Ximian Desktop 2 Reviewed

Bruha writes "Lewt over at Warcry News Network has written his review for Ximian Desktop 2 targeted at the home users that are looking for a good desktop solution. He mentions this is a good product that could be bundled with Redhat or Mandrake to provide a one stop solution for the desktop user where they dont have to install any extra software to fully surf the web. Which you do with KDE/Gnome installs of most distro's."

Comments

What a horrible review.

[Blymie]

What a horrible review.

This thing was all of 10 sentences, contains no detail, and just plain sucks.

Can we have a _real_ review, by someone competent, please? Perhaps one that actually took more than 3 minutes to write, and has some detail?

Re:What a horrible review.

[SkArcher]

You could try Here for a slightly more indepth review, or Here for a selection of screenshots.

Or, perish the thought, you could try Here

RPM db conflict with RH9

[A5un]

For Redhat 9 user, there is a serious problem with rpm db conflict. It has been reported here, so install at your own risk.

Re:RPM db conflict with RH9

[forevermore]

As has been suggested in that bug report, it's pretty easy to recompile the RPM without the "obseletes" clause. Well, for those of us redhat users who still remember how to compile things... Just `apt-get source db4` (or download the source your own way), do an `rpm -i` on it, which will place the spec into your redhat/SPECS directory. Then, just edit the .spec file, remove (or comment out) the "Obseletes: db1" clause and recompile with `rpmbuild -ba db4.spec`... viola! reinstall it and all of your dependency issues are fixed.. annoying to have to do this, though. that bug really needs to be resolved.

Changing default browser.

[TheFlu]

I searched for quite a while, trying to figure out how to change the default browser for XD2 from Galeon to Opera. I always like to write up tutorials on little things like this when I come across them, so you can find that info here.

Re:For systems without wget...

[spydir31]

You can download the installer and packages seperatly and point the installer at the files, the installer supports it. (though I can't vouch for how well, not having tried it.)
find the files at one of the Mirrors

Konqueror-KDE integration

[ThreeFarthingStone]

ALL distros I have ever used that set up a KDE or GNOME desktop for you, have a web browser, normally Mozilla/Konqueror. In fact any version of KDE since 2 always includes the browser, it is as integrated into the desktop as MS Internet Explorer into Windows.

GNOME 2 however doesn't have a browser, unless I add something like Mozilla, so this Ximian Desktop 2 idea is great. KDE has Konqueror and you can install Konqueror on top, but I think OpenOffice and Mozilla are more powerful. KDE 3 needs its competition, that would be XD2.

Problem with XD2 is that its really only available for a few distros.

Re:No support for my distros.

[spydir31]

it's somewhat close to the redhat trick of replacing the rpm module redhat_release.
A quick googling brought me this and this.
looks like you can just change the version number in /etc/SuSE-release to "8.2"
(the better way would probably be to install a new suse-release RPM, though I can't seem to find one)

From a real user's perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed it the day it came out. I've been mucking with it for a week now and have some observations.

1) What is the "integration" with OpenOffice? Aside from a different splash screen? OK, my theme fonts come across to the user interface, and it uses Ximian icons now, but it loads (the first time) as slowly as ever.

2) They should have left the GDM splash screen scheme alone. It took a while to figure out how to replace their splash screen with my old (custom) one.

3) Mozilla is broken and shouldn't have been released. When on a page that uses javascript to open a smaller window (like TV Guide listings is where it can easily be reproduced) then sometimes the text in the child window is randomly truncated. There are other bugs but that's the most glaring.

4) Ximian cripped Galeon so that it can no longer use themes!!! Bad Ximian.

5) Ximian's installer destroys a users custom menus even when told to leave them alone. My RedHat "system tools" menu is gone, along with my Crossover Office menu. There's got to be an easy way to restore my old menus but I haven't found it yet.

6) The RedHat "alert" icon no longer works. I miss it - it was a nice way to tell instantly if there were any updates (yeah I know, RedHat sends out emails for their updates, but I still miss it).

7) There are some nice improvements like the "network proxy" setting that doesn't workin the default RedHat 9 install works now, so you only need to set the proxy once, and panel applets that need network access actually work now.

8) I know this sounds harsh but overall I do like it. Bugs have been filed so we'll see how it goes in the next few weeks...

Re:Extra Software

[arturogatti]

Not too long ago, I tried to install Gnome on a Debian Woody system via these instructions

The instructions you were trying to follow describe how to install an unofficial (i.e., not-supported-by-the-Debian-project) backport of Gnome 2.2 to woody and, in fact, the the page containing the instructions also contains feedback from a number of other users who attempted to follow them and ran into dependency problems.

Your criticism of the distro and the packaging system seems a bit unfair, since (1) it was clear going in that other users had been having problems with the packages and (2) the (unofficial) packages hadn't been subjected to Debian's usual quality-control process.