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Interview: Ask Mandrake Anything
Mandrake, AKA Geoff Harrison, is a heavy contributor to the enlightenment project and has also left his mark on Gnome, XFree86, and a bunch of other excellent free software projects. In real life, he works for VA Research as (surprise!) a software developer. Mandrake is, without question, one of the leading lights of the Linux and free software development communities. Check his Web site, and post any question(s) you have for him below. Answers to most or all of the highest-moderated ones will be posted Friday.
Is enlightenment going to go the 3D way of desktops ? Some companys were promoting kewl 3D accelerated desktops and with the Xfree 4 accelerator support can we expect 3D accelerated desktop support in E ?
I run both KDE and Gnome, It would be great if the two would play nice with each other. My question
is: Are there currently any plans for getting kde and gnome to work together, and if so how far
along is the gnome team? Is the gnome team even talking to the kde team?
How soon do you expect a 1.0 release of E?
.15 yet that you would like to see?
What features, arenn't in E
Do not read this
Whenever I try to compile Enlightenment, I get an error saying my fridge is out of ale, even though it isn't. I tried stocking my fridge with different kinds of ales, to no avail. I even tried removing everything not beer from my fridge, and that didn't work either. Can you help me figure out what's wrong?
You've been involved with some of the later XF86 development, and you run xinerama on your machine, (as evidenced by your screenshots) so my question is this:
Can Xinerama run on two monitors at different resolutions? I know they have to be the same bit-depth, but it would be nice to be able to buy a 19" monitor and use it alongside my existing 17".
On my P1-233MMX-Matrox Mill II system, GTK applications like E, the Gnome suite, and stand-alone applications like FreeCiv display (at times) sluggish interface response and slow screen draw times. Complex interfaces can often be seen drawing in or updating widget contents in sequence.
It can be oddly reminiscient of my old 25Mhz Amiga running a 3rd party widget toolkit like MUI.
My questions for Mandrake are:
1) Where does the fault lie - X, GTK, E, the application, or "all of the above"
2) What efforts are being made to increase performance?
3) Do you think we'll ever see optimisations like hand-tweaked assembly in the GTK event loop, or in the widget redraw code?
DG
Do you think that a newer release of X will be sufficient to carry linux for a few more years or do you think a project like berlin (or some other windowing system) deserves more programming weight put behind it? Is X11 fit to carry all of the linux graphical weight or is it becoming a dinosaur?
-Pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
Hey Mandrake! How is the perl/gtk book coming along? I'm already drooling in anticipation! Can you give us a ballpark figure on when it will be published? Or how about a topics list? Any info would be greatly appreciated!!! Keep in mind you have at least one guaranteed sale!!!
Geoff Harrison (Mandrake) has little or nothing to do with the Mandrake-Linux distribution. Please limit your questions to the scope of his work! (Enlightenment, a WM/desktop shell, XF86, xripple, etc) Now my question(s)?.. Why has the weak gradient between a Window Manager/Desktop/Shell been made into such a clear cut, line-in-the-sand issue? In the past, a WM was expected to provide all the features X didn't. Now the field has fragmented. Why? How does the rapid escalation of hardware performance (and availability of accelerated servers) affect Enlightenment? Are there times at which you say 'I could put in this new three-phase atomic pixel effect for window close, but can't because it would take a week on a 486'?
.sig: Now legally binding!
May I have your children?
Microsoft, as much as we love to hate them, spends tons of money (which I'm sure Enlightenment doesn't have by comparison) on useability and the human interface.
I can rely on the same keystrokes, the same mouse clicks, a consistant Clipboard, the same file dialogs, etc. etc., no matter what Windows app I run.
Linux apps, be they for KDE or Enlightement, or any WM, seem to be as different from one another as possible. This is all in the name of "We're Unique!", which seems to translate to "We're Unusable and have a HUGE learning curve!"
What, if anything, is going to make Enlightenment/Gnome/KDE/Anything else, more usable than one another? Themes are lovely, but a pretty face is only skin deep.
Can we at *least* "steal" some of MS's better ideas for use in "our" environment?
Comments?
mindslip