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OSDL to Bridge GNOME and KDE
Trax88 writes "Open Source Development Labs is previewing work that will attempt to make life easier for software companies by bridging GNOME and KDE. The effort, called Portland Project, began showing its first software tools on in conjunction with this week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Using them, a software company can write a single software package that works using either of the prevailing graphical interfaces. Working with Freedesktop.org on unifying interface issues, they plan to release a beta version of the software in May and version 1.0 in June. Ultimately, advocates hope that it will be part of a larger but separate effort called Linux Standard Base, which is designed to make the operating system easier for software companies to use."
Dammit, bridge for FVWM2 too!
If it's no better than what Redhat did with their Frankenstein mix of Gnome and KDE, then I want nothing to do it.
I'd rather one or the other. But, really the other: KDE.
...that the hybrid desktop will be gnown as Knome :)
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Slashdot ought to ask its visitors what their favorite features between the two that are not shared so this OSDL project can get more guidelines from the right demographic. Ask Slashdot is a powerful resource to collect knowledge, perhaps more than any other system in the galaxy.
Why not just merge KDE and Gnome ?
I understand that my statement looks like a troll's dream but it would not be such a bad situation.
After all, Firefox is now the main F/OSS web browser with a large dominance among the F/OSS community. And it's not that bad. Why would it be so bad with desktop managers ?
Please enlighten me. Thank you.
Nice idea... of course like many I suspect I'm skeptical.
Look at the Windows side... Direct3D is pretty useful and was intended to remove the need for developers to write for specific graphics cards.
What happened? For a time everything was fine until the two major players, in an effort to differentiate themselves from the other went off in slightly different directions ultimately resulting in vanilla DirectX and Direct3D being a lowest common denominator between the two sides, and still forcing developers on both sides to write specific code for major devices so as to be able to offer the best experience.
I foresee a similar issue here. A common platform that enables an app written for it to work fine under KDE or Gnome will work great, at first, but then developers will find a feature of one or the other which they need, or at least want to have optional, so will design in parallel paths of UI rendering and functionality, ultimately resulting in a common framework that is insufficient for many apps.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The benevolent dictator said:
"I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.
This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of
Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will
use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long
since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.
Please, just tell people to use KDE."
Will this help users of non-linux systems, like myself running KDE on solaris/sparc whom are upset that all of Sun's bundled tools are gnome-specific and load up a billion gigs of dependant libraries when I try and launch them?
This is not a new desktop. This is a layer of separation between developers and the underlying graphics libraries Qt (KDE) and GTK (Gnome). This is so I can code an app using this new API and it will run and look good on both KDE and GTK systems.
I love the concept, I really hope that the implimentation will work out to be as good as the idea. If it works out this will be a major step towards bringing linux to more desktops.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
...It's cement. (That's "See mehnt" for you Red staters) Geddit? Portland? Cement? Hahaha. Laugh. It's funny. Or something.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
They might have one heck of a time with things like the artsd. I have found that the KDE sound server is a pain to work with. One thing that would be great is if the sound server became standardized so that apps like jack could operate without interference. The KDE embeded sound apps play havoc with non aRts sound apps, just ask anyone who uses Rosegarden and jack. Even getting Audacity to work with KDE can be a royal pain if the artsd is running locks on dev!
From the article:
Portland Project is working on two ways to gloss over the differences
I hope this doesn't mean it's doomed from the start.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It's hard to tell exactly what this project is going to deliver, but it looks to me like an abstraction layer that will run on top of whatever GUI toolkit is available, rendering with native widgets.
This has been attempted before, and it usually doesn't catch on. There are plusses and minuses to both toolkits (as there are in any GUI toolkit). The problem that arises when you try to combine them is you end up with a superset of the negatives and none of the plusses that would lead you to choose one over the other. Essentially, it's the "lowest common denominator" problem. If a certain feature is present in one toolkit but not the other, then guess what? It's not going to make it into DAPI. If similar tasks are accomplished differently in the two toolkits, the Portland project is going to have to choose one, and shoehorn the other to fit. Either that, or introduce a third way of doing the same thing.
People view the existence of two competing desktop standards a "problem." I disagree with that. As a developer, if I see a certain application already exists on my platform of choice, I'm not going to make another one, even if mine would have been better. On the other hand, if I were a KDE man, and there was an existing app for Gnome, but one that I didn't really like, then there's a little more incentive to make a native KDE version, in the mold of what I really want. In the end, it's the users who win, because they can pick and choose between both apps.
So for now, pick one and go with it. Don't fall into the trap of trying to conquer both worlds at once.
My guitar chord generator.
Hi all,
0 6-March/msg00002.html
Please consider this email a formal request from the GNOME Foundation.
We, being the GNOME Foundation, as well as many GNOME Foundation members and
contributors to the project, have contacted you numerous times over the last
four years regarding the use of the old GNOME logo on Slashdot. We've posted
comments on Slashdot stories covering GNOME. We've been very nice about it.
Please update the icon used for GNOME stories on Slashdot. We have used this
logo since 2002, when GNOME 2.0 was released. It has been a *very long* time
since the marble foot logo represented our project. We're now at GNOME 2.14,
so we've shipped seven releases since the new logo was adopted. In that time
you have posted over 120 articles in the GNOME category on Slashdot.
We'd really appreciate it if you updated the icon. It may not be a big deal
to you guys, but our logo is a mark of pride for our project. We'd like to
see it used.
Thanks,
- Jeff
From: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/20
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/jamesh/2006/03/20/0
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/random/logo/
and has been for years.
Best Slashdot Co
Just what I needed. ANOTHER computing standard to learn. Which standard is next to join the act? Maybe the next one will be more standard than all the other standards.
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right. --Isaac Asimov
vi and emacs?
There's a difference between looks like kde and works like kde. Will the menus/config/keybindings be in the right place/format? Will the application handle dcop messages properly? Cross-platform toolkits usually abstract away the differences between platforms. It might translate the function calls and provide the right look, but that's only half of getting the proper look-and-feel.
The ubuntu openoffice-kde package does a nice job, but it's obviously not a kde application. I hope this toolkit gets it right because I would kill for a KDE version of firefox (damn these infernal gnome save dialogs!).
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
No.
Have a nice day.
A pox on both your houses. Useless bloat.
... Standards and Practices !
PenGun
Do What Now ???
So instead of a bunch of apps with names that start with "k" and a bunch of apps that start with the letter "g" we'll have a bunch of similar apps that start with the letter "p!"
It's crazy but it might just work!
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
I'll tell you why I saw the light.. I was using Ubuntu with it's Gnome desktop.
Gnome was doing me well until I wanted to change something and couldn't. (Window manager metacity blows) So i switched to KDE's window manager, kwin.
Then one day I realized I liked Amarok and digiKam so I installed Kubuntu Desktop via apt-get while using Ubuntu. Figured I'd give KDE a try.
Within an hour I had KDE configured to look exactly like my gnome desktop, to every last button and taskbar. Then I realized, I didn't have to make it like gnome at all!
So in summary. KDE Is better than GNOME because KDE can look like GNOME but GNOME cannot look like KDE. Same as all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. Gnome is a square.
Also, i had a preconcieved notion that KDE was a Windows desktop clone, which it might be at first glance, but you can quickly and easily make it your own.
Gnome is just inferior in comparison, but I still run it on my laptop.
to vote for Cowboy Neil.
...
If the "Portland Project" does not have sufficient Cowboy Neil there is no way it will be of any use to me.
Yes, I am quite aware that "Ask Slashdot" is not the same as a "Slashdot Poll".
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
why not use WxWidgets?
period. linus is not a saint so dont go acting like his word is devinity.
I've been running KDE apps on GNOME and vice-versa for years, largely thanks to the work of Freedesktop.org at getting them to use common drag-n-drop, system menus, and notification area. So based on the incredible lack of information in the article, I had to wonder... WTF does this do that isn't already possible?
The Portland project page isn't particularly informative either -- the description is too low-level: "we're going to create two interfaces." OK, two interfaces to do what?
The Integration Tasks page actually provides information about what kinds of things they want to do: make sure apps built for both desktops will talk to the screen saver in the same way, deal with power management, share preferences like default apps, etc.
Sounds like a logical continuation of FreeDesktop.org's efforts so far, and something that will improve matters for people like me who like some apps from one desktop and some from the other.
I think GTK is admirable, but GNOME has regressed over the last 2-3 years to the point that it's no longer usable for me. The dumbing down of the GNOME widget set cornered me into a Fisher-Price user experience that I disliked greatly. Let's face it, I'm sure only a tiny tiny slice of Linux users are technophobes. Catering to such a tiny user base is a death wish for any but the most specialized of projects. If GNOME doesn't make an about face, it will eventually become nothing more than a fringe player with KDE owning 95%+ of the desktop pie. I have faith that GNOME can turn about and drop this "simplicity" crap, the question is will it?
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
You don't frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person. We blow our noses at you, so-called GNOME Foundation, you and all your silly developers.
Furthermore, since you like feet so much, we have decided to change your logo to this
Now, go away, or we shall taunt you a second time-a!
guis and WIMP interfaces only add to BLOAT
I've always envisioned a perfect world. Where the libraries and such for each operating system would be part of a publicly avialable set, so that you could make a piece of software for one OS, and it would work on the others. Kind of like java, but at a level that would be implemented in C. Too bad this will never happen with Microsoft. They have no reason to allow Linux/Mac usage to spread any further. Yes, Microsoft released .NET stuff for Linux, but as I recall, it's still rather limited and not ready to be used in it's raw form. BUt I like this idea. Same basic concept, but on a GTK/KDE level..... At least bridges one of the biggest gaps in the Linux community.... Now let's see Gentoo use flags implement this so you can install k* without the kde libraries....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
...this sunday on Pay-per-view! Only $50! On a side note, GNOME bites.
Isn't that Linux desktop unification what FreeDesktop.org is supposed to do?
--
make install -not war
Exactly what my Linux desktop needs.
Not.
Thanks: your post tells us all pretty clearly what kind of whiny and unprofessional people are advocating KDE. Thanks for doing such a good job advocating for Gnome.
Vendors like Sun will continue to choose Gnome over KDE, for the simple reason that KDE costs money for non-GPL development.
will i be able to use KDEs superior dialogs such as kdeprint, filechooser, etc. with GTK2/gnome apps ?
also, will interface items like toolbars look and work like KDEs ?
What ? Me, worry ?
Maybe the two together can create an Intuitive WiFi configuration utility that has the ability to join and unjoin networks without me rebooting my laptop. Or how about built-in WPA support?
Let me know when it also works with ncurses.
Firefox->File->Open File.
/tmp/xxx
/tmp while you are typing, without completion overwrite, /tmp/mp/xxx
/etc/tc/fstab /etc/termcapc/fstab.
Type in:
The GTK completes
so you end up with:
If this manages to work the first time, backspace the whole thing, and you
will see the bug.
Or, try to type '/etc/fstab'
You get something like:
or better:
I guess if you type poorly, this interface is for you.
Type a letter, look to see if it completed for you, type the next letter,...
The bug exists from RH9 to FC5.
The portland API is hardly going to replace either of the desktops' APIs. Even if they do leave out all the components that aren't mirrored in each, they can still get all the common functional components which are certainly there. Not all apps need all the widgets in KDE and GNOME.
You're talking about style, increased usability and integration; but you forget that if people want to use apps from both desktops you sacrifice those anyway. The LSB is making progress on solving those problems, and has already influenced the desktop groups.
Other cross-platform projects such as wxWidgets are successful, which has been used by AOL and NASA. Anything which makes it easier for developers to choose to allow users to pick whichever UI backend they prefer has got to be worth trying. That's greater user freedom.
Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes...
The dead rising from the grave.
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.
Gnome and KDE together.....
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Having an application that will run nicely in both desktops is appealing in itself, but aren't the respective API's for Gnome and KDE (which are quite different) one of the great incentives for developers? If this new API is going to appeal to lots of (all?) developers, it would need to somehow appeal to both camps, and given their significant fundamental differences in coding styles, that might be difficult.
Why not just switch to E17 - it's far superior to both kde and gnome; easily customizable, fast, and beautiful...
I presume that the project name derives from Portland cement, an essential component of concrete.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Hope this project succeeds.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Will this effort address automatically discovering and displaying (as icons on the desktop) new devices like USB attached cameras, USB drives, printers, etc? Those are the real pain points that I deal with nowadays.
In my opinion Gnome is a waste of programming. Kde is far more flexible and has more to offer then Gnome. The main reason I chose to use Suse vs. Ubuntu was KDE. Unless like on Debian where you can install both and I fell like wasting HD space do I ever install Gnome. In my opinion lets concentrate on revising Wine so that it can operate more Windows based based programs and also Mac. Then and only then will Linux become a true household OS!
Because the real problem is not so much the used framework but to use a single set of guidelines. The main obstacle of the Linux desktop is the usability, the look&feel of the applications. If one just uses 2 different applications on Linux, one most likely has to learn 2 different ways how to work with. If one uses 10 different application one doesn't have to learn 10 different ways but quite possible 5 to 7.
. html) and follow the links to the sources. Or go and read the guidelines themselves at http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/guidelines/content .html.
t s/2005-December/000349.html), they seems to already have forgotten. I've also informed Novell and posted it to LinuxQuestions, almost no reaction. So what else can I do?
So I created wyoGuide (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) exactly for this, to finally have a single set of guidelines. And I designed wyoGuide to be cross-platform guidelines since no serious developer codes for a single platform these days. wyoGuide can and should be used on any platform with any framework and any language. Sure I do provide sample code written in C++ with wxWidgets but I'd love to put up others sample code as well. So far nobody familiar with other's framework volunteered.
To stress this point again, the Linux desktop won't become a success unless it can't be agreed on this single set of guidelines. It's possible that everybody sits together and designs yet another set but the outcome won't be much different than wyoGuide. On the other side wyoGuide is still work in progress and I'm open to any suggestion to make it more suitable for anybody.
If somebody doesn't believe me just read the LXer article here (http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/54009/index
What I'm curious about is how the Portland project handles this info, the knew it since December 2005 (http://lists.osdl.org/pipermail/desktop_architec
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
I just tried it serveral times in Firefox 1.5.0.1 on Ubuntu Dapper, and it works there. Not only do I have tab completion, the text field even pops up a chooser list to help resolve ambiguities.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
If this project pans out technically (i.e. I don't know how difficult it is to implement) it has the potential of erasing one of the biggest hurdles to adoption of Linux on the Desktop as there will be no more need to worry about your KDE/GNOME app being integrated on the other's environment.
...but can you do the same with wxWindows and Qt?
0 70562
No you can't, just look into the wxWidgets mailing archives.
See also: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182300&cid=15
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
G.A.S.
Sorry, I couldn't resist...
But, gnown as Knome is REALLY one HAL of a good one... Imagine attaching Gnome to the HAL exoskeleton.... Oh, now THAT sentence was serendipitous...
Jeez... image word: chipmunk
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Nope, the next standard is to standardize standards...
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
If Linux had a user interface, every Windows developer would be porting to it.
Simplicity has great value.
Have you read all 54,000 pages of tax code?
Are you aware of all the laws that apply to your daily life?
I believe simplicity in general, and especially simple laws and simple codes are important - otherwise you get to the point where not even one specialized person can understand a single entity.
I heartily applaud Gnome, Gaim, Firefox, and other open source projects who are making the effort to *simplify* their programs.
Simple is far from stupid; simple is smart!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
I just tried it in on two different installs of Fedora Core 5 (desktop and laptop) and one install of Ubuntu Breezy and it works exactly as it should with tab completion. This bug you're talking about does not exist in a fresh install of Fedora Core 5 or Ubuntu Breezy.
Linux has a _ton_ of user interfaces. _That's_ why every Win32 developer _isn't_ porting to it.
Here's hoping something like this will eventually reduce the difference between GNOME and KDE to just different APIs for the same underlying WM...
I have come to a conclusion that every new release of software is distinctly worse than the other. Why? It's because the fat lady can't sing. There's a natural tendency to add stuff," Negroponte said. "Suddenly it [becomes] like a very fat person--uses most of their energy to move the fat. We've gotten to the point where we have to completely rethink." (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1945967,00.a sp)
KDE looks to much like windowz for me. The best thing about Linux is you can use different desktops. If you have enough disk space you don't have to chose. Most modern computers come with disks big enough to install 2 or 3 desktops. I use SuSE but like Gnome, but have I KDE installed. I use applications like kb3 in gnome because I like some of its features. With both desktops installed some applications run on both desktops. But if there was a KDE application I wanted to run that only ran with KDE its a simple log out, change sessions, and log back in.
I trust Microsoft as far as I could comfortably spit a dead rat
...was a solution to a problem that never, ever existed. You have always been able to run the mozilla (or netscape) browser as a STAND ALONE APPLICATION. You never had to use the whole entire suite, YET, all of a sudden out of the blue came this call for a "lean" standalone browser. WTF, it was always there!!! It was never not there!!
I SWEAR the whole lose three years deal with the firefox CONGAME looks like it was *designed on purpose* to give *S breathing room while they built **7.
It is still not as good a browser as the suite browser, it isn't as fast, it doesn't render pages any better, none, it has a much stupider toolbar at the top (WTF do you need TWO input windows for when you can have the clean search or go buttons and one big window you can read the URL in?? Hello, phishing, isn't it better to be able to SEE the URL for most people) it has crappier preferences (dumbed down and candy-assed-ized severely and no one can dispute this) plugins and extensions break constantly for *some magical reason*, search the page works much faster and more intuitively in the suite (you just start typing anyplace in the page, poof, there it is) and combined with t-bird you are right back up to alleged "bloatware" of the suite.
Where the hell is the so called "advantage"? The new name??? Who cares, mozilla was doing just fine, slowly but surely gaining, then we went through that ridiculous set of name changes, diluting mindshare. We are supposed to believe this was an accident, like no one knew that would happen? Any kid studying marketing in junior high would have told them that would be the outcome, yet they still did it!
hmmmmmmmmm
If I was conspiracy minded I would look at some folks finances with these "decisions". I've smelled a rat with this crap for a long, long time now. FF isn't something cool, it looks more like an example of deliberate sabotage to set things back and reinvent wheels for a few years, IMO. Now who would profit from that??
Except for panels such as the file browser and print setup, and other popups like error messages and alerts, etc, people probably would never notice if they are running a Gnome or KDE program on either desktop. The differences in GUI between the toolkits are miniscule due to them copying each other and copying Windows (and Windows is only "consistent" because the toolkits there copy each other, there are in fact many *more* different GUI toolkits used on Windows than Linux).
I would like to see a Unix-style solution to this mess, which is to have small programs do each job. In the file chooser case, any program wanting to popup a file chooser would do something like exec("file_chooser", args...) and wait for it to exit. Exit with an error means the user hit cancel. Exit with success and the program will print the chosen filename to stdout. Existing toolkits would be modified to do this, scrapping their filechooser code.
This would allow people to experiment with new designs of file choosers. This would, within a few months, make Linux have the best file chooser in the world, as opposed to being in last place as it is now. Also practically, the file chooser program could lauch and keep a process running, allowing all the read directories and all the icons and thumbnails and user preferences to be already loaded and cached and shared between every file chooser, rather than the obscene overhead that exists now. It would allow all programs to instantly integrate into KDE/Gnome/XFCE because they all call the same file chooser and other popup panels.
Even today there is a lot of precedence. After a long line of crap, it is becoming accepted to display a web resource by running "firefox ", rather than running the toolkit's html preview widget. There is already a program called "dialog" or "kdialog" that does a very limited version, though people seem to think this is only for shell scripts, but nothing keeps programs with no tookit from exec'ing it.
I would like to see some sign that the freedesktop.org guys are considering this, but have not seen anything. Really sad and scary, as they are killing the biggest advantage Linux has or could have over other systems.
Can we just have the "desktops" agree to disagree and have a configuration option for standardized dialogs and button order? It is absolutely retarded to have one app on your system have Ok/Cancel and the other app have Cancel/Ok.
Personally, I prefer the KDE style because I use Windows at work and dual boot at home. Ok/Cancel is what I'm used to, and it makes more sense to me. If Gnome users prefer the Mac way of doing things, hey - that's great. But no matter what *desktop* a Linux user is using, they are going to be using a mix KDE *apps* AND Gnome *apps*. Can we *please* just have a configuration option that switches button order, file browser dialog style, etc. based on what the *user* wants?
Thanks
"Good people drink good beer"
One thing I'd like to see in the libraries developed for cross-toolkit use: if you're doing it in C, do it well and use Glib as a basis. It's a good cross-platform runtime support library with no extra dependencies, and it won't spoil the purity of your Qt or Xfce code by pulling in a Gtk+ main loop or something. It's sad to see Freedesktop libraries avoiding a Glib dependency in the core library for political reasons, reinventing the set of wheels that Glib provides and adding a -glib compatibility layer on top of it. Leave the "it came out of GNOME, so it can't be good" rhetoric to /. fanboys.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Please update the icon used for Microsoft stories on Slashdot. We have used this logo since 1998. We have never used a logo that portrayed our chairman and founder as a Borg.
We'd really appreciate it if you updated the icon. It may not be a big deal to you guys, but our logo is a mark of pride for our company. We'd like to see it used.
Odd. My version of Firefox does that too, but unlike yours it does do completion overwrite. This is with GTK 2.8.16.
On behalf of the Microsoft corporation, I formally request a change in our icon too.
-Bill Gates
So in summary. KDE Is better than GNOME because KDE can look like GNOME but GNOME cannot look like KDE. Same as all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. Gnome is a square.
.supergnome, then this stupid feature is disabled, and it acts just like GNOME. Thus, since Super-GNOME can emulate GNOME but not vice versa, Super-GNOME is by definition better. Right? Er, no.
Raw Xlib apps can look like anything. Does that make raw Xlib apps better than either GNOME or KDE apps?
A Turing machine can do anything any other language can do. Does that make a Turing machine a good programming language?
Just because something contains a superset of functionality doesn't make it better.
Here's an extreme case. By your logic, I could take GNOME, fork it (call it "Super-GNOME"!), and add an obtrusive and stupid feature (say, adding 5 more buttons to every dialog-box that do nothing) -- but if you have a file called
Having no features is trivially bad. Having all possible features is trivially bad. You can argue that KDE's set of features is better than GNOME's. But simply arguing that KDE has a superset of GNOME's features does not constitute a valid argument that KDE is better.
There is no need for mixing KDE and Gnome alltogether.
As I already mentioned in another slashdot discussion some time ago, I run KDE on vt7 amd Gnome on vt8. (And Fluxbox on vt9 just for OpenGL 3D accelerated games but that's another story.)
Just try it: On KDE 3.5.x, click "Switch User:Start New Session" on K menu. You will get your favourite login manager running on a new terminal. Pick another deskop you have installed. Switch back and forth with Alt+Ctrl+F7,F8,F9... And don't forget you still have your framebuffer consoles on Alt+Ctrl+F1..F6.
There you are, staring at me again.
All I want: KDE's IOSlaves. Being able to seamlessly load over ftp, http, even ssh is possibly the most useful feature KDE has as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, the community or organization that supports a piece of software matters, and I don't like KDE's: we have a big group of zealots that (apparently) oppose making software simple to use, then we have the developers that are wedded to C++ development and screwed up big time on licensing issues, and finally, we have at the heart of it a commercial software vendor that controls the core toolkit, charges commercial users, and for whom Windows and Macintosh are at least as important as Linux.
KDE is fairly good technically; if it weren't for its awful community, it would be a reasonable alternative to Gnome.
yep, this was the ugliest crap - but it fortunately is fixed ;)
gtk+2 2.8.16 (from slackware-current) works as it should
ps. subject is trimmed because i entered 52 symbols and limit is 50 !!!!!111~~~~!!
Rich
OK, so the general idea behind it is to be able to write an application using this library and then compile it as either a GTK/Gnome or QT/KDE application to allow better integration with the users desktop environment. Isn't that what WxWidgets already does? You write an application using it and it allows it to be compiled as a Win32, GTK, X11 or Motif application to name but a few. Why not just make WxQT. People have been talking about doing this for some time. Surely with this the developers could target both the Open Source operating systems and commercial systems at the same time.
How about not having to write for either toolset at all? I would prefer the exact reverse of what this project is intended to do.
Here's an innovative idea (I hope, I'm not a programmer and have no idea if this has been either tried or discussed previously):
You simply write an application and the GUI itself only uses *general* tags for the widget set. To keep it simple to explain, let's say that this is a RAD environment, like Gambas or Kylix, where you simply drag'n'drop the different parts you want to use into a form (don't flame me just yet. put up with me a while longer). Drag a button or a combobox onto the form. The generated code does not say gtkButton or qtCombobox but simply "Button" or "Combobox". Make some finishing touches and compile.
When your app is executed it use the desktop environments own toolset. A wrapper translates the general "Button" to "qtButton" or "gtkButton" as necessary. If you launch the app in Gnome it uses GTK+ toolset, if you launch it in KDE it uses QT toolset.
If all gui applications were written like this you would be able to use K3b, Konqueror, Firefox, Rhythmbox, Xine in ANY windowmanager/desktop and it will automatically have the look and feel and practical elements that the WM/DE designer intended.
Sounds good? Well there is a problem with this as well since all apps need to be re-written over time to use these more general tags. It will not change over night but maybe we will be able to see an improvement over the course of a few years at least. But it's a better idea than the alternatives.
An easy way to install and manage fonts.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
gtk2 version is 2.8.15.
running in KDE.
If completion works, backspace and type it again.
Then it always fails.
Same behaivior on yum updated FC5-PPC, and yum updated FC5-on-P4.
I must live on a different planet that the rest of you.