Slashdot Mirror


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."

73 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. BSD ? by mbyte · · Score: 4, Funny

    Is this some subtile joke by the editors among the BSD is dying trolls ?

    1. Re:BSD ? by trollzor · · Score: 2, Informative

      I have seen other GNOME stuff listed under the BSD section a couple of times. It's all a bit of BS if you ask me. Because the G in GNOME stands for GNU. Perhaps timothy mistakenly believes GNOME is a BSD project, I dunno, anything is possible with these editors. I don't mind the BSD guys using LGPL stuff or GPL stuff, hell I use the OpenBSD derived ssh stuff which totally kicks ass (ubuntu lists it as OpenBSD derived in the bootup and shutdown I believe), but credit where credit is due.

    2. Re:BSD ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Netcraft Confirms: GNOME is dying.

      The current number of servers Netcraft reports as powered by GNOME now stands at zero. It's official. GNOME is dead. Upon hearing the news, creator Miguel de Icaza was seen working at Taco Bell, depressed, sweeping the floor, and muttering the words, "ay carajo..." The KDE dragon was unavailable for comment.

      Or something. I don't quite have the knack for these.

  2. What about Beagle? by rekrutacja · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is this mature enough to include it as standard? Desktop search is key missing feature in Linux...

    --
    This Is Not a Sig
    1. Re:What about Beagle? by ralinx · · Score: 2, Informative

      as long as Red Hat is opposed to distributing Mono, Beagle (written in C#) will never be in the default Gnome Desktop... at least not the one Red Hat will ship. So who knows... there may be another high profile fork (red hat gnome vs novell gnome) coming up soon.

    2. Re:What about Beagle? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

    3. Re:What about Beagle? by KeyserDK · · Score: 3, Informative

      To be honest, the widespread porting of the lucene engine(beagle backend) is the highest amount of forking i've ever seen.

      There exists a port for every language, it just doesn't make sense. The basic algorithms for searching, and storing indexes hasn't changed for quite some time.

      In the digital library space there even exists quite old (10 years) open source software such as zebra[1] which can handle large indexes fast. There are actually open standards[2] for information retrieval (IR), but nobody in the open source desktop space seem to know about it(?).
      [1]http://www.indexdata.dk/zebra
      [2]http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/zing/

      --
      still reading?
    4. Re:What about Beagle? by Korgan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I hope not. I've been playing with Beagle 0.12 and its definitely not ready for prime time. Its a great service and the 'best' front end is very nice (although I personally prefer the web frontend as I usually already have a browser open) but its not anywhere near solid enough.

      Its a mission to get going from source at the moment and even if you run a distro that already includes it, it doesn't take much to break it. Upgrading Firefox/Mozilla is enough in some cases (thanks to best's reliance on the Gecko libs).

      Don't get me wrong. Personally I love the technology, but I really don't think its anywhere near ready for mainstream use. Great if you want to try out bleeding edge tech or help improve the software, but not if you just want a search tech that works.

      The other downside is that beagled has to be run by the individual users when they log in. It refuses to run at boot as part of the init scripts. So its got to be included as either part of the xinit or shell rc scripts. Thus automation is going to be needed on the admins part at the moment. Sure, this can be done as a default part of a distro, but given its not ready yet... ;-)

    5. Re:What about Beagle? by dalutong · · Score: 2, Informative

      Hmm.. I disagree. First a disclaimer: I am working on a very poor memory -- beagle might not be included at all.

      But I have been using beagle on my ubuntu machine using breezy backports. Ubuntu maintains its packages well -- I have not had beagle break at all over the past couple of months of using it. Setting it up to start when I start gnome has been the only kind of work I've had to do.

      I'll admit, though, that the search is still fairly slow and not great at finding what I need. I am using version 0.11 though.

      So I think that stability won't be the issue. The package in ubuntu will be well maintained. I just hope it speeds up a bit. And I wouldn't mind some search tips to help me find my data more easily -- especially an easy-to-find help button explaining precisely what beagle can and can't search.

      --

      What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
    6. Re:What about Beagle? by ashayh · · Score: 2, Informative

      Installation is not the only problem. mono/beagle frequently use 30-50% of CPU time and/or memory.

    7. Re:What about Beagle? by Korgan · · Score: 2, Informative

      /etc/skel is one option if you intend to normalise it as the default search method on your platform across all users. But given how much of a hog beagled is when it comes to resources, on a busy server thats going to hurt.

      In my office I run an Ubuntu termsrv set up. No one has anything on their own machines except for a basic OS with an X server on it. Cuts back on hardware costs. I'm sure I'm not the only one that has set things up this way. Now add in a whole heap of mono processes going and you're gonna hit trouble. Its hard enough having just a few people loading OpenOffice.org apps at the same time, adding in multiple Mono processes running for each user (beagled constantly in the background, best in the fore) and suddenly you need a much more powerful server to cope with that kind of load.

      Sure, /etc/skel would work for desktop/workstation/laptop machines which are likely to have only one person using them at a time, but I'm not that rich. I run a small business and manage the IT side of things myself. I simply cannot afford the overhead required by multiple mono/beagled threads at once.

      This is partly why I'm glad Gnome didn't let Ximian bully them in to coding core parts of the platform in C#/Mono. I've been a Gnome user since 1.2 and I would truly have had to change desktop if they went down that path. It just wouldn't be practical or useful for anything other than desktop/workstation/laptop installations.

      One thing a lot of people seem to forget. Just because its Free doesn't mean it costs nothing. :-) In the case of Mono and C# apps on *nix, it costs a lot in memory/cpu. Sometimes beyond what I would consider reasonable.

      Doesn't stop me trying them on my own machines at home, but at this point in time, I wouldn't consider it on any of my business related machines.

    8. Re:What about Beagle? by Feztaa · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, Ubuntu's next release will be in October. They follow a 6-month release cycle that has them releasing a new distro every April and October.

  3. nice headline... by w4rl5ck · · Score: 4, Funny

    for a second I was... "hey I have to install that imme... wait... I already did... I... *click* 2.10... [strange feeling]... ah, 2.12..."

    can someone correct the headline or something? :)

  4. Totem by astralbat · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  5. It Just Works Philosophy by vectorian798 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:It Just Works Philosophy by dbIII · · Score: 5, Funny
      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.
      Open the iPod bay doors HAL.
  6. Re:Gnome vs. KDE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't want to troll, but I have always wondered... Why are there two major windows manager projects?

    I don't want to flame, but I always wonder... how do people like you manage not to have seen this question discussed to death in every single previous Gnome or KDE-related discussion here on Slashdot since the dawn of time?

  7. Re:KDE by etrnl · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They do, from time to time. Take a look at the Extended Window Manager Hints Spec (that I was involved in administrating for a bit before it got too technical for me...).

    They don't always work together very well, but given the basic design differences in architecture, that's to be expected technically. Personality wise... well, it's my experience that the more intelligent a geek is, the higher probability that they believe that anyone who disagrees with them is an idiot. (De Raat, Stallman, etc) That just breeds personality conflicts. (Linus seems to be an exception to that, for the most part.)

  8. Efficiency by Alain+Williams · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The feature that I want is: efficiency.

    Gnome is great at turning a fast computer into a sluggish one. Just because you have all of those CPU cycles doesn't mean that they have to use them, especially when lots of them seem to be wasted.

    For instance: if you look (strace) at a typical gnome program when it starts up, it stats zillions of files; many of them more than once. This is why startup is so sloooooow.

    Oh, I am trolling am I ? We all have fast computers so why am I making a fuss ? Think about: being able to save power (improve battery life) with a slower CPU laptop; people in the third world who cannot afford the super computers that we, in the 1st world, have on out desktops; think about sharing a server between many people (eg LTSP).

    It would be nice to see a gnome release that just concentrated on making the code faster.

    1. Re:Efficiency by ssj_195 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

    2. Re:Efficiency by stilborne · · Score: 3, Interesting

      we (KDE) have been getting faster with each release in the KDE3 series. optimization isn't exactly a new thing on our plate, but you are right that KDE4 will likely show additional improvements.

    3. Re:Efficiency by jejones · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Amen. When Firefox used its own file browsing dialog, it was kind of slow the first time I saved in a directory with lots of files, but on the second and following times came up immediately.

      On my system at least (Ubuntu; maybe I should uninstall firefox-gnome-support...), Firefox now uses the GNOME file browsing dialog for saving files, and it takes forever for directories with many files, and doesn't seem to cache much, because the second through nth times around are just about as slow as the first.

  9. Re:Gnome vs. KDE by Rapsey · · Score: 2, Informative

    I dont think KDE has more money. I dont know of any company that puts money into KDE, but a few that put money into GNOME.
    They do have more developers. Simply because its much easier to develop programs for KDE than it is for GNOME.

  10. Re:Gnome vs. KDE by bhalo05 · · Score: 2, Informative

    It seems that so much time is put in KDE and Gnome, that if the two teams worked together, they might make something superior to what they made on their own

    Sigh. There's no way they'd be working together anyway. Gnome devs love C and GTK. KDE devs are C++ experts and like QT.

    Besides that, Gnome users like Gnome. KDE users... well, like KDE. They can choose because both are different and there are many different kinds of users, you know...

    There's not going to be a single desktop environment. Period.

  11. Re:Gnome vs. KDE by Internet_Communist · · Score: 2, Insightful

    well to start gnome is written mostly in C and KDE is mostly in C++

    so right there is a major difference in both coding style and what not...You couldn't exactly "integrate" them.

    I also prefer the looks of gnome but I know just as many people who like the look of KDE better. It's very subjective.

    My biggest concern is my programs not matching. Seeing as I like GTK themes better then most KDE themes, and nothing exists to match GTK themes on KDE (just the other way around) I'm stuck with just attempting to match my colors...Sure this is all apperance and doesn't say much about function but it's still pretty annoying...

    Little annoying things like that are my main issue, and that's mostly just GTK/QT differences, not really kde/gnome....I don't actually use a DE, though I use a few gnome programs and thus have gnome installed, well partially anyway. I have konqueror installed so I can test my webpages with KHTML as well, plus I have a few apps which are QT only...etc..

    so yes it's daunting but I don't see anything happening any time soon

    and that's not to mention XFCE which is written in c++ but uses GTK libraries through it's own wrappers or something like that....

    but in the end the question is, who do you really want using linux anyway? Do we really want your average joe on linux? Or trying to install/configure it? In the work place that's not so important, someone can set it up, put some big firefox/word processor icons on the desktop, and that's the end of it...

    so what's really going on here? trying to dumb linux down enough to home users who don't want to take the effort to learn it?

    I just don't see that happening.

    and please note that gnome and kde are not window managers, they just include one. You can use any window manager you want with gnome or kde. Gnome uses metacity by default, and used to use sawfish before that. KDE uses kwin. There's a pretty big difference between toolkits like GTK or QT and window managers like *box,windowmaker,metacity,etc...Your comment makes me think you have no idea what a window manager does.

    --

    If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
  12. Still ugly fonts by AvantLegion · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Neat features. Yes the font in every screenshot is still ugly and would be laughed out of the room if it were the default look for a GUI on an OS from Microsoft or Apple. They're thin, brittle, and chintzy. Though it's not necessarily the fonts themselves. Even when I copy over the fonts from Windows, they make those fonts look thin, brittle, and chintzy. Why can't, say, Times New Roman be rendered in Linux and match Times New Roman in Windows, without the crappy errors with italicized letters and such? All the tinkering with AA and subpixel rendering settings in the world still can't match what a few clicks to turn on and tune Cleartype does. It saddens me to leave my Linux desktop at home, go to work on a Windows PC, and marvel at how much better websites and such look.

    Give me font rendering that doesn't suck.

    1. Re:Still ugly fonts by ocelotbob · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Write congress and tell them to reform patent legislation so that the Xorg folks can use the same techniques that Apple and MS does. It's not gnome's fault that the patent system is broken.

      --

      Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses

    2. Re:Still ugly fonts by Gleng · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you're using a Debian based distro, you can run:

      dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

      And then select the bytecode interpreter from the menu. Fixed. :)

      --
      "Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
    3. Re:Still ugly fonts by Gleng · · Score: 4, Informative

      Also, here's a copy of my /etc/fonts/local.conf which disables antialiasing on font sizes under 10 points, so you get nice crisp Windows style rendering on small fonts. I use Tahoma size 8 on my Gnome menus and it looks pretty sweet.

      <?xml version="1.0"?>
      <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
      <fontconfig>
      <include ignore_missing="yes">/var/lib/defoma/fontconfig.d/ fonts.conf</include>

              <match target="font">
                  <test name="size" compare="less">
                      <double>10</double>
                  </test>
                  <edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
                      <bool>false</bool>
                  </edit>
              </match>
              <match target="font">
                  <test name="pixelsize" compare="less" qual="any">
                      <double>10</double>
                  </test>
                  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
                      <bool>false</bool>
                  </edit>
              </match>

      </fontconfig>

      --
      "Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
    4. Re:Still ugly fonts by Linus+Torvaalds · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes the font in every screenshot is still ugly

      They don't look ugly to me at all. On the other hand, when I boot up Windows to test a website in Internet Explorer, I think the fonts are supremely crappy.

    5. Re:Still ugly fonts by Stevyn · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I see it the exact opposite way. Fonts on linux are so much nicer than on Windows. The anti-aliasing on two gentoo boxes, one a dell laptop and the other with a dell lcd looks a lot sharper than on windows. Whenever I reboot into windows xp, the fonts look fuzzy and I end up disabling Cleartype because it's hard to read.

      I also just put windows vista beta 1 on the computer with the dell lcd and the fonts still look bad. Maybe it's just preference or maybe it's because I'm used to the fonts in xorg, but it looks a lot sharper to me.

    6. Re:Still ugly fonts by zsau · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Fonts are funny things. Everyone seems to like different ones. I dispise Cleartype on Windows (it's better without anything). And Mac fonts I find to be ugly, too. The fonts in my GTK+ 2 environment, though, I find to be absolutely supurb. If you gave me Windows-like rending of fonts on my GNU/Linux box, I'd punch you in the face.

      (However, I consider Times New Roman to be godawful no matter how it's rendered, or even in print, so I almost always use only Bitstream Vera Sans/Serif/Sans Mono, the TeX Computer Modern series, and a handful others like Gentium for special characters. I even have my web browser configure to use my fonts and only my fonts, to the best of its ability.)

      --
      Look out!
    7. Re:Still ugly fonts by mrogers · · Score: 3, Informative
      Also, be sure to enable bitmap fonts - Debian disables them by default, but they're much sharper than antialiased outline fonts at small sizes.

      If web pages still look blurry, add the following line to ~/.bash_profile to disable antialiasing in GTK2 and Gecko:

      export GDK_USE_XFT=0

  13. Re:KDE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Er. You don't have to "choose", for the most part. GNOME applications typically run just fine on a mostly-KDE desktop and vice-versa.

    It's mainly the fanboys who don't STFU. Under the auspices of the http://freedesktop.org/ organisation, KDE and GNOME (and other minority desktop!) developers regularly work together, standardising interaction protocols and whatnot. KDE and GNOME have different design philosophies, and I happen to prefer KDE (though I wish it wasn't written in Qt-extended-C++). I don't WANT to see one or the other go away, though, because friendly competition drives innovation in the linux desktop.

  14. Re:KDE by Phleg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The same reason that you have to choose between Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and *BSD. The developers all have a different perspective on what defines good software, different project goals, different target audiences, and these differences are irreconcilable for the purposes of a single project.

    I have to admit, I fail to see what is so utterly difficult about this concept that causes people to be so blind to the answer, despite the fact that they accept it on faith for everything else: why we have competing cars, fast food restaurants, colas, and so on.

    --
    No comment.
  15. new features, new shmeatures by KZigurs · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ok, but when will I finally see a list of REMOVED features.

    You know - those features that was recognized to be shitty and unusable. Removed default applications that simply don't work(r). Sourcebase size shrinking by megabytes. Abstraction and unification instead of the Linux Way(tm).

    Yes, I'm flaming. But honestly - what's new? Desktop theme? Cool rendering approach? And why desktop envorement should ever mention HAL?

    (yes, but I really like the fact that now Gnome is copying System7. Actually it's really a progress - all the usability quirks from Microsoft Windows have been copied already, yes?)

  16. True Transparencies? by xjerky · · Score: 3, Interesting

    TFA didn't seem to mention anything about it. I would hope that 2.12 can utilize X.org's native transparencies that have been present for months now.

    --
    A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
  17. Re:Gnome vs. KDE by stilborne · · Score: 2, Insightful

    > I dont know of any company that puts money into
    > KDE

    SUSE/Novell, Trolltech, Mandriva and Linspire all pay people to work on KDE directly, to name just four companies you probably know by name. i could also name a bunch of small you companies you don't know who each fund part of a developer to several developers, ranging from co's like kitty hooch who funds quanta developers to KDAB who does a ton of work with KDE and groupware..

  18. Re:Hidden sinker by bhalo05 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've never heard a newbie complaining about the variety of linux desktops. They may have problems installing software, and of course headaches with hardware drivers and kernel compilation. They also say things such as "does do not this thing run Half-life 2?". But I don't remamber any user moaning about the fact that there are two different desktops. In fact, they usually just use the one their distribution uses by default, and don't try the other until they are not newbies anymore.

  19. Re:Gnome vs. KDE by lasindi · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why are there two major windows manager projects? Not like lots of other smaller projects like IceWM. It seems that so much time is put in KDE and Gnome, that if the two teams worked together, they might make something superior to what they made on their own. Does KDE and Gnome have the same goals, or are they very different?

    I'm no expert by any means on either KDE or GNOME; this is all from what I've gathered as a KDE user, so don't quote me on any of this. I personally wouldn't want the two to become one because they do seem to go into different directions. A perfect example is their file browsers. I've always loved Konqueror, especially since it means I get to use tabbed file browsing. Nautilus, on the other hand, decided to use a "spatial browsing" interface, which opens a new window for each folder you open. Personally I can't stand this, but it was decided on after much deliberation by the GNOME people, so apparently some people like it. KDE also behaves a lot more like Windows than GNOME does. Some people dislike the Windows interface, but for newcomers to the Unix world it is useful to have this to ease the transition. So long as you can use KDE apps in GNOME and GNOME apps in KDE, I think there's no problem keeping the two projects separate.

    This is my guess, correct me if I am wrong. KDE has more developers and money. Gnome has fewer people, but more creative people. KDE will give you everything and the kitchen sink. Gnome will find ways put a twist into things, to make it fun.

    I'm not sure if GNOME or KDE has more people; I've always been under the impression that they have about the same number. As far as corporate sponsorship goes, though, companies like Novell are going for KDE, whereas Red Hat has poured a whole bunch of resources into GNOME. As far as putting a new "twist" into software, yeah I'd say that's true of GNOME. The difference is that, IMHO, the twists just make the software harder to use. But again, this is all in the eye of the beholder. Different people like different features, and that's why I'm fine with two different desktops.

    For me, the difference boils down to this. GNOME does what it's supposed to do very well, and it's lighter-weight and cleaner. But what GNOME is supposed to do isn't what I want (like spatial browsing). KDE is supposed to do what I want, but it feels slower and there are weird bugs that can be annoying (example: my desktop icons magically rearrange themselves sometimes).

    --
    I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
  20. Wow! by David+Horn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My boss saw this over my shoulder and is almost (but not quite) possibly thinking about maybe trialling Linux on his home machine...

    --
    PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
    1. Re:Wow! by GeffDE · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yes, right after he fires you for being on slashdot all day...;-)

      --
      It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
    2. Re:Wow! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      It's alright - it's the weekend. He probably meant 'girlfriend'

  21. Yes! by FrostedWheat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    New clipboard management, based off the Freedesktop.org specification and tightly integrated with GNOME, allows for objects to persist in the clipboard longer than the lifetime of an application

    About time! Closing the application and losing the clipboard contents always annoying me and was a real embarrasment for Gnome. I'm glad it's been fixed but I wonder why it took so long.

  22. Re:Gnome vs. KDE by kelnos · · Score: 2, Insightful
    and that's not to mention XFCE which is written in c++ but uses GTK libraries through it's own wrappers or something like that....
    Bzzt! Xfce is written in straight C using GTK+ directly. We have a couple support libraries with utility functions and custom widgets, but there are no "wrappers or something like that".

    There are currently C++ and Python bindings, but the desktop itself is all written in C.
    --
    Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
  23. Re:Hidden sinker by kelnos · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I've always felt that the fact that there are two major free *nix desktops is a real detriment to normal people adopting free OSes.
    Why does that have to be the goal? I'd much prefer a wide variety of choices over being friendly to the average-joe user. Am I being selfish? Not really. The average-joes can have Windows and Mac OS X. I'll stick with Linux.

    Note that there's nothing stopping a company from taking a snapshot of GNOME or KDE (or whatever), and spending a year or two turning it into an average-joe-perfect distribution. IMHO, selling to the teeming masses is more the job of a commercial distro vendor than hackers working on a desktop environment. Let the hackers have their fun (I know I do), and let the businessmen make their money by appealing to the largest customer base.
    --
    Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
  24. Re:Did they fix the Gnome Settings Daemon? by moranar · · Score: 2, Informative

    nautilus --no-desktop
    As it says if you do
    nautilus --help
    But I don't really know about the correct icon for file types. Nautilus has done this for at least a year, and quite possibly more.

    --
    "I think it would be a good idea!"
    Gandhi, about Internet Security
  25. OS X-alike font rendering in Gnome by ThreeDayMonk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Personally, I despise Windows' hinted rendering. I like the heavily anti-aliased look on OS X, especially when dealing with Japanese text.

    If you want to emulate OS X's font rendering, that's easy to achieve in Gnome. Just go to Font Preferences, Details..., and set Smoothing to Subpixel (or Greyscale for a TFT) and Hinting to None. Then walk away from the computer for a few minutes, because it looks weird in direct comparison. When you come back, enjoy the smooth text!

    --
    If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
  26. Re:KDE by kelnos · · Score: 2, Funny

    Ok, so we merge KDE and GNOME into KNOME. What next? Well, why should we choose between the great features of KNOME and Mac OS X? Well, ok, let's merge them too. So now we have MaKNOME X. Well, there's Windows out there too, and it does have a few nice features, so why not do another merge? And thus WinMaKNOME VistaX is born. And a thousand marketing gurus' heads explode.

    Seriously, though, why should unification be the ultimate goal? Different people have different ideas about what makes a good, productive, usable desktop environment. Trying to make a one-size-fits-all monstrosity would be just that: a monstrosity.

    And remember, we're talking about OSS here. Put up or shut up. If you're a GNOME user and like a certain feature KDE has, bust out some coding skills and write it yourself. If you can't do that for whatever reason, find someone with the ability and pay them to do it. In the end, no one is beholden to you, and there's no such thing as a free lunch.

    --
    Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
  27. Re:Gnome vs. KDE by Almond+Tree · · Score: 2, Funny

    Gnome is better ... and vi. There, it's settled

    --

    bau bau chicka chicka mau mau

  28. Re:Apple System 7 ?? by peterprior · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's referring to nautilus's spatial tree file view.

  29. Nice work... shame about those icons by delire · · Score: 2, Insightful


    ... s/icons/wrinkles

    Bring on the spat of posts telling me I can change the icon theme, as of course I do, but I'll say it again: Gnome needs a new default icon set.
    The icons in most of those screens are sadly still as dull, muddied, venerable and depressing as they were 6 years ago, when I first tried Gnome.

    The forward and back arrows in Nautilus seem to have absoutely no graphical correllation with the rest of Gnome's visual landscape (except the Refresh icon). The ~/ icon still looks like a little squashy mushroom house from a childrens novel and the icons in the menu editor (for menu groups) have no internal correlation other than they exhibit a tongue-and-cheek dig at futurism. Who actually thinks of a typewriter when looking for 'office', let alone a bricklayers tool when thinking about development?. Is this theme targeting a 50+ demographic? For icons so small, that aliasing really eats into their form and lastly the colour space of the icons seems all over the place, as though to solve the lack of a common palette they have simply mixed Khaki greeen into everything. This one thing KDE has really sorted out.

    From what I have seen of Gnome desktops over the years, these default icons have a life expectancy of about 2 weeks (especially that home icon). Why not finally lay them to rest - or just move them down the theme list, far away from 'Default'?

    1. Re:Nice work... shame about those icons by moranar · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The question is not about "who actually thinks of a typewriter when looking for 'office'?" but "who doesn't think of wordprocessing or text editing when he sees a typewriter icon?".

      I don't think Gnome needs a new icon set, I think you do. I like the current one.

      --
      "I think it would be a good idea!"
      Gandhi, about Internet Security
    2. Re:Nice work... shame about those icons by jvital · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Thank God you're not making Gnome icons.

      I love Gnome icons, the way they are. They have a unique style, i just love it. And, i hate KDE childish/shiny icons. See, it's all a matter of point of view.

  30. Re:Gnome vs. KDE by dbIII · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Why are there two major windows manager projects?
    As I see it - politics, misunderstanding a software licence and unwillingness to negotiate over a licence. In the end zealots got bored when they realised the first group really wanted the same thing when the first group gave in to the demands, and in gnome developers took over from politics, and we ended up with two decent collections of software, of which the actual window managers are only a minor part.

    KDE was influenced by CDE, a desktop environment on Solaris which showed that not everyone wants to have the same desktop environment, but has some nice features. Gnome was originally a backlash against a software licence used by KDE, and originally was some sort of odd mixed KDE (ie. CDE once removed) and MS Windows based on some code taken from the drawing program "the gimp". The project became more popular and less politically driven, breifly included Enlightenment as it's window manager (until the Enlightenment people ran screaming for the hills a few weeks later because gnome broke all of their cross-platform code and didn't care) and eventually became cross-platform and the useful thing you would have seen over the past few years. Now about the only vestige of it's beginnings is stuff like the windows registry style gconf which really is aimed for single user stand-alone systems and not for anything with aspirations beyond being a personal computer (ie. like something on a network!). There is a tool developed this year that allows gconf settings to be exported to other users on the same machine, so it's getting somewhere.

    As for the actual window manager, you can use plenty of different ones and still use KDE apps or gnome apps - including the taskbar and menu style things.

  31. Re:What about MIME types/file associations? by smallfries · · Score: 2, Informative

    The simplist way seems to be just use the tools. So use the custom icon button in a nautalis properties dialog, and choose an icon.

    Obviously this isn't always desirable, I wanted custom jpg icons for each of my album folders and it would have been a bitch to do using a gui. So to get at the config files, do one by hand, and then look in ~/.nautilus/metafiles/

    The format is quite straightforward xml and its easy to tweak by script.

    --
    Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
  32. God. Now THAT's a mean trick. by Stauf · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's like all my fonts snapped out of focus. Maybe we should tack on an appropriate disclaimer: not for LCDs, your eyes will bleed .

  33. Re:Hidden sinker by dbIII · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Tech: Well, which desktop are you using?
    So it's MS Windows - is that 95, 98, ME, NT3.51, NT4, win2k, XP, 2003? All have their quirks, advantages, disadvantes, and users always hide their start menu entries in different spots if they've had the thing for a while.

    Live with it, it isn't a monoculture anywhere, not even with Macs.

    On linux at least you have the advantage that the tech support person could ask you to run switchdesk - or more likely they can get you to put something in a shell window (bash, csh, ksh whatever they are used to) or get you to let them ssh in to solve the problem.

  34. Re:Explanation of the basics? by johnnyb · · Score: 3, Informative

    The OS:

    Some call the OS just the kernel, and others put the OS as the kernel + libraries + basic utilities, and others put the OS as "everything that ships with your distribution". All of these are more or less correct, and just a matter of perspective. I personally prefer the latter two because it is the measure of compatibility of downloaded tools.

    X is a graphical system. It is actually rather barebones, as it doesn't specify anything about how the controls work. It doesn't include a text entry box, buttons, graphics, or anything. It is simply a basic toolkit for network-driven graphics. It doesn't even hook up to sound.

    A "toolkit" is a set of widgets -- text entry boxes, standard icons, buttons, etc. GTK and QT are toolkits.

    A widnow manager is just what it says -- it manages windows. The top bar of windows, with their close, minimize, and maximize buttons, are actually drawn by the window manager, not the application. The Window manager often, but not always, draws to the background (sometimes the file manager does this). The window manager is involved if you have multiple desktops. It handles minimizing and maximizing. It handles laying out the windows, and telling them where they can and can't go.

    A "desktop environment" is a complete collection of tools and specifications for a desktop. For example, the GNOME desktop environment consists of (a) the GTK toolkit, (b) a set of libraries for making applications work together in a consistent manner, (c) a panel and a set of applets (most desktop environments include a panel), (d) a set of specifications for interaction. These specifications include specifications for the function of window managers, specifications for human interface interactions, specifications for the handling of clipboard data, specifications of standard application interfaces for doing various things like printing, configuration, etc. Many desktop environments specify a default window manager as well.

    Windows and Mac roll all of these parts into one. All you have is the desktop environment, which contains everything else. There is _some_ separation, but it is not as clear-cut as it is on UNIX. Whether this is a benefit or a flaw depends on your perspective.

  35. Software patents and innovation by Richard+W.M.+Jones · · Score: 2, Insightful

    But on the other hand, not having access to those techniques forces the X.org people to come up with innovative solutions to the same problems.

    That's what patents are supposed to do. In practice there are two problems with this. Firstly what happens if the provably best algorithm is patented? (think: compression - eventually someone will come up with an algorithm which is provably optimal, and patent it). Secondly what happens if you need to implement the algorithm to interoperate? That's the case with these fonts: the fonts include hinting programs, so in order to display the fonts as intended you simply have to be able to run those programs. Unfortunately there is a patent on running those programs. No amount of "innovation" is going to help you here.

    Rich.

  36. Re:Explanation of the basics? by pantherace · · Score: 2, Interesting
    A window manager simply manages where X11 windows are displayed.

    The simplest window manager is probably twm. (In that it's nearly the minimum, even if it doesn't do it the now conventional way.) If you want to see what it does, login to a box with a session setting of 'failsafe' (Available on most linux boxes.) Then run 'twm &' (ampersand to put it in the background, so you have a command line free) then type in any favored application's name.

    Now, other window managers add upon the simple positioning of twm, toolbars with more useful things, close, maximize, etc. Then you have things like virtual desktops. (Implemented in any GNOME-compatible window manager, such as metacity, KDE's kwin, icewm, fvwm, and most others on X11.) And some options to allow windows to say things like I don't want a border, or request a size. (Run kicker in twm to see the annoyance of borders on apps which should have them.) This all belongs to the window manager.

    Now, given that most people don't like just a plain screen, you add a panel. KDE's is Kicker, I think GNOME's is gpanel. This gives you the panel at the bottom, a windows like toolbar. It's not limited to that, I personally have 4 panels per screen, each at the center which auto hides. Something that both GNOME and KDE can do.

    Now, add in something to control the appearance. In GNOME's case it used to be a browser, recently replaced. KDE having kdesktop. Both containing the icons on the desktop, and background, etc.

    GTK, Qt, FLTK, Motif, etc. are all toolkits, and manage what is drawn into the windows. Essentially you say: Please draw X widget here, and they provide the appropriate messages to the X server. You don't have to use them, as you can call xlib directly, or alternatively OpenGL. However, that's not recommended at all.

    X11 works by passing messages to the sever: lots and lots of messages. It's handled in a way that it doesn't matter where the client is provided it's authorized. Thus providing the easy way for display across a network. Windows and Mac OS X use message passing as well, but in a local only method. It might be possible to abstract them similarly, but I personally doubt it will happen. X11 isn't really any slower than Windows or Mac OS X, contrary to what many people wishing to ditch X11 say. Drivers are generally better optimized on Windows (Manuf's drivers) or Mac OS X (very very few cards supported). Windows and Mac OS do not have a distinct window manager, or desktop from the OS, and I don't remember exactly how those are managed internally.

    KDE and GNOME are called Desktop Environments, because they provide all the above, as well as other useful programs. KDE pretty much providing anything you'd want to use from one place, GNOME more leveraging already existing GTK programs. However, for the most part you can use programs that only come from the DE. (Example, at the moment, I have all KDE apps open except firefox. and I've got browser, IM, and anything else you'd expect to find.)

    There exist a few alternatives, Qt/Embedded (What the Zaurus uses from Sharp) or Opie (opie being a fork of Qt/E, periodically semi-synced see openzaurus.org), GTK's embedded (name escapes me, see openzaurus.org), DirectFB (GTK was/is being ported to it), and svgalib (requires root permission, links is one that support svgalib output). While most of the examples are embedded, X11 is not necessarily heavy. Keith Packard had a server for ipaq which was 600K, kdrive being the name. The Agenda, a nice little linux handheld used X11 on a 66MHz processor.

    Hope this helps to give you the brief overview, as well as a starting point for where to look further. More or less all the current systems are fairly similar, the differnce being how they seperate out the different layers, or in a DE/OS's case mash them together.

  37. Re:Still ugly fonts - this works too! by bogaboga · · Score: 4, Informative
    1: Install Microsoft true-type fonts.

    2: You could install them via this script: http://vigna.dsi.unimi.it/webFonts4Linux/webFonts. sh

    Then do the following:

    Configure X and Gnome to 96 dpi sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf Locate Section "Monitor" and add the following lines before EndSection: # DisplaySize 270 203 # 1024x768 96dpi

    # DisplaySize 338 254 # 1280x960 96dpi

    # DisplaySize 338 270 # 1280x1024 96dpi

    # DisplaySize 370 277 # 1400x1050 96dpi

    # DisplaySize 423 370 # 1600x1400 96dpi

    Uncomment the line corresponding to your current resolution.

    To get other values, use the following formula:

    displaysize = {pixelsize}/96*25.4

    Remember:

    The display size must be "right" so adjust those values till you get your size right.

  38. Block middle click too, please by Kristoffer+Lunden · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

  39. Re:Gnome vs. KDE by Andre · · Score: 4, Informative

    Qt still is not as free as GTK+, because it is a library and licensed under GPL. GTK+ is licensed under LGPL for a reason. If you use Qt, the license of your application cannot be chosen freely. Either you use the GPL, or you pay for the freedom to choose another license.

    A GUI toolkit is part of the critical infrastructure of a software component on the desktop. Every application needs such a component (apart from fullscreen applications like games).
    And a GUI toolkit is commodity, nothing special anymore.

    Many developments begin at home, and these developments are the programmers' own crown jewels. I want to secure my investment in time and energy, and want to be able to deploy my ideas anywhere I see fit. Of course, I want to take my developments to the workplace and go on without interruption. This is freedom, and highly productive.

  40. Re:What I don't understand by ciroknight · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, the only completely replaced feature I see is PDF viewing, which, from my point of view, was in heavy need of being replaced. The applications which used to exist in its place were rough at best and terrible in my opinion.

    Meanwhile, I think this release of GNOME is going to be leaps and bounds better than 2.10. I really like the fact they've done their best to get Cairo up and running (that OpenGL rendering feature is something they've been needing for some time, especially where the rest of their desktop system is so slow). Hopefully with some more work they can keep improving the usability.

    Last note: I really like the browser now that they've added a relative URL button bar, but it's so.. well.. less powerful than having a text bar where you can simply type the location and instantly go there. But I guess it's better from a GUI point of view if you don't have that ability at all. Also, I wonder if they've ever fixed the slowness of loading folders.. my thoughts would be to cache the thumbnails and lists of the directory contents.. I mean how hard is it to make a graphical view of the "ls" command!?

    --
    "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
  41. Re:Hidden sinker by ebuck · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ahhh... The joys of passing the "Mom" test.

    Look, you Mom isn't going to know that there's another desktop unless you tell her. She will just know her desktop.

    My mother-in-law wanted a computer to surf the internet. I built a cheap linux box, indicating that she was getting "cutting edge technology" far superior to Windows. She asked me (proof of how far Microsoft's advertising budget has reached) if it was harder to use than Windows. My response was, "No, but if you learn something and then change, a lot of people focus on the steps being different instead of focusing on the underlying thing they want to do."

    Within a few weeks she knew more about KDE than I did. I guess I skimped on actually reading most of the end user documentation.

  42. Re:Still ugly fonts - this works too! by DeadMeat+(TM) · · Score: 2, Informative
    If all you want to do is adjust the font DPI, you can do that from the GNOME Font Preferences. KDE's Control Center has a similar option. No manual configuration-file editing is necessary.

    The configuration-file editing is only necessary if fonts are the wrong size because X guessed your monitor size incorrectly (which is very rare in my experience, since it just fetches that information straight from the monitor, but it does happen). At any rate, Windows doesn't have the ability -- GUIfied or otherwise -- to override monitor geometry, at least as far as I can tell. I'd be a little surprised if OS X does, although it might since Macs are used in graphics work so often.

  43. Re:System Seven Savvy by be-fan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not really. MacOS Classic was pretty much the height of UI design. OS X is catching back up to where they used to be, but they aren't there yet.

    --
    A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
  44. Color Me Amazed by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Antialiasing in the color picker? The edges are smoother, but the colors are wrong. It's bad enough they used that feature in that app, but to use that terrible example to show off the feature?

    --

    --
    make install -not war

    1. Re:Color Me Amazed by baquiano · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The color wheel is a inherently imprecise selection mechanism, meant to pick a color in a fast and simple way, e.g, "I want a light-greenish tone". If you want a precise color, you should use the RGB or HSV spinners.

      Complaining about lack of pixel-perfection in the edges of the color wheel is like complaining about lack of pixel-precise proportion of scrollbar thumbs.

      --
      You're bound to be unhappy if you optimize everything. --Donald Knuth
  45. Re:Works For me (TM) by astralbat · · Score: 2, Informative
    Absolutely. The problem is not with the xine backend or the decryption libraries etc.. but with Totem itself. It often refuses to auto play my dvd-rom drive (as xine or mplayer does).
    If you do ever manage to get a dvd-rom to play, the navigation slider is innacurate, and skipping forwards or backwards often causes the audio to go horribly out of sync, although I'm not sure if that is more to do with GStreamer.

    For most media files though, Totem is fine and I'm looking forward to the improved DVD capabilities coming with Gnome 2.12.

  46. Make it work, make it right, make it fast. by Dante · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Make it work, make it right, make it fast.

    --
    "think of it as evolution in action"
  47. GNUstep vs. GNOME vs. KDE by O2dude · · Score: 2

    GNOME and KDE are application development frameworks as much as they are 'Desktops'. It's is therefore ironic that the GNU version of the highly respected Openstep/NeXTSTEP application framework, which by the way is now of course the foundation of Apple's Cocoa/Mac OS X stuff, receives so little coverage or interest.

    It seems to me that GNUstep (http://www.gnustep.org/) offers the cleanest framework for application design in Open Source land with a totally Kick-arse development environment etc. etc. etc. Am I the only person that finds it rather odd that so few people use it?

    Strangy strangy...

    --
    - It took western civilisation 2000 years to ensure popular literacy, and now we work with icon driven GUI's. Go figure.