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GNOME 2.12 Released
Moderator writes "At long last, Gnome 2.12 has been released! Among the many new features are clipboard management, a menu editor, an improved search tool, and a spatial-tree view in Nautilus. Check out the start page for more info."
Since I moved from Debian to Ubuntu on some workstations, I now get to whine "but how long will it take Ubuntu to release the debs?" Or at least whine about GNOME app upgrades that depend on upgrading a new libc, which then forces upgrading all kinds of other apps (like Evolution v2.3.7 does). It's a whole new dependency hell, slightly less hot.
--
make install -not war
Burn Karma, burn!
A MENU EDITOR!
...
what a concept!
maybe they will go back to letting me change the icon of the damn foot menu
such features, years ahead of the alternatives..
mod me troll bait or whatever, but im sorry gnome really urks me sometimes.
For those who want the latest 2.12 goodness nicely prepackaged, Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) will be released with 2.12 on October 13:th, about a month from now.
h light=(release)
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BreezyReleaseSchedule?hig
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Link to torrent:n -5.iso.torrent
http://torrent.gnome.org/gnome-livecd-2.12-i386-e
I just wish a little more effort would go into the user-interface aspect, which is really the whole point of a GUI right? It should be flicker-free. When I want to run a program it should come right up rather than changing the mouse pointer and making me wait. The fact that its logo is a foot doesn't help matters any.
Are there any window shells out there that have a little more pizazz than Enlightenment but retain the crisp response to user-input? Because that's what's needed to get the desktop crowd.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
There is a lot I like about gnome- but last time I did try it, the lack of a menu editor drove me nuts. I dug around trying to find out how to do it manually for days. Even wrote up a journal entry or two on it. I ended up giving up and went back to KDE. I'll check this out and see how it goes.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
If the GUI could match the sheer attractivness of Tiger or Vista, there would be many more converts. Although it is billed as "an intuitive and attractive desktop for end-users" on GNOME's website, it still has a way to go. Say what you will about the other named OSes, but real progress is being made on the GUI front, and I'm afraid that GNOME is falling behind.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Gnome is getting better and better but KDE is still eye-candier (ermm is that proper? candier?)
About gtk-2.8... What are those new "features not currently available in any other toolkit" that the article is talking about?
X~
The 'evince' app looks useful, letting you see PDF or some other formats, sort of like the 'preview' app in OSX. But, wait, there's more! As I read the webpage, Evince will now (or will one day) also handle presentation formats (openoffice "impress" and Powerpoint). This last thing is more than just a copy of non-free software, and that in itself is notable. But I think it's more important than that ... I think it would be very helpful to have just one interface for viewing many types of files. Of course, they will have had to make a comfortable and powerful interface; once this gets into Ubuntu or Fedora, I'll have to check it out!
a MENU EDITOR? jeesus. Now the users won't have to directly manipulate obscure data files?
That's so.. uh.. 1982.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I don't mind waiting so much, if it's a heavy app, but I'm really, really annoyed that applications steal back the focus when they finally appear. It's so unintiutive and annoying. Then again, all (or at least the ones I know of) OS:es and managers do this, so it's not specific to Gnome.
:) And if there is a way to get this behaviour today, please please tell me!
If you don't understand what I mean, here's the point: I often start up an application that I will use "in a while" and then proceed to navigate further in Nautilus or whatever. When the app starts, it steals back focus even though I already do something else. That is not usability. There's two use cases:
1. User starts application, waits for it to complete. This would cover almost all common use and especially non-power use. Focus remains with started application from the point that I start it.
2. User starts application, proceeds to give other window focus (by click, ALT-tab, whatever). Starting application at this point loses focus and will not regain it.
Ok, so if the app doesn't steal focus, it may not be obvious that it's finished? That's what the new taskbar hints is for, and it's also a matter of how you behave. Any user likely to have problems with this probably wait for each app to start in turn anyways, so it's not likely to be a problem.
Now this I would like to see. It annoys me at least a couple of times a day.
Spine World
This is fixed in GNOME 2.12 with the exception of starting apps from the terminal (where the problem becomes real complex).
Gnome is the OSX killer.
You are killing right? Its been how many years, better part of a decade and they just added freakin' clipboard services.
Call me back when they:
I've been disappointed with many of the Gnome release, however for some reason I keep on using it. I will never like Ephanie as I think Galleon was much superior, however it hasn't really been maintained in a while.
Anyone using the Gentoo unstable tree has seen some of the more recent Gnome features including stability in Nautilus. Going from Nautilus 2.8 to 2.10 I noticed it was a lot faster, however it crashed every 10 minutes (I'm not exaggerating). However in several of the point releases since then, I've noticed improved stability and even the cool tree view thing in the browser.
I am hopeful for Gnome 2.12. Hopefully it won't suck anywhere near as bad as the initial release of the other Gnome versions.
SumDog
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Okay, I know a lot of people dislike Nautilus, and I think it keeps a lot of people away from GNOME. Here's how to kill it for good:
/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /path/to/your/background.jpg
1) Find a better filer! It's not that hard. Try "gentoo" (the filer, not the distro), and "rox-filer" for starters.
2) Run gnome-session-properties from an xterm.
3) Find Nautilus' entry in the "Current Session" tab.
4) Click "Remove", then "Apply". Bam! No more Nautilus.
5) To make the change stick, close all the apps you don't want to run when you log-in and then log out. Be sure to check the "Save current setup" box.
6) Profit!
GNOME will now start more quickly. However, you will not have a desktop background or icons, unless you're already using a non-GNOME utility to set them. The background is easy enough:
1) Open up gnome-session-properties again. Go to the "Startup Programs" tab.
2) Click "Add" and input the following: gconftool-2 --type string --set
3) Leave the "Order" field set to 50 (trust me on this one!), hit "Okay", and close the session tool.
Your background should be displayed next time you log in. Note that, if you somehow screw this up (say, by setting a order value that's too low), you can fix it from text mode by editing the ~/.gnome2/session-manual file. Just wipe out everything under [Default].
The icons are a bit trickier, and maybe not worth it. You need a program like desklaunch to create desktop icons. I suggest just creating a new hideable panel and putting launchers on it instead, since desklaunch requires you to explicitly set x and y pixel positions for icons. If anyone knows of a better prog than desklaunch, please chime in.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
...my use of Gnome on Fedora Core 3 has been nothing short of miraculous in simplicity and efficiency and most closely comes to the interface I've come to expect after years of Windows and even, hack/wheeze/cough, OS/2.
KDE on the other hand seems to pride itself on being as different as possible, seems to be designed to make guesses as to what I want as opposed to asking me or simply doing the logical default, and is largely irrellevant to most supposedly KDE-centric apps when it comes to running them on Gnome. I don't have to change out of Gnome for KDE for them to work in almost every case.
Gnome is a pretty damn decent environment and I can see why it is the FC default.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I've always found that to be interesting, because I'm either stupid, they're cheating, or getting useable fonts in X is just too fucking hard. Much more than it needs to be.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
The application font is Bitstream Vera Sans 9.
The window title font is Bitstream Vera Sans Bold 10.
I just downloaded from the torrent and booted it up and it's another disappointment.
.NET implementation). This means that these apps are less prone to memory leaks, buffer overflows, etc. Meanwhile Gecko and Evolution seem (as recently as Gnome 2.10) to be gaining memory leaks which ultimately result in these programs crashing. Is Gnome going to go all .NET? If so, in the mean time are they going to do something about this legacy code that is leaking? Also, gnome-settings-daemon, STILL doesn't play nice with other WM's. If you want to load up Gnome themes, you'll still have to resort to editing .gtkrc-2.0 files in your home directory. gnome-settings-daemon will start Nautilus and XScreensaver from your session profile gnome-session-restore even if you're using another WM resulting in your root window being clobbered and two screensaver daemons running.
First of all, congrats to the Ubuntu folks on a fine Live CD system. It's rather nice and very intelligently makes use of the Debian Installer system for hardware probing. Also, props to the Gnome guys for their hard work on this release.
Now, having said all that, I don't get it. I try every single Gnome release because so many people in the Linux community whom I respect seem to think the world of Gnome. And I just tried it again and yet again I'm left thinking that there's some fundamentally philosophical misunderstanding between myself and the Gnome developers.
The first thing I checked was how well Gnome and KDE integrate in a hybrid environment. Sure enough, Gnome still insists on ignoring the X Windowing system's DPI information and overriding it (and all other applications started after gnome-settings-daemon) with it's favorite 96 DPI. Without a copy of KDE on the Live CD I wasn't able to see if Gnome has adopted the Freedesktop.org MIME standard in this release so that downloads in Epiphany and Firefox will default to the same applications that Konqueror does (it doesn't in 2.10).
Moving on, three failings on the Live CD itself: First, the video and audio samples that are supposed to be used to show off Totem don't work at all. Totem declares that "Cannot play: the resource file:/// isn't writable". Second, Abiword, the word processor defaulted to handle the Gnome philosophical documents on the CD has several problems rendering glyphs on its page. For instance, a lower-case "g" will have the bottom of it cut off because Abiword hasn't correctly set the line-height of the font in question. This is an example of font rendering problems all over Gnome 2.12 apps. Third, the network browser application correctly found my local browse master but instead of listing any server or desktop which responded to its smbtree requests, it requested a username and password to connect to my local browse master. When I rejected it because I didn't want to log in, it failed to show my network entirely rendering the entire network browser system useless (no information of any kind displayed).
Usability: my two pet peeves are still there. Window snapping can only be activated by an undocumented holding of the ALT key while dragging. The file open/save dialog boxes STILL don't have a URL field. One can only access this field by hitting an undocumented CTRL+L (that's usability!?).
I didn't have time to check to see if this version of Evolution has working support for Maildir's that doesn't crash the system when moving large numbers of messages around.
Other things I noticed: a couple of new Gnome apps (Tom Boy, Minue) are moving to Mono/(Linux's
And feel free to flame me. But these are my experiences.
Not keeping up with the Joneses or the latest discussion about the latest version of Gnome, I was left in the dark when it came to know what was meant when the poster mentioned, "spacial tree browsing." I found the following two articles useful:
However, I don't have the foggiest as to what spacial tree mode really means. Can anybody enlighten me or point me at some screen shots?
-AP
Someone wrote that GNOME is an OSX killer before.
Well yeah, maybe in 2020.
You see, Nautilus alone is vastly inferior to Finder (the new one). Of all gnome components, nautilus is the one that sucks most. Try browsing a large directory with thousands of files with nautilus, konqueror and windows explorer. The latter ones scan the directory MUCH faster. Nautilus takes about 1-2 MINUTES - unacceptable.
The main point of new gnome bugfix releases should be to improve nautilus. Speed it up, say, to about 100 times its current "speed".
Also, it is evident that once an ORDINARY USER (no hacker, no power user, no admin, no dev) has to edit a config file, the whole design has failed. Of course, this is not gnomes problem alone, but to a great deal the underlying OS; however, we are talking about an OSX killer, right? If you aren't lucky, and the hardware doesn't fit 1:1 with the distro, you have to dig through obscure manpages.
I also read that anyone that is not able to edit configfiles is an idiot and everyone MUST learn how to do this. See, I doubt a biologist that made some photos about a weird plant and want to download them from his cam to his PC is interested in editing config files just to get this to work - he JUST WANTS TO DO HIS JOB and is certainly not interested in learning sh and all about the Unix architecture. Config files per se are ok, as long as editing them is optional. Unfortunately, it still is mandatory sometimes (fortunately, the camera issue is resolved automatically by modern distros - but still, simple samba shares have to be edited by hand for example).
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
What the Gnome developers should do next is to concentrate on the basic elements. Making the code cleaner and faster. Make the interface more customizable. Make the file manager more functional and friendlier.
Right now, they are just doing too many things at once. Sure, there are Evolution users, but most people use Firefox and Thunderbird nowadays. Who needs yet another video player or CD ripper? It's more important to have a good CD burner - right now I still need to resort to the command line to blank a CD-RW. I sometimes have problems connecting to Samaba servers via Nautilus, the use of the mount command is required.
So, focus on the basics and make them better. Don't reinvent the wheel.