A Look at GNOME 2.14

An anonymous reader writes "Gnome has a nice preview of their newest version 2.14 posted which should be hitting the streets around the 15th of March. From the article: "As well as new features and more polish, developers have been working around the clock to squeeze more performance out of the most commonly used applications and libraries. This is a review of some of the most shiny work that has gone into the upcoming GNOME release."

Comments

Coral Cache Link

[Breaker_1]

Before they get slashdotted: http://www.gnome.org.nyud.net:8080/~davyd/gnome-2- 14/

Re:Will it be in FC5 or Ubuntu 6.next?

[Philodoxx]

Every Ubuntu release is timed so that it arrives shortly after the release of gnome. This is done so that the Ubuntu release features the latest and greatest of what gnome has to offer.

Re:Will it be in FC5 or Ubuntu 6.next?

[Sodki]

Yes, GNOME 2.14 will be in both Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu 6.04 aka Dapper Drake.

Re:Progress!

[be-fan]

Now, for the confusing part. Why was their previous allocator so lame compared to malloc()?

Because glibc's malloc() is actually a pretty fast and scalable piece of code for a general-purpose memory allocator. Even GNOME's new special-purpose allocator only gets about twice the performance of glibc's.

GNOME's audio backend GStreamer to use DRM

[billybob2]

GStreamer, the official audio backend for GNOME, will include DRM plugins developed by a company called Fluendo, which hopes to make money by restricting the users' rights and turning GNOME/Linux/"the Free Desktop System" into a Vista-like nightmare controlled by the entertainment cartel. Why? Because Fluendo is on the GNOME Foundation's Advisory Board. I can't believe I've been so stupid to actually give them money, so that they can turn around and stab Free Software in the back! Never again will I trust the GNOME Foundation after they sold out the community like this.

I hope KDE is smart enough to avoid DRM by choosing a multimedia backend that is GPL. This will ensure that users can change the code of any plugin, remove the DRM, and be left with a functional product. Xine would be an excellent choice for a multimedia backend, since it is light-weight, works with more codecs that Gstreamer (not to mention better) and can be included as a library in any program, like Kaffeine and Amarok have already done.

Re:GNOME's audio backend GStreamer to use DRM

[VStrider]

Noone is forcing anything on you. DRM plugins will be in the "ugly" module. You don't have to install this module. GStreamer will still work perfectly fine with the rest of the plugins.

From gnomejournal:

Most distributions, for legal reasons, only ship a small subset of GStreamer 0.8 plugins. Because GStreamer's plugins are built from the same source module, each packager was forced to split it up to remove components that were illegal or unwise to use in their particular area of operation. The amount of custom code caused a number of problems for users. To solve this, 0.10 has five plugin modules called base, good, ugly, bad and ffmpeg. Base and good contain plugins that any distribution can ship without fear of potential legal issues. Ugly contains well-maintained plugins which may or may have legal issues of some form, generally patent or license issues. Bad is an incubation area where new plugins mature before moving to good or ugly. If a plugin never matures, it may remain in bad for the rest of its life. ffmpeg contains wrappers for all the codecs in the ffmpeg package. This new scheme will allow downstream packagers to have more consistent package naming and installation scripts, making it easier for users to discover and install the plugins that they need.

The base package is not intended to contain all the plugins required by a typical GStreamer setup. Instead, it contains one important example of each type of GStreamer plugin. The code and documentation for base plugins will remain current so developers will always be able to create new plugins from a known working code base.

Re:SW Dualprocessing

[tpgp]

How do I use that with Ubuntu instead of OpenSuSE?

Downoad the latest ubuntu CD, then:

1 .Enable the universe repository (see AddingRepositoriesHowto)
2. Make sure that you have the latest mesa, libglitz1 and libglitz-glx1, xserver-xgl

            sudo apt-get update
            sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa libglitz1 libglitz-glx1 xserver-xgl

3. Install compiz-kde and/or compiz-gnome depending on your desktop

            sudo apt-get install compiz-gnome

4. Replace /etc/X11/X with a symlink to /usr/bin/Xgl

            sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/Xgl /etc/X11/X

5. Close all applications and restart gdm (This will log you out!)

            sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

6. Log in, then in a terminal start compiz and the Gnome window decorator (do NOT use sudo here)

            compiz --replace gconf decoration wobbly fade minimize move place resize scale switcher cube rotate zoom
            gnome-window-decorator

            Leave out the gconf plugin if you don't have compiz-gnome installed

7. Add these commands to ~/.gnomerc if you want this on every login (which you probably do)

Taken from the Ubuntu xgl howto wiki

Re:How do we make it look more compact?

[UuCon]

right-click on your menubar, select properties and then
change the number in the 'Size' box. Done! This feature
has been there since 1.x days.

Toolbar size depends on your font size. Go into your
Preferences->Font and change 'Application Font' to
something smaller.

Re:Why

[pyros]

Why do the Linux GUIs always have the menu bar as part of the windows and the top 3 buttons on the right? Surely it makes more sense to only have one menu bar taking up space at a time, and the buttons near the menus where your mouse is.

KDE can be configured with one global menubar. Both KDE and Gnome can have the buttons on the left, you just have to find a window manager theme that puts them there.

Re:KDE?

[diegocgteleline.es]

KDE is focused in revamping the whole KDE infrastructure with KDE 4, even during the kde 3.5 development some people said 3.5 would be unstable because too many developers where focusing in KDE 4 (kde 3.5.1 is great for me).

So you won't see any kde news for a while except for KDE 4. KDE 3.5 is everything what KDE 3.X has to offer. Of course people could continue developing 3.5, but they're focusing in kde 4....there'll be news in the kde 3.5 field - bugfix releases, updates from individual programs like koffice or kopete - but overall, you won't see any "earthbreaking" change in kde 3.5.

Some gnome developers think that there should not be a gnome 3 - at least, there's zero lines of "gnome 3 code" right now - and that the gnome 2 is OK and that it's much better to do small improvements to the current architecture. This is a big error IMO, but the fact is that until kde 4 is released it will be gnome who gets more attention and releases more attractive things.

Might I suggest. . .

[lord_nimula]

For those who find KDE and Gnome to be a bit much: http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/581/

Re:Naming

[gerardlt]

Tssk. What, do you know nothing?

"A delicate bar of cartilage connecting the dorsal and ventral extremities of the first pair of bronchial cartilages in the syrinx of birds."
From The Free Dictionary

Surely everyone knows that!