity, however, so it clearly doesn't solve all of the problems with preferences.

Secondly, while preference overkill is a problem for many applications, user desktop environments are probably one of the types of applications where users want the most tweakability. This occurrs for two reasonts: 1) Many more (I dare say nearly all) users use some kind of desktop environment (even if it's TWM), whereas only a subset of users use any given productivity application. This means there are many more peoples' tastes and needs to deal with. 2) People use their desktops day-in-and-day-out, and as I mentioned before, the more someone uses a program, the more they are likely to find things they want to tweak.

This doesn't mean that the defaults shouldn't be chosen intellegently - they should - and it doesn't mean that every preference in the universe should be included "just because", but I think that there will always be some applications (e.g., desktop environments) where there will inherently be more demand for preferences, and if you remove too many of them, a large number of people will feel they can't get the behavior they want.

Re:Layer the Preferences

[tempest303]

I disagree with Havoc that the layered preferences approach (beginner, intermediate, advanced) used in Nautilus 1.x is a bad thing. If done properly, and applied on a global scale (all of GNOME, for example), I think this can be a good solution to the problem.

I liked this idea too, except that it usually means that a lot of total *crap* gets crammed under "advanced". So we're back to square one: too many preferences. Yeah, advanced users are better equipped to deal with it, but I'm an advanced user, and I want MY desktop to Just Work just like the newbies' do! :-) That, and since a lot of junk gets stuffed into a particular user level, you get the same problems of bloat and difficulting in troubleshooting that Havoc mentions. It's a shame, because it's not too bad of an idea on its own, IMHO, it just has too many implementation problems...

People use their desktops day-in-and-day-out, and as I mentioned before, the more someone uses a program, the more they are likely to find things they want to tweak.

True! But as was mentioned in the article, why lobby to make it an option - if the tweak is truly better, make it the default! If not, the cost of the preference needs to be weighed... It's a personal decision, naturally, but I would gladly trade in a tweak or two for a more stable, more usable desktop.

I think that there will always be some applications (e.g., desktop environments) where there will inherently be more demand for preferences, and if you remove too many of them, a large number of people will feel they can't get the behavior they want.

Damn right! Certain options, while sub-optimal, are destined to be judged too important to ditch. This is where the judgement of the coders and the release team comes in, and if they screw up, their users will let them know... the problem is when judgement slips, and coders give in to the pressure to include misfeatures that will alienate more users than it will ever keep/draw in.

Hell, at least in Free Software, we actually have some say in how things will work.

Re:Layer the Preferences

[GroundBounce]

True! But as was mentioned in the article, why lobby to make it an option - if the tweak is truly better, make it the default!

I agree with this if you can show that the tweak is clearly a *better* way of doing it. There are many cases where this would work. The problem arises, particularly with desktop environments because they are used by almost everyone and personal taste varies so much, when the tweak is not so much a better way of doing something, but a different way of doing it based solely on personal taste. One man's crack might be another man's bread and butter.

A good example might be the mouse focus issue that others have brought up. I may prefer focus-follows-mouse and Havoc may prefer click-to-focus, but I really don't think you can unequivocally say that one is *better* than the other. Which one is more productive and easier to use (i.e., "just works") is really dependent on the user. In areas like this, where there are several equally useful but different ways to do something, and neither one is clearly "better", preferences should remain.

Now, even though I prefer focus-follows-mouse, I think the default should be click-to-focus because many newbies will be migrating from Windows, and focus-follows-mouse would be likely to confuse them while click-to-focus would give them the feeling that things "just work".

We can acknowledge that a lot of software has too many options and preferences without having to carry it all the way to the other extreme and sacrifice almost all configurability to the holy grail of extreme simplicity. As with most things, the right place is probably somewhere in the middle - a balance between complexity and configurability - and there are ways of hiding the extra complexity from newbies by using layers and intelligent defaults.

Whine, whine

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

Just to repeat the whail of the common Redhat user at major KDE releases:

Where are the binary packages for SuSE? :-)

There are none, are there? (Checked three mirrors.)

Also quite interesting that apart from a little claimed speed improvement nothing seems better than in your other leading desktop environment...

Anyways, congratulations Gnome team! May the best team win (and may all cooperate!).

Probably not, in my experience.

[ubernostrum]

I've been using Red Hat for quite a while now, and while they did do notices for the 2.4 kernel when it was first released (for example), I doubt they'll do it for GNOME 2.0; it's too new, too (possibly) buggy, and not enough apps have been ported for them to include it "mainstream" for a while. At best, I'd say they'll include it in a beta later this year/early 2003, when the bugs are mostly ironed out and lots of apps (like Galeon, AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc.) have been ported. If you're into that sort of stuff, start watching Red Hat's beta FTP (I think it's Rawhide, not sure).

This may turn you on

[Mawbid]

Agreed on the component reuse. Writing a less capable version of something that the desktop provides is silly.

But in the particular case of open/save dialogs, I'd like to get rid of them altogether with XDS (Direct Save)

The application's UI includes a draggable icon representing the document. You drag it to an open file manager window and the file gets saved where you drop the icon.

This is especially nice if the file manager works like the MacOS Finder, where you can hover over a folder icon while dragging something to open that folder (pressing space opens it before the timeout).

I read about this being a general way to save files on Acorn Archimedes machines before x86's even had a GUI, so the idea isn't new.

Re:This may turn you on

[Nodatadj]

It's also completely unusable for someone who can't use a mouse

Re:This may turn you on

[Cardhore]

How do you choose the filenames?

Re:This may turn you on

[Echemus]

If it works in the same way RISC OS worked over 10 years ago, you type in a filename and then drag the icon to a window to save, the file then appears in that window with the filename typed in.

The ROX Desktop team have created a system under Unix/Linux that works like this.

It is a very elegant way of saving files, but, if you have "raise on focus" it could be awkward to use, RISC OS doens't raise of focus so it was easy to have a filer window overlapping your work window slightly and just dump your files there.

Re:Themes are bad UI design.

[g4dget]

Good UI design scales with screen size

I agree (but I find it pretty ironic that your posting uses fixed line breaks).

Themes are usually tied to the screen size, using pixmaps for buttons and such.

Many theme engines usually allow both vector-based and pixmap-based components. It's up to individual theme writers to decide what to use. If you get a theme that doesn't scale and scaling matters to you, don't use the theme.

Re:i wonder how long it'll take

[steveha]

I did a web search, and found a discussion about this on the debian-gtk-gnome list. The packages are just about ready to go, but they decided to wait until the official 2.0 release before putting packages into Unstable. (There was one message voting for waiting until 2.0.1! I hope they ignored him. This is Unstable, not Stable, and I want GNOME 2.0 sooner rather than later.)

steveha

Re:How Many More Times...

[diamondc]

you can use the gtkhtml2 html renderer in Nautilus .. it's decent for lightweight browsing

Garnome 0.12.0 also released

[MicroBerto]

Garnome 0.12.0 has been released for Gnome 2.0 already!

Checket out, it makes installing/testing Gnome 2.0 very easy and will not affect your Gnome 1.4 installation (it installs to ~/garnome/)

Hail Fluxbox!

[Apostata]

Just thought that needed saying.

Re:Hail Fluxbox!

[SomeOtherGuy]

I 2nd that....Fluxbox rules all

Bash Windows, not KDE

[0x0d0a]

Just for once, can we have a KDE article or a GNOME article where instead of bashing the other Linux desktop UI, we bash the Windows UI instead? The common enemy?

Re:Bash Windows, not KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Both KDE and Gnome in terms of UI are BAD windows ripoffs. They all (inc. windows) lack any real innovation, and wouldn't know a good UI principle if it bit them on the az.

The One Reason I Use KDE and not anything else

[Nailer]

A Scenario:

• You install your desktop environment with the default settings
  
• Your hard disk begins overheating
  

Unix operating systems will start sending all the error messages from yoru disk to /dev/console. Because all users on a Unix system are supposed to see /dev/console. If you're running KDE, you'll see /dev/console. If you're running the default setup of any other desktop, you won't. Your hard disk will melt. Have a nice day.

Sure, you can add some third party app to your non-KDE desktop yourself if you know you need to, but secure defaults (security == protecting data) are why I use Unix.

old screenshots

[timothy]

Luis:

I hope you don't toss the old screenshots completely -- if you can, I hope you find a directory ("Of Historical Interest"?) where old shots can be displayed.

They're interesting by themselves, and even more so in context ... maybe a clickable timeline? :)

Cheers,

timothy

Re:old screenshots

[luge]

Not going anywhere, just changing the link. None of us has time/energy to do something as involved as 'cvs remove' right now :)

Virtual desktops...

[BrokenHalo]

Is it true that there are no virtual desktops in Gnome 2? (Anybody?) I ask because that is quite an important feature to me (and I'm lazy :-P), and if true, I'm going to think again about upgrading.

Re:Virtual desktops...

[Nodatadj]

There is no longer a seperation between workspaces and viewports. So you can have multiple viewports. I have 4 at the moment.

Release? (sorry)

[Dwonis]

"What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake."

Re:Christmas in June! Well Done!

[badassmf]

Apparently released..got this in my mail today

I'm glad to be able to finally(!) announce the new Gnome 2 Desktop as available in Gentoo Linux. The Gnome 2 release was announced today;
Announcement:http://gnome.org/pr-gnome20.html
More info: http://gnome.org/start/2.0/
Release notes: http://gnome.org/start/2.0/releasenotes.html
With this we are the first Linux distribution to support the Gnome 2 desktop, and it has been many months of quite hard work for me and the others who are involved in getting this project to run smoothly for all users.
[snip!]

XFree86's crashes not Gnome's fault

[Chaos Alpha]

I think this is going to be helpful to some of you.

It's a little bit offtopic but will help a lot.

NVidia's X drivers have 2D problems with XFree 86 4.x and the Linux Kernel 2.4.7. They can hard crash your computer while you are doing normal 2D tasks (eg: browsing the net) and make you do a reboot to get it back.

It happens that the problematic kernel is included in one of the most popular distributions: RedHat 7.2.

Just go to www.kernel.org and donwload/compile/install a new kernel (eg: 2.4.18). This will stop hard crashes of your Linux box and some other random Nautilus/Evolution/Galeon/Abiword/etc. crashes as well.

Please do not blame Gnome 1.4 for X crashes, the desktop is stable and very useable, only Nautilus is slow as a desert tortoise, but the eye candy is worth the wait (sometimes). :)

Not true

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

27.06.2002 15:21 CET:
No binaries on ftp.suse.com:/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/GNOME2

Re:How Many More Times...

[diamondc]

an anonymous coward gnome developer, huh? make some sense buddy.

Not impressed so far

[chegosaurus]

I've spent the best part of today building GNOME 2 on Solaris.

I've got a fast machine, so compile time wasn't much of an issue, but there are just so many packages, and finding the dependencies is a fun piece of detective work in itself.

KDE has *big* packages that take forever to build, but you can at least kick them off and leave them to it. The GNOME build is much more involved, not least because, on Sol at least, many of the packages need some gentle persuasion before they'll work. Generally it's just popping -lintl or somesuch into the LD_ADD Makefile line, though a couple of others were more involved.

But is it worth it? So far I'd have to say no. GNOME 2 looks just like GNOME 1, but I liked the way GNOME 1 looked. It seems neither quicker nor slower, and though it's maybe marginally snappier than KDE it's hard to call.

But those crashes! I can't open a Nautilus window without a segfault.It's currently stuck in a loop where it keeps trying to open my $HOME and segfaults every time, then tries to carry on where it left off ad infinutum.

A couple of the control centre applets have crashed on me. A cursory look around GNOME db bombed on most operations.

That's only two or three apps though. What about all the other goodies? Well, for something which professes to be a desktop environment, isn't GNOME 2 awfully sparse? It has the Gimp, it has Gnumeric, it has, err, an xterm. KDE throws in, among many, many other tools. mail, news, and a browser. I know I could get Evolution, Pan and Galeon (if I could get Galeon to build on Solaris, which I can't) but have these been ported to GTK 2 yet? If they have then it's not been well publicised.

Other initial gripes are that the window list applet doesn't work, the control centre seems to have vanished, I haven't yet successfully imported *anything* into Gnumeric, and crashes, crashes, crashes!

I really didn't want to be negative, but as yet I can draw so few positives from GNOME 2. Maybe it's just teething troubles with the Solaris port, but given Sun's supposed involvement that's hardly an excuse.

Maybe I'm missing something, and I understand that the internal architecture has been substantially improved, a change which will pay off big in the future, but from the outside GNOME 2 really looks like a step backwards. I'm hugely disappointed.

Sorry.

Re:Not impressed so far

[chegosaurus]

I was waiting for the typical "stop whining and do something about it" AC. I don't want to just "not use it". I like GNOME, and I want to help make it better.

As I said, what I just wrote was a summary of my first impressions, and was the first step in making a list of the faults I've found.

I don't yet have enough exact details to file bug reports, I don't want to report something as a bug which is actually down to me having built it incorrectly or not understanding how something should work.

I take quite a lot from the Open Source community, and I do like to help out where I can.

Re:An important question

[User 956]

Supposedly gnome 2.0 is like MacOS (top menu bar, etc).

Re:Patch for direct OpenGL rendering

[User 956]

Myself and may others out there have TNT2 cards - what exactly doesn't work?

The rendering doesn't sync properly on TNT2s.