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.
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...
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.
atk
libart_LGPL
libgnomecanvas
libxml2
libxslt
libIDL
linc
ORBIT
intltool
GConf
libglade
libbonobo
gnome-mime-data
gnome-vfs-devel (needed to insta
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)
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.