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Interview with Taylor & Pennington from Red Hat
RH-Gimp writes "OSNews has put together a long and informative interview with Havoc Pennington and Owen Taylor from Red Hat. They discuss about the KDE issues, the UI on Red Hat 8.0, the future of the Linux desktop and XFree and other interesting stuff."
Listen, you have to run out and get an exta rpm for playing mp3s. As always you have to download Nvidia drivers and if you have an ATI card I suggest going to the gatos.sourceforge.net and using those drivers. Fonts are an install away from the corefonts sourceforge project and dvd playback requires an ogle download.
I can understand every single bit of this. However, apt-rpm needs to come with the distro.
Also what is the deal with the extras submenu? I understand simplifying the menu structure. The SuSE distro menu is a huge mess with a hundreds of programs organized fairly well but still hard to find and half with no icons in the menu! Still, when a new program is installed the user should have a choice of whether they want it merged into the main or the extras menu (can't they come up with some better frickin' title for the thing?) not very easy for an end user.
Finally they need to be hit by a clue-by-four from of all places with the dipsticks at Lindows. Every desktop OS has at one time or another a compatibility layer to ease users over to its use. Mac OS X has one for old OS 9.2 apps. Windows had one for dos and Win 3.11 apps. We need a compatibility layer that runs Windows apps and it is called Wine. It is time that the distros come together and I mean everyone including the OpenLinux distros, Redhat and Mandrake and figure out how to make Wine as good as it can be without it being completely taken over by codeweavers and transgaming.
A good compatibility layer that works as well as CrossOver Office does right now out of the box with no messing around. Install Redhat, and then install Office 2000 and it just works. This is needed not by me but the newbie easing into Linux use.
It is still going to take a shift in thinking to get Linux to the desktop in any numbers even within IT departments.
Currently the Distro is still seen by too many as simply being the OS layer -- kernel, GNU shell and the GNU utilities.
The Distros need to think of the Linux OS as being made up of three parts as most OSes do --
OS layer -- kernel, GNU shell and GNU utilities.
Compatibility layer -- Wine
GUI layer -- kernel frame buffer support to Xfree86 to finally the desktop
Redhat is almost there and considering how quick the shift in focus came from Redhat they did a pretty good job.
ACK
Fortunately, somebody has managed to emulate most viewport functionalies with workspaces. The only thing that missing (from what I can see) is edge-flipping, but this script provides the infrastructure with which to implement that.
More scripts can be found at the WikiSawfishLibrary .
OLPC Australia
That WAS supposed to the the BeOS 6. The "BeOS 5.1 Dano", which was the internal codename, is what the Be marketing wanted to call "BeOS 6". But they sold out everything to Palm, and now everything went the way of the dodo..
They've stopped sucking for a long time now. I don't know what cookie-cutter distro you use, but my Gentoo installed automatically included a TT-bytecode interpeter enabled FreeType and MS Windows fonts. When I got my UXGA laptop, there was initially some problem because the LCD looked best when all fonts were anti-aliased (it has enough resolution that AA text looks sharp rather than blurry) but all I had to do was download FreeType2 CVS, get some nice Postscript fonts, and I ended up with font rendering that whips OS X all over the place and easily matches ClearType.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
XFree86 resolution changing is supported by your favorite window managers
.
X controls the resolution, not the window manager or desktop.
Your Window Manager will support any resolution change made by X
A while, I'd guess.
Unfortunately, this is true. It will take a while for X4.3 (or whatever) to make it into the next major versions of most distros.
But if your impatient, you can install XFree86 on your own. It's not that hard.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
It means that the desktop is resized to the given resolution. I look at ctrl-alt-+/- as more of a 'Zoom' function than anything else.
The effect of this change will be so that when you zoom in, your desktop does not extend outwards by about half a screen in every direction.
Think of the way Windows changes resolutions, if what I say isn't lucid enough.
- The control center contains an incredibly useful "Information" section that unifies a lot of the info that can only be found on the console with a bunch of different utilities or cat'ing parts of
/proc.
- The incredible integration of konqueror with manpages and infopages (if you haven't tried this, you really ought to, the manpages are much easier to read in a konq window.)
- I haven't tried the gnome-terminal from gnome2, but the kde2 terminal allows multiple terminals from one window, which allows very easy access to those console utils.
KDE can import gtk+ themes quite handily if you like.
- There's a wealth of basic KDE utilities to do OS specific functions like changing password, managing users, and runlevels.
- The power of Konqueror as a file browser. Easy Samba browsing. Automated CD ripping and ogg encoding with drag and drop. Multiple window configurations. Embedded terminals. FTP and web browsing.
- The KPackage program for use with RPM or dpkg/apt.
These are just some of the basic things that KDE2 does to integrate in to the OS (I haven't even tried KDE3 yet). The KDE project just focuses on integrating with itself because they want to have a very well integrated environment. And they've obviously succeeded in that (just look at the programming model for evidence). Sure, they don't go out of their way to integrate with the Gnome folks, but then Gnome isn't doing any better. I think Redhat has a bias towards Gnome (there's a lot of historical evidence of this), and it's on display here. KDE does a good job of integrating with itself, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't integrate with the underlying OS as well."I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Now it is easy to install TrueType Fonts in Linux /usr/share/fonts/ttf and within 30 secornds the Xft2 font engine finds the fonts.
Copy your truetype fonts in
I'd just like to add that, as reported on the Dot, it seems Gentoo users can issue
# emerge redhat-artwork
and be in Bluecurve bliss.
Texstar has some "Freecurve" RPMs for Mandrake 9.0 up as well, for Mandrake users who want a taste of Red Hat's new theme.
No other country officially recognize the independence of Taiwan. It is a fact. You watched too much MTV.
Actually, with the FreeType CVS, the free Postscript fonts look just great. I've currently got the bytecode interpreter disabled because the autohinter in FreeType CVS is so good with Postscript fonts that it looks much better on my LCD than the hinted TrueType fonts. Letter shapes are a whole lot more accurate, while the outlines are still sharp. Read the FreeType mailing list (devel) sometime.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...