Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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.
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.