Re:Why are /.'ers even READING Cringely?!?!
on
C# To Crush Java?
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· Score: 2
I think you are confused.
There are people working on C# compilers and runtimes for non-Windows platforms. Mono and Portable.NET are both working on the problem.
C# is actually a very good object oriented language. There is a complete type unification in C#. In C# structures and basic data types (like int, char, double) can be treated as objects with no hacks attached (I am not familiar with the Java hacks, but those who know claim that Java has some kind of difference between int and integer, or something like that).
C# is very much like Java, with a few extensions: properties, events, delegates and contains support for attributes (arbitrary metadata you can attach to language elements).
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For a long time I stuck to GMC as my desktop manager, because I figured someone had to run it if we planned on keeping people with small systems happy (there are a lot of under powered machines out of the US).
I finally made the switch because of the simplicity and cleanliness of Nautilus. I did not like Nautilus 1.0, I felt there were too many taste differences between my way of working and Nautilus way of working.
But the Nautilus hackers were quick to respond to the input of the user community, and by the time Nautilus 1.0.3 came out, they had addressed most of the community issues.
Today people are using Nautilus in really creative ways, and I finally made the switch because of all this creativity. Tuomas has a `magnets' package for his desktop and a set of images to play free-form solitaire on the desktop. Sure, they are just toys, but like that there are hundreds of other things being done with Nautilus.
The core foundation in Nautilus is sound, and a lot of people are doing really creative things. For example someone wrote a "3D" viewer for directories. You can at any point switch your default view into 3D-view inside the window. It is just a Bonobo component, you do not even need to touch the Nautilus code to add these third-party views.
Some other people have been writing Nautilus scripts, and I have been using a few of them. They could use some polish, but for being user-contributed things, they are pretty nice.
I also noticed that the new Windows XP shell incorporated various ideas that were in Nautilus or earlier versions of Nautilus and some others were demoed as concepts by Andy as potential services to consumers.
I would like to extend's Andy's idea of "actions" that are available on the left pane to be more comprehensive as it is on XP.
Other features in Nautilus are its support for SVG-icons. Something that has been overlooked for some time. I did not knew about this until I saw someone's desktop with these huge icons (common used things were huge, others were there just for reference). Those huge icons looked perfect (maybe they were 100x100 size), when I asked I found out that it was the new Tuomas/Jakub set of SVG icons.
Many hackers have been using pictures of themselves as their desktop "home". For example Nat's personal home directory has a `Friends' directory, and each `Friends' folder has a high resolution picture of his friends, where he keeps his information. He has a picture of his car for details about his car. Maybe he can post a screenshot of his desktop so you get an idea.
There are many more creative uses of Nautilus out there, but I have to say that as the product matures, more and more options are available.
But Nautilus overall makes for a terrific file manager, but it takes some time to get the best out of it.
I still want to see some of Andy's experimental code that allowed live objects to be shown in Nautilus. At some point I saw someone's desktop contain various "web sites" in a folder. Instead of using an RSS feed, various mini-web sites (fully functional) were embedded into a directory. I wish someone could send me a link to this url.
There is no need to go to the extremes (in both cases). I think your premises are both right.
It is a good thing if most of your code is written in a single language and various team members can take the place or fix someone else's code.
The bit you are missing is that as a class library developer, you can write all your classes in J#, or in C#, or Fortran and then the end-user that happens to use those will be able to use whatever he preffers rather than the language the class library vendor ships.
Well, given that you seem *too* interested in the user aspects of Mono, I can tell you some of it:
The Mono compiler is in itself a bunch of classes written in C#. Those classes are being developed so that you can have multiple instances of the compiler for example and to be reusable as a component. The idea behind what can look like a really stupid goal is to make the C# compiler a component that gets plugged into SharpDevelop (a GPL.NET GUI for application development. A free Visual Studio if you will).
Also parts of the interfaces in the compiler are there so that SharpDevelop can provide method completion and useful suggestions to the user (what Microsoft calls "IntelliSense").
The compiler "base" classes can be shared, and is indeed the foundation for a work in progress Mono BASIC.NET implementation. A separate effort with the same goals in mind is creating an ECMA Script compiler.
But to us -Ximian- Mono represents a way of reducing our cost of developing end user applications. Evolution being our largest program (750k lines of code so far) has shown the needs for a better platform for software development. Everyone likes to criticize Microsoft for writing unstable applications. The problem is that once you reach certain complexity, it is hard to keep improving and extending an application without a deep knowledge of its internals.
So Mono to us is just a new platform to build better, larger, faster, nicer, more robust applications. Oh, it has the side effect of being compatible with the.NET development framework, but that is just an "interesting" side effect.
I guess one of the problems is that there are too many mailing lists to keep track of. So unless you are reading them all, you are probably not tracking the changes;-)
It happens to me.
Now, regarding the GNOME releases, the various components that make up GNOME are released continously. The "branded" releases of GNOME have never been anything but just a "re-brand" of the latest set of stable releases.
In some cases when major components are integrated (like gnome-vfs, oaf, bonobo) the "branding" was the place where we commited to maintain API stability for some components. For other pieces, the switch from 1.4 from the previous version was basically just a configure.in number change.
The GNOME 2.x is a different case. It is a switch in our platform to Gtk+ 2.0.
The CLR and the type system as well as the Language Specification in the.NET Development platform solve the problem of language interoperability.
It does not matter in which language you define a function or a class, other languages targetting the CLR can consume the data (as far as the languages are CLS compliant, there is a spec you have to follow to get this).
The JVM did not have such functionality nor such a spec.
I have talked about those in the past at various conferences. Specially after having met Andy Hertzfeld and his team of hackers at Eazel.
The Eazel people always talked about usability, and always tried to make computers easier to use. I think their contribution to the GNOME project will live forever in terms of having taught us that things need to improve in that area.
Sure, the interview did not talk about these topics, because the questions that Dare made were not focused in that area.
If you want to see the kind of things that the GNOME project members are doing towards improving the user interface, I suggest you read a number of mailing lists: gnome-2-list, gnome-devel-list, gtk-list and gnome-hackers. They have archives on the web.
Many new usability features are added to GNOME continously. Most GNOME hackers have been reading on topics of user interfaces and usability and have been acting based on this input.
Also, Sun has been providing direct feedback from the usability labs (you might want to check gnotices and the developer.gnome.org site for the actual articles and comments).
Based on this input we have been making changes to the platform to make sure that GNOME becomes a better desktop.
I am sure others can list in more detail all the new improvements that we got. For example, I just found out about the new screenshooting features in the new gnome-core; The Setup Tools got a great review on the Linux magazines for its simlicity to customize the system; There is a new and simplified control center and control center modules that addresses many of the problems in usability that we had in the past.
Better integration is happening all the time in Nautilus.
The bottom line is: the GNOME project is more active than ever and if you want to get to the source, you can either check the mailing list archives, or we should run a series of interviews with the various developers of GNOME that have contributed those features.
Dare was interested in Mono, so that was the focus of this article.
.NET is its own platform. The "compatibility" of components is only guaranteed inside this universe.
That means that if you use a Pascal component, it has to be compiled with a compiler that generates files in the CIL format. There are compilers for a bunch of languages out there (proprietary mostly, but there are some research and free compilers as well. The one we are writting is free).
That being said, the.NET framework provides a great ammount of facilities to interoperate with other languages. From allowing you to provide custom marshallers, to provide full introspection of components to the low-level Platform Invoke interface.
The interesting bit here is that the runtime can provide bridges to arbitrary component systems. For example, Microsoft in their runtime have support for COM. We envision our runtime supporting some sort of COM (XPcom maybe) at the runtime level and things like Bonobo at a higher level (as it does not need any runtime support, just a set of classes that use System.Reflection).
I did not see any mention on the article on whether other journaling file systems would be available on Red Hat 7.2 as part of the installation/upgrade procedure.
I am have been using ReiserFS for about 18 months now and greatly appreciate it on my 20 gig hard drive on my laptop. Never had a single corruption problem, and always rebooting the machine quickly (specially with VMware crashing the system;-)
Some systems at Ximian use XFS extensively as well. When you have too many files in a directory (for example Gnus spools) ext2/ext2 wont cut it due to the slow operations on directories with lots of files.
Linus did not choose the name `Linux'. Linus chose the name `Freax' and the guy running the funet.fi archive decided that was a horrible name and renamed the kernel for him.
People gathered around this new operating system that was being written from scratch, and they wrote piles of tools that were missing for this new Linux thing. Many tools came from GNU, yes, but many others were assembled and contributed by many people specifically to make Linux run.
It is funny how history is rewritten these days. If you ask the people who were around rms on the early days of Linux, you will see that they tell a story from different angles: `Do not work on Linux, work on the Hurd, anything else is a waste of time'. At least this is the story as told by Donald and now Ulrich.
End user applications to get my work done: mailer, browser, word processor, calendar, games.
That basically means GNOME or KDE with or without some kind of browser. All of those running on toip of the X11 libraries, those reusing the super-bare-bones libc, those using the kernel.
For a modern computer, I really have no use for any of the Unix tools to begin with (as a Unix programmer I love them, but as an end user system they are useless).
Some people are even using GNOME/KDE without any of the underlying Unix system with most features removed.
Not trying to make any point about the debate at hand, but pointing out that your needs might be different from other needs.
Linux is a branding name that is useful, but inacurrate to represent other systems like FreeBSD. That is why I preffer to talk about `free software' or `unix systems' or `open source', but both Linux and GNU/Linux mean very little in practice.
Ulrich is telling the truth, which is the scary thing.
I do not want to work with RMS anymore (for other, but similar reasons). I realized too late that I should have listened from other people who had been burned in the past.
I will keep writing free software and I appreciate some of RMS's comments and his early vision. But his new vision is now blurred with different objectives that I do not agree with or am sick of.
GtkHTML2 is a completely new code base, separate from GtkHTML (which is what we based our code to build the HTML editor). GtkHTML has all the copyright notices in place.
GtkHTML2 is a new code base, new abstractions, and has complete CSS2 support.
Miguel.
Re:I'm a disappointed GNOME user...
on
KDE 2.2 Tagged
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· Score: 3, Informative
Hey,
Someone already posted a very nice list of projects that are being developed for GNOME, new projects: DevHelp and GIDE (it even has an integrated debugger!).
A new File Selector widget; A new control center that is very pretty and integrates system adminisrtation tools (the Setup Tools which are a cross platform set of tools for doing system configuration).
On the GNOME 2.0 front: we are frozen now (a lot of work has gone in there): Bonobo is now split into UI and non-UI pieces, so it can finally become a full component system for Unix. Gnome Print is much more advanced (six months of development, polishing and improvements;-).
Evolution is of course one of the bits that has me super excited. Beta2 just came out, and there are so many features, productivity and usability that you will be amazed. Give it a spin, you can install it very easily:
lynx -source http://go-gnome.com | sh
(Do that as root).
We also have a new desktop-wise theme engine, that enables you to build themes that encompass all the system: Nautilus theme, Gtk+ theme, window manager theme, Gnome libraries theme (and it has a pluggable architecture).
The Setup Tools have reached maturity, and support many different systems: one UI to manage all the systems. It also comes with the time-travel feature, and we will be moving towards supporting small clusters (mostly for managing computer labs and small clusters).
Our HTML editor is extremely good, one of the best out there in the market. How to you use it?
Just create a moniker:
moniker-test -c OAFIID:GNOME_GtkHTML_Editor
Or from your application, just embed it like this:
w = bonobo_get_object ("OAFIID:GNOME_GtkHTML_Editor");
Full with table editing, templtaes, full undo, etc.
On the GtkHTML2 side of things the guys at CodeFactory have a full CSS2 implementation (complete, not a partial one) plus DOM support and god so many features.
Gtk+2 is also packed with features, too many to list: double buffering rendering all across the place; Simplified API; Support for Pango (everyone who has seen pango loves it); New model-view widgets and oh man. So much. So much. I can not even make sense.
Some technologies are available on GNOME 1.4, some will be out with GNOME 1.4.1. Many of these are scheduled for GNOME 2, by the end of the year.
Accesibility is another major improvement that comes with GNOME 2, all contributed by Sun. All these features bring GNOME into a more mature level and a complete product that will help us regain the desktop market share.
You can help make this dream a reality, just join us in the effort to improve GNOME and make it perfect.
I am missing too many things, and I apologize for those hackers working steadily on all those pieces of GNOME that are going continously into the tree. But there is way too much going on in the GNOME world.
We believe in writing as much code as possible in C# i
nstead of C, because we believe we can write more code, more robust code which in the end could be reusable as a components if we use C# instead of C for pieces like the compiler and its associated tools.
This seems to contradict what we have in our web page about the class-library. The class library is being built in a way that would allow the GUI toolkit to be plugged.
It is also plain FUD that we do not want to make Mono work with other desktops (hey, even GNOME works on other desktops).
For classes that might differ more (for example, the implementation of Windows.Forms), we might have different directories altogether:
System.Windows.Forms/Win32,
System.Windows.Forms/Gtk+ and
System.Windows.Forms/Cocoa.
It is a real shame that many people have not bothered to research what `.NET' really means, and what the different components of it are, and the relationship with the Mono project is.
It is not the fault of any of you to do so, but it would be Petreley's duty to do a little research before writing from an uninformed point of view.
I remember I was once sitting in a panel with another famous pundit. The panel was on `Open Source' and they had brought the `experts' on Open Source to talk about it.
Such pundit said a minute before the panel begun to us `I do not see the difference between Peer to Perr and Open Source, to me they are the same thing'.
In Market speak.NET is a Microsoft-wide company initiative. To humans this means that a vision has been set at Microsoft, and every bit of the company is moving towards making that goal happen.
Now, this.NET "vision" encompasses many different areas, let me list some of them for you:
The Development Platform.
The Passport/Hailstorm Initiative.
Their enterprise servers.
Web Services in general.
People are confused between two elements: The development platform and Passport. People who claim that Mono is related to passport are making statements that are similar to `Excel is Turbo Pascal'.
The Mono Project is a project that Ximian has launched and is devoting resources to bring the benefits of a new, fresh and powerful development platform to Unix. Why we are doing this? Because we need those tools to bring you the next generation end-user applications. We could do this with C, C++ or Python, but it would take us longer, and we would waste our engineering time.
Passport is a completely different beast. Many people are confused, and asked me `How is Mono related to Passport'? The answer is: it is not related in any way. I have written a document that highlights the problems on Passport, you can get it here: http://www.go-mono.com/passport.html. This has nothing to do with Mono, but people are still confused.
Even worse, some people claim that `Mono will bring Passport to Linux'. Those people have not been paying attention. Passport is already available to be ran on Linux servers. Just go to http://www.passport.com, and download the Linux toolkit.
This bears repetition: Mono is not related to passport.
We have put together a list of the major features of Evolution.
You can also read an functional overview of Evolution and what it has to offer.
Since Evolution is not feature frozen, we are polishing the GUI and killing all bugs that we have reported so far, you can help by going to the developers page and learn about how to report bugs on Evolution or how to send your favorite patch and improvement.
You can get Evolution using Red Carpet (that is how I installed it myself a few minutes ago). Select the `Ximian Preview' channel and then select Evolution, all the required software will be installed for you.
Finally, now that I am pasting URLs, I would like to say that on the preview channel you can also find the latest two great contributions of Ximian to GNOME (plug, plug). The Ximian Setup Tools is there for people to test (ie, unified System Administration across Unix systems, with a nice and friendly GNOME UI). The technology behind it is extremely nice. And we are also previewing the Metatheme selector, which allows you to change all the theme setting across the board in your desktop.
Evolution supports using SSL over IMAP, SMTP and POP3 on top of many others.
The camel library from Evolution is the most advanced mail library in existance right now. The API was inspired by the JavaMail design, but it has been extended and improved to deal with many real world situations that JavaMail did not cope back in the day.
Well, I have been running the nightly builds of Mozilla for quite some time now, and I am very happy with the speed improvements that have been landed over the past few weeks.
Mozilla stopped feeling slugish for me about two weeks ago, and ever since it has kept on improving. Great work everyone!
You might want to learn about some of the things that I am more excited about Bonobo right now: the Moniker system (basically a name space for Bonobo Objects). It is here: http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/monikers.html
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are confused.
There are people working on C# compilers and runtimes for non-Windows platforms. Mono and Portable.NET are both working on the problem.
C# is actually a very good object oriented language. There is a complete type unification in C#. In C# structures and basic data types (like int, char, double) can be treated as objects with no hacks attached (I am not familiar with the Java hacks, but those who know claim that Java has some kind of difference between int and integer, or something like that).
C# is very much like Java, with a few extensions: properties, events, delegates and contains support for attributes (arbitrary metadata you can attach to language elements).
\
For a long time I stuck to GMC as my desktop manager, because I figured someone had to run it if we planned on keeping people with small systems happy (there are a lot of under powered machines out of the US).
I finally made the switch because of the simplicity and cleanliness of Nautilus. I did not like Nautilus 1.0, I felt there were too many taste differences between my way of working and Nautilus way of working.
But the Nautilus hackers were quick to respond to the input of the user community, and by the time Nautilus 1.0.3 came out, they had addressed most of the community issues.
Today people are using Nautilus in really creative ways, and I finally made the switch because of all this creativity. Tuomas has a `magnets' package for his desktop and a set of images to play free-form solitaire on the desktop. Sure, they are just toys, but like that there are hundreds of other things being done with Nautilus.
The core foundation in Nautilus is sound, and a lot of people are doing really creative things. For example someone wrote a "3D" viewer for directories. You can at any point switch your default view into 3D-view inside the window. It is just a Bonobo component, you do not even need to touch the Nautilus code to add these third-party views.
Some other people have been writing Nautilus scripts, and I have been using a few of them. They could use some polish, but for being user-contributed things, they are pretty nice.
I also noticed that the new Windows XP shell incorporated various ideas that were in Nautilus or earlier versions of Nautilus and some others were demoed as concepts by Andy as potential services to consumers.
I would like to extend's Andy's idea of "actions" that are available on the left pane to be more comprehensive as it is on XP.
Other features in Nautilus are its support for SVG-icons. Something that has been overlooked for some time. I did not knew about this until I saw someone's desktop with these huge icons (common used things were huge, others were there just for reference). Those huge icons looked perfect (maybe they were 100x100 size), when I asked I found out that it was the new Tuomas/Jakub set of SVG icons.
Many hackers have been using pictures of themselves as their desktop "home". For example Nat's personal home directory has a `Friends' directory, and each `Friends' folder has a high resolution picture of his friends, where he keeps his information. He has a picture of his car for details about his car. Maybe he can post a screenshot of his desktop so you get an idea.
There are many more creative uses of Nautilus out there, but I have to say that as the product matures, more and more options are available.
But Nautilus overall makes for a terrific file manager, but it takes some time to get the best out of it.
I still want to see some of Andy's experimental code that allowed live objects to be shown in Nautilus. At some point I saw someone's desktop contain various "web sites" in a folder. Instead of using an RSS feed, various mini-web sites (fully functional) were embedded into a directory. I wish someone could send me a link to this url.
Miguel.
The Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights and how they are being routinely ignored by the government.
Free Speech: Second thoughts on the First Amendment. Another very interesting read.
I have been lucky enough in the past few weeks to attend a couple of Howard Zinn's talks in Boston.
Miguel.
You might want to check out www.nat.org which contains nice updates on Nat's life.
Evolution works with X, so it will run on KDE, CDE, GNOME, E, WindowMaker, and pretty much anything else
There is no need to go to the extremes (in both cases). I think your premises are both right.
It is a good thing if most of your code is written in a single language and various team members can take the place or fix someone else's code.
The bit you are missing is that as a class library developer, you can write all your classes in J#, or in C#, or Fortran and then the end-user that happens to use those will be able to use whatever he preffers rather than the language the class library vendor ships.
Miguel.
Java could have been moved in that direction with some trouble. For example it can not cope with languages like C or C++ efficiently.
Also it lacks features like P/Invoke that were things we were interested in.
We were trying to see how to move ahead with GNOME, and we made a choice.
Miguel.
Well, given that you seem *too* interested in the user aspects of Mono, I can tell you some of it:
.NET GUI for application development. A free Visual Studio if you will).
.NET development framework, but that is just an "interesting" side effect.
The Mono compiler is in itself a bunch of classes written in C#. Those classes are being developed so that you can have multiple instances of the compiler for example and to be reusable as a component. The idea behind what can look like a really stupid goal is to make the C# compiler a component that gets plugged into SharpDevelop (a GPL
Also parts of the interfaces in the compiler are there so that SharpDevelop can provide method completion and useful suggestions to the user (what Microsoft calls "IntelliSense").
The compiler "base" classes can be shared, and is indeed the foundation for a work in progress Mono BASIC.NET implementation. A separate effort with the same goals in mind is creating an ECMA Script compiler.
But to us -Ximian- Mono represents a way of reducing our cost of developing end user applications. Evolution being our largest program (750k lines of code so far) has shown the needs for a better platform for software development. Everyone likes to criticize Microsoft for writing unstable applications. The problem is that once you reach certain complexity, it is hard to keep improving and extending an application without a deep knowledge of its internals.
So Mono to us is just a new platform to build better, larger, faster, nicer, more robust applications. Oh, it has the side effect of being compatible with the
Love,
Miguel.
I guess one of the problems is that there are too many mailing lists to keep track of. So unless you are reading them all, you are probably not tracking the changes ;-)
It happens to me.
Now, regarding the GNOME releases, the various components that make up GNOME are released continously. The "branded" releases of GNOME have never been anything but just a "re-brand" of the latest set of stable releases.
In some cases when major components are integrated (like gnome-vfs, oaf, bonobo) the "branding" was the place where we commited to maintain API stability for some components. For other pieces, the switch from 1.4 from the previous version was basically just a configure.in number change.
The GNOME 2.x is a different case. It is a switch in our platform to Gtk+ 2.0.
Miguel.
The CLR and the type system as well as the Language Specification in the .NET Development platform solve the problem of language interoperability.
It does not matter in which language you define a function or a class, other languages targetting the CLR can consume the data (as far as the languages are CLS compliant, there is a spec you have to follow to get this).
The JVM did not have such functionality nor such a spec.
Miguel.
I have talked about those in the past at various conferences. Specially after having met Andy Hertzfeld and his team of hackers at Eazel.
The Eazel people always talked about usability, and always tried to make computers easier to use. I think their contribution to the GNOME project will live forever in terms of having taught us that things need to improve in that area.
Sure, the interview did not talk about these topics, because the questions that Dare made were not focused in that area.
If you want to see the kind of things that the GNOME project members are doing towards improving the user interface, I suggest you read a number of mailing lists: gnome-2-list, gnome-devel-list, gtk-list and gnome-hackers. They have archives on the web.
Many new usability features are added to GNOME continously. Most GNOME hackers have been reading on topics of user interfaces and usability and have been acting based on this input.
Also, Sun has been providing direct feedback from the usability labs (you might want to check gnotices and the developer.gnome.org site for the actual articles and comments).
Based on this input we have been making changes to the platform to make sure that GNOME becomes a better desktop.
I am sure others can list in more detail all the new improvements that we got. For example, I just found out about the new screenshooting features in the new gnome-core; The Setup Tools got a great review on the Linux magazines for its simlicity to customize the system; There is a new and simplified control center and control center modules that addresses many of the problems in usability that we had in the past.
Better integration is happening all the time in Nautilus.
The bottom line is: the GNOME project is more active than ever and if you want to get to the source, you can either check the mailing list archives, or we should run a series of interviews with the various developers of GNOME that have contributed those features.
Dare was interested in Mono, so that was the focus of this article.
Miguel.
.NET is its own platform. The "compatibility" of components is only guaranteed inside this universe.
.NET framework provides a great ammount of facilities to interoperate with other languages. From allowing you to provide custom marshallers, to provide full introspection of components to the low-level Platform Invoke interface.
That means that if you use a Pascal component, it has to be compiled with a compiler that generates files in the CIL format. There are compilers for a bunch of languages out there (proprietary mostly, but there are some research and free compilers as well. The one we are writting is free).
That being said, the
The interesting bit here is that the runtime can provide bridges to arbitrary component systems. For example, Microsoft in their runtime have support for COM. We envision our runtime supporting some sort of COM (XPcom maybe) at the runtime level and things like Bonobo at a higher level (as it does not need any runtime support, just a set of classes that use System.Reflection).
Miguel
I did not see any mention on the article on whether other journaling file systems would be available on Red Hat 7.2 as part of the installation/upgrade procedure.
;-)
I am have been using ReiserFS for about 18 months now and greatly appreciate it on my 20 gig hard drive on my laptop. Never had a single corruption problem, and always rebooting the machine quickly (specially with VMware crashing the system
Some systems at Ximian use XFS extensively as well. When you have too many files in a directory (for example Gnus spools) ext2/ext2 wont cut it due to the slow operations on directories with lots of files.
Miguel.
Linus did not choose the name `Linux'. Linus chose the name `Freax' and the guy running the funet.fi archive decided that was a horrible name and renamed the kernel for him.
People gathered around this new operating system that was being written from scratch, and they wrote piles of tools that were missing for this new Linux thing. Many tools came from GNU, yes, but many others were assembled and contributed by many people specifically to make Linux run.
It is funny how history is rewritten these days. If you ask the people who were around rms on the early days of Linux, you will see that they tell a story from different angles: `Do not work on Linux, work on the Hurd, anything else is a waste of time'. At least this is the story as told by Donald and now Ulrich.
Let me think what do I want from a computer:
End user applications to get my work done: mailer, browser, word processor, calendar, games.
That basically means GNOME or KDE with or without some kind of browser. All of those running on toip of the X11 libraries, those reusing the super-bare-bones libc, those using the kernel.
For a modern computer, I really have no use for any of the Unix tools to begin with (as a Unix programmer I love them, but as an end user system they are useless).
Some people are even using GNOME/KDE without any of the underlying Unix system with most features removed.
Not trying to make any point about the debate at hand, but pointing out that your needs might be different from other needs.
Linux is a branding name that is useful, but inacurrate to represent other systems like FreeBSD. That is why I preffer to talk about `free software' or `unix systems' or `open source', but both Linux and GNU/Linux mean very little in practice.
Ulrich is telling the truth, which is the scary thing.
I do not want to work with RMS anymore (for other, but similar reasons). I realized too late that I should have listened from other people who had been burned in the past.
I will keep writing free software and I appreciate some of RMS's comments and his early vision. But his new vision is now blurred with different objectives that I do not agree with or am sick of.
Miguel.
You are confused.
GtkHTML2 is a completely new code base, separate from GtkHTML (which is what we based our code to build the HTML editor). GtkHTML has all the copyright notices in place.
GtkHTML2 is a new code base, new abstractions, and has complete CSS2 support.
Miguel.
Hey,
;-).
Someone already posted a very nice list of projects that are being developed for GNOME, new projects: DevHelp and GIDE (it even has an integrated debugger!).
A new File Selector widget; A new control center that is very pretty and integrates system adminisrtation tools (the Setup Tools which are a cross platform set of tools for doing system configuration).
On the GNOME 2.0 front: we are frozen now (a lot of work has gone in there): Bonobo is now split into UI and non-UI pieces, so it can finally become a full component system for Unix. Gnome Print is much more advanced (six months of development, polishing and improvements
Evolution is of course one of the bits that has me super excited. Beta2 just came out, and there are so many features, productivity and usability that you will be amazed. Give it a spin, you can install it very easily:
lynx -source http://go-gnome.com | sh
(Do that as root).
We also have a new desktop-wise theme engine, that enables you to build themes that encompass all the system: Nautilus theme, Gtk+ theme, window manager theme, Gnome libraries theme (and it has a pluggable architecture).
The Setup Tools have reached maturity, and support many different systems: one UI to manage all the systems. It also comes with the time-travel feature, and we will be moving towards supporting small clusters (mostly for managing computer labs and small clusters).
Our HTML editor is extremely good, one of the best out there in the market. How to you use it?
Just create a moniker:
moniker-test -c OAFIID:GNOME_GtkHTML_Editor
Or from your application, just embed it like this:
w = bonobo_get_object ("OAFIID:GNOME_GtkHTML_Editor");
Full with table editing, templtaes, full undo, etc.
On the GtkHTML2 side of things the guys at CodeFactory have a full CSS2 implementation (complete, not a partial one) plus DOM support and god so many features.
Gtk+2 is also packed with features, too many to list: double buffering rendering all across the place; Simplified API; Support for Pango (everyone who has seen pango loves it); New model-view widgets and oh man. So much. So much. I can not even make sense.
Some technologies are available on GNOME 1.4, some will be out with GNOME 1.4.1. Many of these are scheduled for GNOME 2, by the end of the year.
Accesibility is another major improvement that comes with GNOME 2, all contributed by Sun. All these features bring GNOME into a more mature level and a complete product that will help us regain the desktop market share.
You can help make this dream a reality, just join us in the effort to improve GNOME and make it perfect.
I am missing too many things, and I apologize for those hackers working steadily on all those pieces of GNOME that are going continously into the tree. But there is way too much going on in the GNOME world.
Miguel.
We believe in writing as much code as possible in C# i
nstead of C, because we believe we can write more code, more robust code which in the end could be reusable as a components if we use C# instead of C for pieces like the compiler and its associated tools.
This seems to contradict what we have in our web page about the class-library. The class library is being built in a way that would allow the GUI toolkit to be plugged.
It is also plain FUD that we do not want to make Mono work with other desktops (hey, even GNOME works on other desktops).
You do not want to get a Gtk+ toolkit on MacOS, nor on Windows. You want to get a native interface, from http://www.go-mono.com/class-library.html:
For classes that might differ more (for example, the implementation of Windows.Forms), we might have different directories altogether:
System.Windows.Forms/Win32,
System.Windows.Forms/Gtk+ and
System.Windows.Forms/Cocoa.
It is not the fault of any of you to do so, but it would be Petreley's duty to do a little research before writing from an uninformed point of view.
I remember I was once sitting in a panel with another famous pundit. The panel was on `Open Source' and they had brought the `experts' on Open Source to talk about it.
Such pundit said a minute before the panel begun to us `I do not see the difference between Peer to Perr and Open Source, to me they are the same thing'.
In Market speak .NET is a Microsoft-wide company initiative. To humans this means that a vision has been set at Microsoft, and every bit of the company is moving towards making that goal happen.
Now, this .NET "vision" encompasses many different areas, let me list some of them for you:
People are confused between two elements: The development platform and Passport. People who claim that Mono is related to passport are making statements that are similar to `Excel is Turbo Pascal'.
The Mono Project is a project that Ximian has launched and is devoting resources to bring the benefits of a new, fresh and powerful development platform to Unix. Why we are doing this? Because we need those tools to bring you the next generation end-user applications. We could do this with C, C++ or Python, but it would take us longer, and we would waste our engineering time.
Passport is a completely different beast. Many people are confused, and asked me `How is Mono related to Passport'? The answer is: it is not related in any way. I have written a document that highlights the problems on Passport, you can get it here: http://www.go-mono.com/passport.html. This has nothing to do with Mono, but people are still confused.
Even worse, some people claim that `Mono will bring Passport to Linux'. Those people have not been paying attention. Passport is already available to be ran on Linux servers. Just go to http://www.passport.com, and download the Linux toolkit.
This bears repetition: Mono is not related to passport.
If you want to have an informed opinion on Mono, please read our FAQ: http://www.go-mono.com/faq.html
miguel.
You can also read an functional overview of Evolution and what it has to offer.
Since Evolution is not feature frozen, we are polishing the GUI and killing all bugs that we have reported so far, you can help by going to the developers page and learn about how to report bugs on Evolution or how to send your favorite patch and improvement.
You can get Evolution using Red Carpet (that is how I installed it myself a few minutes ago). Select the `Ximian Preview' channel and then select Evolution, all the required software will be installed for you.
Finally, now that I am pasting URLs, I would like to say that on the preview channel you can also find the latest two great contributions of Ximian to GNOME (plug, plug). The Ximian Setup Tools is there for people to test (ie, unified System Administration across Unix systems, with a nice and friendly GNOME UI). The technology behind it is extremely nice. And we are also previewing the Metatheme selector, which allows you to change all the theme setting across the board in your desktop.
Love,
Miguel.
Evolution supports using SSL over IMAP, SMTP and POP3 on top of many others.
The camel library from Evolution is the most advanced mail library in existance right now. The API was inspired by the JavaMail design, but it has been extended and improved to deal with many real world situations that JavaMail did not cope back in the day.
Well, I have been running the nightly builds of Mozilla for quite some time now, and I am very happy with the speed improvements that have been landed over the past few weeks.
Mozilla stopped feeling slugish for me about two weeks ago, and ever since it has kept on improving. Great work everyone!
miguel.
EEL and GAL are different libraries. They are both libraries that were extracted from existing applications to encourage reuse.
But they are both tied to different time schedules, and there is really little (if any) code duplication.
Both are libraries with unfrozen APIs and both libraries are just stop gap measures while we get the most reusable bits into glib, gtk+ or gnome-libs.
There is hardly any competition at all between gal and eel. They are fully complementary
Miguel.
You might want to learn about some of the things that I am more excited about Bonobo right now: the Moniker system (basically a name space for Bonobo Objects). It is here: http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/monikers.html
Enjoy,
Miguel.