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Interview With Ximian's Nat Friedman
Sheepish writes "OSNews features a long and interesting interview with Nat Friedman, of Ximian fame. Nat tells all and talks about the upcoming Ximian Desktop 2 and its differences from Gnome 2, the difficulties of developing the MS Exchange Connector, Linux as a desktop, Mono and plans for Gnome integration, the hundrends of OpenOffice.org changes made to make OOo like a Gnome2 app, and how Ximian feels... about Apple's business. Four screenshots of Ximian Desktop 2 are included too."
From their desktop support general info:
/etc/redhat-release
Slackware Linux is a well-respected Linux distribution, and has a dedicated, fierce following. It is possible that Ximian may support Slack in the future but we have no idea when that might happen. Slackware support is likely to come after BSD support, Debian PPC support, and SuSE PPC support. Right now, we have plenty of work supporting the distributions we already support.
The things that prevent Ximian from supporting Slackware are partly technical, and partly market based. Technically, Slack has a package management system which has substantial differences from other distribution's package management systems. Dependency checking, for example, is absolutely necessary for certain Ximian services and features (the installer and the updater, in particular), and is not fully supported by Slackware. Slackware's architects have a well-defended disdain for dependency checking, and we can understand their arguments. But without it, Ximian Desktop can't figure out what to install, what to upgrade, and what to leave alone.
That means, basically, that it's a lot more work for us to add really good support for Slack than it is for us to add good support for, say, Conectiva, which is based closely upon the Red-Hat model. Not only that, but there aren't a lot of distros based upon Slack. From our support for Red Hat, it's a quick jump to other rpm-based distros. If we support Slackware, it's working with an entirely new package system just for one Linux distro.
Another market force is the profile of the typical Slack user. Slackware users often compile stuff themselves. They know how to install software at the command line. They know their dependency trees themselves, and don't trust or need package management systems. They're hackers in the best sense of the word, and we respect them deeply for that. They don't need things like the Ximian Desktop update service, or the graphical installer. Ximian is about making free software easier to use, and Slackware users don't tend to need any help.
So, what can you do, elite Slackware user, ignored by market forces and business types, if you want the prettiest, bestest desktop in the Linux land? You can download pre-rolled tgzs from the variety of Slack software mirrors, or get the binary rpms or source rpms from the Red Hat directory at our ftp site, and install by hand with rpm. Or you can convert them to slack packages with rpm2tgz. And, in a brave trick of hackery, you can fool the graphical installer into thinking you're a Red Hat user. The command:
echo "Red Hat Linux release 7.2 (Enigma)" >
has been reported to make the installer work, although you're likely to have difficulty with one or another dependency somewhere. Official Ximian support of this method is not available, and we cannot give you any guarantees.
Sure, even older.
Ximian Desktop 2 is not a complete distro. It's software for a variety of operating systems.
It is (or will be, upon release) available for download free-of-charge. Source is/will be available for all open/free components. Patches are being and will be submitted upstream to maintainers.
Purchasers ($99) get extras including 3rd party (proprietary) software, PLUS 30 days support, PLUS a year's Red Carpet Express high-speed updates.
a.
Source code will be released the same week of June 9. It's mentioned in their faq.
Celebrate the finer things in life
I loved XD1 back in the RHAT 7.3 daze, but since I never seen a supported 8.0 version I gave up on it.
I loved it but I remember that whenever I wanted to update by version of Redhat I had to format seems the rpms used by Ximian were diffrent than Redhats.
I'm going to give XD2 a shot, I'm sure it will be great, I'll just put it on a box I don't care about before I put it on my main Linux machine.
About oo...
I can't speak for the entire suite but oowriter has been great to me until recently.
I attent the University of Phoenix online and was working on a major paper. Of course everyone else in the class uses the ms office suite.
I was about to submit my paper when I fired up rdesktop to view it in XP... it came out hacked in symbols (@#![])... I had to retype it in ms word!
I still think it's almost as good as abiword, but abi doesn't seem to get much press so it may even be better...
We're getting close!
I was looking at 3.0.3, which only has five tabs. Good to hear the tab momentum continues apace in new versions of KDE
(Also, I wasn't really trying to FUD; just to illustrate the different value systems.)
We don't have a fundamentally new file selection dialog, but we added some quickbuttons to the stock Gtk one that jump you to your desktop, documents or home directory. This makes it a bit easier to use.
Owen Taylor is allegedly developing a new file manager in Gtk 2.4 that should be much easier to use, and that we expect to see adopted across GNOME very quickly.