Slashdot Mirror
Gnome 2.22 Released
kie writes "The latest version of the Gnome Desktop is being released today.
New features in 2.22 include Cheese (an application for webcam photos and videos),
window compositing, PolicyKit integration and much more.
The full details are in the Release Notes."
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
BTW, does Gnome now allows switching the spelling language of an application during the use of it?
Like switching the spell checker of a chat session during the chat session? Or the assumption is still that everybody only ever uses one language at a time.
Seriously. I'm not flaming, I mean to ask the question. One of the reasons I stopped using Gnome, after many years using it, was that in order to use a Dutch spell checker in Gaim, I had to restart Gaim using a dutch locale environment (and be stuck with a Dutch spell checker for the rest of that Gaim instance).
does it run Linux? Oh, wait, ummmm, shit! I really suck at karma whoring....
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.
GNOME (Or more accurately GTK+, glib, Cairo and X) has got faster steadily since the GNOME 2.12 days. GTK+s UI's are just as snappy for me as Qt equivalents. I noticed significant improvements after several video/X driver updates and updates to Cairo 1.4.x (from 1.2.x).
One down, now if only we can get the "vi versus emacs" folks to do the same.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Maybe we should shoot for more realistic goals. Like acceptance of Emacs' superiority.
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
Also known as the Richie Benaud release
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Now to wait for Fedora 9 so I can more easily update :) I tried pointing Smart at the Development repos for the Gnome RC but there isn't a way to say "upgrade all Gnome" - no meta package or anything that I saw - so I didn't feel like doing it package by package.
I've yet to see the point of Cheese as a 'main Gnome' app, though.
At least it was feature complete.
the traditional way to do a windowed gui was to limit each apps drawing area so that it could only draw within it's own window and force the app to redraw stuff when it's visibility changed. This system has the advantage of being light on ram and being low on CPU when windows aren't moving. However moving windows is a relatively expensive process both because of the need to ask apps to redraw and the need to actually move data arround in the screen buffer (this is why many older systems use a dotted box drawn with XOR to indicate window moving and only move the window when the user has chosen the final location). Also it is virtually impossible to support any kind of partial transparency or rotozooming under this system and even non rectangular windows are a pain.
3D games work in a totally different way. They work with a (large) set of textures and the scene is redrawn every frame building up from the back to the front and rotozooming everything into place. This makes transparency, drop shadows etc fairly easy and of course rotozooming is a fundamental requirement of a 3D game.
A compositing window system (afaict under X this requires support from both X itself and the window manager) draws each window into it's own buffer and then treats that as a texture. Then a frame for the screen is built up in much the same way a 3D game builds up a frame. This enables all sorts of effects from simple stuff like drop shadows and inverted colors to advanced stuff like a window selector that shows a thumbnail of each window or a desktop selector that puts the different desktops on the surface of a cube. Different window managers will obviously choose to use theese capabilities to different extents and in different ways.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Well, Emacs is a nice OS and all, but what it really needs is a good text editor.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
In general, I agree with the camp that hates making GUI's too simple and limited. Yet I'm using Gnome now because it's the default in Ubuntu and because of I work with Mono which uses Gtk, and spending some time with Gnome made me gradually like it.
It could be because I was lucky enough to find the features I want in place so that I wasn't bitten by the "too much minimalism" problem. I don't have much need for sound, printing or the like and 90% of my time are spent in either firefox, monodevelop or a text editor.
Also, the Tomboy note taker rules. I wish something like it was in Windows. This must be a milestone where a user begins to dislike working on Windows and prefers Linux because of an application.
I hear viper-mode's coming along nicely. Haven't checked recently since I don't dual-boot much.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
I have to admit I like Gnome a lot. But even if I were a KDE user I would have to give Gnome credit for their release schedule and process. They come out with a good set of reasonably stable features every 6 months, reliably enough that Ubuntu (and Fedora?) base their distro releases on the Gnome schedule. They've guaranteed core ABI compatibility through the 2.x series, which has been out for 5+ years by my count. They're conservative in what they add and take away. And every release has a nice set of release notes which tells me exactly what to look for in terms of new features.
Software development ain't easy, especially not in the decentralized volunteer world of free software, but the Gnome guys seem to have it down pretty well. Kudos to them.
> all the things you describe modify your OS on a low-level basis by modifying, adding and removing files from your root directory and sub-directories which can break your installation
I don't see how annoying me with a password prompt PREVENTS me from breaking my installation. It could only DELAY the breaking. (It also prevents someone else from walking to my computer and breaking it, but for that situation, there's a "ask for password on resume" option in the Screensaver.)
What does effectively prevent breakage of the system are utilities that are well-designed and work correctly. And in that department, Ubuntu 7.10 does its job well. I could set up dual screen and 3D acceleration without reading a manual or editing config files.
> It is the way Unix-like OSes work
'The way it has always worked' is the number 1 excuse for continuing bad interaction design, to the detriment of computer users the world over. What goes on behind the scenes (the engineering domain) and what happens between the human and the keyboard/screen/mouse are two different things, and there is no reason the latter has to accommodate the former. In fact, since computers are supposed to make our lives easier, shouldn't it be the other way around?
PolicyKit? That's the answer I was looking for! Now I've got something to look forward to in the next release!