Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Inside Ximian

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the dry-erase dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Linux and Main is running a story of a visit to Ximian headquarters and a talk with Nat Friedman, Miguel de Icaza, and Jon Perr about GNOME2, Ximian 2, and getting Linux onto the corporate desktop. Interesting and funny, with lots of details about the place and the guys."

17 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Let this be a lesson. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you kiss Microsoft's ass, you'll contract Mono.

  2. Development isn't much different than Everquest by jsonmez · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Oh, yes! Writing code and squashing bugs. I usually get here at 7, 7:30 a.m., and I learned not to turn on the lights, because there are probably people who have been here all night coding, who are asleep on the couch or the floor."

  3. Fenway neighborhood, huh? by slagdogg · · Score: 3, Funny

    Well, let's hope Ximian has a better year than the Red Sox ...

    --
    (Score:-1, Wrong)
  4. Why _do_ people buy Ximian? by lakeland · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've often wondered why people bother with ximian. Are the packages it releases any better than the ones released by gnome itself?

    Sure, it has a pretty autoupdate feature, but then so does debian and mandrake, and it can be added to redhat, .... And if you install it then your installation seems to be not quite compatible with a standard gnome install.

    I can see why people would install gnome2 over kde3, although I personally prefer kde, but why would you install ximian gnome over normal gnome?

    Is it yet another linux company that is going to crash and burn once it runs out of VC? Just what is there to encourage people to pay them money?

    Corrin (sounding really like a troll...)

    1. Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian? by afidel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      two words: ximian connector This is a killer app for us as we are (unfortunately) transitioning to a unified messagin/calandering system based around exchange. While imap will work for messaging something like connector is needed for calandering.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    2. Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian? by chetohevia · · Score: 5, Informative

      Ximian GNOME has a number of advantages over the standard desktop GNOME that comes with your distro.

      For the desktop itself, we put a lot of effort into making sure it's more attractive, easier to use, and better updated. We focus on the desktop, we're desktop experts, and it shows.

      * If you're using it in a large company, it's cheaper because it's the same on more than one platform: this consistency makes both UNIX and Linux systems less expensive to support. (This portion, by the way, is free).

      * People buy Ximian Connector because they want to be able to connect to Exchange 2000 systems without having to use Outlook Web Access and without having to use a Windows box. Especially in large corporations where engineering is a Linux/UNIX installed base, it's important to be able to schedule with the management and use the shared address books and so forth; if you can't, you might as well not exist.

      * People use the Red Carpet CorporateConnect service in order to have a stable, cross-platform way to ship their own software, plus operating system and desktop software from multiple vendors. They need to manage software installation sets and updates across multiple platforms, without vendor lock-in.

      * Companies like HP and Sun pay us to perform custom development work, including accessibility improvements and platform ports.

      * Individuals like you sign up for Red Carpet Express to get faster downloads.

      * Linux ISVs can ship software through Red Carpet or Red Carpet Express. This isn't a really big business now, but it has potential.

      Is that a reasonable enough answer?

      For more information about Ximian desktop software and other products and services, feel free to visit http://ximian.com, write to us, or fill out the information request form at ximian.com/about_us/contact/information.html.

      Yours,
      Aaron Weber
      Ximian, Inc.

    3. Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian? by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I don't think so really and they really only work on redhat variants. I've found that on debian it really trashes dependancies.

    4. Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian? by PD · · Score: 5, Funny

      Thank you for not using the words "productize", "big picture", "methodology", "consumers", "leverage", "methodology", or "proactive" in your description of what your company does. I could actually understand every word of what you wrote.

      --
      If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
    5. Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian? by SLot · · Score: 3, Informative

      Sure, it has a pretty autoupdate feature, but then so does debian and mandrake, and it can be added to redhat, .... And if you install it then your installation seems to be not quite compatible with a standard gnome install.

      The easiest way I've seen to keep Ximian from screwing up things that up2date should do (thanks /. poster who originally wrote this!) is to get a list of ximianized packages, tell up2date to ignore them in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date in the pkgSkipList section.

      Something like:
      rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}\t%{VENDOR}\n" | awk '$2 ~ /Ximian/ {print $1}' |sort | perl -pe 's/\n/;/' > ximian.list

      works well for me.

    6. Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian? by ajs · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I've often wondered why people bother with ximian.

      You seem to already know the answer to your own question. However, I will point out that the question in your subject line is not the same as this one. I "bother with" Ximian. I don't usually purchase it unless I have a specific need for media (which I've done once).

      Are the packages it releases any better than the ones released by gnome itself?

      Well, for starters, Ximian is more than just Gnome. Most people install Ximian because it's a little bit more "tuned" than the version of Gnome that comes with their OS (or, in the case of Solaris, because their OS does not come with Gnome by default at all). However, Ximian also includes many third-party programs that are not part of Gnome propper (e.g. Evolution, which is a Ximian app, not a Gnome app, and at least under Red Hat the Ximian version of Evolution is far more recent and less buggy than the one that comes with the OS). In the end, you probably won't up the overall package count on your machine by much when you install Ximian, but the quality of the installation will generally improve quite a bit (I know this is true for Debian and Red Hat; feel free to comment for your own OS).

      Sure, it has a pretty autoupdate feature, but then so does debian and mandrake, and it can be added to redhat

      Yep, it can be added to Red Hat quite easily: install Ximian.

      Just what is there to encourage people to pay them money?

      Businesses over a certain size cannot afford to use a desktop which is not maintained by someone else. Red Hat's desktop (and those of the other Linux vendors, from what I've seen) is ok, but generally unusable for anyone who isn't a developer. This leaves the choice of Ximian, MacOS or Winderz for most companies. I think we'll see a lot more MacOS going out onto corporate desktops, but Ximian's share will probably increase the most rapidly for the next couple of years (it's easier to tripple a user-base of 1000 than it is to tripple a user base of 100,000).

      The really interesting gating factor will be what the big Linux Vendors (especially Red Hat, but also Caldera and SuSE), Sun and HP will do with their desktop offerings. Sun could quickly consume the corporate science market, as there's already a big buy-in there. HP could take quite a bit of government seats, as they have some amazingly well entrenched deals with places like the DoT.

      And then there's Red Hat. I see Red Hat eating up the educational niche over the next 5-10 years. There's a lot of software that doesn't exist yet, but these places just can't afford to keep playing ball with MS.

  5. Frequently Asked User Interface Questions by ekrout · · Score: 3, Informative

    1) Does it have to be aesthetically-pleasing to the eye?

    Yes.

    2) Does it have to be just like MS Windows?

    No. Working with any computer's interface is a learned behavior. People learned about the _ [ ] X buttons at the top right of their programs because every computer they sat down at was running Windows. They soon realized that the X closed a window, the _ made it temporarily dissappear.

    Many studies say that modern day UI must "look like a Microsoft product". Sorry to break it to you, Sun et al., but this simply isn't true.

    --

    If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
    1. Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions by mackstann · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Many studies say that modern day UI must "look like a Microsoft product". Sorry to break it to you, Sun et al., but this simply isn't true.

      If only UI developers would take that to heart....I look at Gnome, I see a windows knock-off. I look at KDE, I see a pretty windows knock-off, with OSX knock-off bitmaps.

      Why can't the open source desktop people come up with something innovative and useful instead of trying to build a cradle for all of the MS converts?

    2. Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions by spitzak · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Why can't the open source desktop people come up with something innovative and useful instead of trying to build a cradle for all of the MS converts?

      A lot of responses here seem to say "it must look like MS for people to understand it" and assumme that "innovation" means totally different, like some sort of 3D interface. This is not what is needed, and I agree with the original poster in being unhappy with Gnome/KDE's windows-copying.

      Here are some ideas I would VERY much like to see:

      POINT TO TYPE!!!!!! Goddamm it, make it the default. Complete novices learn it very very quickly and it makes it almost impossible to return to a click-to-type system. This is the biggest way to get Linux converts. It also does not confuse Windows users, if when a new window openes or otherwise grabs the focus, you warp the pointer to the window.

      STOP RAISING WINDOWS WHEN YOU CLICK ON THEM. This is one of the biggest problems with the systems today (because both KDE and Gnome and even NT let you turn on point-to-type, even though it is not the default). This stupid behavior, which was eliminated in f**king 1982 by X11 (see X10 for the last version that did this), makes overlapping windows and the desktop metaphor completly useless because it is impossible to refer to one piece of data while working on another. Click-raising is also the reason for monstrosities like "MDI" and "paned windows", which seriously limit the ability to display large amounts of data in a window.

      RESIZE AND MOVE WINDOWS WITHOUT RAISING THEM! Here is a bit of cleverness from X11 history that seems to have gotten lost. If you click a window frame without moving, it raises. But if you move or resize it, it stays where it is! This can be done even if click-raises or click-to-type is left on.

      GET RID OF "LAYERS". This crap appeared with NeXTstep and refuses to go away. I WANT to put a window atop the toolbar. Just let me raise the toolbar by clicking on it. There, that wasn't too hard, was it? The only windows that should be forced to stay above others are "modal dialogs", and the ONLY thing they should do is be forced to lie above the windows they are blocking interaction to, they should have no effect on other applications.

      GET RID OF "APPLIACATION ACTIVATION". There is aboslutely no reason that all windows created by a program have to stick together in a layer. PLEASE make it possible to raise a dialog without raising the underlying window, so I can copy data from another window into it!

      You can try my window manager fltk for my attempts to do these ideas. It really isn't hard, in fact the window manager is much shorter than most.

    3. Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions by Wdomburg · · Score: 3, Insightful

      >POINT TO TYPE!!!!!! Goddamm it, make it the
      >default. Complete novices learn it very very
      >quickly and it makes it almost impossible to
      >return to a click-to-type system. This is the
      >biggest way to get Linux converts.

      I personally hate that "feature" with a passion.

      >It also does not confuse Windows users, if when a
      >new window openes or otherwise grabs the focus,
      >you warp the pointer to the window.

      Another feature I hate. If I want my mouse pointer somewhere, I'll move it myself.

      >STOP RAISING WINDOWS WHEN YOU CLICK ON THEM.

      I prefer this behaviour myself.

      >GET RID OF "LAYERS".

      Another feature I prefer. If I didn't want my toolbars permenently visable, I'd set them to hide.

      >GET RID OF "APPLIACATION ACTIVATION"... PLEASE
      >make it possible to raise a dialog without
      >raising the underlying window, so I can copy data
      >from another window into it!

      I can count the number of times this would be useful to me on zero hands. I highlight from app A, raise app B, paste. No need for the window I'm pasting from to be raised when I've already gotten the data I'm copying from it.

      On the other hand, it has been useful for me to have the window associated with a dialog raised when I'm going to interact with it again.

      I'm not saying everyone should work how I do. I'm saying not everyone works how you do. Your preferences are not objectively better.

      Matt

  6. Cool logo by capnkid · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well the project sounds ambitious and all... but I tend to gauge the success of a company such as this by how cool their logo is. I think these guys are going to have a great future. Anybody else as shallow as me?

  7. As an ex-Ximian user... by Sanity · · Score: 3, Insightful
    ...I found it best to stick with my distro's default version of Gnome, and use apt-get to keep my system up-to-date. I found that Ximian's "Red Carpet" software had a nasty habit of screwing up the RPM dependencies on my system, and while visually appealing, I didn't really like its interface (for example, the way you need to click on every single package you want upgraded even if there are 50, 60, or 100 of them).

    I also got the impression that the purpose of Red Carpet was more to-do with providing Ximian with some kind of business model, than actually providing useful functionality to the end-user - otherwise why not just build it around apt-get and give us all some flexibility?

    In the end, I didn't really see any solid advantage to going with Ximian Gnome (although I do like Evolution), and it had the disadvantage of making my rpm dependency tree more complicated than it needs to be.

  8. Re:As a matter of fact, we do all drive the same c by g4dget · · Score: 3, Interesting
    From a user-interface standpoint, we all pretty much drive the same car

    That's a predictable but wrong answer, and it shows the same blinders that people have when it comes to Windows. Professional cars (trucks, racecars, tanks, etc.) are very different from consumer cars. There is likewise no reason why software for professionals should look anything like consumer software. Asserting that it should is the same idiotic advertising machinery that sells cheap plastic thingies as "professional tools" to consumers who are eager to buy "the real thing".

    And even among consumer cars there is enormous variation: other than the steering wheel and two pedals, all the other user interface elements can be found almost anywhere within reach, in almost any arrangement.