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Review of GNOME 2.26 and GTK+ 2.16
devg writes "The GNOME development community recently announced the official release GNOME 2.26, the latest version of the open source desktop environment for Linux. It adds the Brasero disc burning software, UPnP support in the Totem media player, and basic support for video chat in the Empathy instant messaging client. GNOME 2.26 will be shipped in upcoming Linux distributions, including Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04. Some early reviews show that it is an incremental improvement with some good additions. GNOME 2.26 is accompanied by the release of GTK+ 2.16, a new version of the widget toolkit that is used to build the desktop environment. Ars Technica has published a detailed programming tutorial with code examples that demonstrate how developers can use the new features of GTK+ 2.16 in their own applications. Users can test GNOME 2.26 by downloading one of the official Foresight-based VM or ISO images via BitTorrent."
From the changelog:
Second is support for Microsoft Exchange's MAPI protocol. This is the protocol that Microsoft Outlook uses to communicate with Exchange. Previously, Evolution only supported Exchange's SOAP protocol, which is not available on all Exchange servers. This support significantly improves Evolution's integration with Exchange servers.
That sounds like a big deal. Anyone knows how well it actually works in practice?
They're nice. Especially as someone who use KDE, it allows me to easily see what's happening in that part of the world.
There's not a whole lot to critically analyze here - I've been using Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha and haven't really noticed any major changes, and that's the entire point (Though the Exchange stuff is nice, I must admit, just not for me). Sure, you can list the features, I suppose, but I don't see how anyone's going to come up with a conclusion that's any different than what the summary stated.
the gnome file manager also has an awesome bar like firefox now!
I left gnome when they removed all the options from the screen-savers because they decided that configuring the screen-savers was to complicated for users. Surely not all gnome users are retards!
Per application volume control is a MAJOR feature. Listening to music, while not having web pages blast out your ear drums is a major win. This is my favorite feature of Vista, and I am happy to see it integrated into Gnome.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
And I'm anticipating similar functionality appearing in Kontact really soon... this sort of friendly competition makes Open Source progress so fast.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
I use Ubuntu regular, so brasero has been the default cd burner for me, and I've grown to hate it. In the past, in had performance issues that stemmed from bad memory management. (It used the HDD like it was RAM, and caused massive slow downs / virtual lockups as it out-competed the rest of my system for the HDD).
I tried K3b. Ah-mazing. Why not just port K3b to gtk? I mean, its just a cd-burning app. All it needs to do is support the features of your drive, and manage the burning process. Nero accomplished this feat some 10 years ago, and clearly K3b has accomplished it too. Brasero hasn't.
It seems like someone is reinventing the wheel somewhere; I just don't get why.
... just tell me what got deleted because the GNOME overlords didn't think it was worth fixing.
Shouldn't you be taking your drugs, er, medication right now, Mr. Limbaugh?
Can I put a different wallpaper on different desktops yet? That's the main feature I miss from KDE when I use Gnome (I tend to have different versions of the same code open on different desktops, so a visual queue as to which one I'm looking at really helps).
Barack "Teleprompter" "Uncle Tom" Hussein Obama
Dare I ask, what the President of U.S. has to do GNOME or even GNU/Linux in general?
Obama uses UBUNTU and GNOME because it reminds him of his roots and his heritage.
Can someone please explain the Tsarkon meme to me? TIA.
In all the taskbars, the icons are always HUGE! Look at this for instance:
http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.26/figures/gnome.png.en_GB
Why oh why isn't there an option to use small icons? Not all users are visually impaired! On this widescreen laptop I like to have as much vertical space as possible.
Things went downhill the moment the first sound server became common. The first popular one was "esd" or "esound", the Enlightenment Sound Daemon.
With that came sound libraries by the dozen, because sound was no longer simple for app programmers. This in turn was an enabler for the evils of ALSA, which is totally unusable without the ALSA library. As the years went by, everybody and their dog wrote a sound server. We got sound servers feeding into sound servers. You could even connect them to each other in a loop, something easy to do with all the confusing config problems. We lost the "Just Works" feature long ago.
And for what? I certainly don't want sounds from different apps mixed into an ear-assaulting mess. I want one thing at a time. I'm totally fine with having one thing monopolize the hardware, with my audio stream unmolested by mixers of dubious quality and high latency. If you want to be fancy, a stack-based design that plays the most recent app (going back to the previous one when the recent one finishes) would be kind of nice. That assumes I want stuff interrupted, which is a big maybe.
I find using cheese annoying because when you record a video it's REALLY compressed and looks crap. It also saves it as OGG which makes sending videos a pain to the uncoverted.
Oh and as usual no obvious way to change the format or quality.
The way it is now I don't see how Cheese would be usable to someone who isn't computer savy and knows how to change the video format so those on windows can watch it. I'm not saying you can't watch OGGs on windows just that it doesn't come default so to the laymen it doesn't work.
...It sucks. Just get a Mac already.
I had to edit config files to get my laptop to recognize and bring up the second screen after docking. Editing config files should not be required for one of the core mobility scenarios.
Does this release fix the issue? I.e. if I just connect the monitor, will it get recognized automatically?
You can disable the labels from the "Interface" tab of the "Appearance Preferences".
Citadel is obviously a modified BBS program. I tried it on a company server, and it just wouldn't work out. Configuring it is a pain in the ass, and nothing really makes sense. It doesn't integrate well with OpenLDAP either. I suggest using SOGo with postfix and dovecot. Makes a very nice Exchange replacement.
Happy New Year, it's 1984!
I was using Evolution for general email and admin emails. Sometimes my cron job emails would get too big and evolution just choked on them, causing the whole client to come to a grinding halt. I would have to kill the process or watch my whole desktop start to freeze up.
Thunderbird works much smoother in this respect and found myself having to move to it. Thunderbird manages memory much better in my opinion. I hope the Gnome project will focus on these issues more.
I switched to K3d in place of Brasso -- much better.
As someone who has not messed with gnome based distro (or linux in general) in a while, have they fix the file dialog yet? I like to have a thumbnail view for once that is
An actual group of large thumbnails would be nice!
It sucks that I would have to use a hack to get a KDE dialog to pop up for Firefox; always buggy too.
You expected a minor version change to have revolutionary changes?
This is the best off-topic thread I've seen all week.
Whats the harm in yelling 'Computer, end program!'? You could be living in Star Trek! Go on.. give it a try.
I don't get it. What the hell does this thread have to do with me clipping my toe nails on a speedboat while an old lady sits behind me listening to Megadeth?
Whats the harm in yelling 'Computer, end program!'? You could be living in Star Trek! Go on.. give it a try.
Oh NOES! Quick MPAA save us from teh bad peeple.
Whats the harm in yelling 'Computer, end program!'? You could be living in Star Trek! Go on.. give it a try.
No, but I didn't expect a minor point release to have an in-depth review on the front page of a major technology news site.
That is only because
Bite out of apple sales
Apple might still make the coolest computers on the block but it is struggling in the face of global recession as consumers opt for cheaper alternatives. Mac sales fell 16 per cent year-on-year in February, according to research firm NPD Group. Sales of PCs, meanwhile, increased 22 per cent in the same period thanks to a boost in sales of cheap, lightweight notebooks.
which was from a newspaper which does not have an IT section but an Apple cheerleading squad was rejected from the story where Ballmer correctly called Apple a $500 logo.
In short /. will let that through but not something that says Apple sales are declining.
* Epiphany is using the WebKit backend by default
* Nautilus supports filtering with wildcards int he Location bar as in the good ol' Motif days of UNIX
* I don't have to tweak way too many GConf entries to make the performance workable on a 1.6 GHz 512 MB RAM system (If W2K can run with 64 MB RAM, why can't Linux?)
No. I didn't. Read my comment again.
My biggest question: Did they fix session management? On my Ubuntu 8.10 box, sessions and session saving is completely hosed. I have been eagerly awaiting a fix for this severe regression.
-l
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Friendly!? Haven't you seen any KDE-gnome flame war? Ok, ok, just kidding. It's lively discussion, but I guess it could be tagged as friendly
-- dnl
(Not only is the user the enemy, the POV is that any configurable screensaver is by definition broken.)
Not exactly. The idea is that screensavers which require configuration are broken, which doesn't really relate to the problem in question.
gnome-screensaver doesn't operate on hacks like xscreensaver does; it operates on "themes", which are a hack combined with a set of configuration options. Why there's no options to duplicate a theme and edit its options, now that is confusing. I think that's what the developer wanted someone to write for him.
He sucked at explaining this, and succeeded only in pissing off the users. That part is the developer's fault.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
That can't possibly be expected behavior. File a bug with your distribution if it's not already known (see the following; I don't know what distro you're using).
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/207135
http://bugs.debian.org/505097
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/474745
http://pulseaudio.org/wiki/BrokenSoundDrivers
The developers can't possibly have all of the relevant hardware; they need users who run into problems to help them out. Please try to help if you can; it might help the bug get fixed quicker.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca