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Gnome 2.18 Released
xdancergirlx writes "Gnome 2.18 was released today (on time as usual). Detailed release notes are available. Nothing revolutionary in this release but definitely some nice new features, bug fixes, and improvements."
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I was wondering where my tidy-whities went...
Gnome 2.18: Nothing special really, just somewhat improved infravision, an extra +10 bonus to detect uneven grades, worked out some bugs in the "failure to run from big scary trolls due to lack of common sense" department. Should be a somewhat more usable gnome.
Thanks to those I got first post!
*sneaks away and orders popcorn*
Linus' usability patches?
2 37
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/02/16/1937
Personal security is now fully integrated into the desktop, allowing digitally signed communications, encryption of emails and local files, and user-friendly management of personal keys. Internationalization records progress in all directions, with support for vertical text layout and a full Arabic localization matching the quality standards. The official release incorporates essential tools for developers, which hopefully will contribute to get more and better software for the GNOME users.
What's more important, for the first time we ship online games, chess with a 3D look, and endless Sudoku entertainment.
Good thing we've got our priorities straight.
I use both KDE and GNOME on a regular basis. I really don't have a preference either way; both allow me to get my work done well enough. But what I've noticed is that with each KDE release, it feels significantly more responsive than the previous releases. I can't say the same with GNOME. If anything, it seems to be getting slower as time goes on. I use OpenBSD, so I end up compiling all of the packages myself. I use the optimal C and C++ compiler flags for my particular system. It's not a matter of my using KDE packages built with a more recent version of GCC, or something like that.
In any case, earlier today I built GNOME 2.18 on my system. I've been using it for a few hours now. And compared to the KDE 3.5.6 installation I was using earlier today, I think it's significantly slower. Evolution is far more heavy-weight than KMail. Nautilus takes longer to display directories. I have one directory with about 15000 photos in it. Nautilus crashes when viewing it, while with Konqueror I can easily scroll through the thumbnails within about a second.
Maybe it's just a quality control problem with GNOME. While I don't follow the development mailing lists very closely, I've heard from co-workers that GNOME is suffering from some pretty serious organizational issues. Low-quality code is being accepted into GTK+ and GNOME itself, and many people are noticing a decrease in its quality as of late. Maybe somebody can shed more light on whether or not these rumors are true?
The big change is they went to a Knome skin that makes it look like KDE.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Anyone know if they accepted the patches Linus Torvalds gave for Gnome?
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Riiiiight.. cause that summary really screamed hype to me. I see you got modded up too, moderators can't even be bothered reading the summary now?
Fuckin' Slashdot.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Any place yet to change the scroll speed of my mouse? Seriously. KDE has it.
Yeah. Right. Stellar track record. Never late for any reason.
I've got your sig, right here.
As usual too ;)
Yeah, god, I just can't STAND all this hype.
Just as some examples:
- As an end-user why can't I extend applications by simply dragging and dropping features from one application to another? i.e. Dragging a search box from one app to another.
- I have 1000s of photographs. How can these images be automatically categorized and displayed most effectively without having to manually add meta-data. It should be sorting images by looking at similarities between pictures, date taken and other automatically generated information
- I have 1000s of mp3s. How can these songs be automatically categorized by mood, tempo, etc without manually entering in meta-data? Think of it as Pandora with your own music collection.
These are some of the type of things that would make using a computer easier to use.Are open source desktop developers so focused on trying to make it "easy" for Windows user to convert they get Microsoft tunnel vision and can't innovate?
It's the year 2007 and we have desktops with the same intelligence as those back in the early 80's.
The way the post hyped it up, I was expecting something actually exciting.
WTF? The post even says "Nothing revolutionary in this release".
If that's hype, you must suffer from spontaneous ejeculation at a repubrocrats/demican rally.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
KDE's KWallet has offered similar support for years. In combination with other KDE programs, such as the KMail mail client and the Kopete instant messenging software, KDE users have had access to such features for ages.
n dex.html) anything about it being a frontend to gpg. KWallet appears to be closer to the gnome password manager than the newer gpg management feature. Since I removed KDE from my system a year and a half ago, I cannot verify this.
I did not see in the KWallet docs (http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdeutils/kwallet/i
These features were supported back in KDE 2!
I didn't see anything in the KDE 2 notes about supporting vertical text. Though it could be they didn't specifically mention it.
Yep, KDE has offered such functionality for years. KDevelop is an extremely mature software development environment. It's of a far higher quality than Anjuta, and offers a far greater number of features.
Most definately true. KDevelop is a pretty nice program.
http://www.picture-newsletter.com/gardengnome/gard en-gnome-n2y.jpg
No fishing rod?
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I thought that the first "KDE is better" post in a Gnome thread will end with "first post!". I'm disappointed.
...removed Mono from it? Or is technology known to be covered by Microsoft patents still part of the GNOME desktop?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
With the release of GNOME 2.18, it appears there has been a change in the playing field. In order to be considered to a full fledged modern OS, a Three-Dee Chess program must be included with every new operating system. The Release of Mac OS X seems to have started this trend. Microsoft soon followed suit with Windows Vista. Now there is Gnome. Will KDE be pulled into this madness, or will it fall behind into oblivion?!
Apple Chess
Windows Chess
GNOME Chess
Feel free to flog me now.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
I'm looking at this screenshot and thinking that it looks quite good. People often complain about the brown in Ubuntu being "ugly", and Ubuntu has stated that they don't want to be "just like Windows" by going for blue. Well, based on that screenshot, I think green would be a good choice.
"KWallet appears to be closer to the gnome password manager than the newer gpg management feature. Since I removed KDE from my system a year and a half ago, I cannot verify this."
Sounds like you're looking for KGpg then.
I think the thing they were going for in gnome is to start integrating, not just password management, but identity management. Thus, Gnome's new feature manages both gpg and ssh keys.
That's not "detailed release notes", that's marketing spin. Release notes would mention specific apps, like evolution, and specific fixes, not just buzzwords and superficial brags about how the experience is better.
Such marketsprach has its place. But the release notes are even more important. And even more important is not pretending that marketsprach is release notes.
If GNOME release managers don't release that by themselves, then the project is in serious trouble.
--
make install -not war
Not fully automated, but we live in the internet world where an encyclopedia written by Wiki is among the most used references in the world...
Namely, I'm talking about MusicBrainz. Programs will analyze and produce a fingerprint, and MusicBrainz will do a fairly good job of matching that fingerprint to the track. From there, tempo, mood, etc could all be community stored info. More esoteric tracks suffer, but as Wikipedia shows, things that don't work well in theory can sometimes work surprisingly well in practice... Esoteric tracks generally have a more fanatical/enthusiastic fanbase to offset their lack of popularity. Hell, such a system could one up the GP's requested behavior and be able to make recommendations of tracks based on community opinion, both implicit (tracks that tend to be submitted by the same people and rated highly) and explicit (users specifying related tracks).
The photograph conundrum he poses is harder, since generally photographs are personal things. The low-hanging fruit of Date taken and some other things is handled by EXIF data most cameras record, and most photo managers deal with, but looking at similarities in photographs without context is more along the lines of the difficulty you bring up. Some heuristics would probably do interesting things, but a lot of environments will look too similar and sometimes related images couldn't be picked out by a person without any context. For example, a pictures taken of a landscape with some buddies on a road trip would group with some other buddies on the same roadtrip in a bar, no one could ever tell they belonged together without knowing the group and/or the circumstances. Simple fact is, if you have time to take your pictures, you have to be ready to organize them if you care, because no one or nothing could ever do a sufficiently accurate job on such individualized data.
On the drag and drop a widget (in his example 'search'), that seems goofy and impractical. Drag and drop a text-entry widget that happens to be a search into an app with multiple child panes, wtf do you search? What if the child widgets don't have any text to export, or else format it differently? Anyone adding a search widget to most structures knows the complexities and pitfalls, occasionally it is a simple 'add toolkit search and do what makes most sence', but if your program is doing things that people care about, the situation is almost always too complex for that.
However, specifically to his search inquiry, things are being tackled in a more structured way. I.e. beagle is intelligent about the filesystem and a number of popular programs and how they manage data, and how it makes sense to organize it. A popular app emerges and developers who know how to index it right and present it have to manually add the intelligence to do the right thing, and it's effective at keeping up because of a sufficiently healthy development community.
However, in a more general sense of applications sharing features more intelligently, the good old pipes of the command line set the precedent here. NeXT brought that into the GUI world and extended it to know more about the context of the data and whether the operation was applicable before a user selected it. They were/are called services. I.e. you have a text editing application. It had a menu item called 'dictionary'. Well that menu item was actually a third party app that registered itself under the name 'Dictionary'. That same menu item and app would also appear in your Terminal application, letting you spellcheck your *nix commands, since that would be so effective... Probably also in the file management that dictionary item would appear. If you had text in the active context, it would spellcheck that. If it were a file, it would know and spellcheck the file. It's similar on a very basic level to the right-click context menu in windows explorer, but much more flexible and pervasive. Don't know how well it would scale in a highly competitive software market place (many companies wanting a 'Search for related info' menu item would undoubtedly happen and then it gets interesting), but it seems like the best approach to get close to what he describes.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Its not like they released GNOME 3 here, what did you expect, a party?
In your link: I find it very annoying the the apple developers fail to provide many of the features that have been standard with oranges for years. For example in oranges there is a very hand segment feature which allows the fruit to be broken up into small convenient bite size peaces. With apples the only way to do this is to use a third party utility such as a knife. I have tried to submit patches to get segments into apples but the developers arn't interested telling me that it is just to much the orange way and thats not the way apples are. Against this kind of mentality what can you do. Lets not even get on to oranges convenient juice feature and how hard it is to get juice out of apples. (Hint requires a full application suit). This post isn't mine, but he posted anon too...
and with any luck it wont come back.
Last time I tried KDE, I could not configure it to understand both Alt-Tab and Alt-Escape. I had to choose which of them I want and then assign the key! IceWM has no problem supporting both, by default. And Windows supported both at once at least from the 3.1 days.
Im my old P4 1500 KDE is fust enough, but with Gnome I have to wait...
You have to love it when things get so slow around here that we post story blurbs that explicitly say they aren't news.
Well, there were no major new features in 2.16 either. Is it just me or is GNOME.... stagnating? How about continuous versioning backup-tool? Infrastructure already exists, someone just has to create a GUI and tie it to the desktop. How about something like OS X's Expose? How about being able to re-arrange items in the Taskbar? How about looking in to Gimmie as a Taskbar-replacement? There are tons of useful features they could add to the desktop, but no. What do we get instead? "Using Tomboy to create lists is now as simple as adding a * or a -." Ooooooh, I have been waiting for THAT feature for a long time!
This release gets a big fat yawn from me. Like 2.16 did as well.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
This is an earnest question, which I hope you will answer:
To me, the prime UI difference is that in dialogs, there is "[OK] [Cancel]" in one, and "[Cancel] [OK]" in the other. That is the #1 thing that keeps me from trying it out, because I instinctively mix those two up. I use mostly the keyboard to answer dialogs, so in Gnome I have a grim tendency to choose the wrong option...
Do you have a way around that? Or do you just not have as much muscle memory (or whatever it is that applies)?
"Good news, everyone!"
Here you can see the evolution of the patches: Dependency tree of the patches submited by Linus to GNOME: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/showdependencytree.cgi?i d=408898
You can see how many "bugs" were solved.The two first patches were introduced immediately without discussion. The next was one of the most important and with more discussion, but finally it was introduced to next version of GNOME. The other patches seem to be discussed.
Someone took the effort to put the patches on Bugzilla, and they are being handled conveniently by the people of GNOME. All the patches weren't integrated in a row, but each patch has his own way of discussion and modifications. GNOME has interest that his project is used by more people, including Linus.
The evince document reader has had a problem of displaying pdf file with small writing. Try to open a random physics article with evince and xpdf: http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0203118. Has problem this been solved in the latest version?
I have always liked gnome, it is simple and does what I want. It is a very clean experience. Gnome has been good enough for me since the 2 series started. It just works for me now and I do not think about it much.
Since ubuntu I believe the quality has gone up and I like how ubuntu's features all integrate well.
I do not understand why people who complain about gnome not being like KDE do not just use KDE. It is to everyones benefit that there are two DEs and both have different agendas, because it is unlikely that one DE would suit everyone.
Much Appreciation to all the devs hard work.
The current menu editing app in Gnome, Alacarte, is better than previous menu editors but is still quite bad. Creating new sub-menus is pretty much impossible, so if I have (say) a large number of Games, I end up with a huge list that takes forever to scroll through. It'd be nice if I could create (again using the Games example) a sub-menu for Strategy and then drag-and-drop strategy game icons into it. This supposedly works now, but not in actual fact; I can click on the icon and drag it, but it either doesn't drop into the sub-menu, or drops the wrong icon (!). And there's no way to delete a sub-menu once it's created, so trying to use the menu editor actually creates more of a mess than it gets rid of. Alacarte is still better than previous menu editors, but it has a long way to go before it's actually good.
UPDATE THE DAMN DONORS LIST PLZKTHX....
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
If the remaining people are enough to keep GNOME going, then it isn't failing, is it.
should be sorting images by looking at similarities between pictures, date taken and other automatically generated information Define "similarities between pictures". Define it closely enough that a programmer can look at two bitstreams (which is what the program sees) and determine the "degree of similarity". Note that you have to be able to use boolean algebra. "Sort of like this" doesn't work.
How can these songs be automatically categorized by mood, tempo, etc without manually entering in meta-data? Define "mood". See above for the constraints.
Best Slashdot Co
Nothing revolutionary in this release but definitely some nice new features, bug fixes, and improvements.
:) Yeah, I know mod me down flame bait or what have ya. I hate you anyway! ;)
Did they fix the developer's smug bug in this release?
Urgh. GNOME. The distribution that treats its users like idiots.
Drool 'n' Click computing at it's worse.
I've been complaining here and there for a while about this. The games menu in particular needs sub-menus. Someone needs to define a standard set of menus that will support applications other than those shipped. If not, packagers have a habit of making things go into one of the few existing standard menus. Games should have categories, for example: Action, Board, Cards, Gambling, Strategy, etc. There should be a standard place for things, for example kiCAD belongs under Engineering not Other. qCAD probably belongs there too, not under Graphics (these are Fedora examples, your distro may vary). It's ultimately up to the distros and the package maintainers to decide, but I think Gnome itself should provide some guidance on this issue. They could at least set an example in the games area where they ship enough things to make sub-menus sensible. The HIG tries to reduce menu levels, but there is a point where sub-menus are simpler than a big long list.
> Nothing revolutionary in this release but definitely some nice new features, ...
Hey! None of that! This is Gnome. Features are verboten.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You must be a really fun guy to hang around with.
* Pager Thumbnails .16 and maybe KDE are the only other WM/environments that still retain this kind of functionality. I'm currently running Beryl now, and I kind of wonder why they haven't implemented a visual thumbnailing pager, since it seems they have the only compositing framework that could do that kind of live thumbnailing right.
:P .
I really miss the virtual desktop pager from Gnome 1.4. It had window thumbnailing that would update the screen contents of the thumbnailed views of all of the windows you had open, and you could use that little pager to move the real windows around your current desktop in addition to dragging them onto other virtual desktops. I really wish they hadn't removed all of that from Gnome 2 onwards. Seems like Enlightenment
* Quicklaunch clustering
Another feature I miss from the Gnome 1.4 panel are multiple rows/columns of quicklaunch icons. Right now if you have a wide panel but small icons, it just wastes a lot of space. I've resorted to hiding them in a drawer, but I get annoyed needing two clicks to launch a common app instead of one
* Panel interference
Is there any way to make the panel less annoying, in terms of the way it tries to stay on top of fullscreen windows, or prevent other windows from overlapping its space? I just want it to behave like a normal window.... maybe it can jump to the top if I hit the "Super/Win" key or something. I realize this is mostly due to its WM hinting as a "panel" type, just wondering if there was some way to disable this behavior at the source rather than from any/every ICCM-compliant window manager I try to run (e.g. such as the way gkrellm's configuration works). I really hate it when I can't move a window over a clear patch of space because of a stupid panel I have tucked away in another corner.
Other than those few peeves, I really like Gnome. Its relative simplicity and visual elegance has kept me from seriously trying to migrate over to KDE. KDE looks and works great in KNOPPIX, but every time I've tried to use it as my primary desktop, I kept running into progressively weirder quirks that I ran out of patience trying to resolve.
Looking forward to when Gnome-terminal supports compositing hints so Beryl can give it true transparency!
Better not. Do you have any idea what disease(s) you might get?
You could get a Beowulf cluster of viruses.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Certainly the screenshot of "vertical Japanese" in TFA is hideously incorrectly formatted; apparently whoever took it didn't realise that setting Japanese vertically isn't just a case of lining up the characters in a column (you have to rotate certain characters 90 degrees, and certain other characters need to be shifted up and right), nor that Japanese underlining normally goes to the right of the column, not to the left.
Can be built on OSX.
Is it just me or have a lot of people not twigged to the point that GnuStep would essentially double the market for any application which was written to the API? OSX users should be able to use it with essentially a rebuild or relatively minor tweaks.
Deleted
I have been harping about Mono being based on ECMA standards documents that contain patented technology from Microsoft and have not received even one response after repeated emails to the EFF, DotGNU and Mono people. As Gnome moved toward Mono, I move away from Gnome. If Microsoft and the Trusted Computing Initiative get their way, the only people writing code will be Intel and Microsoft employees.