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GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
Kethinov writes "I just read this article reviewing GNOME 2.6 via the 2.5 development version. Many screenshots, plus extensive discussion on the new direction Nautilus is taking among other things. Worth a read. (A mirror would be nice ;)" Sorry - I duped this. Mea culpa.
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Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
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
i must say. i've been using gnome 2.6 since first release candidate and although there aren't an overwhelming number of new features i do find it to be a big improvement over 2.4
the new file selector for one is very nice, although it still has a few rough edges.
personally i'm not too fond of the new 'spatial' nautilus even though i've been a mac user for many years. i miss (or missed) a shortcut to close all open windows for example. nautilus *is* blazingly fast though. also, browsing samba networks works very nicely.
i'm very curious as to the final release. with it's shortcomings gnome remains my most used desktop environment.
great going guys, keep up the good work.