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GNOME 2.8 Released
damogar writes "The GNOME 2.8 Desktop and Platform release is the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment, out today, with an awesome schedule time. Some pretty cool improvements have been made, specially the Nautilus file manager, the new MIME system and others.
Release notes are already available, as well as screenshots and a variety of sources. Enjoy!"
jimmy_dean adds a plug for the new
GNOME Journal, which is meant to be a source of "good written material surrounding GNOME and the opinions of the community."
...is right here.
The Army reading list
Ah, the screenshots always kill a webserver don't they ;) Here's a mirror of just the screenies for Gnome 2.8: screenshots. Firefox users remember; center-click is yr friend! ;)
CB_)(^%#
free ipod and free gmail!
Not really, I submitted into Linux section, but it was magically edited to BSD.
Because Gnome runs on BSD as well as Linux. They left out Solaris, HP-UX, and Darwin though.
GNOME 2.8 Desktop and Developer Platform Unveiled
Just click here: http://www.mysan.de/article19429.html
Greetings, Jakob
yakobusan
Yes
- improved gdm which doesn't cause random system hangs on logout (with a dual display GeForce setup)
Never heard of that before. Check bugzilla
- faster nautilus
If you use spatial nautilus it's extremely fast. If you don't, then it's not so fast. Pick your poison.
- fixed constantly non-functional (without necessary tweaking) file preview (audio and video)
It always worked for me out of the box on Fedora, though you may have to enable it in the preferences for remote mounts.
GNOME2.8 came too late for Mandrakelinux 10.1 (just as KDE 3.3), that's why I've created my own packages. You can get them from a urpmi repository. Remember to add the Mandrake Cooker (soon to become 10.1) and Contrib repositories as well for some of the dependancies.
If you really want to switch just a window manager, and aren't confusing window managers and desktops, you can do that in KDE too.
I'm a GNOME user at heart, but I've found modern versions of GNOME way too slow on my Duron 900. GNOME 1.4 was lightning fast, and 2.0 and 2.2 were reasonably fast. 2.4, 2.6, and 2.8 seem to have regressions in speed.
PLEASE focus on speed rather than new features. Comparable modern desktops like Windows XP and KDE 3.3 are very fast on this box. I'm running xfce4, which isn't really comparable to GNOME in features, but is very fast, so I use it.
metacity (the Gnome window manager) can be a compositing manager, but it is disabled by default (a configure switch) so that only users who know what they are doing enable it.
--
The world is divided in two categories:
those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.
If you install packages from your distro then you will *probably* get menu items. This is assuming that there is an up-to-date and correct package for your distro of course. If you install software from source, you may need to set the prefix to be /usr to get menu items, or change the configuration of your system (if you do it's a bug in the distro but a very common one).
It's not really a GNOME issue. It's a generic Linux issue, which will take some years to solve correctly I'm afraid ...
You're welcome! :)
(I developed that patch)
According to Distrowatch, here are the top-ranked distributions. I've added in their default desktops. "Either" means there is no clear preference.
Your assertion that Gnome is the "default desktop on every major distro" is clearly incorrect.
1. Mandrakelinux - KDE
2. Fedora - Gnome
3. Knoppix - KDE
4. SUSE - KDE
5. Debian - either
6. Slackware - either
7. Gentoo - either
8. MEPIS - KDE
9. PCLinuxOS - KDE
10. Damn Small - Fluxbox
You can get these effects with any desktop running on Xorg6.8
just run
xcompmgr -c
(in an xterm) and that will give you proper dropshadows and compositing (no-more window trails)
and the
transset
(in an xterm)
command will give you a point-and click crosshair to make any window have real transparency.
Here's a screenie of my desktop demonstrating it.
You should be able to get similar results using any WM from TWM upwards, just make sure you have a enough beef to enjoy it fully.
Nick...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Watch out - metacity 2.84 has problems with the new stuff, use 2.83
... available here
Office tends to work similarly, with a lot of the code being loaded at startup. This increases the Windows start time but decreases the time taken to start an Office application.
No, this isn't true. You can NOT run all those apps...especially Office AND IE AND Outlook with just 128 of RAM smoothly.
Smoothly is the key point here. Yes, you can run them, but not smoothly...go tell that to someone else but don't try to spread that around here as you'll get laughed out of the forums.
It's not even funny as a troll either. I mean, come on, try a little harder.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Constructing and rendering a GUI is surprisingly intensive, especially with modern toolkits that support complex layout and text internationalization.
Perhaps because it's already readilly available to anyone following the marcuscom ports tree? Mine finished building sometime last night after about 10pm.
scott
My girlfriend's mother's computer has 128 megs of ram. I have tried to get it working at a speed that I can tolerate when I visit their house. Thus far I haven't gotten it to work. It's running win2k pro and even right after it boots, its already using swap. Opening anything takes a good 20-30 seconds and that's just *one* other program. I can't imagine trying to open all 3 (Office/IE/Outlook). I've run spybot/adaware. I've shutdown all the unnecessary services. I really don't know what more I can do to get an acceptable speed out of it.
If you know how to get better speed I would love to hear it, but my personal experience shows that things drag with 128MB of ram in win2k pro.
For anyone keeping track its a standard dell machine. It's got a P4 1.6ghz processor. Not a wonderful machine by any means, but really, it should be able to run win2k. My P3 laptop with similar stats ran kde acceptably (before I switched to fluxbox). I can't speak to gnome. I tried it once on my laptop and spacial nautilius drove me away.
Just thought I'd add a quick plug for Epiphany Extensions. We worked on a couple (Page Info and Select Stylesheet) right before the deadline, so now we've got a somewhat reasonable bunch.
Epiphany is still a browser centred around simplicity. But the extensions can give you those features you wish you had from other browsers.
The full list: SSL certificate viewer, dashboard connection, HTML/Javascript error viewer and link checker, mouse gestures, page info dialog, stylesheet selection, "smart bookmarks" (right-click on selection -> search the web), tab grouping (open new tabs directly next to the current one), tabs menu entries.
However, it's not until GNOME 2.10 that there'll be a UI to select extensions.
Gnome 2 has a good menu editor. Just
go to "applications:///". You can also edit the menu directly (right click on a menu item).
You must have FAM (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fam/) installed to see the changes without a restart.
Shock! Horror! They're using a proportional width font that makes characters like 'i' and 'l' look narrower than 'X' or 'W'! You might also want to double check that you're looking at the picture at full resolution. If you open it in a Gecko-based browser like Mozilla or Firefox, the image will default to being scaled to your browser window, and scaling a picture of a font tends to make it look awful. I think that the fonts look fine when looking at the image at full scale, though others are obviously free to disagree.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Adding items;
Open the menu you want to add an item to.
Right click.
Choose "Entire menu->Add new item to this menu".
Editing items;
Right click on the item you want to edit.
Choose "Properties".
Deleting items;
Right click on the item you want to delete.
Choose "Remove this item".
Gnome doesn't have a menu editor application because it doesn't need one.
### Actualy, it's perfect.
Not really, far far away from 'perfect' actually. The Ctrl-L hack is really horrible, the window is to small, it easily loses focus, its slow as hell compared to the former dialog, it doesn't provide a view into the current directory, etc. Ctrl-L hack is really not something that should have ever entered into a production release.
The dialog also suffers from the lack of different views onto the files, in Gimp and Co. it would be nice to have a nautilus like thumbnail-preview, in other situations a small-icon view would be better then detail view. There doesn't seem to be a way to rename files either.
That said, if you are just 'mousing around', its better then the former one, but far from perfect, I would prefer the Windows one (for mousing) or the old Gnome one (for keyboarding) any day.
As you put more work into a reply than I got ever before on slashdot I will respond. You have a valid point that those older systems are sometimes put to use. I agree with you that there should be a way to run them with Linux, and run them safely. This is not the same as continue using Windows98 and connect to the internet wich is frankly not a very smart thing to do.
;-)
I think that's what older or specialized distros, Fluxbox and remote Xservers are for. But NOT the Gnome Desktop in it's latest incarnation.
My quote "We have them already" was driven by my experience that I keep installing Linux on older machines all over the place. Friends want to try it on their obsolete hardware but that means that they won't get the full performance and often turn it down in favour of their shiny, new XP box. Still, dualboxes sometimes show the behaviour you described. Even OpenOffice or Firefox seem to run faster on Windows. I don't think that this is Gnomes mistake, though. The examples were given by the grandparent and clearly show the library issue as it was pointed out.
Gnome itself is not bloatware, it is just a complete, cutting-edge desktop with a lot of bells and whistles and this comes at a cost. Most of the time it is just a RAM issue that can be solved easily without a big investment. This is all I was trying to make clear. I am just tired of this: "Gnome is bloated because it doesn't run on a 128MB machine." talk. It is simply not what it was designed for. Same with Doom3.
Windows doesn't do any of this by the way. There is no relevant Office caching going on. Mind that, whatever the zealots will tell you. IE is partially loaded at startup because it is part of the OS. That's it.
What you might consider is that StarOffice had a designflaw wich still is part of OpenOffice.org at the time but will be fixed at 2.0 (i think). It loads not only the Writer, it loads the whole officesuite. Imagine Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. starting altogether. That is why OO.org is such a beast to launch.
On my old P3 850 I went back to using Nautilus. I was using Rox for the longest time because nautilus was too slow. Then came Nautilus 2.6. I'm back using it because it is significantly faster than it used to be, and on par w/ my experiences with Rox (which was a pretty cool file manager btw). So, I will attest to the fact that spatial is way fast.
I agree with you about big being clumbsy, annoying, and just plain clutter. However, Gnome does make it easy enough to change the size of your toolbars, hell, mine are TINY. In fact, I think that's the size option that I use in the preferences, 'tiny'. I'm at 1280x1024 and my taskbar, I believe is about 24 pixels... and I love it that way :)
-matt
Come on. You know Dell is not going to sell a machine that can't run the shipped operating system adequately. Different people have different standards...
I wouldn't think they would either, but win2k pro was the shipped OS and it *doesn't* run it acceptably. It's not something only I notice. Even her and and her mother comment about how much longer it takes than the machines at the office (which have 256-512 megs of ram). Anyway, I finally got her to pick up 2 128mb sticks of ram (it uses RDRAM, thankfully they were 23$ each since she has to buy matched) so hopefully that will aleviate the problem.
When 1.4 came around, easel's crappy half-finished nautilus was integrated and the system ground down to a near halt.
That's incorrect - all of the 1.x series used gmc by default. Eazel's Nautilus could be installed as an alternative, but was never part of Gnome. 2.0 was the first version in which Nautilus (heavily rewritten) was the default file manager.
But you're right about the performance since then - 2.0 wasn't all that great either, but each subsequent release has been better. I happily run 2.6 (via Fedora 2) on my work desktop, a 700MHz Celeron - it could be snappier, but is perfectly adequate.
A Desktop Environment is a comprehensive set of applications that provide a full suite of tools that allow the user to get work done.
For example, lets say you use blackbox. Does blackbox have it's own calculator, PDF viewer, web browser, file manager, image viewer, card game, etc? No, it does not have any of these things. That's because blackbox is just a window manager -- ALL it does is sits there and draws a window border around your window and provides you with a way to move windows around the screen.
Gnome is a desktop environment because it has all the things I mentioned and much, much more. Ideally, the term "environment" means that it is completely immersive, eg, if you were using gnome you would never need to launch a non-GNOME app to get your work done, but the real world doesn't work like that... for example, I use GNOME but I swapped out metacity for xfwm4 because I like it more (3 reasons: window focus policies, window snapping, and independant horizontal/vertical maximization by clicking on the maximize button with right/middle mouse buttons). Then I also use k3b for burning CDs as it is more flexible than nautilus's cd burner, and I also use firefox, thunderbird, etc. But still, most of the simple apps (file manager, calculator, etc) are provided by gnome and I use them, that makes gnome a desktop environment.
I've started using KMyMoney (personal accounting program) at home recently. When I was at work yesterday, I wanted to check my bank balance. I ran the app here at the office and opened a file requester to load a data file. In the "location" area, I entered "sftp://homeserver/" and then browsed my filesystem at home to locate the appropriate file. KMyMoney then used SFTP to load the data. When I added a new entry and clicked the "Save" icon, it used SFTP to save the data back to the file at home.
I do web development on a Zope server for a living. I use Kate (the KDE programmer's editor) to read and write files to the server via WebDav. Kate has its own set of bookmarks in the file requester, so I maintain a list of webdav://, sftp:// and fish:// pointers to various locations where I need to edit files.
Kopete (multi-protocol instant messenger) can link entries in its "buddy lists" to KAddressBook. When I'm in KAddressBook, those people have a little icon next to their name showing their current messaging status.
Konqueror uses IO-Slaves extensively. Want to view your POP3 account as a file folder? Browse to "pop3://myusername@mailserver/".
There's a standard encrypted information store called "KWallet". Most KDE apps have migrated to using that to store passwords, form data from websites, or other personal information. I type one password at login to unlock my "wallet", and every app I use has access to its working information. If I lock my wallet, then my information is off-limits.
Want to burn the contents of a directory to a CD? Right-click that directory in Konqueror, select Actions -> Create Data CD With K3b.
It's the million-and-one details like these that define a "desktop environment". In a nutshell, no program stands alone - they all work together to make life more convenient. Mac OS X is the only other OS I've used with this level of integration.
A lot of people dismiss this all as "bloat", and I just don't understand that line of thinking. To me, it seems incredibly efficient to make all of these services available to every application that wants to use them. It would be bloat to add an HTML viewer to every application. It is not bloat to provide an HTML viewing object that any application can use. If KMyMoney natively supported network-transparent IO, then I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. But since the environment provides it, I get a lot of extra functionality "for free" without any extra work by the KMyMoney programmers. Isn't this what Unix is supposed to be about?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?