GNOME 2.12 Previewed

An anonymous reader writes "Davyd Madeley has completed his Prerelease Tour of GNOME 2.12. Scheduled for release on September 7th, 2005, GNOME 2.12 has picked up a new theme, some features popularised by Apple's System 7, some new multimedia tools and plenty of bug-fixes."

Comments

Totem

[astralbat]

I'll look forward to the day when Totem manages to play DVD's better than Xine.
Even changing the GStreamer backend for the Xine backend, Totem still never manages to play half the movies I seem to give it.

I do like the idea of a GStreamer based Mozilla plugin though. It will give users a great choice to drop the ugly Mplayer based plugin.

It Just Works Philosophy

[vectorian798]

From the article: More software is taking advantage of the Hardware Abstraction Layer from Project Utopia. HAL-aware applications can display more information to the user, as well as benefit from "it just works" plug and play style hardware support. GNOME-VFS in GNOME 2.12 has improved integration with HAL, and now gives more visual cues about the types and names of media devices.

I am looking forward to this feature, especially - just another step towards making Linux more user-friendly.

In fact, this prerelease tour shows many exciting features for those who want to see a real desktop linux - improvements to Nautilus, a panel with Edit Menu option compliant with Freedesktop.org spec (how long have we been looking for something like this?), and more. Yay

Re:What about Beagle?

[Anonymous Coward]

no beagle is only a trojan horse done to justify
mono as default platform into gnome.
i've heard that someone are working to produce a beagle replacement in python
http://img185.echo.cx/img185/2971/pybeagle47ya.png

Re:Efficiency

[ssj_195]

I think both the major desktops are beginning to start the optimisation drive round about now; the thing is that software development usually proceeds in fits and starts, with different parts of the software development process going through the phases of Making It Work, Making It Work Well and Securely, and, finally, Making It Work Fast. I'm going to stick my neck out and say that even though both Desktop Environments have been around before the year 2000, both have undergone more intensive development, or at least had more features added, over the last year or so than ever before in their history (actually, this goes for Desktop Linux in general, from the kernel to X to the toolkits to the DE's to the distros themselves), so there are a lot of rough and unoptimised new additions in there.

Fortunately, unlike a certain other purveyor of Desktop OS's, the devs are actually fairly committed to making everything faster and less resource hungry (witness the GNOME optimisation bounties, and the efforts of the Ubuntu team). Robert Love gave a very interesting talk on optimisation of the desktop environments (I can't find a link right now, but the talk was called "Optimising GNOME", although some of the library-level changes could be conscripted by KDE and anyone else, really). KDE posted some resource-consumption figures for the (very rough and unoptimised) KDE4 port of Kate, and it already looks significantly better. Add in the upcoming xgl et al, and things should hopefully get to the absolutely perfect state of getting faster and faster while still adding features that every developer yearns for :)

Of course, it's pretty much impossible to continuously increase functionality without paying some price in terms of resource-consumption, so you might be better off going to less featureful DE's like, say, XFCE, if you prefer speed over functionality.

Block middle click too, please

[Kristoffer Lunden]

If they could only add an option to block "middle click pastes" too, it would all be perfect in clipboard land. But browsing the web, evertime someone even thinks this thought it is immideately flamed through the ground by all the people who knows how superior this way of doing things is, and that also knows that there is no chance in hell that anyone could do this by mistake.

Heads up: I'm not proposing to remove it, or even turn it off by default. I just need a way to turn it off manually. It is extremely annoying, and I (and other with me) *do* click middle by mistake - often - and that is a hell when scrolling around code in text editors... Yep, a lot of it probably owes to the mouse I have, it has a tendency to get stuck slightly on scrolling, which results in a click. But really, do I need to buy a new mouse for something as simple?

I don't use, want or need it, and it hinders me in my work. I would really like to see it go. (Maybe it really is a X.org issue in the end, though. Not sure where it would be best to implement it).