Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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!
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.
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.
As usual too ;)
Does he have a problem quitting?
I've got your sig, right here.
Yeah, god, I just can't STAND all this hype.
I was wondering where my tidy-whities went...
It's 'tighty'. Those things definitely aren't 'tidy' after you leave that nice racing stripe in them.
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.
System -> Preferences -> Mouse
I'm using Ubuntu 6.10 with Gnome 2.16
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.
Right. Check that to see if you can change your scroll wheel sensitivity. Google it too. Good luck.
It's a pretty good reason to be late. You wouldn't want to discover that someone had compromised the source tree and left something nasty behind, better to be safe than sorry. It's the only time it has ever been late, and for what it's worth, it was ready to ship on time.
Christ. Not only did that squirrel give the gnome an entire basketful of red, painful-looking chancres, but it also ate off his left hand. And he's *smiling*. That's one badass gnome.
and with any luck it wont come back.
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.