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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
But that "default desktop" screenshot is pig-ugly. Grey isn't going to pull in the XP-using Teletubby-land loving hordes. I think they should have a nice default background image, and if you want to get rid of it, you can. It can't be hard to improve on "Bliss", anyway.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
This is a repost of an article submitted by the author and posted by Taco.... I wonder if any newer articles about this topic have been posted since? Personally, I doubt we will see too much more from article-writers until GNOME is packaged up by the major distros...
GNOME has a netstatus applet now, which lets you know about the status of your network interface. It is similar to the Windows XP network status applet (which spews forth those irritating balloon like message boxes from the taskbar every now and then).
Like when your connection goes down? Wouldn't you like to know when that happens? I rather would. And, not to troll, but Windows has had that since NT 4.
What is with some developers and their attitude towards little Windows-like widgets? Some of those things are actually useful. And if you ever want GNOME to approach the functionality of, say, Windows XP (and I do say functionality; the XP interface simply does a hell of a lot more) you need to focus on both "polish and more polish" and the inclusion of useful little applets.
Why must you tease me with your promise of screenshots? Gets me every time...
I'm always fooled into this false sense of security based on the fact that no one really rtfa's, and click on the link, only to find the slashdotting effect has forced me to go work instead of look at pretty pictures.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Hello, oGALAXYo.
Nice to see you using the "worked on GNOME for 5 years and got ticked off" line, it makes it much easier to put together posts you've made on "osnews.com". Haven't seen you posting much there lately, but I assume that's only because you've been banned there.
How long did you have this rant stored on your copy of notepad... er, I mean, whatever text editor comes with MorphOS? Why did you post as an AC? I've got nothing personal against you, but man.... I've got to call a cheese a cheese.
Nobody is forcing you to use Gnome or KDE desktop.
If you want a ligh one use fluxbox or if you uber-cool-unix-hacker ratpoison
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
People love that clean feeling. It makes them more comfortable. The first thing I think of when I see IceWM screenshots is how old school they look and how I assume, "I could never get anything done on that." Let's not start a gui war, but the gui is what people see, not the kernel source code. I think that it is very important for developers to focus on this. Linus has the kernel, but the gnome and kde people have more of the end user to worry about. Making the gui look more stable is important not just for "pulling people away from winblowz" but to keep people on gnome. Also, the switch to gkt2 allows things to look more seamless which is what windows users are more or less comming to expect. Ironically though, office doesn't look like anything. I'll never understand that!
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.
I remember on the Amiga, and Macs having spatial, and this is a very bad move from GNOME.
Its a mistake, Every one used Directory Opus to deal with files on the Amiga for a very good reason. Spatial handling is messy, and a pain in the arse.
There not just redoing things, there now repeating other peoples mistakes. ArsTechnica is quite good normally but spatial file handling was never any good.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
*sigh*.. again somebody goes and ruins a perfectly good flamewar by actually posting information.
Mod this however you want, but the only thing I though of when using Gnome's new 'Spatial' file browser last week was navigating around Windows 3.1. Not only is this a bad idea, but the implementation was inconsistent on the desktop. The taskbar icon started the familiar navigational version of Nautilus, the Desktop icon launched the spatial version. What should have been done was improving Nautilus itself, not making a drastic change to the way it works.
This is a step backwards, and one that will slow down making any inroads into the corporate or personal desktop.
So how's performance? Or does it just not matter these days?
Look. Unlike Windows, this stuff is going to be going on to multi-user systems. There will be tens, hundreds of instances of each of the applications running on a particular machine... Over the network... Performance for X based applications is *absolutely crucial* in the corporate environment. That *is* where Gnome is going, isn't it?
Gnome 2.0 (Solaris packages) performs poorly in comparison to other X based UIs like CDE and Openstep. Both in local and network performance. So, does 2.6 suck or is it acceptable, is it even better?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Just for
"XP-using Teletubby-land loving hordes"
You must get modded a +5 Interesting...
I haven't laughed that hard in a while.
Now as another poster said. Very few are going to download this on the web and compile it. Most will wait for SuSe/RedHat/Mandrake et all to put it in their distibution. Notice that this guy said it took almost 6 hours to set up! Heck he even considered it good that it only had 3 errors he had to manually fix. No "teletubby" is going to be able to do that.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
You think Konqueror sucks horribly?!?! I'm aghast!
As far as I'm concerned, Konqueror is KDE's killer app. It's the one thing I can't give up, the thing I miss most when I have to use a Windows or Mac OS machine.
I can't imagine anyone disliking it!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW