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A Preview of Ximian's Gnome 2.0 Desktop
TweetZilla writes "Dennis Powell has a good preview of Ximian's newest desktop. But does anybody care at this point? How many people still use Ximian's desktop? As opposed to Evolution?"
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How many people still use Ximian's desktop?
A lot of Solaris users (including myself) that don't want to spend days downloading and compiling dependencies for Gnome.
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2B1ASK1
Read the article- it's (will be) based on 2.2. I'd say that with the polish and finish that 2.2 has brought vs. 2.0 that this was a lot of the code maturity and consistency that Ximian was waiting for. - you have to remember that although they are not up to CVS speed for getting this out.. (I know I know it's taken them freakin forever) that they wanted to wait for a good solid "Gnome Distro" to be tested and ready. They don't target this neccesarily towards the techie crowd- but more as a corporate (easy to roll out and maintain via Red Carpet (and RC enterprise) desktop solution WITH a company in the back to optionally support it (important seling point to some mgrs.). Also it's an easy to install/maintain and 'fairly' quick intro to Gnome for a lot of folks who won't/can't/don't want to compile and put up with problems with bleeding edge code...
"You never truly understand a thing until you can explain it to your grandmother" -Albert Einstein
Ditto on that front.
If you're running RH8.0 and want to use a version of Gnome that's a little more current, may I suggest that you check out Garnome? It's a very nice ports-based Gnome distribution based (currently) on the latest 2.2RC1 (2.1.90)
I installed it on my Laptop which is running RH80, and it fixed a lot of things that were pissing me off. Upgrading galeon from their site didn't hurt either.
Edge-flipping and viewports are both in GNOME 2. Annoyingly enough, the GNOME people took a page from the KDE people and decided that no one would *ever* want one big desktop, so their default now sucks. It's quite easy to get things back, though.
;; set up viewports
I use sawfish. Add the following to ~/.sawfishrc:
(setq customize-command-classes '(default viewport))
(setq viewport-dimensions '(3 . 4))
(or whatever size you want -- I like 3 across, 4 high.
For edge flipping, be sure you've turned it on in the sawfish config dialog.
Finally, a bunch of the kickass features in GNOME 2 are off by default to accomodate less-than-technically-ept Windows users. You probably want them on too.
Add the following to ~/.gtkrc-2.0:
gtk-can-change-accels = 1
gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"
This will give you emacs style keys back again. Once more, ctrl-a will go to the beginning of the line, ctrl-k will kill, etc. It will also let you rebind menu items by simply hovering the mouse pointer over the item so that it's selected and then hitting the desired key combination.
And I agree about the Evolution/Desktop thing...how did this ever get on Slashdot?
May we never see th