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A Look at the Upcoming GNOME 2.6
unmadindu writes "GNOME 2.6 is just around the corner, and I figured out that many GNOME users would like to know what's in store. So I installed GNOME 2.5 (development version for 2.6) in my box, and came up with a list of the new stuff that are coming up. (and just in case, copies of the article are also available here and here)."
If you want to help Gnome 2.6, then you are in luck! The Beta release is here and it needs testing
More details here
Don't forget to report the bugs!
GNOME ... catches the SVG fever ... quite a few of the games have switched to SVG based graphics, which is a really nice thing, and a move towards the right direction
FYI : SVG = Scalable Vector Graphics
A new GTK file selector. FINALLY. I can't wait to use the new one - the old one was one of the great warts of the free desktop world, IMHO.
But they have decided to remove the text entry box??? Eeep. I guess having the Ctrl-l shortcut to get one is OK (after all, it will most likely be geeks that want direct text on a file open) but thats one they need to document WELL.
On the whole though, it might be a good thing. I guess we'll have to wait and see. But text box or not, it can hardly be worse than the old one.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Site doesn't like /. referrals, just click the URL and press Enter on each 403 Forbidden...
Diving Into GNOME 2.5 - A Preview of GNOME 2.6
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Sayamindu Dasgupta
The boring intro...
As a part of the Bangla/Bengali GNOME l10n team, I decided to give the GNOME HEAD branch a spin - in order to find out what's new, as well as to get an estimate of how much we would have to translate (I hate that part of the job) to attain supported status. The last time I did this, I also wrote an article about what I saw, but unfortunately, I never learn from my mistakes - so here I go again....
However, before jumping in into this guided tour, please remember that I have been involved with the GNOME community for the past few months as a helper in the GNOME Summaries, and I may not be able totally impartial towards GNOME. Feel free to consider me biased.
The Vital Statistics
Before going into the real stuff, let me give me a brief overview of my system, so that when I mention something as fast or as slow, you would be able to guess how it would crawl in your system.
Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2600+
RAM: 512 MB of PC 2700 DDR RAM (with 875 MB swap)
Motherboard: Nforce 2 based mobo from Leadtek
Storage: A 40 GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
Distro: Mandrake 9.2
Kernel: 2.6.2
The Installation
I had gone through (successfully) the GNOME dependency maze before, and to avoid losing my sanity, I decided to use jhbuild (one can also use GARNOME or cvsGNOME - maybe I'll test one of those with GNOME 2.8)
Using jhbuild is quite easy - just set some variables in ~/.jhbuildrc, and you are ready to roll. Jhbuild grabs the latest source code from CVS (taking care of the dependencies), compiles them, and installs them in whatever $prefix you want them to be in. OK - there was one major problem - but that was at a later stage, and it got fixed really quickly.
First Impressions
Fig 1. The default GNOME 2.6 desktop
Jhbuild took around 6 hours to get a bare bones GNOME system up and running, and surprisingly, there were very few errors, and I had to manually intervene only thrice.
I logged in as root the first time (yaya - I know security risk and other stuff..), to be greeted by a clean and polished looking GNOME desktop (Fig. 1) . (Note that I am running the Freedesktop.org Xserver here - so don't expect a stock GNOME 2.6 install to have panel shadows).
Seeing an icon named "Computer" right on the desktop - my first reaction was to click on it, expecting Nautilus to pop up with my "/" directory or something like that.
Nautilus goes spatial
However, as soon as I clicked on that icon - my reaction was "Yikes!! What have they done to Nautilus ??". Gone was the old and familiar explorer like interface. In it's place was a really minimalistic window, with no toolbar, just a plain menubar. I was quite confused - I even clicked on "Help" -> "About" to verify that the "thing" was indeed Nautilus. After some head scratching I remembered a post at FootNotes, in which the Nautilus developers announced something about going "Spatial". People had been pretty much excited about this - though I personally had no idea about what this stuff was all about. Now I thought I understood.
Fig 2. Spatial Nautilus - Showing "Computer"
All my disks had been correctly identified by Nautilus, and was showing up in the "Computer" window (Fig. 2). But that was not very important at that point - all my attention was riveted on the new UI. After some Googling and RTFM sessions, I figured out that Nautilus was following a "Object Oriented" metaphor, instead of the normally used "Navigational" metaphor. The most user visible aspect of the OO metaphor is that there is a always a direct, one-to-one relationship between folders and windows, and the window for each folder remembers where you placed it the last time - i.e, the next time it will pop up in the same position. This new interface is partially inspired by the interface described in http://arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-1.ht ml.
Fig 3. Viewing a deep folder with spatial Na
I guess I'll never be a Gnome user. What is the fascination with muddy colours?
GNOME is quite themable; if you don't like the muddy colours, use another theme.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
"When will we start to see serious performance improvements?"
With GNOME 2.0 and 2.6. Nautilus 2.0 got a huge speed boost compared to 1.x. Nautilus 2.6 is spatial and has because even faster. Windows appear instantly.
"Linux is supposed to get us off the upgrade treadmill, but as far as I can see, GNOME just keeps getting bigger, slower and more complex."
Not true. GNOME (and KDE!) have only gotten faster and faster. The exceptions are KDE 2.0 (which is slower than 1.0; but 3.0 is faster than 2.0 and 3.2 is even faster than 3.0) and GTK (which has become a little slower but also smoother because of extensive double buffering). On this system (Athlon 1.4 Ghz 390 MB RAM) I can definitely say GNOME 2.x is faster than 1.4. And GTK 2 feels smoother than GTK 1.
"When gconfd is eating up 20 megs (resident), just for a configuration back-end, it's evident that we're getting sloppy."
OMG not this again. I will repeat it *again*. Don't trust memory reports! The 20 MB you read includes shared memory! In reality it uses a lot less than 20 MB, somewhere around 6 MB on my system.
People who think software x is bloated by looking at the system monitor's memory report are just deceiving themselves.
And sometimes you need to use more resources in order to make things faster. Low memory usage doesn't always equal fast and high memory usage doesn't always equal slow!
Nautilus is much faster in GNOME 2.6. And it was faster in 2.4 than 2.2, and faster in 2.2 than 2.0.
There are also several specific performance improvements in particular GTK+ widgets, and the GNOME Help system has had an incredible speed up.
Linux kernel 2.6 also makes a very noticeable difference, with it's pre-emptive schedule that gives priority to things that the user is doing.
There's quite a bit of inter-operability work going on at freedesktop.org. There's a lot of shared specifications and software there. Plus there are software libraries that both DEs use that aren't listed on FDO, like libxml2.
The KDE folks have also worked on some Qt-GTK toolkit inter-operability stuff. See also:
GTK-Qt
Ditto
Glib/Qt main loop integration
amongst others.
As for a low resource using window manager, check out XFCE4. It has the look and feel of Gnome but is far more zippy on old hardware. I run it (and occasionally fluxbox) on a P2 300 laptop with 128 MB RAM.
2^5
It is certainly not just geeks who will want or need to type in file names. Skilled typists will not want to move their hands from the home row to open a file. Making them use the mouse to open a file is a bad idea.
So ... type in the name of the filename, anywhere in the window. This file selector has type-ahead support so it will search through the files looking for the next file that matches the string you have typed so far. If you've been using this feature extensively in Mozilla, it'll be second nature already.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
OK - Here's a mirror that should work properly - sorry for the initial goof up http://www.clai.net/sayamindu/GNOME-2.6/GNOME_2_6. html
The FD.O X server runs existing X apps just fine. Since it was based on the already-working kdrive server, it should be working (varying degrees of "working") through most of its development cycle.
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