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Rasterman leaves RedHat
Well I thought I'd send this mail out now...
The short and curly:
As of friday the 28th of May I no longer work at Red Hat Software. The story is along ad will be explained sometime later - it's been brewing for months though.
I am now officially unemployed.
I am as happy as chickens in a seed farm.
As of tomorrow , June 1, 1999 I will be leaving North Carolina and moving west. I currently have no other employers.
This is all good for E and E development.
I am so glad to get out of ths creativity-stifling environemnt of RHAD LABS - away from certain people there who see E and its userbase as what I can literally quote them saying a "festering crowd".
I've tolerated this attitude towards E users for way too long. I do not envisage much future support from Red Hat for Enlightenment - they have been itching to get rid of E and will as soon as they can. I don't much care. They can do whatever they like - and I wish them all the best but I do not fit in there. E does not fit in there. They want a windows clone distribution and OS. I do not. They don't believe users really count - corporates and "partners" count and what they percieve as the "business world that wants an exact windows clone" counts.
I am not advocating changing distribtuions, but I am saying that this is onyl good for E - I will be freed up to concentrate on it and associated projects (that includes working on X and extensions to X). This also means i will be able to develop E free of GNOME. E is NOT GNOME's Window Manager - GNOME does not have one. Infact E will be workign to becoming its own desktop shell (I separate Desktop and Desktop Shell here for a reason) in its own right as time moves on - but unlike GNOME I won't make a vaporware publicity stunt out of it until there's something concrete there. E is getting on and a lot of important backend code is in place. After a few more necessary features it will start to grow into a desktop shell (a desktop shell is what I term the combination of Filemanager, Window manager and a Panel app launcher and an "applet/dock" holder). This means E is independant of whatvere desktop apps you use - you can use KDE apps, GNOME apps, GTK apps, X apps, Motif apps, CDE apps - whatever apps you like - but your desktop shell will be consistent and configurable to exactly how you want it. You alreayd knwo E's memory footprint is pretty small - especialyl compared to those of gnome and KDE (when you add the memory use of all the applets, panels, programs, wm etc. of each they add up to much much much more than E). E can absorb much of the functionality of these with very little overhead since it's already got the backend code there in E. Once the desktop shell for E is compleyte, debugged, optimised and so on E will hit 1.0 - but I'mnto setting a time limit on this - this happens when it's done and not before.
If you want to help: sit tight and stick to E - send good feedback and bug reports - We DO listen to them. Send patches to E if you want features. When the new dock applet apiu is done you can all scrutty off and write 5000 loadmeters, cd pplayers etc for E's new dock applet api (yes non square 64x64 dock apps - any size, anywhere (in the dragbar, in small windows, on the desktop istelf). all "dock applets" for E will follow the theme of the WM. This has yet to be worked on but will be - as well as adding in the iconbox again (that comes first).
Expect E to go far.
For the next week I'll be driving across the USA so dont' expect much response from me - after that I'll be moving into a new home, but therafter expect things to move along again.
I do hope we are doing things right by the majority of e users out there. You are my priority - not commerical interests, not political games, not a windows clone, not GNOME, not KDE - users come first. Those that help wiht the project get their wishes often done sooner than others becuase there aren't many working on E.
Here's to a bright future for Enlightenemnt and for all who use it.
--
--------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------------
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler) raster@rasterman.com
Raster's Page raster@linux.com
"
that's not true at all.
In fact, I work on enlightenment at VA.
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
This brings up an interesting side-issue...is scalability a feature that is considered in UI design? It doesn't seem to be, although I really do want it.
n tents.htm suggests that Palm applications, _unlike desktop applications_, should be small and fast, should display useful information to the user right away, and be task-specific. This implies to me that somewhere there's an unwritten rule that desktop applications should be slow and bloated, should require the user to fight with the UI to get the information they want, and should include all sorts of features unrelated to the task they perform. Frankly, I prefer single clicks instead of double clicks (gosh, when was the last time I ever double-clicked for anything other than selecting words from text? 1996? Even Windows' right-click-drag-release for "open" is better than double-clicking...), I like applications that try to display maximum useful information in limited screen area (or, conversely, display maximum aesthetic appeal given unlimited screen area), and I like applications that are task-oriented and don't try to do everything that other apps already do.
I have all the problems AC does with Windows and trying to run a lot of small applications. The entire OS from the internals all the way up to the UI is designed around running a handful of really bloated applications. It has problems coping with lots of small applications, or combining applications in useful ways (unless of course the applications involved are designed from the ground up to work with each other--and conceptually that's just really one application with two inseparable modules).
I've never been able to make Windows understand that I want all text and border decorations to be minimally sized because I want to put ~20 windows on the display at the same time. In Linux this isn't always trivial but it's at least possible.
Personally, I'd like to use a UI (as well as its associated "look and feel" rules, which are really conventions for application implementors) such that applications will run as well on my 1600x1200x24 X display(s), with dozens of open windows, as they do on a Palm Pilot's 160x160x1 stylus screen. Unfortunately, many modern applications have difficulty even resizing their windows that small, much less working afterwards.
Interestingly enough, the Palm Pilot Developer's Guide (http://www.palm.com/devzone/docs/pptdg/TableOfCo
Of course the Palm's GUI design is a direct copy of the MacOS design in many places, and I am impressed with how well it has managed to capture almost all of the MacOS flaws. They could have built the system around Unix-like text files (with transparent compression for data transfer and long-term storage to conserve memory) instead of the broken MacOS creator/type filesystem--at least that way you'd have some hope of combining two small, memory-limited applications into one larger, more useful one. Thank God it doesn't have a Windows Registry...
-- I avoid spam by accepting only OpenPGP encrypted or signed email at this address. Clear-signed, RFC2015, heck, even
Anyhow, E's look is nice and all, but gnome's outright refusal to adopt a window manager has annoyed me to no end. I change gtk, I have to change gnome separately. Gtk and gnome never look quite like they match up, and of course there's a whole new drawing layer on it.
... I simply have no link to reply to this article, and the moderator dropdowns show up inlined. kfm seems to be awful funny with forms... So anyhow I'll piggyback my reply to someone famous, hopefully it won't be moderated down :)
As for Kwm (Raster does talk about E in KDE after all), it uses Qt as its toolkit. Same idea as mwm using motif. The window menus and root menus and such, they're KDE menu objects (derived from Qt). No wheels reinvented here.
In the gnome app list, I see a gtkwm that aspires to do the same, but it appears to be forever vaporware. Could some enterprising soul who knows window managers perhaps take up this project? It's ridiculous to have a window manager represent a code fork from a desktop environment.
As for reply links
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
just my 2 cents... .deb format, but that would require downloading something else to unarchive it, and im sure the majority of the people are just too lazy to do it.
personally, I think that in the world of linux, no standards are imposed on anyone. i use RPMs because they are convenient, not because i have to. i have seen plenty of things to download in
-w00p
The KDE developers list is an output-only medium, just like the regular media: There is no way to correct anyone on kde-devel list, given that only developers get post access, but everyone can read.
As it stands, Matthias opinion on the hype of Gnumeric and his "comparission" on the code quality are unfounded.
His bashing on other free software projects on that list are as bad as the ones I have been criticized for (hey, it was my *opinion*).
I did look at KSpread code when writing Gnumeric, hoping to get some good ideas from it, but I was rather dissapointed with the code.
Why does he say it is overhyped? Mistery; Why did the pink rabbit die? Mistery; Why did he spread miss-information about Gnumeric? Mistery again; Why does he imply we have some marketing team to market Gnumeric? Mistery once more; Why do I love Paris? Because of the coffee.
Miguel
I think you're right, but missing the point. From a general employer/employee point of view, you are absolutely correct. The employee was hired to do a job, and to do it under the direction of the company. I don't know what Raster's contract said, but I'm guessing that he was paid to develop E. As his employer, Red Hat has (well, had) the right to tell him how to do that.
But I think that j-edge's comparison to a music artist selling out is very apt. Raster has his own concept of how he wants E to work. If he was instructed to develop it in ways contrary to his plans, he could follow orders and perhaps feel like he sold out, or he could keep his vision and leave his job. It comes down to artistic integrity (and coding can very definitely be an art form).
I haven't looked at E's code, but from the interface, I'd say the Raster's pretty talented. I don't think that he'll have a problem finding work. He might want to consider doing the sort of thing Linus did--explicitly searching for a job that that doesn't involve E. In such a job, he might not have as much time to develop E, but there would be no conflicts of the nature we're seeing here.
--Phil (May we all be lucky enough to find a job where "work" and "play" intersect.)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
bash bindings? this i have to see. URL?
Of course if it's as functional as the perl or python bindings, both of which result in immediate core dumps even when both qt and the bindings are compiled from scratch, then I don't have a lot of hope.
bash bindings could really be the nail in the coffin for CDE, which has dtksh, a graphical korn shell that uses motif
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I also recall Alan Cox saying in his diary that Raster's code was spaghetti-like. That might be true or not. I've never seen any of Raster's code. But I know I'd be pissed if a fellow employee wrote that my code was unreadable, and posted it in his .plan or in a public diary for the world to read.
Raster isn't being unprofessional, RedHat is starting to resemble Microsoft a little too much. Rushing software to market before it's ready (GNOME 1.0), trying to get users to use software they prefer (GNOME), forgetting to include GCC in the standard installation, and charging WAY too much for their product. SuSE offers the same technical support but costs 50$ less than RedHat. I think RH has gotten a little to big for it's britches. Raster is right in calling them a Windows clone. Sure I would like an easier installation/upgrade/maintenance linux system, but not at the cost of funtionality. This is whats happening at RedHat, they are sacrificing form for funtion. Finally someone had the nerve to stand up to them (Way to go Raster!!), they get all the free publicity from the computer magazines and technology news reports, which makes them feel like they are bigger than they are.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
For all those who were worried about Red Hat becoming the next Microsoft, their fears seem to be at least partly justified. If their goal is to create an "exact windows clone," and they consider businesses better friends than users, it suddenly becomes clear why fvwm95 is their default WM even though it sucks.
My only hope is they don't force standards on us. For all those who say that isn't going to happen, just look at RPMs. Who distributes using DEBs?
Maybe Corel will get it right?
Agreed. Isn't it the job of moderators to take care of such posts. So I guess if I put a line saying "Moderators, let this message go through" then they will just ignore it. Seems kind of ironic I suppose.
And so Red Had would release a binary only E, so?
The free software community would be free to continue to develop the GPL'd version of E. That is the beauty of the GPL.
Well - I do believe under US law ( interesting
since RH is a US company and Alan codes
in England...) that even as a contractor - if
you are paid for the work -it's the employer's
unless stipulated otherwise in a prior agreement.
(All this from a non-lawyer so take it with
a large grain of salt.) I'd also
guess that English law probably has similar
constraints.
BUT since everything is GPL'd I think Alan's
take is right on. It doesn't matter one iota.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Nah.. You will be back in WindowMaker soon.. // Theme-addicted-Mindjiver
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
I wouldn't agree. HTML and XML is not binary, it's still a text format. There are plenty of people who code HTML pages with vi (or the equivalent). I would say it's easily human readable AND it would be easily parseable by E as well as a Theme Builder program (for instance).
Anyone thinking of writing a ThemeBuilder? Easy GUI construction of configuration files, previewing without whacking your own desktop, etc?
http://www.mieterra.com/download/
Actually with a bit of configuration kdm, the kde xdm replacement lets you do just that at login time. I find that quite useful. Most of the time I want kde, but when I have to do something quick under X, then log right back off, twm or blackbox meets my needs quite well.
Aren't both KDE and GNOME based on CORBA... .... right ?
and E too..
but, they just don't work together all that well... or something
New things are always on the horizon
Window managers are such a subjective thing that it would be very poor strategy for RedHat to supply future distributions with just a single window manager configured on installation.
Obviously there has to be a default, but all the other major window managers should be just one simple menu selection away.
The very least that should be provided are E, WM, fvwm*, icewm, twm and olvwm, and another half dozen or so would be most welcome.
People have hugely varying tastes and functional requirements, and the ability to choose window managers is one huge advantage that we have over Windows --- RedHat should make the most of that possibility.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I had a different experience with RH support. I upgraded several boxes with the RH6 boxed set distribution, and ran into trouble with only one, which happened to have 3c905b NIC. After checking the newsgroups and trying a couple different things, I opened a support ticket.
I got an e-mail with the answer, within 24 hours, to get the latest Donald Becker driver source for that card as it was not tested and shipped with RH6. I gave it a try and that fixed the problem I was having.
I saw the next day that this was posted in the knowledge base.
No, both are output-only mediums.
;-)
We did not delete the archives, they are just available to people on gnome-hackers.
KDE has kde-private, which is not an open list either. Just like gnome-hackers is not.
Hey, bet you did not know about the existance of kde-private
Miguel.
That's not always feasible. Companies generally get to know more about you than you get to know about them.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
So what if it is not output-only to me. I do not spend my life reading kde-devel. I found out about Matthias whinings here on slashdot, not on my Gnus buffer.
gnome-hackers was always closed. The fact that some people found the archives on the web was a bad side effect.
gnome-hackers was always on the same level as your private kde-private mailing list.
Your point is then?
Miguel.
No, the list still exists.
It was removed because we discussed internal stuff in that list, and people used my private comments on a private mailing list to start a flamewar with some KDE people.
The fact that it was available on the web was a mistake, as it is a private mailing list.
Nothing about the earlier release of gnome 1.0.
Miguel.
actually it's not GPL anymore, it's the X license.
which is actually a lot freer than GPL.
and you'll find a lot more people than raster's name in the copyright.
eesh -ewait "copyright"
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
I know that E is very quick. But when it's used in conjunction with GNOME it is not snappy. And unless you use v16 (or 13!) out of CVS, you need gnome to get a pager. I was just adding a small point to Raster's comment on the growing rift between E and GNOME. I say "good."
Peace.
If I had achieved 10% of what Matthias has, I would be 10 times more ;-).
annoying than he is (hey, I may already be
Besides, you are totally missing the point of what you replied to:
Matthias is just a developer. He is an extraordinary developer. Hell, he
writes perhaps the prettiest code I've ever seen, but he is not the
equivalent of Linus/RMS/Miguel/whatever in one important aspect: he is not
"the boss".
You see, he is not humble about his code. He doesn't need to, his code is
good. He is humble about just being a coder, which is (IMHO) a lot more
important.
BTW: what he says of KWord and Abiword is actually true.
Good grief... There's nothing funnier than paranoia stemming from delusions of grandeur.
Well, this is kind of strange.. Its never good to hear this kind of stuff happen in the family. He alluded to the fact that this sort of tension had been brewing for several months, which makes me think this isnt exactly a spur of the moment decision for him.
Whatever his decision is, thats cool. It's Karsten's right to flip the bird to whoever he wants..but not without consequences. You have to admit, there are better ways to leave a company..Certainly more professional (and perhaps more mature) ways, at that.
Publically referring to your former employer as an entity which doesn't care about its user base, and prefers only "commercial interests, political games, and making a windows clone" won't exactly earn you any friends. Or a good employment reference, for that matter. It makes both Red Hat _and_ him look bad.
My only fear is that whoever his future employer will be will look past his talent and see him simply as a potential risk to the company's public image. If he decided he didn't like my company, and then turned around and slammed MY company in the press like this, I sure as hell wouldn't hire him either, talent or no talent.
If you dont like where you are, thats fine. Its cool to move on.. But dont spit in the face of people who gave you a shot in the first place. Its not just unprofessional..its also a bit childish, imho.
Bowie
PROPAGANDA
Bowie J. Poag
You have threatened to re-write a whole bunch of things though. Maybe someone just assumed you'd done for E what you're doing for spreadsheets and want to do for email, etc.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
He also talked about the GNOME publicity stunt. We all suspected this but it's interesting that someone actually admitted this was planned.
IMHO, he simply got tired of the politics.
Has anyone here used the gnome-linuxconf? It is really good. linuxconf works with all distros. I do not think that gnome will just go away. It does need some work, in terms of configurability, and themes, and needs a new window manager. I think RH would be wise to add gnome to there Anotherlevel.
about E......I would have never tried E unless it as in a distro. Is it in any other distros?
in order to 'woo' windows users from windows, they must make them feel at home.
I use linux cause it is stable. So far RH 6.0 has been pretty stable for me. X has crashed a few times, but I imaginge that would happen with any distro, depending on what you have X doing.
why do people here always see things as being only "ONE WAY". Its either KDE or GNOME. Both have good things that have come from them. GNOME Help is pretty good, and it allows easy access to the man pages. GNOME term is better imho than kterm. However kfm is better than gnomes filemanager (IMHO).
I use them both and parts of each. They fit nicely with Afterstep.
I just hope that none of this splinters Linux. If linux splinters, there will be no chance for it to ever evolve into a mainstream desktop.
Personally I think that kde and gnome should have just improved an existing desktop/windowmanager, like AfterStep, adding programs to an already existing window manager.
Only 'flamers' flame!
> We have the Gnome coordinator slagging off KDE
Since the justification for GNOME is a political
one, GNOME should be ignored with similar
justification -- Miguel needs to grow up.
So far as GPL-all-the-way is concerned, we really
need to stop and ask ourselves whether that is
so much of a good idea -- are we more interested
in the software being free? or anti-proprietary?
I, personally, am for it being free over a-p,
and find RMS's agressive (GPL you libraries)
stance to be short sighted, and in contradiction
with his goals (first, GPL'd libraries produce
the need for a replacement library for everyone
else, second, the 'It's my software, its my
license' type whining is exactly what he set
out to OPPOSE -- see the Stockholm speech)
p.s. I was impressed with GNOME until I took
a look at the memory consumption -- now I just
run WMaker (but use the GNOME terminal)
So far as the 'wish Qt was GPL' bit -- that is
silly, libraries MUST allow for non-GPL
development (bear in mind that there can be no
GPL-compatible copyleft that can 'survive'
contact with GPL'd code (the GPL must take
precidence)). Sure, GPL-everything seems an
attractive proposition for the immediate future,
but look a few years ahead and things look a
little different. Never forget that Free Software
is more than (and not necessarily the same thing
as) GPL'd Software (trying to have a you-can-do-what-you-like-with-it and you-cant-take-advantage-of-it license is trying
to have your cake and eat it -- not possible).
John_Chalisque
Did it occur to you that these packages were meant for use with said distribution, and would not require "downloading something else" to install them?
.deb packages, or else he would have to download/get/install the Debian distribution, which still qualifies as something else. You can, after much effort get rpms to work even with old slackware installations, so there isn't any reason to even believe that he's a RedHat customer.
.deb packages, but I don't, and I can't be bothered going to the effort of installing another package manager when there's .tar.gz available.
Did it occur to you that he might have been using a different distribution than debian? That would mean he would have to either download/install something else to install
If I was using Debian on any of my systems, I'd probably use the
Great! Then you are the ideal customer for a WM that is just a windows clone.
I really like KDE, too, but my God, it is so boring--it *looks* like a WM written by Germans trying to win enterprise desktops. If that's your goal, why not just use WinNT and be assimilated.
I fired up Gnome/E about three monts ago and will never look back. If you don't think it's fast enough, then you haven't used E in a while.
Good luck to Rasterman!
I've noticed a number of instances where KDE has really had a different culture than GNOME or E, which has led to a different attitude to from the project:
1. Core KDE developers *never* rip on opposing projects. They attempt to intergrate. I'm sure everyone remembers when KDE anounced Version 1.0 of GNOME promenantly on its webpage.
2. No publicity stunts. The software's done when it's done. 1.1.1 took forever to get out, but when it was out it worked really well. In fact KDE folks are currently debating whether they should try to pre-release more official stuff in order to generate interest. For example, the koffice daily snapshots won't generate the type of interest a Koffice-0.3 would.
3. No central cultish leader. Sure it's nice to have what ESR described as the "benevilent dictator", the Linus or the Larry Wall. However, neither Miguel or Rasterman fill this role particularly well. They have the dictator thing down, but not the benevilence. Sometimes, I'd say the FreeBSD/XFree/Apache model of just a bunch of developers works pretty well.
Just some observations about the way Open Source software works in different cultures.
It didn't seem to me that Raster wrote anything bad about Redhat in his message. He only stated that he felt his creativity was stifled. I challenge anyone who has worked under another person not to say the same.
You're missing the point.
A mundane "gee does it matter" comment by someone the community has "blessed" is bumped up to a 5. In several people's opinions, this is an example of moderation being used too often as a popularity contest.
Funny how socially ostricized geeks (myself included) can believe that "cliques" are stupid until we find a community of our own and start our own cliques, to which we are conveniently blind.
where Miguel essentially said he thought E was a piece of sh*t
Actually, your description of the article seems fairly familiar, altough I am quite sure it was not Miguel behind the sentence.
Now that I think about it, it was an article titled "The Mad Hatters" by some US newspaper. I guess you'll find the link from GNOME.org's news archives.
(Checking for it, it might be that Frederico could've been interpreted to have said that in the interview, which actually wasn't about GNOME but rather the RHAD labs).
--
--
Midgard Project - Open Source CMS
it [the QPL] doesn't preserve my freedoms, it's not free.
The BSD license doesn't preserve your freedoms so by your logic the BSD license isn't free. This is wrong hence your statement is false. (Proof by contradiction)
The QPL is a free software license.
According to redhat, they upped the price to deal with the fact that pretty much well everyone who bought a boxed set wanted more technical support than what was previously offered.
Technical support is *very* expensive, especially when you have a high demand for it.
Microsoft, on the other hand, upped the price for either greed, and/or to make it seem like its a "better deal".
Just wait till microsoft moves to a per term licensing scheme like everyone else(ie, Sun, Compiler companies, etc)
---------- Real roxen error message: Error: The server failed to fulfill your query, due to an internal error in the i
I would like to apologize for my incorrect statement. I confused two separate articles and somehow merged them in my head. :( The comment was actually made by Federico, who states below that it was actually a reporter trying to drum up a story. MY VERY humble apologies. ;)
:)
PS - I think Gnome is KEWL
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
----
The KDE developers list is an output-only medium, just like the regular media:
----
I have offered you in the past to forward anything you want to that list, Miguel. It's not output-only for you.
I remember when you whined about that on IRC... and then oops, you closed gnome-hackers. Bad double standard there, Miguel.
Don't you have any IRC channels about projects you don't take part of that need crashing tonight, Miguel? Old habits die hard, don't they?
----
His bashing on other free software projects on that list are as bad as the ones I have been criticized for (hey, it was my *opinion*).
----
Except, of course, that you are the self-appointed GNOME leader, and that you gave your "opinion" on the BBC. If the parallel was more pathetic, it would be emetic.
Phht. Again? Didn't you do this once before?
*wave* good luck raster. Somehow I knew corp. culture isn't something that could change you =)
Later.
Vince, aka 'Random'
Ps. I'm too lazy to login too.
---------- Real roxen error message: Error: The server failed to fulfill your query, due to an internal error in the i
I have (well who hasn't), but as E is still evolving, I expect the theme-format to change as well, and having to throw away a lot of work at regular intervals is bad for the ulcer that I've probably developed by now.
I could not disagree more. Who among us hasn't landed what we thought was a 'great job with a great company' only to have it turn into a living nightmare due to mergers, management changes, policy changes?
The company I work for now was great - two years ago. Now it's mired in stupidity and process due to an ill-advised merger. My days there are now few in number.
As for 'public defamation of a prior employer', why not? You say it's unprofessional, I say it's fair game, and in most cases it does public good. I have chosen not to accept positions with some entertainment studios due to former employees bad experiences. Saved myself grief and stress. And that's bad?
US corporate employers generally don't give a damn about you, your ideals, your goals, your ethics or your beliefs. They just want workers that will come in on time, sit doen & shut up, and bang out code for 8 hours. Why should RH be any different?
Good luck man!
We always check out the latest E !
C-ya
oliver
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
Posted by shaver@netscape.com:
Since when does Miguel work at or for Red Hat?
What channel/net?- ----------------
-----------------------------------
Jamin Philip Gray
jgray@writeme.com
http://students.cec.wustl.edu/~jpg2/
Celebrate the finer things in life
Moving both scrollbars buttons to one edge of the widget is one example I was told was not readily possible in gtk.
Please notice that this information I got second hand, so it may not be totally accurate.
Qt 2.0 is free, open source, has theme support more powerful than gtk's (you can't change a widget's topology in gtk :-P), there are bindings for python, perl, C and BASH (yes, really).
So, senseless bashing has to die.
I sort of agree with you. WMs have different purposes. E looks damn cool. Twm/blackbox are lightweight. Kwm with all the KDE stuff adds a lot of functionality.
However, I will take this oppertunity to attack the BeOS theme for enlightenment. Whoever wrote that (or at least the one I saw the last time I used someone's machine that was running E) had obviously never used BeOS. The thing in the top right corner had an awkward sort of application launcher thing instead of a process list. For someone who's hactually used BeOS a lot it seemed half-assed and counterintuitive.
Just what is "Enlightenment"? Does Gnome require it? Can Enligtenment be extended to do what Gnome does? [Sorry in advance to moderators who think this is a dumb question]
------- CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Them releasing version 1.0 prematurly mabey?
-- filgy
kde-devel and gnome-devel-list are both public lists. gnome-devel-list posting privileges are available to all - kde-devel posting privileges are available to those who contribute KDE code.
kde-private and gnome-hackers are both private lists.
I agree, but it's just part of open-source development; everything's open, not just the code, not just the feature discussions, but the bickering on the kernel mailing lists, the open letters from three-letter acronyms, and so on. The only thing I'm afraid of is that the media (read clueless zdnet) will start to get a hold of things like this and distort them, or that MS will use them in their FUD campaign. Actually, it happened before, see
Apple's Linux foray prompts squabbles, Internal rift among Linux advocates, and any of a number of other articles that does a poor job of airing our dirty laundry. How should things like this be dealt with?
-----
... gnome-hackers was always on the same level as your private kde-private mailing list.
So what if it is not output-only to me.
-----
Well, wasn't your problem it being output-only?
Let me explain the unknowing public what you need to do to get posting permission in kde-devel:
Send an email to konold@kde.org telling him that you are interested in development of kde. Yeah, it's so DIFFICULT.
-----
gnome-hackers was always closed.
-----
The same kde-private list that you *demanded* to have read/write access to? Remember that little rant of yours?
The same kde-private list that you annoyed everyone about for weeks? The one whose existance you deemed proof of kde being eeeevil?
-----
Your point is then?
-----
If you can't see it, there is no point in explaining it.
Linuxtoday seem to manage to do their research just fine.
Yeah and I'd like to try AbiWord, but it's developed by bigots.
P.S. Wake up boy, the GPL isn't free, it puts more restrictions on what you can do with your code than a truely free license would.
The revolution will be mocked
Does it really matter? Red Hat own the parts of the kernel I work on in Red Hat time. It's GPL'd so its kind of irrelevant.
Alan
Yeah, and Malda shot Kennedy, both of them. What happened to people doing thier OWN research? This is still the Internet right?
-- The unsig...
Your unfair, repugnant, and inappropriate bashing of the KDE project was a major factor in my choosing not to contribute to the GNOME project.
His bashing on other free software projects on that list are as bad as the ones I have been criticized for
This is simply not true.
(hey, it was my *opinion*).
The expression of your opinion in press releases has had unfortunate consequences. Chiefly making it significantly harder for the KDE and GNOME projects to co-operate and set shared standards.
Red Hat shipped an older and buggy (early 1.0) version of GNOME. You can get updated GNOME RPMs for Red Hat 6, which will help stability considerably.
The current CVS GNOME is quite stable. I haven't used E much yet, but hope to get it set up on my Ultra 10 soon.
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
"more stable" ?
"lighter" ?
most people who say these types of things don't know much about enlightenment. it doesn't hog memory unless you tell it to, and it certainly doesn't crash all the time like people tend to assume it does.
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
Hey, it does work on Qt 2.0.
;-) I had done it a year before Qt had any styles/themes whatsoever:
Even the provided platinum style does it.
In fact (if I may brag a bit
http://ultra7.unl.edu.ar/themes/desktop01.gif
All my letters/reports/posters are done in klyx.
:-)
That's all I have to say about that. Leave his immigration status the hell out of it. I'd say he contributes more than most 'mericans BORN here. Just a _little_ off topic ya think? sheesh.
I would say that the mere fact that KDE and GNOME both exist and are under active development is enough proof that the developers of the corresponding system is not happy with the other.
:).
Its that simple.
If Im happy with a program, I dont try to change it, much less try to code my own.
I would find it very strange if the KDE-developers didnt have more faith in their own applications than they have in GTK/GNOME ones.
Oh well, I think Ive made my point, no point in going on, is there?
So far as window management standards go, I hope that Raster can get together with (at least) the KDE people, and use E to set the new standard. (If he were to team up with Alfredo, so far as interoperabiliy was concerned, to the point that E becomes a drop-in replacement for WM and vice versa, then things will get interesting)
John_Chalisque
What the $#@! does this have to do with RedHat. However I don't think it was such a bad idea. Remember the 2.0.0 linux kernel? was that a publicity stunt? Same thing here. The betas weren't tested enough and most bugs came to light afterwards. Because we released 1.0 that early we now have a stable enviroment, which we might not have had had we not released. GNOME != RedHat, remember that. RedHat may suggest certain things, but ultimately it is not their decision.
there where a few other things but i forget. he sort of made the statement that linux was a reaction to 'm$' and not really a 'real mans' unix.
sort of reminds me when i was working for a local 'dot com' company of a unix guru's dilbert cartoon with a bald, white bearded old man flipping a coin to dilbert and saying, 'here get a real computer sonny'... this sort of summed up KT's attitiude.
btw www.rasterman.com is down or '/.'ed?
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Basically All I would like to say is the Redhat does care about end users, for example redhat has setup mailing lists for users to colloborate and solve problems... redhat employs a few people (i.e hartr@redhat.com) that helps people out with problems... they distribute their version of the linux os for free on the website... they support the use oss (open source software).. They sent 6 geeks on a vacation in a beachhouse... I for one enjoy redhat and love redhat.... Raster just needs to cool off a bit... that mexican (alfrado or whatver his name is (gnome dude) is a wierdo too.....
Raja
Perhaps Gnome isn't all that stable, I don't know, I don't use it very much, but E in and of itself is very stable from my experiance. I've had no problems w/ any of the released versions, and while ON OCCATION the CVS versions I pick up are unstable, in general they're pretty good, and that's damn impressive considering they're CVS. I wouldn't suggest CVS for anyone not interested in debugging and playing w/ funny errors though, but then, that's CVS...
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
The point is not that they would close the source. But that they added a killer feature and THEN closed the source.
Remember, the example assumes RH becomes evil. So they come up with some moderately good idea, patent it (evil, remember), stick it in E and release binary only.
Suddenly GPL'd E loses the market and RH becomes MS.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
kde-devel is *not* a one way street. If you want write access, ask. I'm not so sure I'd be glad to see you with write access however, since you only seem to spew self-righteous flames.
As it stands, you spew out your opinions as if they were the gospel truth. If it's just your opinion, perhaps you should make that clearer when you spew to the press.
There's a difference betteen you "stating your opinion" and what Matthais did. You state your opinion to people in a very public forum, that tends to be followed by slashdot. M.E. stated his in a private forum, intended for people working on KDE.
Why does he imply you have a marketing team? He does? Hmm. I musta missed *that*. Gnome in general gets more coverage on slashdot, and has more rabbid people mentioning every releas on freshmeat, hence, Gnome and Gnumeric tend to be over-hyped.
Why does Miguel think he is so innocent? Mystery. Why does Miguel refer to pink rabbits? It's the crack cocaine.
The revolution will be mocked
That's a little bit of advice that everyone
should remember. The people you have to work with
can make your job rewarding or a living hell.
There are enough computer jobs out there
that for one rare time in history, people
can actually have a choice in the environment
in which they spend most of their lives. In this
world of ours, that freedom is an indeed rare
and beautiful thing.
Life's short, do what *you* need to do! Rasterman.
Immature? I suppose this depends on your perspective. Refusing to put up with something you don't like and/or believe in, is, IMO, a brave thing to do. In this case it is reasonable to suspect that the company has grown too big to change and "work it out." To think that companies change in this way is somewhat immature in itself.
---
Joseph Foley
InCert Software Corp.
Wow, I'm glad a RedHat employee finally said what non-RedHat users have been saying for so long: RedHat does not care about the users, they don't care about open source, they only care about corporations and money. Rasterman's leaving the company only illustrates this clearer.
"...I wish [Red Hat] all the best but I do not fit in there. E does not fit in there. They want a windows clone distribution and OS..."
I've been saying this about Red Hat since I first tried it and started X11. What should show up, but a window manager that looks exactly like Windows 95, right down to the "Start" menu and Red Hat's "Control Panel". Some people might say this is to make Windows users feel more comfortable about using Linux, but why should we make our operating system look like theirs? Projects such as Enlightenment are clear examples of the power and capability of Linux, yet Red Hat would rather have its money-paying corporate users run in an environment that looks like Windows 95.
I wish all the best of luck to Carsten in his move away from Red Hat. I hope the Englightenment project continues to prosper and grow into an even better window manager.
This is arrant flame-bait and not at all necessary. For a long time I used Gnome on one machine and KDE on another. After RH 6.0 came out, I chose Gnome everywhere and erased KDE. Is it so hard for KDE folks to believe that some of us prefer Gnome, and have not experienced any sort of stability problems with it? To be sure, I didn't have any stability problems with KDE either. They both crash much less than Win98, which I am forced to use for some purposes.
I went from Gnome 0.3 to 0.9, where I stayed for a long time. When Gnome 1.0 was released, I heard a lot of well-considered criticism of its stability and avoided it. I heard that it was fixed by about 1.03 and that's when I first upgraded to 1.x. I simply do _not_ have problems with crashes on my machine: Celeron 400 with 128MB RAM running RH 6.0 + Gnome (RH 5.2 + Gnome + Kernel 2.2. was just as rock stable). Netscape is the only occasional offender, and nothing that kill can't fix. BTW, I do everything from burning CDs to GIMP art to programming (Python, Java, C), etc on my main machine.
Gnome has as much a place as KDE. The competition between them has made both _much_ better in spite of the childish jabs from either side. Miguel can sometimes overdo the advocacy, but I have also heard (at second hand, admittedly) hair-raising flame-bait from core KDE developers as well.
And the key point is that Red Hat is not "pissing away" anything by supporting Gnome. In UIs, as in other things, non est disputandum de gustibus. Believe it or not, the fact that RH didn't board your favorite ship does not doom it to oblivion. Nor does the fact that other distros chose another desktop. All it proves is that there is healthy competition in the Linux landscape.
--Uche
"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross" -- E.P.
E has its own pagers and configuration system. I'm using it now.
The pagers seemed to be hidden in 0.15, but in 0.16 (CVS version), they're on by default and you get the nice configuration stuff.
E is not slow by any means, btw. (Sure if you throw in HUGE graphics and all, it may be, gut that's just the graphics being slow. E is fast).
Well, I am not sure about everyone else, but I am unsure of the relation between friends and enemas :-) I have never involved a friend with an enema and have no such plans.
:-)
Sorry, couldn't help myself
Troy
... the news made it into the online version of the Austrian daily newspaper "Der Standard", which is one of the most popular web sites in Austria (2nd at the moment, I think). The headline was "Top-Programmer leaves Red Hat". :-) It concludes that the "commercialization" of Linux would cause more reactions like this among open source programmers... (look here). I don't think it's bad to have an exact Windows clone personality for Linux, if it's also more flexible than Windows. There'll always be room for creativity, since everyone's free to change/improve whatever desktop/window manager/variation of Linux they begin with.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I was searching for E distributed as .debs, and I came across a pretty damn hot flame from raster at some guy on a mailing list, along the lines of "everyone uses redhat so thats all I'll support"
;)
Perhaps it'll change now
(doh, posted now, so I cant moderate
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I was rather pleased to see how Gnome was coming along because I don't rather fancy the look of KDE, although that is what I have been using for the computer labs because it is the most complete system at this point.
Raster is correct in that E and Gnome are two different beasts. That is the problem. In giving out Red Hat 6.0 CDs to Linux newbies, I have found that they all get incredibly confused by the fact that the level of complexity of Gnome is compounded by a factor of two because of the fact that one must configure the window manager and gnome (sorta like matching your shirt and trousers).
I think that Red Hat was trying to push E towards being "Gnome's window manager" simply because that is what the most people out here would really really like to see. Gnome fills in the gaps that E leaves rather well, and truth be known, I think that a total integration would make the most sense. Insisting that Gnome be "non window manager specific" is just plain insane on their parts: it NEEDS to be or will forever have that dual configuation hell.
Despite what might be best for Red Hat, or what the most people want, absorbing E into Gnome most certainly isn't Rasterman would want. I can see why he would feel this way. People do open source software not for the money, but for the glory. There is precious little glory having your work buried into another project.
So, unfortunately, this shows one of the major weaknesses of Open Source. Because the modivation is notority, it lends itself to programmers whose egos can dictate more than what might be good for the community. Raster meantions that he is motivated by user input, but from what I have seen with the people I have tried to introduce Linux to, an integrated Gnome/E would be the most preferable path to take. While really really pretty, Enlightenment has always been the least usable window manager in any incarnation.
Admittedly, I don't know what might have gone on inside Red Hat, so I apologise to Rasterman if these comments have sounded overly critical, and certainly neither I nor anyone else should have the right to dictate the course of your life. But I must say that I am disappointed to see that we are less likely to see a more integrated Gnome/E and very disappointed that the change could not have been done in a more gentlemanly manner.
Surely this will provide a dividing line for the community and a oil tankers worth of fuel for the flame war that will follow.
Your comments lack an understanding of business.
Redhat is a small company. It seems big because
it is one of largest companies in the Linux community.
Redhat is not attempting any kind of monopoly. To gain monopoly status you can not give away your product (i.e. OpenSource precludes monopolies). Redhats concern for business partener show that they have an understanding of the business environment. Businesses want support. Neat software in fine, but without support it is useless to a business. This is why MicroSoft can sell software. They provide support or at least have convinced other corporations that they do. So the point is that for Redhat to remain viable over the long haul they must connect with business. Individuals do not represent the bulk of the money for OS and support.
Troy Roberts
Hmmm. Is it not possible to run Gnome atop the KDE :)
for the best of both worlds?
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
At some point the stupidity of this must dawn on you, all of you. If I did not see it from the start I would be hard pressed to understand how the departure of one man, could lead to this flame war. I could understand the uproar over the BBC quote, though I felt some are too thin skinned. But this one is truly stupid, an argument over people not being nice enough!!!. I have not heard such shit since kg - a long time ago.
It only took one ill advised post by Sanity to launch others into a truly pointless diatribe. May I ask what is the point, what did you hope to accomplish. At the end is there some sense of satisfaction. In short, Why ?.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
Ettrich does not seem to stoop to the level of critiquing Gnome on SlashDot, but rather spends his time coding...
---
I suppose he wouldn't bother to defend himself when people resort to name-calling, either.
I've never tried Enlightment, simply because I don't need all the eye candy, but I doubt it's as fast as those whose primary good is speed and small resource usage. Like Blackbox, or any of the other really small ones that offer no configuration options and speed being the "only thing." Blackbox is cool, and has no dependencies at all.
Since Raster worked for Redhat and coded on Enlightenment and other things.. who owns E now? If he worked on it for ONE second it's Redhat's property unless he had it among other things exempted in his contract..
.. who owns E now?
So
(Note... I'm not referring to license. It's still under GPL. I'm referring to COPYRIGHT. If I worked on something on company pay, the company owns it unless they say otherwise.)
J
>According to redhat, they upped the price to
>deal with the fact that pretty much well everyone
>who bought a boxed set wanted more technical
>support than what was previously offered.
If that's the case, then I think they failed to justify the price increase. I got a supported version of Red Hat 6.0 to see how useful it'd be compared to my previous Cheapbytes purchases. When I had a problem with the upgrade and couldn't solve it promptly, I submitted an incident to Red Hat's support page.
They made no reply after three days, so I solved my own problem instead...just like I'd do with an unsupported Cheapbytes purchase. In my case, Red Hat's support system failed significantly, and I could have saved my money. Next time I need an upgrade, I'll do it the cheap way.
--
Some keywords for the NSA in the Lord of the Rings universe: One Ring bind find Sauron quest Nazgul freedom
I'm a KDE advocate, and I have nothing bad to say about GNOME.
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
Okay, so the second link has expired, but you get the point...
I don't know Rasterman. I have only used E to some small extent, but enough to know that whatever came with Redhat 6.0 (whether it was E or GNOME's fault) was very slow. E is pretty. I liek the way it looks. I do not like the way it works. But that is ok. I am an ex-windows user. Most people do not care about customizing the crap out of their window manager. They care about what allows them to get their work done. If their IT department mandates a switch from windows to Linux, I say KDE all the way, because they can get their work done quickly. It looks the same. It feels the same. And it was a lot easier to install than E was before RedHat 6.
As for Rasterman's comments with regards to Redhat. I believe these were extremely unprofessional. I think a simple "creative differences" would have sufficed. But saying that the company stifled your creative energies, etc, etc is a bit more than is needed. All it did was fuel the anti-redhat war.
Despite what the linux community at large appears to believe, not everyone has time to learn a new OS, a new way of thinking. Thay are not there because of the power of Emacs and grep, they are there because it does not crash. They are there because they can get their work done. IT people like it for remote admining, plus probably the power of the utils. I can vouch for this because I am an IT person, I tried to get a group of windows user to switch, and I knew that they woudl never have time to learn everything. They would rather spend the extra 3 minutes rebooting into something they knew rather than spend an extra 5 learning how to do email, then an extra 5 learnign how to start a command line app, then learn how to tar.
I know that learning is good (I spent the last year and a half learning linux as much as I could). I know that there are philosophical and ethical reasons for using linux. I don't care about those. I care that it is free (as in beer). I think it is neat that it is free (as in speech). I care that it works, and that the community in general cares more about quality than features. That's why I will use it. And I will keep using distributions that are easy to use.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I don't get this; the RedHat default GNOME desktop is fairly Windows-like, too, but you don't judge it based on the default, right?
KDE has theme support through kdethememgr, with MacOS (even uses a global menubar if you like for KDE apps), Drawing Board, and many other cool themes. Theme support will get even better in the future, with the introduction of Qt 2.0.
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
uhm, E fast? since when
last time i check it hoged like a hell
and who said that 486s are obsolete,
i have four 486 servers and they have really nice
uptimes....
Let's put it this way, Miguel:
/.?
If Matthias giving his opinion in kde-devel is the same as you giving your "opinion" in the BBC, then me, blowing my nose in my bedroom, is the same as a nuclear test in Nevada.
You really think you got a hard time in
Honestly?
I really like wm2, but its programmed in C++ which most gnome hackers wont touch with a bargepole.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I dunno. I thought under the circumstances he was pretty restrained. Most of the letter is devoted to explaining the future of Enlightenment.
He doesn't want to be part of a company that treats it's users as chattel. He even suggests that you don't switch distributions...what more can you say? The only option I can see that you'd be happy with is to not say anything critical - might be fine with you but not everyone is willing to roll over and play dead.
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
coulda saved himself a bit of trouble
if he'd checked out their culture before
he joined up.
dont you think?
--
Everyone airs their dirty laundry a little too much... ESR vs. RMS, Bruce Perens vs. Everybody, JWZ vs. AOL/Netscape. Grow up people
If my memory serves me correctly, it was Raster that kicked off this themeable look to X that's so prevalent now. He decided to push X to the limit and beyond and from that has come a great deal of cool looking apps. For that he deserves credit. Lots of it. But I must admit that his letter makes me think of a kid stamping his feet all over the flowerbeds just because he can't get his own way. Mind you, we all have to vent our frustration's sometimes, and not all of us are saints when doing it. Certainly not me. I wish him luck for the future and hope that his little outburst won't cause him problems.
Raster,
When you get out to San Francisco, check in at Linuxcare. (650 Townsend, corner of Townsend & 8th, third floor of the Sega building) We'll get you set up with all the local folks, and perhaps we have some mutual interests? In any event we would be pleased to offer you an internet connection and whatever resources you might need to find a place, a shower, and all the arrival basics.
Take care, Art...
I thought that under the GPL, any modifications you made also had to be GPL. The only way to actually change the liscensing was if ALL the copywrite holders agreed on changing the liscense. And I would think there have been many people who have written parts of E here and there (thought I could be wrong).
I thought I heard that E was slowly going to become the default window manager for RedHat. I guess this isn't true now, but what happened? Or was this just a rumor I heard somewhere.
If you keep saying it you will eventually believe it and then it will come through. The Linux community will change as it grows, but GNOME KDE and all the other projects can coexist. Look how GNU and Linux combine nicely, despite differences in opinions. Such disagreements are to be expected, but they are not the end of the world. As long as the ideal is bigger than the differences we are okay.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
1) Matthias was not suggesting anyone abandoned AbiWord, he was suggesting that perhaps it was smarter to spend effort on KWord than on porting AbiWord to KDE. (this is what happens when you quote out of context).
2) You are obviously a happy gnumeric user. Can you say with a straight face that it is "full featured", as it is mentioned in some GNOME press releases?
3) Filters: if you want Excel filters, use SIAG, which is really a full featured spreadsheet, with several versions, including a KDE port.
Could you please enumerate to everyone the instances in which Debian has spent money out of its treasury to keep lawyers on retainer, file for trademarks, or fund advertising?
You're just plain wrong. Money from the Debian treasury has been spent on things like domain name registration fees (and the annual renewal rate).
If you're referring to the Open Source trademark issue, as I recall Bruce Perens paid for that out of his own pocket (but in the name of SPI), which is one reason he claimed he had the right to transfer it to Eric Raymond without SPI's approval. Now that Bruce and Eric have parted ways, however, I don't know if that reasoning has changed. But that's beside the point.
Debian money doesn't pay for lawyers or advertising. If we spent our money on things like that we'd be broke in a week.
As far as the criticisms about "politics" go, this is just a consequence of the fact that 99% of ALL Debian discussions are carried on in the open, on public, archived mailing lists. Debian does not have a dictator, a CEO or a staff of suits to tell us when to jump or how high. The body of developers is self-governing in a way that no commercial distribution can ever hope to be. Technical and political decisions alike are thrashed out in vigorous debate. Corporate boardrooms have closed doors; ours are wide open (except for sensitive issues like security bulletins that are sent to us and which we are asked not to publicize until a certain date).
Those who are interested may want to read the Debian Constitution. This is our alternative to "do this or we're going to have to let you go." If people want to join our VOLUNTEER project and be dictated to, that's fine, but most of us want a voice, and want to participate in guiding the Project to which we belong. Employees become shareholders in the corporations for which they work for similar reasons. If you think Red Hat is less "political" than Debian, you simply haven't been reading the news.
-- Branden Robinson, Debian Developer
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
I use JB at home but can't at work. Refreshing the main page at home takes about 5 seconds via 56K. At work: often well over 10 seconds via T1.
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
I think this is the best move for E in months. I was happy to see Raster join RH last year, but seeing as how things have transposed with RH, it is probably for the best. I don't like GNOME. Never did, and probably never will. Sorry, start the flaming. It brings me great joy to see that raster has made this move. Now, I may actually pick up theme development again and start using E (again) I have moved to KDE in the interim.
:-)
Side note about the comments concerning usability and the such:
1. E is STILL in development.
2. raster never claimed he wanted a "User Friendly" WM. Just one that is pleasing to the user and customisable.
3. Good luck raster, let us know where you end up
http://wrexallen.blogspot.com/
I use enlightenment as my standard window manager, i'm not into flash and flair (I use tigert's ShinyMetal theme). TigerT is an outstanding artist, he should make a poster of of that hot air balloon gimp thing, I'd buy it. Anyways, I use E, becuse it's the fastest W i've come across on my hardware K6-2 350mhz/8mb ATI video. Yes, even faster than Blackbox on screen renderings (due to caching i assume). Sure it uses a little more memory, but you get a lot more, too. It's unfortunate that E can't seem to escape its bad fvwm-xpm days image. I recently demo'd my E system at a local Linux user group, and the two most common comments i got were 1) how fast it was, and 2) How nice it looked. E can be as easy to use, or as complicated as you wish to make it. To say its not worthy, because it doesnt run well on a 486, is unfair, no modern M$ OS runs decently on a 486. 486 is nearing obsolescence. for today's standard PII system, it works fine, its completely configurable, fast and flexible. Good luck to you, raster, keep up the good work (there's some of us who use E for work AND play). And christ, man, take some english classes, your spelling is still as horrible as ever ;)
When dating, you don't speak ill of your former girlfriends. The new prospective girlfriend would otherwise get very suspicious.
I's the same with employers. Try to use a positive terms as much as possible.
Anyhow after a few years you will forget the anger and remember the fun part and it's nice to be able to pay them a visit and talk about the good old times.
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
There is no entry on his page that he is leaving RedHat. However, he DOES say that he is moving to California:
So, we know for sure that he is leaving North Carolina, but not that he is quitting RedHat. Can anyone verify more than this? Was his post signed?Linux isn't about marketing and making $, Linux is about what we want it to be.
Red Hat != Linux. Red Hat == Linux distribution
Of course Red Hat is in the business of productizing Linux in a form that people, generally unwashed masses, will actually use. We can all dream on about why Linux suddenly is so visible in the trade press (my theory is hypercaustic chihuahuas yapping at the top of their lungs on certain news groups). That doesn't preclude the need for someone to step up to the plate, define a distro, provide support for it (not everyone out there is a coder, BTW), forge alliances with distribution channels, pry it into new markets, etc.
As for Rasterman's "integrity" and the "authenticity" spooge, get real. Yes, one would like to keep one's self intact, but sometimes one has to sell out temporarily to acheive another goal. Permanently selling out is a bad thing, but to change a couple of songs to please the corporate mavens (in another message) isn't a bad thing. It's part of a give and take -- if one isn't a good negotiator and can't assert oneself to keep a couple of the unchanged songs, one deserves to be road-kill.
-scooter
I met Carsten once, at the 1998 Linux Expo (and what a blast that was). He struck me as a highly creative mind, with a desire to create software that is innovative above all else.
RH, it seems, wants to target the mainstream user. Simplicity is their goal.
Both are great goals. But these are divergent goals. it is sad to hear of the sniping and infighting in RH. But, perhaps, this is more proof the the Linux Revolution (tm) is in full swing. This simple software can be stretched into countless directions. In essence, this CAN be a good thing for us all.
Good luck, Raster. I will keep your RH business card as a collector's item.
JL Culp
I agree about the default window manager for Redhat being lame. I don't know what Redhat is thinking using that 95 look-alike. I stopped showing it to people because everyone laughed at it and thought it was lame. I wish Redhat would get away from it. If I want my desktop to look like 95, I'll use win95. I can barely stand KDE because it is too similar to 95.
I think this may be what Raster needs to be able to work in an environment conducive to his sort of 'maverick' creativity. As for the future of E and Gnome, I like them both and use them together. My only complaint is stuck with having two 'control panels' and two themes. I think Raster's track record for creating intuitive and eye-catching tools tells us that his panel, etc., will be awesome. I can't wait. Good luck, Raster, and welcome to the left coast.
Mandrake said he does not presently have a job. :)
And as far as most of you should be concerned, raster has said of GNOME-vs-KDE
"I wish people would quit fighting and start coding."
Quit wasting your breath, people, and get a life. Start making your own stuff, most of this chatter is useless. Find a better way to waste breath
You can install debian packages on any machine with tar, gzip, and ar. No dpkg is needed. Try 'ar x file.deb' sometime.
My palmtop is a 486. I care it runs stuff well. It doesn't run E too well, which I don't care about and imlib is awful on it, although better since I bitched at Raster.
The 20 seconds delay on a 486SX caused by imlib poor coding is a 4 second delay on a pentium 166 which for 10 gnome apps starting is a lot of CPU time.
People who write unjustifiably unoptimised code are not good programmers. People who write inconsistent guis are not the greatest gui designers.
There is a lot of E code that is justifiably CPU intensive. It isnt rasters fault shape extension in X11 is heavy nor that transparent window moves while they look beautiful are CPU heavy. Imlib on the other hand I don't like codewise. I use it cos it works. (That being qualification #1 for good software 8)).
Another way to think of it for the more religious warfare inclined - imlib is why KDE is a lot faster than gnome on an 8bit display lower end machine.
Instead of a hundred incompatible configuration file formats, Linux apps should start using XML. It allows simple, flat configurations, hierarchical ones, piecewise inclusion, etc.
Parser support is "free" in all major programming languages. No more parser writing. Backwards compatibility is pretty easy. Just use XML!
Why pay $40 for RH6 with no support? It seems like it would be more helpful to order a RH6 CD from CheapBytes for $2 and donate $40 to Debian on the same credit card order.
Personally, I just downloaded Slackware 4 last week, though.
Prospective employers don't like to hear that you were rude about your previous employers in public, since they worry it'll be them next. I might decide to do it anyway if my employers were serving grated baby for lunch, but not because I didn't like the way they wrote code.
I'm sure that Rasterman won't be unemployed for long anyway, but there's the tip.
--
Xenu loves you!
Except Debian, Red Hat is still ethically the best distribution. SuSE and Caldera do the completely proprietary dance.
If you don't like the $80 price tag, buy the $40 version without support. They were just diversifing their product range; not raising prices. $80 RH6 has better support than 5.2, and costs more. $40 RH6 has no support, but costs less.
Fred Brooks
The Mythical Man-month
Federico, I would also like to apologize to you since I started this ill-conceived thread. The article made you comments out to be nasty, and I should have assumed that they were taken out of context.
-ShieldWolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
HERE is a clip of the screenshot from the RedHat site. Big as life and twice as ugly!
File size: 185k
And HERE is a full screenshot (albeit on a crappy WinDOS based browser.
File size: 220k
I know this really isn't gainful to the discussion. It's just funny, in a perverse sort of way. And it's a lot more constructive than the "Don't let the door hit you in the @$$ on the way out Raster!" garbage that some people have been spewing.
I wish both Raster and RedHat continuing good fortune. I just hope RH will at least retain E as an option.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Enlightenment is a window manager; it handles how your screen looks, i.e. the shape of windows, maybe your pager (the thing that allows you to choose your virtual screen), and so on.
Gnome is a graphical user environment; it is supposed to provide a unified interface for programs.
To put it simply (an oversimplification, I know), Enlightenment handles things outside your windows; Gnome handles things inside.
Of course, some window managers have elements of a graphical user environment, and KDE includes a window manager (kwm) itself. However, you should think of the WM and GUE as being two different things.
For all it's worth, I distinctly remember reading about Redhat opening a satellite branch in California. It would make a lot of sense for him to be moving out west to work in the new Redhat office. Then again, he might really be leaving redhat, but if this is the case I would imagine he would say something about it directly, and before he just packs up and leaves.
Or are you just talk?
There are toolkit abstraction layers -
wxWindows for example. But few people use them,
for the same reason people didn't like the
old Java AWT. You get a bad "least common
denominator" effect and a performance/space
hit.
Most cross-platform apps take a different approach; look at Mozilla and AbiWord.
Miguel also has his own company http://www.gnome-support.com/
Thank you for telling me that. I will now uninstall it from my machine (where various iterations of E have been running for almost 2 years now) and then delete all the code I wrote while using this Window Manager. I guess I'm just an idiot for realizing that my desktop can either look good or be useful but not both.
Don't degrade others who may be just as professional and who do "real work", yet who also will take the time to set up something that is competely customized to their tastes.
To all the people out there who say E is slow/memory intensive/blah blah blah, I am running E right now on my desktop (nice fast PII) and my oooolllldddd Pentium 90 (two digits!!!) with 16 megs of RAM. The latest versions of E have run quite smoothly on the laptop, since I mostly use it for troubleshooting on client sites and the occasional burst of creativity. On top of that, I also use the same theme as on my desktop, just not with all the fancy bells-and-whistles like opaque window move and Eterm transparency. But it still looks mighty nice and is very useful. By the way, it is not E that is the memory pig, it is all of the little Gnome programs that run in the background. Not only does each one eat memory, they all swell X to monumental proportions.
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
This is reasonably simple given a good OO architecture
Basically, you just take the interface for the entire scrollbar, subclass it, and then change (override) the routines that handle the actual positioning of buttons -- applications drawing the scrollbars are non the wiser. (Remember that the container will get size etc. attributes from the scrollbar, allocate screen space, and then pass any redrawing of the area taken by the widget to the widget (which then handles the drawing and mouse captuting on its 'turf' from then on))
The problem with GTK themes is the lack of a decent OO framework (p.s. OO UI programming in C is never a good idea if you can avoid it -- C++ is not really suitable, but you can get by with it (it should be though of as the absolute bottom line choice for an OO language -- anything worse should not be used for OOP)
John_Chalisque
Redhat's vision definitely makes sense from
a business point-of-view. I never even got why
Redhat promoted E so much before when it is
supposed to be for 'advanced' users, e.g. theming
not simple.
Though on the other hand, after using MS Office97
to view some document in school today I have to
say that Microsoft can't design GUIs for life.
Red Hat is in the middle of a conversion from a small, tightly-integrated company with a strong shared vision of its beliefs and values, to a larger firm, a notable industry player, with dissenting versions of what its vision should be.
No doubt there are people at Red Hat who think that producing a Windows-clone user interface is the best way to going beyond the early adopters and penetrating the majority market. No doubt there are also people at Red Hat who think that the whole point of the exercise has been to build something different from Microsoft's offerings and that if you're just going to turn the product into a Windows-clone, why bother? No doubt there are even people at Red Hat who don't care a great deal about these issues, and just want to do their job and pick up a paycheck.
This is normal.
I'm not saying that I agree with everything Red Hat is doing; in fact, I have had serious issues with Red Hat for a couple years now. But this item is not one of them. We can only expect to hear more and more dissent from inside Red Hat, and this is good--it means they are maintaining transparency. We as users and customers want to know what's going on inside the company, and that means sometimes we will see some dirty laundry aired. Let's try to be mature about it.
-Graham
Do both of you just believe in the "my distribution does this type of package management, thus it must be right". Personally I chose the method of package management (encap - http://encap.cso.uiuc.edu) first, then chose and/or contructed the system to match.
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
How many times has this tired tale played out? The oss coder doesn't like the philosophy of the people he's working for, so rather than try and iron out their differences, he simply leaves. It is no wonder that oss is still second rate in many areas- too often do coders just have fits and go and start their own new versions of a program. If oss coders spent half the energy on actually getting decent stuff written that they did having tantrums about doing it, then we might be in business. Until then, the cold laughter of Redmont will be our only reward.
"...than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
RPM's are not supposed to be installed with the --nodeps argument unless you really know what you are doing. The fact that you do so without knowing what you're missing on your system tells me you have an unfulfilled dependency requirement on your system, and I would blame the missing library for all the faults and instabilities you encounter.
Furthermore, I'm not sure Miguel's "slagging off KDE" was as detrimental as everyone made a fuss about... the problem with KDE's language-dependence is, to some programmers, a serious problem, and I see that to address it, someone has started writing a few other language bindings (was it python I saw on freshmeat the other day?). Clearly someone else agrees with him. If no one had written these bindings, history may have proven Miguel correct.
I'm convinced that the problem within the linux community is not the infighting, slagging, or discord but with knee-jerk reaction posts to stories like this that blow up disagreements into huge flamefests and hate-mongering. It's like FUD, but instead of against software, it's against humans.
My advice to circumvent the whole problem: GROW UP!
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
...it does matter. The owner of the copyright decides the license.
Example: Let's say RH owns E. Right now E is under the GPL so no big deal. Then RH becomes evil AND has a good idea for a new killer feature for E. They add the feature and re-release E binary only. They can do this because they are the copyright owner. If they were just a licensee then Evil RH is no problem. You can see how this would suck.
In the case of kernel code (particularly from you) it's a little different. First, I believe you contract to RH, do you not? Unless you signed something saying RH owns the code you write they probably don't--you aren't an employee, you are a separate company (although this would be worth looking into). Furthermore, even if they did own the stuff you write/wrote, it's only a small fraction of the total kernel (no offense). With E, we are talking about the whole ball of wax.
Now that I think about it, this is a good reason to worry about any company that collects kernel developers like action figures. If they get enough of them they can release non-GPL'd Linux code...
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
Miguel and the control of Gnome all reside outside of the Red Hat world. Miguel works for unam, who afaik don't have anything to do with E development or have an official policy on it.
Alan
Gnome has as much a place as KDE.
...), and have confidence that the apps they create will work (integrate with other aps) irrespective of what desktop environment (or window manager) their users choose.
Agreed to a certain extent.
I think choice is a good thing, and I would like Linux developers to be able to choose which set of development libraries they use (GNOME libs or KDE libs or
On the other hand (in my opinion) KDE has earnt a place as a usable desktop while GNOME has not (yet), primarily due to the premature GNOME 1.0 annoucement.
The competition between them has made both _much_ better in spite of the childish jabs from either side. Miguel can sometimes overdo the advocacy, but I have also heard (at second hand, admittedly) hair-raising flame-bait from core KDE developers as well.
I agree that the competition has been good. However you seem to be implying that core KDE developers have engaged in a similar level of GNOME bashing as Miguel has in KDE bashing. This is simply not true.
Miguel has repeatedly made derogatory comments about the KDE project in public (official) annoucements. (and in doing so has done a disservice to other GNOME developers that wish to cooperate with KDE)
I challenge you to show me one single public KDE annoucement that makes even a single derogatory comment about the GNOME project.
As far as informal KDE discussions go, yes I have seen anti-GNOME sentiments expressed, (not by KDE core developers though). But so what? The official KDE project policy seems to me to be one of co-operation and friendly competition.
Furthermore I believe this is an honest policy and reflects the true feelings of kde-developers, core or otherwise.
Er, so do I and I'd say he's right.
/= ignorance
different opinion
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
There's a fine line to be drawn when discussing other "rival" projects. According to the quote's URL, Matthias was writing to the KDE developers list. In this context there is an argument that this is a personal opinion to a fellow developer, possibly backed up by fact.
Has anyone compared the functionality of Gnumeric/Abiword and Koffice? Are Abiword and Gnumeric overhyped? Possibly, when compared to the underhyped Koffice. Can Kword do twice as much as Abiword? Dunno, it's not something you can comment on unless you've compared both. Is Kword a nice design, more powerful and object oriented? Again, not something you can say unless you compare both.
If the same comments were used in a public forum such as an online news site, slashdot article etc, then it could be interpreted as being FUD. In this case, I would take it as a strongly worded (in part) opinion on a mailing list not meant for public consumption.
Julian
Well, it _did_ crash for me the last time I tried. But I only blame software for crashing when it's version number is above 1.0. You get what you deserve when you try a version DR0.15 ;).
I'm using KDE here, and it's rock stable. If only Qt would suck less...
It's about preserving freedom for users; software licensed to its under the terms of the GPL is very useful to me. Perhaps you'd rather take other peoples' code and "integrate" it into your own projects, the results of which you will not allow other users to use freely. Fine--just don't do it with my code. If I'm sharing my code, I expect you to share derivative works. The restrictions the GPL puts on the use of the software are intended to keep it free for future users, and I agree with the motives behind Stallman's license. You don't have to use my software. Trust me, I won't be up late at night worrying that you're using Microsoft Word.
A truly free license consists of two words: public domain. Releasing all owner rights to a work of software might make it truly free, but it provides me little motivation to see any of my software succeed. I have no idea where it might have gone, what it might now be called, or under whose name it is currently "authored." It's as if I never even wrote it, except someone else might be using it (maybe not).
Computers are amazing tools; I'd like to share what I can do with them with anyone else who wants to learn, but occasionally I'd also appreciate other peoples' contributions. Considering the ocean of free software out there now I've still got to write a lot of free software to catch up.
I personally like the idea of every wm having it's own desktop enviroment(e.g. Windowmaker/GNUstep, Kwm/KDE, ?wm/GNOME, and Enlightenment/Enlightened Shell). But I really wish they were toolkit independent. Does any one know if it would be possible(read: feasible) to make an abstraction layer for toolkits?
I've always been a huge gtk fan(at least from the development point of view) but i truly depise GNOME. Does any one know how much of the DND is in the toolkits as opposed to in the de's?
d00d
If that was really his letter to the net it was rather sad. Bitterness is pretty lame.
Hope he has a nice drive, but I hope at the end he decides to be a bit less vindictive to the people he works with.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Hee hee...
:) But that's
Raster and the debian maintainers tend to wear
each other raw rather quickly
usually just debian policy and raster's way
of thinkings brushing against each other...
bma
former E maintainer for Debian
--
Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org/
This cannot happen. If Redhat or anyone else added a "killer feature" to a GPL package then it too must be released as GPL.
The GPL was explicitly designed to prevent that sort of abuse.
This is why I find all the anti-Redhat paranoia so amusing - even if they wanted to become a MS, the can't. They are prevented by the GPL.
...then again the same could be said for the KDE project...
I'm not sure why there's always been an anti-biz slant to just about every one of these divorces. Sometimes, and I've been there and done that, one has to do code which productizes software.
Overall, I think RH is on the right track to making Linux (or broadly, Unix, since most Linux apps will run on other x86 Unix platforms) usable for the masses. Yes, it means "selling out" to "the corporates" -- but it's not selling out, per se. The reason why mediocrity has 90% of the users out there is because it has an incredible marketing machine (and really crafty contract writers.) Part of the RH strategy is to give the ordinary (dare I say, mediocre?) users something they're familiar with... and then be completely subversive by introducing changes that get them on the road to something more useful (UI-wise, application-wise, etc.)
While I appreciate and try to code to perfection too, there's a point at which the code has to be released and shipped. Usually companies have two sets of coders: one which creates the features and the "cool stuff" and another set which productizes. It seems to me that RHAD combined the two, pissed off one of their developers, and now we all get to hear about the bad blood.
Personally, I hope there's an opening when I finish this degree at RHAD. The important lesson is to choke down one's ego when it's appropriate.
-scooter
Wow. All anyone needs to do to attack the professionalism of the Open Source Software movement is quote a bit of the crap that RHAD people make public. Between Miguel and Raster, they would make any suit afraid to put their company in the hands of such prima-donna crybabies.
These little diatribes also have a great way of ending one's career. Advice for Raster: Keep your mouth shut on the way out. It's enough that you've escaped. Don't burn any bridges.
Regarding the 'freedom' of Qt, may I point you to my other post, as I've followed the licensing discussions for quite a while.
It's here.
This is kind of funny, actually.
;-)
First, I did post as djb@redhat.com. Upon taking a peek at responses I decided it was time to change my default profile to point at donniebarnes.com. What I didn't realize was that slashdot pulls this info from it's user profile database NO MATTER WHAT, and thus I basically changed it for EVERY article I've posted, no matter how old (it would seem).
I never intended to change the address or URL of my post about raster. I intended to change it for future posts. Be that as it may, what's the difference? If you'll check my home page on donniebarnes.com you'll find that I claim to work for Red Hat on the "about me" page.
I've been here for four years now, though, and I guess I wrongly just assume people know who I am.
Oh, and no, I don't post using that address so that it is "less official", as one of my defenders stated. I post from there because I'm vain.
And yes, it is VERY ironic that a flamer on this topic would post as Anonymous Coward. To each his own, I guess.
--Donnie
You really need a clue.
Let me clue you in:
1. AbiWord is written in C++. OH SHOCK!
2. The fact that he does not talk to the press
is completely irrelevant. Slashdot posters
have made it clear that speaking your opinion
is a capital sin. Or is it just a sin for me?
Miguel.
No, not at all because:
a) I don't mind GNOME having a private mailing list at all. (I do mind Miguel showing double standards, though)
b) I have never trolled a GNOME IRC channel (much less done that for two whole weeks)
Miguel:
You're a dude for taking this kind of crap and turning it around in a civil and professional manner.
I'm not a Gnome user, I actually prefer KDE+Caldera GNU/Linux, but your attitude should be a model we could all afford more in this virtual pack of loud mouths.
Best of luck with your future work, and thank you for your present contributions.
flames > dev/null
Raster is right about adding more GUI shell capabilities to E. There are people who want to have a nice looking, functional, fast and easy to use windowing enviroment, but at the same time they don't want all the bloat and useless features of things like GNOME.
Don't get me wrong. I myself use WindowMaker 0.53 . It is reaching the shell stage Raster is talking about. It has app dock, 2 GUI configuration programs, themes, nice looking, fast , drag n' drop, etc (though, the file manager is not there yet). I have downloaded, installed, and deleted GNOME and KDE many times. Deleted GNOME mainly for instability and KDE 1.1 because I don't see why should I need all those features.
In GNOME and KDE it is easy to configure things like menu, background or the dock, but you can do so in Window Maker for example very easily as well. And the rest of KDE/GNOME deatures only add bloat.
I use gvim/vim instead of their pussy text editors, epic instead of xchat, xterm (with nexaw3d) instead of kterm or gnome term, pine/tin instead balsa, kmail, etc. Overall GNOME looks more like a shell for newbies, thats it. I like KDE more, because it has at least a window manager (and very nice), but still I feel that WindowMakert and other window managers already have all features that I need (well, a fast, stable, integrated file manager would be nice too but it is not a necessity for me)
Encap is a very useful tool, and it's partly how my current system is managed. I don't use a "distribution" at home, but I do use Debian at work--it's a mighty fine piece of work. It's great being able to do "apt-get install [package]" and have it done within 5 seconds. Of course things are different at home where I don't have a T1; most all my software gets installed by way of EGCS, GNU make, and cp.
It's about time I re-install at home anyway, and it will most definitely be a distribution a friend has been packaging for the last few months. It's up-to-date, complete, and I know the packaging system well (Encap is your friend) enough to do any installation or removal myself, cleanly, and easily.
'Tain't really code per se. It's more or less just what Red Hat does, only with a very different 'style'. It's just a Window Maker-managed Linux with pretty much all the GUI config tools taken out (no tcl/tk, no gtk) and a fair amount of console stuff. pico and pilot are added to help deal with the initial learning curve, and I've included _lots_ of hitherto unseen textures for backgrounds and all my linux graphics and desktops- I need to clear the lots-of-textures as they are 'harvested' from another program's output. I may or may not come up with cool scripts, but I am in the process of taking basically the package list from the install and _annotating_ it- should prove to be interesting reading, and contains _lots_ of critical information, such as information about how, when you run 'at' and drop into the subshell, in order to finish and return to the interactive shell, you _must_ type control-D in order to close the subshell- nothing else will help- plus fun stuff like a review of bc leading the hapless newbie through 256+256, then 256*256, then 256^256 (whereupon newbie boggles and jaw drops), then for fun it's suggested to try 1024^1024 :) :)
Well, anyway- maybe that bit will be the most useful one! DOCUMENTATION! It's from a relentlessly text-oriented viewpoint, but this is all stuff pretty much everybody has, just maybe isn't using- and that's just not right. Though some of it, well... I have to admit I get a bit satirical about stuff like awk
Yes, it's just awful how I am too helpless to reset my filter to view all comments- jeez, start your own friggin site if you don't like this one and quit whining for God's sake.
It's better to spend money like there's no tomorrow, than spend tonight like there's no money -P. J. O'Rourke
This could leave the Linux community up in the air for a while to start arguments, etc.
Perhaps all of this is true, but it could also be a product a well know anti-Linux company.
Why do you think that this is the truth? This is one persons view of things. How much did raster have to do with GNOME? The only think I see is his window manager specs. He most likely did not work well in the RHAD environment because it came time to get some real work done - i.e. - Red Hat Linux 6.0 needed to have a good desktop. raster has never worried about deadlines or backwards compatibility. Just look at how many times theme creaters have to rewrite their themes because of config file format changes.
Furthermore, Red Hat is doing the furthest thing from making a Windows clone. It may be true that they made the Clean theme - the most Windows looking theme - the default in Red Hat Linux 6.0. That decision HARDLY makes Red Hat Linux a windows clone.
Just by saying "unlike GNOME I won't make a vaporware publicity stunt out of it" you've done just that - in saying these things about your co-workers - your colleagues - it shows that raster just didn't fit in. It seems that he had his own agenda and just wasn't a team player in the labs.
> I know I'd be pissed if a fellow employee wrote that my code was unreadable
I want them to. And I do the same to them. One of the best ways to learn is from other people. If someone has a criticism of your work, then you should listen. Even if you end up not doing anything as a result, the exchange of ideas is always useful.
Some things just have to be moderated down.
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
If they are just used as extension languages, they don't count as having "KDE Bindings"
--
Guess what? You can use RPMs with more than just RedHat, so I guess the question here is, do you know what .rpm files are? "Had you done your research," you might accidentally discover that use can use RPMs with just about any distribution of Linux, INCLUDING your precious Debian. Additionally, why would you feel the need to attack someone with your "reply", instead of just posting helpful advice, if you had any? Oh, btw, why on earth would people not do something an easier way that would take less time "just because they're afraid of being called lazy"? Maybe next time you should think out your reply before submitting it...
-w00p
Alan writes:
> But to a lot of people the fact that all buttons > behave the same way is a feature they like.
I've found places where E doesn't do what I expect, but I thought that it was so configurable that all its buttons *could* be made to behave in exactly the way one would want, if they didn't already.
Is this not so? (Examples please.)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Red Hat wants to bring Linux to the masses. Raster wants to write really cool code. These are both worthy goals, and they often overlap; but often they don't, such as when the masses want something boring.
So it makes sense for Raster to go his own way, and I don't think it's a disaster or a tragedy or a commentary on free software development; he and the company just didn't fit together well, that's all. He's variably sized and curvy, Red Hat is 64x64 and square.
People change jobs. It happens. Often it's good.
Alan
who prefers his windows rectangular and opaque, but still appreciates Raster's work
Oh, oops, you never have.
I thought that "COMMY" hating type of thing went away after the cold war.. Guess I'm wrong.
If Rasterman wan't to work for now pay, and do the community a great deal of good, thats fine with me, and that kind of work deserves respect. If it wasn't for people like Rasterman the open source community wouldn't have been where it is today..
And as for you my friend, of course you shouldn't work for 16 hours and let you're kids starve! But if Rasterman wan't to do that (I bet ya he doesn't have kids to take care of). Thats great!
Posted by Federico Mena-Quintero:
I think you are referring to an article about RHAD Labs that appeared some months ago in the News and Observer (a local paper). It was me who made similar, but not quite the same comments.
Let me tell you the little story. The day before the interview I had spent an unfruitful afternoon trying to write a configuration file for Enlightenment, to make a theme. Mind you, I did not succeed. So the next day I was rambling about how unreadable Enlightenment's configuration files are. I was especially untactful against the Enlightenment configuration parser.
So on the next day there came this reporter to interview the RHAD Labs crowd, and he asked me what I was rambling about. I told him, and somehow he managed to mangle it into text that said that I hated Raster's code and that Enlightenment was a bad program. I don't think I said that. I said that I did not like the way it parses configuration files. I apologize to Raster if I was harsh.
I have offered Raster to write a real parser for his Enlightenment configuration files. I think it is important for the window manager such as Enlightenment to have an easy way to create themes. A configuration file with better organization than what there is now would be good. A GUI tool to do it would be even better.
Again, I am sorry. I have learned the hard way that the press likes to mangle one's thoughts to create "interesting" press about a non-existent conflict.
As Miguel said, the thing that we *do* want to replace is Imlib. Imlib's memory management is rather poor, and as such GNOME applications cannot be as efficient as they could be with respect to image loading and caching. Imlib was designed for Enlightenment's particular needs and as a libXpm replacement.
I hope this clears things up. I apologize to Raster if that newspaper article implied offensive things. And I wish him the best of luck in California, where you can find nice civilized cities.
Federico
>... slow as a dog and a memory pig. It's wonderful for >students,teenagers, and other idle hands, but not much of a solution >for doingreal work. As such, I'm glad to see it's influence leave RedHat.
You got it. The fact that it looks like 99% of Enlightenment supporters tend to hang out on IRC should tell you something about it right there. It's something for the "wannabe set" to play with. I got tired of this kind of stuff during my Amiga days real fast. Sure it's fun to play with for about a month or two, but then it gets old real fast.
Let's get ethical, Olivia! I work for AbiSource, I write code. I built KOffice (QT and the entire KOffice sources) in late 1998. Some programs worked, I didn't bother running others. It looked like a good collection of software, but I'm sure lots has happened since, right?
When I compiled QT, Trolltech was moving to a "free" license which ultimately turned out to be "not quite free" (the same way Velveeta is not quite cheese). I've since never needed the QT libraries, so I don't use them.
But my original argument has nothing to do with why I'm not using QT. It has to do with the characterization of the KDE developers as generous and benevolent. They might be very nice people in real life and very talented programmers too; maybe someone else writes their e-mail?
I would love to be more specific about the version of KWord I compiled, but I haven't needed a Frame Maker style word processor, so the version (or was it a date-based snapshot?) is not very fresh in my memory.
Now, you said you tried compiling AbiWord 0.7, but you had problems. Were you using the native Solaris make, or GNU make? Solaris SunPro C++ or gcc? The Solaris makefiles work on our end, please submit a bug report or just mail me if you're having problems. It's very hard to fix problems when they're not reported.
I have used both KWord and AbiWord, but of uncomparable versions, so I've made no claims as to how they compare. You, on the other hand, claim to somehow know that "what he says of KWord and Abiword is actually true." Please tell me how you know this.
>Them releasing version 1.0 prematurly mabey?
and just during [miracle !] one of the largest
Linux conference ?
seb.
--
Memory fault -- brain fried
>Matthias Ettrich wrote: With abiword and gnumeric ...
.1x series and have found it to be extremely stable, have it to have a fairly large feature set for such a young application, and it has the ability to load Excel spreadsheets. Again, not perfect, but it is enough that I don't need to use Excel for the majority of basic spreadsheets at work anymore.
>there are now two overhyped gtk projects that
>both have a far superior counterpart in the KDE
>office suite.
>
>Without wanting to discourage you: Do you really
>think that's worth it? I mean, Abiword right now
>can't do even half of what kword can do! Why
>fiddle around with these over-hyped C-sources
>without functionality, if kword is nicer >designed, more powerful and object-oriented?
Strange, seems to me last time I looked at the Abiword source code it was in C++.
Not to mention that it is not gospel truth that C++ is the end all be all of computer languages. Neither is C, Java, Eiffel, etc, etc.
There are other considerations in the speed of Abiword development, such as cross-toolkit compatibility rather than sticking to only one (QT in the case of KWord.
KWord also does not list on its feature set a Word imported, which is available on AbiWord, though it is not perfect yet.
As for Gnumeric, I've been using it since the
The "over-hyped" comment is completely out of line, as there has been little mainstream coverage of either comment outside the casual mention in articles about each desktop enviorment.
The "far superior" comment is a MATTER OF OPINION, as both have features unique to themselves.
And even these being true would NOT be a reason to abandon two projects which are progressing very nicely and will only lead to more choice in the free software community.
My only hope is that there will be some consensus on file formats, preferably an XML derivative.
In the words of Rasterman: "They [RedHat] don't believe users really count - corporates and 'partners' count and what they percieve as the 'business world that wants an exact windows clone' counts."
Is it just me, or is something wrong with this picture?
------
-----
"Be kind to your local milkman... you have his eyes." -Mother
I pulled out an archive message, the content of which was not exactly crucial to my argument. I'm not quite sure what you're saying; "Matthias is just a developer...he is not humble about his code...", but the point of the message I replied to was that the entire KDE team is a group of cooperative and programmers. I assert anyone with five minutes and a web browser can find megabytes of list traffic that, well, hint otherwise.
And what was the last version of AbiWord you compiled? If you had any problems, did you post to the mailing lists? Did you log any bugs through Bugzilla?
I'd like to give KWord a try, but I use free software these days, and for the same reason I don't put Velveeta on my pizza, QT doesn't quite count.
Welcome to Slashdot, dude. As someone once pointed out, /.'s motto should be changed to "Gossip for nerds. Stuff that matters."
---
You seem to be both indicting and displaying the same behavior.
That's not good.
...yellow number five, yellow number five, yellow number five...
Who pays the packager/distributor $80 for what is free, particularly if it isn't in turn funding the Rastermans of the world? Who'll pay Red Hat to make Linux more like Windows?
.au working in the states), but not the end of the world. redhat labs has been touted as a nivana for oss development in that they get paid (be it below commercial rates). But commercial reality is hitting home here. You could interpret this to mean that RH consider 'e' as a non-essentail component of their distro. Dont forget though that a hell of a lot of the best work has been done by 'volunteers'. living outside the box!but to get to the above statement, who will pay USD$80 for software they can get for free? why business of course! mainstream conservative business instictivley distrusts 'free' (read oss) beacause of mislead perceptions such as reliability, onsite support and a host of other stupid beliefs.
:)
well i must say that rasterman leaving redhat citing differences is sad (nice to see a local lad from
how many times on slashdot have we heard lines like, 'ohh we tell the pointy haired boss that xxxxx (insert yr own os) runs that bit of software, but in reality have installed linux, freeBsd or some other flavour and theres no downtime and i get no complaints'
i was talking to my boss the other day about how redhat jacked their prices up from distro 5.2->6.0 and he said 'good, more business's will probably buy it.' From a business point of view it doesn't seem that free sw is the deciding facot and I'll be buggered if i know why?.from a home-user pov, cost is a factor and this is why oss is gaining a foothold on users desktops.
I'm currently trying to build a really small linux installation for 486es
plz post yr results on slashdot. i reckon myself and others would like to see the results and pilfer their code
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I dunno, it also says that if it were true, he'd have posted it on his website. Whatever the case, perhaps it's time to remind people to use GNU Privacy Guard and -sign- their stuff for confirmability.
This patch 'requirement' has been changed into a 'recommendation', i.e. TrollTech recommends using patches (or CVS). The only requirement is that the new, non-TrollTech code be clearly marked as such.
If this was true that would be great, I'm not saying it's not true but I just reread the QPL 1.0 by following your link (it's pretty simple!) and I see no clause that permits me to redistribute a modified version of the source code, only source code with patches (clause 3).
To be honest I didn't know about clause 4 which allows me to distribute "machine-executable forms of modified versions of the Software" under conditions I find perfectly reasonable. This is what is really important to me.
The QPL is pretty much like the GPL, and the main (or even only) reason why RMS thinks the current QPL is not GPL compatible, is that it doesn't allow 'secret' in-house improvements that aren't distributed outside e.g. a respective company.
I've spent a fair bit of time thinking about this and have come to the same conclusion you have, this is a flaw in the GPL, moreover it's a serious one. I am willing (hopeful!) to here arguments to the contrary.
BTW if what you've said about the patch clause being changed into a recommendation is true then IMHO the QPL is freer than the GPL! (In the sense that it provides greater protection to the software user).
I really would like confirmation about the patch clause being changed into a recommendation.
Back when Raster started working at Redhat I was kinda wondering how it would turn out. I'm not terribly surprised to see the outcome, but a bit disappointed in Redhat. I don't use the distribution myself, but with the price raise to $80 for 6.0 (At the local Best Buy anyway), and Raster's comments here, it really seems like they may be headed towards being exactly what so many of us feared. This isn't to say that Redhat is going to become some kind of dictator, but that thier goals as a business, not just succeeding, but excessively growing, seem to be getting higher priority than than just developing cool software.
;)
I understand that making sure you have a good business model is certainly important, but when any company, or even a group of people, target to have a monopoly on the interface to linux, i.e. what a person sees, when they see it, how they interact with it, that strikes me as being rather scary. This is, imho, why Enlightenment seems such a good concept. Provide the backbone to allow any interface, but do everything behind the scenes. Don't market the default interface as the end all. Actively promote diversity to accomplish the best results. I truely hope in the future that linux doesn't simply become the underlying archetecture to propriatary interfaces. Even with opensourced code, the concept of an end-all interface with it's own agenda can be damaging. Unfortunatly, it appears that this is the road that many companies, (and individuals) desire. Hopefully the most open design in the end will win, and that the people who work for companies investing in linux, will not abuse thier positions.
Ok, I'm off my soapbox now, flame away..
Infact E will be workign to becoming its own desktop shell (I separate Desktop and Desktop Shell here for a reason) in its own right as time moves on - but unlike GNOME I won't make a vaporware publicity stunt out of it until there's something concrete there.
You are my priority - not commerical interests, not political games, not a windows clone, not GNOME, not KDE - users come first.
Too bad it takes an event like this for the truth to come out. Best of Luck, Raster.
...I didn't know that they would try and dictate the direction he would take with it, though. That is not for them to do, being as it's not their software to do it with...
...I think the community is much better off with Raster coding what he likes & bringing his contributions back to the community, and Red Hat either hiring someone to code their GNOME-compliant Win9x-style interface that they want to appeal to the masses...
It's as just as much their software as it is anyone else's, right? Isn't that what open source is? It doesn't matter if someone has done 100% of the coding, if it is released as open source, then anyone can take it and run in any direction they want, isn't that right? I, for one, can understand why they would be interested in the direction of software that they are bundling with their distribution.
You are probably right. No need to work together if you can't reconcile your vision. But that doesn't necessarily mean that one vision is right and another is wrong. Is there something wrong with wanting to develop Linux for the masses? I don't see how that can be labeled as "selling out". From my perspective, "selling out" to the business world is a misleading argument, because the bottom line is that there will be more users sitting in front of a Linux box doing their everyday things and being productive. Freedom of design and creativity are important and everyone needs a voice, but unless that creativity is focused and directed at meeting the needs of the masses, all the visionaires are just a cacophany of voices.
Rubbish. Of course the sole owner of some software can release the software or scraps of it under conditions entire to his liking, regardless of whether he has released them GPLed before. So the ownership does matter for future development when there are no third party copyright holders.
Even the *main* owner can effectively release his GPLed software and other with it under the BSD, if he simply declares that he will not pursue any license violations.
So with GPLed software, the owner does matter a lot. This is different with BSDed software: there is almost nothing that a "malignant" third party would not be allowed to do with the software the same way as the copyright holder: release binary-only, restrict further redistribution, etc. etc.
>As someone once pointed out, /.'s motto should be changed to "Gossip for nerds. Stuff that matters."
:)
And we love slashdot for it!
screw jerry springer. This thread is WAY more entertaining that that..
I use both KDE and GNOME, as the mood stikes me.
and I find KDE-GNOME wars like this immensly entertaining.
Flame on!
> I apologize to Raster if that newspaper
> article implied offensive things. And I wish
> him the best of luck in California, where you
> can find nice civilized cities.
The 17 Jan 99 Raleigh News & Observer article "The Mad Hatters" ( read it here) gives the impression that Raster was not getting along well with the rest of the RHAD team. The author makes a note of Raster's fastidious attire and contrasts it to the more casual dress style of other team members. RHAD team member Jonathan Blandford refers to him as a "rock star." Jonathan and Federico criticize his code. RHAD team leader Michael Fulbright says that he and Raster "[are] kind of at opposite ends in some ways, which is okay..." Raster says of Fulbright "We tend to butt heads a lot. Thank God he's very smart, because he'll at least listen to me.", suggesting that Raster thinks that other team members are not smart and don't listen to him.
Granted, the reporter probably exaggerated, but even still this screams "personality conflict" to me.
I suppose that Gnome hitting 1.0 just before RedHat 6.0 was released was a coincidence? And the fact that RedHat employs Gnome coders gives it no influence over things like release dates?
Regarding your "it was good that we released buggy software as a 1.0 release because that makes it better" argument, are you advocating this as a general policy? Do you fault the KDE people for waiting before the stuff is stable before releasing it? Do you think the 2.2 kernel was released too late, that it would have been better to release it earlier, when it was buggier? Do you admire Microsoft's strategy of releasing buggy stuff, because it makes it better? And do you beleive Microsoft when they say that release dates have nothing to do with marketing considerations? If not, why should we beleive that Gnome releasing buggy software too early had nothing with marketing? Do you think that this strategy helps Linux and Gnome's reputation?
Stephen Molitor steve_molitor@yahoo.com
Ok, now I'm tired and I'm going to sleep. Bye!
So how do you think slashdot would be paid for if it wasnt for the ads? True, Rob&Hemos should spend a little more time on speeding up adfu, but for that they most definitely need the money they get when the ads are read.
Yes, I know - as long as there are people stupid enough not to use junkbuster, you look really smart.
Rasterman's rant is very mature, and very helpful to Linux as well as RedHat users. The world won't fall apart just because someone sounds off in a way which shows that the emperor has no clothes.
It helps for Linux users to see how things can be inside a company which has had a lot of good PR lately and plans on capitalizing on that.
I like the idea of E being clearly separated from Gnome. Both seem to have design flaws and problems with code organization and there is no need for their problems to necessarily compound each other.
Please note posts by both Miguel and Alan Cox on this story. Rasterman's "publicity stunt" for E kicked off here tonight is no worse than RedHat's publicity stunts. He seems to have caught RedHat by surprise and they don't like to be beat at their own game.
However, I don't think this will cost anything to RedHat financially. Big business doesn't care. They percieve RedHat as having a lock on the American Linux market and will proceed accordingly to bet on a winner. It's amazing, thought, the degree to which companies, or rather individuals with investements of time and I guess stock in these companies, react to free speech.
Don't look for Bob Young to make a fool of himself like Alan and Miguel did by posting here tonight.
He's too good a businessman. Nerds can be incredibly stupid about some things.
Thanks, Slashdot, for not bowing to corporate pressure and for carrying this story.
This seem like him .... He is known , for example, to constantly bitch about KDE.
I know this is going to draw in some flack, but BeOS is not gaining in popularity. There is an absolute dirth of people releasing quality products for it.
Now that all of the Amiga users that are going to switch have switched and the project has started to lose it's geek-cool ethos, it will probably sink without trace, like so many other fine OSes.
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
The *press* thing, I don't think that matters as much as you imply.
:-)
I don't appreciate a C++ code lock-in (I like other languages too, you know) or reliance on a widget library from one vendor (where's the choice), but I do appreciate the whole KDE project.
Now that some guys, who write great code, and say mean thing because they are egomaniacs: that is not news and I don't care. I also don't care to hear anyone elses excuses for them (please, if their act like asses sometimes, make them make their own excuses).
I see _no_ reason why there cannot be two, open source, word processing programs with similar (not the same) goals. This thread was full of points that could have been past over (not just missed), in my grand opinion.
But it is only my opinion and I'll thank you for yours anyway. And good day!
...yellow number five, yellow number five, yellow number five...
Dude, I've had RH 6.0 installed for a few weeks now & E has crashed on me at least 25 times. I like the way it looks, but the code that shipped with 6.0 is apparently buggy. Same for GNOME, it's dumped core *almost* as many times as E.
:-)
They are both much prettier than KDE for sure, and I know they'll get more stable as time goes on. It's just a pain to have to wait.
Anyway, Good luck to Raster, I'm sure he'll land on his feet.
-Randy
- Kate
"DNA is life. The rest is just translation."
I challenge anyone who has worked under another person not to say the same
Ok, here goes...
Posted by stodge:
Dont make him out to be the martyr that he isnt
Im honestly very proud of Raster. Not many people I know would quit thier job to stand up for what they believe in or to protect a project from corporate slime.
Personally I look forward to any enhancements Enlightenment can bring to an environment which has grown a bit stale.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
What is everybody talking about?
--
"Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda
How peculiar - to complain about people wanting a "windows clone" and then spend your time working on file managers, "app launchers", and other pointless desktop drivel.
Just think what Linus could have done if he'd had "non square 64x64 dock apps".
First (in response to the original message): GNOME being RHAD's raison d'etre, I doubt that Red Hat will be "jettisoning" it any time soon.
As to GNOME stability: I'm currently running GNOME out of CVS on my home system (P200, Linux) and my work system (SPARC Ultra 10, Solaris 2.5.1). The only stability problems I've had (aside from some problems with the original 1.0 release, and one of the pre-1.0's until I rebuilt the world) were caused by outdated includes and libraries being visible during the build --- you can't safely build GNOME with outdated Gtk+ headers and libraries around, a fact which is fairly well documented.
(I'm not currently running E; I find the default Enlightenment theme to be a bit much, I *like* minimal user interfaces. I currently run a seriously minimalized fvwm2 configuration, but will be borrowing the RH6 E theme as a basis for customization when I have time.)
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
For what it is worth, his post was NOT signed (though none of his prior e-develop posts were, either). Nonetheless the post does exist and I don't personally doubt it.
You got your references wrong Dude.
It was not me trying to rewrite E, probably someone else, but not me. As far as I care, I only care about the application framework and the applications.
The window managers never quite excited me, so I doubt it was me.
The only code I want to rewrite is Imlib, because Imlib 1.xx has serious memory management issues. So we are going to base our new image code in Raph Levien's code.
Hope this clears up your confussion.
Miguel.
Hey,
Try BlackBox again. 5.05 is out and Brad rewrote the rendering code. He claims it is 50% faster, and I tend to believe it after using it.
I can't believe that it won't race past E if speed is your only desire. E is pretty dang cool though...
Cuchullain
"If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -St. Augustine
Interesting commentary indeed.
I wish Raster the best of luck. I'm not sure why he would care to say nasty things about Red Hat, the product, or the people there, though. I don't know anyone at Red Hat who did anything to make Red Hat an unhappy place for him.
Sometimes things just aren't a perfect fit, though, and people have to find that perfect fit. I hope raster finds his. I'm saddened at Red Hat wasn't it.
I also hope that E development continues as it has. I think it's a damned good piece of free software and hope to continue to be able to use it. I also hope it does continue to tie into GNOME nicely. No, it doesn't have to be the GNOME window manager. There can be many. But I like E and I think it fits well.
Anyway, good luck raster.
--Donnie
I'm currently trying to build a really small linux installation for 486es, and I'm getting the files from RH5.1 to do it. The CD originally came from linuxmall as a two-for-one at about $5. Red Hat is probably not the distribution I should be using, but it's the only one we got at the moment, we're real low budget
Anyone who seriously thinks that cloning Windows is strategically vital had better go investigate the Interface Hall of Shame, and the reviews of the Windows Find applet, Explorer, and the common file dialogs. These are faithfully duplicated in environments like KDE (I'm thinking of Explorer in particular, it is _very_ similar), and the agenda to clone Windows will bring more and more of these horrible, appalling errors and awkwardnesses into whichever Linux environment goes that route.
Meanwhile, I'll be messing around with largely text-oriented Window Maker implementations (and figuring out neat things to do with scripts), and Raster will presumably be constantly furthering the limits of wild and ornate window manager interface design, and we can damned well make our _own_ mistakes, thank you: we don't _have_ to make Windows' mistakes as well just to be taken seriously. I'll happily take Raster seriously- he talks like a designer, like someone willing to try something new, or make his own decisions. I hope he takes me seriously but hey, I haven't 'shipped' yet so I have to get results together before I can expect to even be noticed. At any rate, I think it's safe to say that neither of us give a damn for faithfully replicating Windows mistakes out of some misguided notion that it is expected of us
So good luck, and if there's anything I can do to help, Raster, you're welcome to it. Here, it's not much, but I am good with GFX: use any or all of my Linux graphics such as tiles and textures and backgrounds. If I can do more I will, and if my own pursuits help you out I will rejoice, just as I daresay you'd rejoice if yours help out mine.
And if Red Hat does not rejoice to see non-Red-Hat-style implementations being busily developed, if they do not rejoice to see their profitable standardization undercut by people like us, well, fsckem
- if you want windows so badly, Microsoft is happy to sell you it
- cheapbytes. Who pays the packager/distributor $80 for what is free, particularly if it isn't in turn funding the Rastermans of the world? Who'll pay Red Hat to make Linux more like Windows? Not me, I'll tell you. They are just another distribution.
Good luck, Rasterman. Hack on.This is what I've thought for ages. People are constantly trying to cater to newbies by simplifying linux, where 'simplify' means 'make less powerful'. Instead, I think the proper course of action would be to *educate* the newbies on how to take advantage of all the power they have at their fingertips.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
In response to the post above with a reference to Rasterman's website saying it's a hoax, he's referring to something else. If you notice, the date on that post was May 4th. Plus, this letter made no references to what floor he lived on or anything about his girlfriend. So, this is probably a legitimate article.
As I imagine you well know, inflicting X on
someone with less than a pentium is not pretty.
It would be interesting if E could be lined up
as a build in WM system for a non-X system (i.e
run in the displayserver). Sure the theme
programming language needs a complete rewrite
for this purpose, but... (that said, what
I am basically describing is more like Berlin,
though an abstract display architecture sans
CORBA would be nice)
John_Chalisque
It takes infinately more maturity to realise that the situation that you are in is not in your best interests. I wish I had half the courage and integrity as raster has to get up and quit with no open prospects. Keep in mind that there are many other people who will be wiling to hire him based on his talents. When you are hiring a new employee, you have to look at their contributions and performance, not the past falling down that he has.
He said:
'I am so glad to get out of ths creativity-stifling environemnt of RHAD LABS - away from certain people there who see E and its userbase as what I can literally quote them saying a "festering crowd".'
That is hardly a unfounded remark. As he can say, he can literally, quote them, not figuratively. In other words, somebody within redhat has shown raster their true stripes as a corporation, and he feels it no longer has a soul. What is immature about that? and where else does he dog on redhat? Yes, he says they are trying to make an exact copy of windows, and for all intents and purposes, they seem to be doing just that! He speaks more about his move, and his love for E than anything, while spending very little time to be whiny and immature.
Lowmag.net
Then all responsible moderators should "take the pledge" to only moderate up, never down.
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
Hm. I use E on my home system, which runs 24/7, and I can't remember it crashing since version 0.14 or so. And that was a LONG time ago. Maybe if you left your email address you could get someone more knowledgable to help you get things set up properly. Charles
Too lazy to log in? Your such a slacker, but none of the people working with you can be... how typical ;) kyle
I run the CVS version of E as a default window manager here, and I cannot recall a crash yet. The only time it exits on me is when I hit control-alt-backspace (intentionally) and even then it exits gracefully.
Enlightenment is good stuff.
(and you've got to dig the new pagers and config features)
It is irrelevant that a sole owner can change the license. The GPL does not include a clause which allows an owner to revoke rights already granted (such a clause exists in IBM's public licenses, for example).
So even if a putative badguy was to close a previously GPL'd package, everyone else could continue development with the last GPL'd version. This would be little more than an inconvienience.
In reality it is even more difficult to close the source for an open package. Since most packages have several significant contributors and no one except the FSF bothers with copyright assignments, one contributor could not close the source for a package without either obtaining permission from all the other contributors or removing their contributions entirely. Not even Linus could close the source for Linux.
Anyway, what is going on people - is the Linux community loosing its grip?
--
After LinuxExpo, I installed Debian 2.1 (Actually, debian's install was so broken it ended up not working), Caldera 2.2, RedHat 6.0, and SuSE, and with the exception of Debian (I just don't know if it does), they all let you choose your WM when you login, and they all allow you to enable XDM/KDM logins during installation.
BTW, after doing them all, for the installs, I would rate RedHat #1, SuSE #2, Caldera #3 (pretty, but buggy), installing from random unlabled floppies #4, and debian #5.
I was very happy to see RedHat install SMP support automatically.
-- Keith Moore
This sig is the express property of someone.
I have to agree here. top tells me enlightenment is using 2408k (-1616k shared = 792k unshared). Compare this to the gnome drivemount-applet at 3240k (-2312k shared = 928k unshared). What's up with that? That's almost a meg for a little icon I click to mount a drive!
FWIW, KDE isn't any easier on memory than GNOME. Both environments would benifit from a serious diet, IMHO.
The upside is that I don't really have to choose. I can have both on my system so that I can continue to tinker with GNOME/E and my wife can use KDE if that suits her. And if Enlightenment goes its own way, I can use it separately as well.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
This in response to rasters letter and everyone on here that think about him. First of all, raster left Red Hat as a matter of principle. He left because some Red Hat employees above raster actually made fun of Enlightenment users in general, and directly made fun of a channel with Enlightenment users calling us a "festering crowd". The fact that he left Red Hat because he cares about his users more than his employers shows so much more integrity than alot of people out there. There are people at Red Hat that got hired thinking it was going to be great working for them. But quickly found out like raster that the powers that be wanted to assimilate all code to be Gnome compliant. I think that raster is the man, I think Enlightenment is the best window manager out there and isn't afraid to be different. I've talked to raster personally, he is a great guy, he cares about his users so much that I applaud his choices. I mean, you all can stay back in FVWM-95 or twm all you want, I didn't switch from Windows to Linux to use the same looking GUI, I came for difference, that included the window enviroment. Next, about the people that think Enlightenment is some kind of pretty game, it's not. This window manager represents what Linux is about. Linux was meant as an alternative to commercial software. It is meant to be underground from corporate America. For Linux to be all "GNOME-compliant" is just reverting back to the Windows mindset to assimilate the graphical user enviroment back to all of the same thing. Enlightenment is a big step in the right direction. Linux is about change, Enlightenment is about change, Linux is Enlightenment.
Well, (I hope Alfredo doesn't read this), I have finally switched to E for more than 48hrs (insert #E people laughing here). I'm really impressed with how its moving along. I can't wait till he gets cranking on it full time.
all the best,
Yours,
Trae
aka: OctobrX
ps. Yes I'm too lazy to login.
I hope this does not affect rasters coming to Australia for the Conference
of Austrlian Linux Users.
mmmm I always that that RH were very pro E. Oh well,
it is there loss I guess.
Most of the comments here sway between GNOME and enlightment offering a decent solution to windows, or them being unstable. Personally, I found that the distribution I recently recieved of RedHat 6.0 was far superior to anything I have used before. I even prefer it to the Solaris Sun machines I use at University for programming.
I think the argument between Windows and Redhat 'replacements' are unfounded because of the completely different ethos between the two. RedHat offers something which my geek freinds and I can play with and learn about, develop software for and play with.
But you have to remember that the big Linux Vs. Windows argument is never going to hold...
...just look over the horizon. BeOs is gaing popularity (try the demo CD!), even my Amiga was more powerful/usable/stable than Windows!
People are finding systems which suit their needs (finally), so I think Rastermans' move was a step in the right direction. The scene is getting stagnant and we all need to move on.
> Will Redhat stick with FVWM as their default wm?
Maybe something more like Afterstep if they don't decide to improve the look of FVWM.
Hey! Me, too! After I read that BBC article, I was so outraged that I have started learning Qt/KDE programming (got that new O'Reilly book; looks good so far), and I plan to contribute apps to KDE as soon as I get it all figured out. It may take a while, though... :-)
So, thanks for the inspiration, Miguel!
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
I thought E was the best part of the gnome distribution. Gnome itself is rather buggy and missing a lot of features I'm used to.
All gnome and kde developers should download TKDESK and use it for a few hours. All my appbar buttons have a default click action _and_ a menu of items to choose from. When I right-click on a file, I get a whole menu of actions which can be configured by file type.
I like having the window manager separate from the desktop and the applications. The Unix way is small programs which do one thing really well, and work together well. Large programs which only interoperate with each other is the Microsoft way.
Scripting is the way of the future.
E is slick. E gives good demo. E is user-hostile and though it's GNOME compliant, it's in no way GNOME-compatible.
RedHat did what they could. If they couldn't get Raster to show any interest in making sense out of E's UI or doing anything to make it or its configuration user-friendly, at least RH had the good sense to ship it with the only readable theme anyone bothered to make.
I thought the Hobbit-Klingon look and feel of most E themes and widget sets summed it up well. Yes, E has the nicest wipes and slides and zooms around, and is pretty lean about it. Not only is Raster uninterested in making it a usable environment for end-users, though: he's pretty clearly hostile to it. The idea of anyone making E usable for someone who isn't a Unix hacker or a CompSci major or a trekkie who likes to read API docs in his/her spare time seems to disgust him.
This same disease seems to affect the GNOME project to a lesser degree: who ever heard of an end-user environment that makes it easy to not only get rid of your main toolbar (the panel), but also makes it diffiult to make it come back by default? Why such an allergy to a trash can? Is two-stage deletion for wimps? Is the hatred for 15 years of UI design convention that strong? At least the GNOME project seems to finally be ineterested in some of these usability issues.
Raster, OTOH, seems to have nothing but open contempt for people who dare think of computers as a tool to run prewritten apps on. Not everyone working for a living has the spare time to become a programmer on the side so they can configure their windowing environment. Most people would regard a coherent GUI control panel for what is, after all, a GUI, as something sensible. Not as a sellout.
There was session on Enlightenment at Atlanta Linux Expo last year with Raster and Mandrake. Both of them said that the code had become spaghetti-like as it grew and both of them had worked on a major rewrite.
When I saw this headline, I remembered that Red Hat includes the top two headlines from /. on their main page. So if you go to redhat.com, you too can have the privilege of seeing this letter linked from their front page.
Just an interesting thought. I'm sure they've realized by now.
Do you really think the folks here at Slashdot have enough time to research each peice before they put it up? I wouldn't even want them to! It would spell the end of Slashdot as we knew it. Imagine if Rob or Hemos suddenly started to research every scoop that came in, it would be insanity, and I feel is not the function of slashdot. If a story is false, post some feedback, it's what it's all about, the whole CGI BBS thing...
-- The unsig...
Posted by majestic1:
.20 i think?) .. At that time I would agree, it wasn't stable at all. I switched to WindowMaker.. Then a few months ago I thought maybe it was time to try the two out again, so I installed .15 and gnome 1.0.. So far so good. GNOME adds all the functionality I need, and Enlightenment keeps my eyes happy. Maybe it's a huge fluke, but Ive had E and GNOME running for about 40 days so far.. I was under the impression that's a respectable uptime for a workstation?
This is just my opinion.. but Im not so sure about these stability issues. I originally ran E and GNOME way back when (gnome was in
>That doesn't seem to be the mark of someone that won't accept input from others.
Actually, when I first heard about GNOME and Enlightentment, I went to the respective web sites to have a read. Gnome was okay, but on the enlightenment web site the following comments caught my eye:
"One thing you can be certain of is that it DOES work - the developers run it all day themselves - There is a reason it doesn't work for you - it is likely something on your system."
and
"Please make sure you also have a stable Xserver - Enlightenment can push X hard - often X breaks. When your server goes down - your server is at fault."
Those two sentences gave me the distinct *impression* that the authors didn't really care about the end users, "it works for us, if it doesn't work for you, it's your fault, not ours"
Of course, with any software, it is always possible to be a user configuration problem, and nothing to do with 'E', but the attitude that came across in those sentences would leave me very reluctant to even attempt to report a problem.
So before he throws too many stones about redhat believing users don't really count, he should check if he's living in a glass house.
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
You E fans really amaze me. You're acting like
this whole thing is something new. It's *NOT*.
Amiga users went though the exact same thing
concering the "Magic User Interface". Basically
MUI split the Amiga camp into two factions also.
One faction was was the bunch who it seemed the
only thing they did was code and run demo's all the time
on their Amiga's and the other faction consisted
of Amiga usrs who really didn't care all that much
for that kind of stuff. I know. I was one of the
Amiga users who didn't give a hoot about the
demo scene or MUI either...
Looks like history's repeating itself all over
again, eh?
you're sure it's E and not the session manager?
:)
or even your X server?
or even something else running on your desktop?
if you can give me a way to make E crash I will be impressed. (I don't know what redhat shipped - I know they have some nonstandard patch on there).
not only that I'll fix it.
--
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Software Engineer - VA Linux Labs (http://www.valinux.com)
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
I read an interview with the developers of Gnome where Miguel essentially said he thought E was a piece of sh*t and he kept threatening to re-write it from scratch. How can work in a place that treats you like that? E is a very kewl Window Manager and I was very surprised at how lame the default them for RedHat 6.0 was. Geez it looked just like Windows 95. :(
My $.02
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Even the first version of the QPL (0.90 IIRC) has been declared free software by RMS. He did, however, mention the 'patch clause' as an obstacle.
This patch 'requirement' has been changed into a 'recommendation', i.e. TrollTech recommends using patches (or CVS). The only requirement is that the new, non-TrollTech code be clearly marked as such.
That's nothing else than what the GPL requires (and is very sensible, as responsibilities for bugs and possible trojans are more obvious that way).
The QPL is pretty much like the GPL, and the main (or even only) reason why RMS thinks the current QPL is not GPL compatible, is that it doesn't allow 'secret' in-house improvements that aren't distributed outside e.g. a respective company.
This is, however, not a problem for average OSS developers, and IMHO it's rather a loophole in the GPL that it allows this than a flaw of the QPL.
To find the original sources please go to the Troll pages and the KDE licensing mailing list.
IMO GNOME is carrying around E like an albatross.
It should never have been made the default
window manager. It needs something lighter and
much more stable. Raster is a creative guy, but
a careful coder he aint.
To add a little comment to shutton's post (and grab some other things along with it), this whole thread seems to be slightly off topic from the original topic, but it does bring forth an interesting view.
:)
Most people believe that since 'we' support Linux, Gnome, KDE, E, whatever, we shouldn't be emulating Windows.
Now hang in there for a second. Most people have worked with the windows GUI (which admitedly has some nice things, though they kind of get snowed under by the absolutely horrendous things), and know how it 'feels', expect certain looks, etc.
So let's take that to the 'Linux' community, if you'd be able to write a desktop that acts like the Windows one, but with Linux as a kernel, instead of the extremely buggy, inefficient Windows 95/98 kernel (NT is slightly, just slightly, better), you'd still have a Linux system.
It just *looks* different. I think a lot of people just immediately react to the fact that AAAAAH, It Looks Like Windows! Kill Kill Kill!, completely forgetting the fact that the driving force behind this Windows look-alike is something they so fervently support.
(Why would you not buy a 16 processor dec/alpha machine because it comes in a yellow instead of a purple box?
Mad.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
For comparison's sake:
28140 pgf 0 0 1096 728 468 S 0 0.0 2.3 0:05 WindowMaker
Of course, I'm running a gaggle of gnome stuff at the same time. What's the figures for E?
(Although I suspect if Dave were reading this he'd tell me something about how innacurate top can sometimes be.)
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
(currently testing something about signatures here)
AFAIK, Raster has always welcomed people's contributions to Enlightenment, both in terms of ideas and even more so in the form of patches. I seem to recall some quite explicit note to that effect either on the E website/mailing list or in the sources. That doesn't seem to be the mark of someone that won't accept input from others.
Are you suggesting that this was not really so in practice, that he didn't want to accept certain types of functionality and so he left? Details please. E could be themed to look and behave very very much like W95, so there's no inherent reason why RH couldn't have put E to good use in their plans as far as I can tell.
Maybe the source of the problem is that perhaps RH wanted Raster *not* to work on the bits of E that he knows currently require a lot of attention, but on other bits instead --- maybe W95 lookalike or workalike functionality, since he mentions something like that. I can see how that would not have gone down too well. It's typical of managerial types to want to direct the course of development in ways that don't take technical necessity into account.
I guess we'll never really know the full story though.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra