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

BSD ?

[mbyte]

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

Re:BSD ?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

nice headline...

[w4rl5ck]

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? :)

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:It Just Works Philosophy

[dbIII]

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.

Re:Gnome vs. KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

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

Efficiency

[Alain Williams]

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.

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.

Re:Still ugly fonts

[ocelotbob]

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.

Re:Still ugly fonts

[Gleng]

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

dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

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

Re:Still ugly fonts

[Gleng]

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>

Re:What about Beagle?

[Korgan]

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... ;-)

Re:Still ugly fonts - this works too!

[bogaboga]

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.

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).

Re:Gnome vs. KDE

[Andre]

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.

Re:Still ugly fonts

[zsau]

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.)