Posted by
michael
on from the world-outside-KDE dept.
JanneM writes "Gnome 2.4 is arriving early september. Sayamindu Dasgupta has installed the 2.3.5 development release to see what's in store, and has written a very nice overview of the upcoming release."Update: 08/14 16:06 GMT by M: The author has provided a mirror.
The best function in Gnome 2.4...
by
heironymouscoward
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Is the "typing break". I can sit back in my chair, hands on my head, and when the PHB asks why I'm not working, I just say "Gnome Typing Break" and he says "Uh-hu" and goes away. Totally excellent.
--
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Re:The best function in Gnome 2.4...
by
hey
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I don't think its trying to prevent RMI (Remote Method Invocation)... Maybe RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) ???
not flamebait
Does it fix any of those annoying problems in the current versions like:
Nautilus takes an ungodly amount of memory to run
It can't seem to associate file type with applications consistently
It has that annoying "feature" where any time I insert removable media, it opens a window of the media automatically. (I was going to bitch about it mounting automatically, as well, but I suspect that's RH's doing, there: god, sometimes I want to dd, you know)
You close it and it still takes up the same ungodly amount of memory. If I want that kind of behavior, I'll look for it in Windows, thank you.
* It does take up less, I believe (not having done any formal comparison).
* I have never seen that problem; maybe time for a bug report?
* That is Redhat, and can be turned off. Go to "Preferences" -> "CD properties".
* It won't really release all memory until you _really_ close it - as long as you want it to handle your desktop it is still running. Oh, and just like all other Linux apps, releasing memory doesn't actually release the memory as such; the pages are kept around as long as nothing else needs it, and they are still mapped to the app as long as the app is running. Looking at RSS gives you a sort-of reasonable estimate on the memory use, but it too (if I am correct) will overestimate memory use.
-- Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Well, it does a lot of stuff... you might not use it all, but it's there.
It can't seem to associate file type with applications consistently
This is somewhat confusing, but I found in RH9 and Ximian's XD2, a lot of things are associated correctly from the get-go.
It has that annoying "feature" where any time I insert removable media, it opens a window of the media automatically. (I was going to bitch about it mounting automatically, as well, but I suspect that's RH's doing, there: god, sometimes I want to dd, you know)
RTFM? Try "gnome-cd-properties". This isn't nautilus' fault in the first place.
You close it and it still takes up the same ungodly amount of memory. If I want that kind of behavior, I'll look for it in Windows, thank you.
Then you haven't really closed it now, have you? What do you think is managing your desktop? If you don't like it, there's always KDE, or TWM if you'd prefer...
If I had to posit a reason for Nautilus using so much RAM, folder caching would probably be the reason. Nautilus devs can correct me on that one, but it seems like folders I've opened before open much more quickly than new ones. Fixing your memory "problem" would probably knock down the speed of Nautilus tremendously. Buy some more RAM and get on with life.
No idea what the problem with file association is. I've just never had an issue with it (and rather like the way Nautilus gives you a menu of programs to try with a right-click). If you're setting new associations, read the choices carefully, as some similar sounding ones do different things.
You do realize that the _desktop_ is controlled by Nautilus, and thus you really can't close it without killing it, right?
-Erwos
-- Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Re:Nautilus?
by
FooBarWidget
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
1) Not sure about memory usage, but it has never bothered me. I never look at the memory usage. If it feels fast enough, then that's good enough for me. Besides, no tool reports the right memory usage.
2) The current MIME system is severely broken in many ways. This is more of a gnome-vfs problem. They are currently still working with KDE on a new shared MIME system that's better than the current GNOME and KDE ones.
3) That's a RedHat thing. It doesn't happen on my GNOME desktop. But anyway... but complain about automatic mounting? Everybody else complains about *not* automatic mounting and want drives to work like Windows. Heck, people even call mounting and unmounting a "broken concept".
4) Don't look at the output of top, it's not reliable. And this is a kernel issue, not a Nautilus issue.
Re:Nautilus?
by
FrostedWheat
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Another thing I find annoying about Nautilus is its lack of feedback when double-clicking on icons.
Sometimes windows can take upto 10 seconds to open on my machine (2Ghz Athlon, go figure), and I find myself clicking on it a few times to make sure I got it, or right clicking and selecting 'Open' - then have three windows appear at once. Very annoying.
The Gnome system monitor does not give an accurate indication of how much RAM is truly in use. Gnome shares memory between apps. If an application requires the memory, later, it will be released. You're most likely just looking at cached memory that hasn't been released.
It's not a problem, technically. People are just paranoid about their memory usage and don't understand how Gnome really makes use of it.
I've got a really good filemanager. It does everything I want it to and more, and it only takes up a few KB of memory. It's not entirely intuitive, but once you understand it its a dream to use. It's called ls, along with its friends cp, rm, mv, chmod, chown and a few others.
Honestly, folks, isn't this why we moved to Linux in the first place? To get away from bloat in the name of userfriendliness? What happened to K.I.S.S.? What happened to having one program do one thing? What happened to the Unix Philosophy? Nowadays we have all these Explorer wannabe programs that purport to do everything you want and more all in one program -- and I've tried them all -- and I've never found them to be anything but clumsy, compared to the elegant tools of the old school.
A GUI browser, I can understand completely. Ditto word processor, spreadsheets, etc. But for a filemanager? If you're going to insist on a GUI for that, please don't complain about bloat.
-- Ratio of replies to old sig content : replies to actual post content > 0.5. Sig changed.
A GUI browser, I can understand completely. Ditto word processor, spreadsheets, etc. But for a filemanager? If you're going to insist on a GUI for that, please don't complain about bloat.
There's nothing inherently wrong with managing files graphically. The ROX-Filer does an excellent job of combining shell-like globbing with click-and-drag ease and is particularly handy for managing images. ROX-Filer is small, doesn't eat up gobs of memory, runs fast and does one job (file managing) well. Nautilus might be prettier, but it needs a lot of improvement in both bloat and actual file managing before I'd use it full-time.
Of course, for any serious heavy-duty data management (e.g. take all the PNGs in directory A, shrink them by 50%, despeckle, convert to JPEGs and move to directory B) a shell will always beat a graphical pointy clicky tool. But I see no reason not to use both and do so on a regular basis.
--
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
slashdotted
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Informative
What's coming up in GNOME 2.4 - a look at GNOME 2.3:: What's Changed
Having nothing better to do (and wanting to do a bit of testing on the
localization stuff we are working on), I decided to download the latest beta of GNOME - GNOME 2.3.5 (Jebe) . Since the RC
release freeze is imminent, and the feature freeze is already in place, the
system that I am running currently will not be significantly different from GNOME 2.4, when it is released on September.
In this article, I would be briefly describing the new features and applications of GNOME 2.4. However, I would
concentrate mainly on the packages in the core GNOME system, and will not be going beyond those.
Installing the packages (WARNING: slightly hairy)
To GARNOME or not...
I had heard that installing the GNOME packages in the right order could be a tricky process, and I was looking at
GARNOME and other tools for an easy way out. However, after some poking
around, I decided to do the install by hand. This decision was largely prompted by
this document, and I am really grateful to its author.
The system
The usual convention before doing a description of any large scale installation process is to give a short summary of
the specs of the machine in question, and so, without much ado, here it is:
Processor: 700 Mhz Pentium III RAM: 192 MB Swap: 250 MB OS: Redhat Linux 9.0 (Shrike) Kernel: 2.6.0-test2
It is obvious that this is not a very modern machine, but such boxes are quite common in where I live (India).
The installation
Most of the files needed for compile and install are downloadable from the directory
ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/2.3/2.3.5/sources/.
There are also a few "extras" which are usually included in stock "development machine" installations, like the Docbook
4.1.2 DTDs, etc. If you don't have them, the./configure script will complain, and you will find them in your
distro CDs.
I did not download the gtk2, the glib2 and the pango packages. More or less up to date GTK2 and glib2 are already included in
RH 9.0 and I usually keep in sync with the Pango development process through CVS (I have to keep track of certain outstanding
bugs in Pango w.r.t bengali rendering). If you follow these steps, please ensure that you have the devel packages installed
as well.
To avoid a mess, I had decided to install the new GNOME packages under/opt. That meant that the new
libraries and the header files would be installed in/opt/lib and/opt/include. So, I had to
set the $PKG_CONFIG_PATH to/opt/lib/pkg-config (by issuing
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/lib/pkg-config) so the pkg-config utility searched/opt/lib/pkg-config before the usual/usr/lib/pkg-config. I had also added the line/opt/lib
to the file/etc/ld.so.conf. Moreover, the usual./configure was replaced by./configure --prefix=/opt so the installation folder was/opt.
I followed the following sequence while installing packages. It works for me, and it may or may not work for you.
What's with the gum-drops on the right hand side of the title bar? Is this like OS X for left-handed people?
On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
CowsAnonymous
·
· Score: 5, Informative
From the article:
> The most significant addition to the Control Center > is a utility for changing the screen resolution and > refresh rate on the fly.
This will probably be my fav. It's tough to look "kewl" with Linux when I need to exit the GUI just to change the resolution. Then again, going into that console screen does impress chicks...:0)
You must not know many real chicks, if console impresses them.
You fool!
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
FooBarWidget
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
One thing I don't understand is why everybody wants to change resolution on-the-fly. Do you change your resolution every hour or something? Everybody I know just set their resolution *once* and never look back again.
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
bmj
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Often, if I have to switch hats from programmer to designer (part of the job description when you work at a small shop) that I'll crank up the resolution to fit more stuff on the screen. Once I'm finished and get back to coding, I'll reduce the resolution again so I don't go blind. So, it'd be nice if I didn't have to restart X to do that.
-- Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
LordDartan
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It also comes in handy when you and your significant other use the same computer but like different resolutions. My wife likes 800x600 and I like 1280x1024. This is one of the main reasons my wife hates using linux.
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
sholden
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· Score: 3, Funny
Have you thought of using bigger fonts?
You know, like everyone else does who uses high resolutions.
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
larien
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In my case, I sometimes change resolution for streaming videos. The image is usually small (especially for some movie trailers) and even at double size, it's quite small in terms of screen real-estate under 1280x1024. Decreasing resolution to 800x600 usually lets it fill the screen much better.
No, "full screen" mode is not an option in most cases as the scaling usually makes the image look, well, wrong. Also, not all players provide such an option, especially embedded players in browsers (some don't even allow double size).
Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change
by
Mr_Icon
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
One thing I don't understand is why everybody wants to change resolution on-the-fly. Do you change your resolution every hour or something? Everybody I know just set their resolution *once* and never look back again.
If you have over a 100 gnome desktops in your department, you don't want to field "can you please change my resolution" requests from your users, trust me.
-- If you open yourself to the foo,
You and foo become one.
What's coming up in GNOME 2.4 - a look at GNOME 2.3:: What's New
GNOME 2.4 is going to have a number of cool, new applications. In this section, I am going to describe them. The Browser: Epiphany
One of the most controversial changes in GNOME 2.4 is the dumping of Galeon in favour of Epiphany as the default browser. Epiphany is based on Mozilla, but is much more light and bloat free and features a much, much, much cleaner interface. I have not used Galeon very extensively, but Epiphany has already become my default browser. Startup is much faster than Mozilla, the interface is much more intuitive and clutter free and it merges nicely with the look and feel of the rest of the GNOME environment. The latest versions (0.8.2 and above) also have a extra experimental plugin which allows mouse gestures.
Fig 12. Epiphany - The Brand New GNOME Browser. (Click for a larger view)
It supports popup blocking, tabbed browsing, customizable toolbars, automatic image resizing and all of these, with an extremely simple and clean UI. However, I would like to see the download manager to be a little more advanced (resume support maybe??). The PDF Viewer: GPDF
GPDF has a UI which is similar to GGV (The GNOME Postscript Viewer), and handled PDF files quite well in my system. It is based on xpdf (actually, the "NEWS" file says that it is a port of xpdf to GNOME 2).
Fig 13. GPDF - The GNOME PDF Viewer. (Click for a larger view)
As with most other GNOME applications, I found the interface to be nice an clean, but it seemed to have some issues with regard to embedded fonts. The Character Picker: GUCharmap
This new GNOME Character map is quite a fancy tool - a bit too fancy, IMHO. It has support for all the Unicode Characters, and it seems to have detailed information on each and every character.
Fig 14. GUCharMap Showing Some of the Characters. (Click for a larger view) Fig 15. GUCharMap Showing Details. (Click for a larger view)
The Calculator
The new calculator of GNOME is also quite improved. There is a handy list of commonly used mathematical constants (pi, e, various conversion factors, etc). It has three modes - basic, financial and scientific.
Fig 16. GCalcTool - The GNOME Calculator. (Click for a larger view) GNOME System Tools
In my opinion this is one of the best additions to the GNOME software map in a long time. As the README file says, these tools are designed to make (Unix) system configuration easy for desktop users. They aim for what the README calls "unified system configuration", meaning that the same toolset can be used in different flavours of Unix. This is achieved by splitting each tool into two distinct parts - a frontend written in C/Python and a backend written in Perl. Currently available tools include a Runlevel Admin, a Network Admin (which lets you specify your hostname, samba hostname and workgroup, DNS servers, search domains, hosts, network interfaces, ppp, ethernet, slip and in a limited way, wavelan). Also included are a Time Admin, a User Admin and a Boot Admin. I really liked the interface of each tool, especially the artwork. I think it is a great approach towards making a user friendly set of system configuration tools for the desktop user. Tools provided by the various distros are also great, but since each one has a different interface of its own (and a different set of problems), it becomes difficult for both users and tech support people to handle them.
Fig 17. GNOME System Tools - Boot Admin (Click for a larger view) Fig 18. GNOME System Tools - Network Admin (Click for a larger view)
More information on GNOME System Tools is available at http://www.gnome.org/projects/gst/. The Media Player: Totem
Yes - GNOME now has a media player of its own (though of recent, it has suddenly disappeared from the module listing withou any warning). It is called Totem, and currently it is based on a Xine backend. However, from the README, I gathered
I don't care about any new visuals that they've added or performace enhancements. I just want it to be as easy in Gnome to make shortcuts and use the quick launch bar (Gnomes version of it) and manage display settings as it is in KDE 3 and Windows insert any version greater then Windows NT 4 here.
I am not a Gnome basher, frankly I find it humurous that people would bicker over desktops. But, I am forced to use it from time to time, so I would it to be at least as good as KDE.
Re:The typing break
by
Anders
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If I didn't spend 10 minutes an hour meandering arround the office I would probably go insane.
I am not sure why this is funny. It really is a good idea with typing breaks, and of course you can do other work while not typing.
The tool Xwrits may be of use for people interested in this item but not prepared for the entire GNOME upgrade shebang. It must be cool, JWZ uses it (and so do I).
I know what you mean! I'd be even more insance if I didn't spend the other 50 minutes reading Slashdot.:)
Re:KDE is WAY ahead!
by
BladeMelbourne
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Version numbers rarely have anything to do with software development progress with respect to competitors software.
If that was the case, is Windows 3.1 more advanced software that a Linux box with kernel 2.6.0-test3?
It is a well known trend that competing software vendors may increase their version increments to appear current with their competitors.
For example, Netscape 6 (as opposed to Netscape 5) was released because MSIE was already at version 6. RedHat 9 came out after RedHat 8 (there was no 8.1) presumably to keep abreast with Mandrake 9.
GNOME is a mature desktop environment. Their software is good enough - their is no need to resort to such version jumping. It suits some people, but not others. My (Red) Hat goes off to them for not needing to keep their versions in sync with KDE.
However, I do have a couple of questions which is kinda off-topic-ish:
1) Is there a "roadmap" setout in regards to GTK 2.4/2.6 etc terms of functionality one should expect in up coming releases.
2) I've heard rumbles that gtk2 is still being ported to Quartz, could someone confirm it. I know there is an X11 version, however, it would be nice to have one that does require it, not because of anything political, I just don't want to download that massive 40+ MB XFree86 package from Apple;-)
3) Is there going to be a move by GNOME to support MAS as a replacement for esound? having used MAS and seen it action, it would be a really great addition if it was made available.
4) When running GNOME on FreeBSD I notice that when I select text in a terminal window there is a stall and the whole computer freezes then suddenly comes alright. I haven't experience that with KDE.
Having run GNOME 2.2 on Linux quite nicely it clearly isn't an issue with GNOME but with the FreeBSD port. Could someone confirm that this is being addressed?
--
"The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting" - Woody Allen
Re:Problems with gnome 2.3 (the 2.4 beta)
by
FooBarWidget
·
· Score: 4, Informative
1) File dialog.
The current GTK+ file dialog *cannot* be changed without breaking compatibility. A new file dialog is under development for GTK+ 2.4, for quite a while now. But GTK+ 2.4 will not make it before the GNOME 2.4 release. If you want a slightly better file dialog (with Back button, Home button, Bookmarks, etc.) but is still compatible with all the current apps, take a look at this patch: http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=363 5
2) Galeon. Galeon never was a part of GNOME 2. At one point they had to choose a browser so they chose Epiphany because it's goals are like GNOME's. There's nothing stopping you from installing Galeon yourself. I'm typing this in Galeon right now.
3) Extract Here I agree with you on this. Email the File Roller author, not Slashdot.
4) Panel size Why click 20 times? Just focus the spinbox and type in whatever number you want using your keyboard. As for the goat logo, how's that a usability issue? Users don't care what logo they see in the about box (if they look at all).
5) Media player GStreamer doesn't "suck", it's just not finished yet. Xine is not "superior", it's different. GStreamer is a very ambitious project, and is like Windows's DirectShow. It's not just for playing files, it's an entire multimedia framework, which includes things like recording and encoding. I don't see Xine doing something like that. What's stopping you from installing MPlayer (not Windows Media Player!) or Xine or whatever? I installed MPlayer, setup some associations and everything works perfectly.
Anyway, I don't know why you say 2.4 isn't as good as 2.2. Except for Extract Here, none of the features in 2.2 are removed, some features just didn't make it to 2.4.
Maybe it isn't a memory leak
by
r6144
·
· Score: 5, Informative
As for "used memory" keeping increasing... You just have way too much memory. On most machines "used memory" is almost equal to "total memory" while the system runs fine, because the memory not used by processes can be used for caching (and not just the "Cached" shown by top/free, either). In short, it is hard to know whether or not the kernel or a user process leaks or not just by looking at the memory statistics, even if there actually IS one.
If you suspect a leak in some process, look at its VM size. If there is a leak, the process will end up much larger after repeating some operation, such as opening a new window, N times (clean up after each time) than doing that once.
Another way is to look at the swap usage. It usually keeps increasing, but should mostly be stable after e.g. 2 hours of usage, unless you start some other very large applications.
Re:GNOME vs KDE
by
ElGuapoGolf
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I personally don't care about eye candy, but I do think the development is lagging behind.
Example: File Dialog. The Gnome file dialog is the most hideous and counter-intuitive piece of software I've ever seen. With the KDE file dialog, not only can I navigate easier, it's tied to their IO slaves, so I can save to FTP sites, SMB shares, etc. Pretty much anything.
With the GTK/Gnome dialog, I'm usually cursing and grumbling as I clumsily navigate around. And the programs that constantly reset the dialog to your home directory, even after you've called the dialog and navigated a few levels in, are way annoying.
Any Metacity Fixes/Updates?
by
mauriatm
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One of the most troubling things to me is still Metacity WM. Maybe this has changed but last I recall you could not change the animation settings (that annoying minimize/maximize ani) and the redraw settings (dragging/resizing would show contents). To make it worse, Gnome in general made it difficult to change your WM. And what bothers me more still is that Sawmill(fish whatever) reduced its settings/options to be minimal like Metacity, although deep config settings could restore most settings back to the 1.4 days. I remember hearing some explanation that Metacity was the only Gnome2 compliant WM, so others were looked down upon.... Am I misinformed or has this changed?
why are they bothering
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Gnome's gone downhill since 1.4 in the area of user customizations. The ability to customize behavior is almost non existant compared to what we had in 1.4. I could tweak and adjust 1.4 to create a very cool environment for myself. With the 2.x series, almost all of the capability is gone. It's now just a mindless environment for dummies. Gnome's stated that they're aiming low and catering for the dumber computer users. There was soo much potential for it to develop into a really powerful environment and then those silly studies were conducted and the rest is history..... Oh well.
Re:Problems with gnome 2.3 (the 2.4 beta)
by
FooBarWidget
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Instead of asking "how many preferences can I still change now?", ask yourself this first: How many of all those preferences actually make sense?
For example, the preferences in the Pager applet that lets you tweak for a certain window manager make no sense. They're the "unbreak me" type of preferences. Things like that should be handled automatically. Another one is startup notification. Why would anyone not want it? Why should it be disable-able? And there's the Nautilus desktop preferences. A lot of users got confused by the sudden disappearence of their desktop and don't know how to get them back. Besides, this is a preference that only power users with old hardward would want to use, and is only set once.
And most people who complain about the lack of preferences are geeks and power users who are used to lots of preferences. Well sorry to say this to you, but you are not GNOME's target group anymore. GNOME is now targeting normal users that want simplicity and don't want to be flooded with config options.
Nautilus Useable?
by
xjerky
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sorry, but even the latest Nautilus is noticably slower then Konqueror. I have a directory with a few thousand files and Nautilus popped up a message saying something like "There are too many files for Nautilus to display. Exiting" WTF?????? Its the primary job of the friggin app and it won't do it??? Very unprofessional.
-- A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board:
"You know what? You're right."
Re:Nautilus literally has no clue?
by
mrroach
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Slashdot Mirror
Is the "typing break". I can sit back in my chair, hands on my head, and when the PHB asks why I'm not working, I just say "Gnome Typing Break" and he says "Uh-hu" and goes away. Totally excellent.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Does it fix any of those annoying problems in the current versions like:
Put identity in the browser.
Having nothing better to do (and wanting to do a bit of testing on the localization stuff we are working on), I decided to download the latest beta of GNOME - GNOME 2.3.5 (Jebe) . Since the RC release freeze is imminent, and the feature freeze is already in place, the system that I am running currently will not be significantly different from GNOME 2.4, when it is released on September. In this article, I would be briefly describing the new features and applications of GNOME 2.4. However, I would concentrate mainly on the packages in the core GNOME system, and will not be going beyond those.
Installing the packages (WARNING: slightly hairy) To GARNOME or not...
I had heard that installing the GNOME packages in the right order could be a tricky process, and I was looking at GARNOME and other tools for an easy way out. However, after some poking around, I decided to do the install by hand. This decision was largely prompted by this document, and I am really grateful to its author.
The system
The usual convention before doing a description of any large scale installation process is to give a short summary of the specs of the machine in question, and so, without much ado, here it is:
Processor: 700 Mhz Pentium III
RAM: 192 MB
Swap: 250 MB
OS: Redhat Linux 9.0 (Shrike)
Kernel: 2.6.0-test2
It is obvious that this is not a very modern machine, but such boxes are quite common in where I live (India).
The installation
Most of the files needed for compile and install are downloadable from the directory ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/2.3/2.3.5/sources/. There are also a few "extras" which are usually included in stock "development machine" installations, like the Docbook 4.1.2 DTDs, etc. If you don't have them, the ./configure script will complain, and you will find them in your
distro CDs.
/opt. That meant that the new
libraries and the header files would be installed in /opt/lib and /opt/include. So, I had to
set the $PKG_CONFIG_PATH to /opt/lib/pkg-config (by issuing
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/lib/pkg-config) so the pkg-config utility searched /opt/lib/pkg-config before the usual /usr/lib/pkg-config. I had also added the line /opt/lib
to the file /etc/ld.so.conf. Moreover, the usual ./configure was replaced by ./configure --prefix=/opt so the installation folder was /opt.
I did not download the gtk2, the glib2 and the pango packages. More or less up to date GTK2 and glib2 are already included in RH 9.0 and I usually keep in sync with the Pango development process through CVS (I have to keep track of certain outstanding bugs in Pango w.r.t bengali rendering). If you follow these steps, please ensure that you have the devel packages installed as well.
To avoid a mess, I had decided to install the new GNOME packages under
I followed the following sequence while installing packages. It works for me, and it may or may not work for you.
What's with the gum-drops on the right hand side of the title bar? Is this like OS X for left-handed people?
From the article: > The most significant addition to the Control Center > is a utility for changing the screen resolution and > refresh rate on the fly. This will probably be my fav. It's tough to look "kewl" with Linux when I need to exit the GUI just to change the resolution. Then again, going into that console screen does impress chicks... :0)
CowsAnonymous: We're here to help moo.
What's coming up in GNOME 2.4 - a look at GNOME 2.3 :: What's New
GNOME 2.4 is going to have a number of cool, new applications. In this section, I am going to describe them.
The Browser: Epiphany
One of the most controversial changes in GNOME 2.4 is the dumping of Galeon in favour of Epiphany as the default browser. Epiphany is based on Mozilla, but is much more light and bloat free and features a much, much, much cleaner interface. I have not used Galeon very extensively, but Epiphany has already become my default browser. Startup is much faster than Mozilla, the interface is much more intuitive and clutter free and it merges nicely with the look and feel of the rest of the GNOME environment. The latest versions (0.8.2 and above) also have a extra experimental plugin which allows mouse gestures.
Fig 12. Epiphany - The Brand New GNOME Browser. (Click for a larger view)
It supports popup blocking, tabbed browsing, customizable toolbars, automatic image resizing and all of these, with an extremely simple and clean UI. However, I would like to see the download manager to be a little more advanced (resume support maybe??).
The PDF Viewer: GPDF
GPDF has a UI which is similar to GGV (The GNOME Postscript Viewer), and handled PDF files quite well in my system. It is based on xpdf (actually, the "NEWS" file says that it is a port of xpdf to GNOME 2).
Fig 13. GPDF - The GNOME PDF Viewer. (Click for a larger view)
As with most other GNOME applications, I found the interface to be nice an clean, but it seemed to have some issues with regard to embedded fonts.
The Character Picker: GUCharmap
This new GNOME Character map is quite a fancy tool - a bit too fancy, IMHO. It has support for all the Unicode Characters, and it seems to have detailed information on each and every character.
Fig 14. GUCharMap Showing Some of the Characters. (Click for a larger view)
Fig 15. GUCharMap Showing Details. (Click for a larger view)
The Calculator
The new calculator of GNOME is also quite improved. There is a handy list of commonly used mathematical constants (pi, e, various conversion factors, etc). It has three modes - basic, financial and scientific.
Fig 16. GCalcTool - The GNOME Calculator. (Click for a larger view)
GNOME System Tools
In my opinion this is one of the best additions to the GNOME software map in a long time. As the README file says, these tools are designed to make (Unix) system configuration easy for desktop users. They aim for what the README calls "unified system configuration", meaning that the same toolset can be used in different flavours of Unix. This is achieved by splitting each tool into two distinct parts - a frontend written in C/Python and a backend written in Perl.
Currently available tools include a Runlevel Admin, a Network Admin (which lets you specify your hostname, samba hostname and workgroup, DNS servers, search domains, hosts, network interfaces, ppp, ethernet, slip and in a limited way, wavelan). Also included are a Time Admin, a User Admin and a Boot Admin.
I really liked the interface of each tool, especially the artwork. I think it is a great approach towards making a user friendly set of system configuration tools for the desktop user. Tools provided by the various distros are also great, but since each one has a different interface of its own (and a different set of problems), it becomes difficult for both users and tech support people to handle them.
Fig 17. GNOME System Tools - Boot Admin (Click for a larger view)
Fig 18. GNOME System Tools - Network Admin (Click for a larger view)
More information on GNOME System Tools is available at http://www.gnome.org/projects/gst/.
The Media Player: Totem
Yes - GNOME now has a media player of its own (though of recent, it has suddenly disappeared from the module listing withou any warning). It is called Totem, and currently it is based on a Xine backend. However, from the README, I gathered
I am not a Gnome basher, frankly I find it humurous that people would bicker over desktops. But, I am forced to use it from time to time, so I would it to be at least as good as KDE.
If I didn't spend 10 minutes an hour meandering arround the office I would probably go insane.
I am not sure why this is funny. It really is a good idea with typing breaks, and of course you can do other work while not typing.
The tool Xwrits may be of use for people interested in this item but not prepared for the entire GNOME upgrade shebang. It must be cool, JWZ uses it (and so do I).
I know what you mean! I'd be even more insance if I didn't spend the other 50 minutes reading Slashdot. :)
Version numbers rarely have anything to do with software development progress with respect to competitors software.
If that was the case, is Windows 3.1 more advanced software that a Linux box with kernel 2.6.0-test3?
It is a well known trend that competing software vendors may increase their version increments to appear current with their competitors.
For example, Netscape 6 (as opposed to Netscape 5) was released because MSIE was already at version 6. RedHat 9 came out after RedHat 8 (there was no 8.1) presumably to keep abreast with Mandrake 9.
GNOME is a mature desktop environment. Their software is good enough - their is no need to resort to such version jumping. It suits some people, but not others. My (Red) Hat goes off to them for not needing to keep their versions in sync with KDE.
Mike
However, I do have a couple of questions which is kinda off-topic-ish:
;-)
1) Is there a "roadmap" setout in regards to GTK 2.4/2.6 etc terms of functionality one should expect in up coming releases.
2) I've heard rumbles that gtk2 is still being ported to Quartz, could someone confirm it. I know there is an X11 version, however, it would be nice to have one that does require it, not because of anything political, I just don't want to download that massive 40+ MB XFree86 package from Apple
3) Is there going to be a move by GNOME to support MAS as a replacement for esound? having used MAS and seen it action, it would be a really great addition if it was made available.
4) When running GNOME on FreeBSD I notice that when I select text in a terminal window there is a stall and the whole computer freezes then suddenly comes alright. I haven't experience that with KDE.
Having run GNOME 2.2 on Linux quite nicely it clearly isn't an issue with GNOME but with the FreeBSD port. Could someone confirm that this is being addressed?
"The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting" - Woody Allen
1) File dialog.
3 5
The current GTK+ file dialog *cannot* be changed without breaking compatibility. A new file dialog is under development for GTK+ 2.4, for quite a while now. But GTK+ 2.4 will not make it before the GNOME 2.4 release.
If you want a slightly better file dialog (with Back button, Home button, Bookmarks, etc.) but is still compatible with all the current apps, take a look at this patch:
http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=36
2) Galeon.
Galeon never was a part of GNOME 2. At one point they had to choose a browser so they chose Epiphany because it's goals are like GNOME's. There's nothing stopping you from installing Galeon yourself. I'm typing this in Galeon right now.
3) Extract Here
I agree with you on this. Email the File Roller author, not Slashdot.
4) Panel size
Why click 20 times? Just focus the spinbox and type in whatever number you want using your keyboard. As for the goat logo, how's that a usability issue? Users don't care what logo they see in the about box (if they look at all).
5) Media player
GStreamer doesn't "suck", it's just not finished yet. Xine is not "superior", it's different. GStreamer is a very ambitious project, and is like Windows's DirectShow. It's not just for playing files, it's an entire multimedia framework, which includes things like recording and encoding. I don't see Xine doing something like that.
What's stopping you from installing MPlayer (not Windows Media Player!) or Xine or whatever? I installed MPlayer, setup some associations and everything works perfectly.
Anyway, I don't know why you say 2.4 isn't as good as 2.2. Except for Extract Here, none of the features in 2.2 are removed, some features just didn't make it to 2.4.
If you suspect a leak in some process, look at its VM size. If there is a leak, the process will end up much larger after repeating some operation, such as opening a new window, N times (clean up after each time) than doing that once.
Another way is to look at the swap usage. It usually keeps increasing, but should mostly be stable after e.g. 2 hours of usage, unless you start some other very large applications.
GTK+ 2.4 Plan
I personally don't care about eye candy, but I do think the development is lagging behind.
Example: File Dialog. The Gnome file dialog is the most hideous and counter-intuitive piece of software I've ever seen. With the KDE file dialog, not only can I navigate easier, it's tied to their IO slaves, so I can save to FTP sites, SMB shares, etc. Pretty much anything.
With the GTK/Gnome dialog, I'm usually cursing and grumbling as I clumsily navigate around. And the programs that constantly reset the dialog to your home directory, even after you've called the dialog and navigated a few levels in, are way annoying.
One of the most troubling things to me is still Metacity WM. Maybe this has changed but last I recall you could not change the animation settings (that annoying minimize/maximize ani) and the redraw settings (dragging/resizing would show contents). To make it worse, Gnome in general made it difficult to change your WM. And what bothers me more still is that Sawmill(fish whatever) reduced its settings/options to be minimal like Metacity, although deep config settings could restore most settings back to the 1.4 days. I remember hearing some explanation that Metacity was the only Gnome2 compliant WM, so others were looked down upon. ... Am I misinformed or has this changed?
Linux Resources
Gnome's gone downhill since 1.4 in the area of user customizations. The ability to customize behavior is almost non existant compared to what we had in 1.4. I could tweak and adjust 1.4 to create a very cool environment for myself. With the 2.x series, almost all of the capability is gone. It's now just a mindless environment for dummies. Gnome's stated that they're aiming low and catering for the dumber computer users. There was soo much potential for it to develop into a really powerful environment and then those silly studies were conducted and the rest is history..... Oh well.
Instead of asking "how many preferences can I still change now?", ask yourself this first:
How many of all those preferences actually make sense?
For example, the preferences in the Pager applet that lets you tweak for a certain window manager make no sense. They're the "unbreak me" type of preferences. Things like that should be handled automatically.
Another one is startup notification. Why would anyone not want it? Why should it be disable-able?
And there's the Nautilus desktop preferences. A lot of users got confused by the sudden disappearence of their desktop and don't know how to get them back. Besides, this is a preference that only power users with old hardward would want to use, and is only set once.
And most people who complain about the lack of preferences are geeks and power users who are used to lots of preferences. Well sorry to say this to you, but you are not GNOME's target group anymore. GNOME is now targeting normal users that want simplicity and don't want to be flooded with config options.
Sorry, but even the latest Nautilus is noticably slower then Konqueror.
I have a directory with a few thousand files and Nautilus popped up a message saying something like "There are too many files for Nautilus to display. Exiting" WTF?????? Its the primary job of the friggin app and it won't do it??? Very unprofessional.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Single-click:
.hidden files:
Applications->Desktop Preferences->File Management
Click "Behaviour"
Choose "Single click to activate items"
As for the launch notification within nautilus, that feature will be in 2.4
Here's a list of the new features in nautilus. There's lots of good stuff including the multi-rooted tree view, and
-Mark