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GNOME GUI

Gnome On Dell's Business PCs 156

Posted by Hemos from the good-for-desktop-acceptance dept.
jedipapi writes: "Dell will unveil on Monday that they'll have Gnome preloaded on selected business PCs along with a partnership with Eazel among others. ZDNet has the full story."
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Gnome On Dell's Business PCs More

Gnome On Dell's Business PCs

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  • It's a troll because I posted it and I have a reputation for trolling.
    The points are valid, it's an important concern but I posted it - so it's a troll.
    Wellcome to slashdot.
    --Shoeboy
  • I thought this would have happened sooner.
  • Cool. Hopefully, this will expand the userbase in the business world. I wonder if when a business calls up and asks for a windows-based system, if dell will say that a linux system is also available?

    Also, the company that I work for buys systems based on the price of the system after some minimum requirements have been met. And usually its three different companies competing for the order. This would be great because a linux system should be cheaper. The only downside is that the minimum requirements state that it needs to come with Win NT or Win2k. Doh! Oh well.

    -----------------
    My company doesn't use linux. Time to look for a new job.

  • If you want to develope close source applications using QT you can buy a different license from them and do that.
    Indeed. However, I wouldn't be basing my business with QT technology as the cornerstone with the possibility that they will greatly increase licence fees if QT gains dominance.
    There is no problem here except when people want Free Software but are not willing to make their own software free.
    What of people that merely want to make Open Source software? With QT it's GPL or proprietary, with no room for middle ground (if you want to be able to distribute binaries, which is kind of useful).
    I do wish the Windows version of QT was GPL because then I would use it in a GPL program I'm writing for both Windows and Linux
    Indeed, such complex licencing situations on a widget set are just stupid. What is the point of a cross-platform widget set if you can't deploy things cross-platform with ease? There's just too many hurdles and restrictions for something that is so central to an application. I'd be most dissappointed if The Gimp for Windows didn't exist because of a licencing restriction on the widget set.
  • Which polished office suite do you use?

    Claris office?

    Polished and MS office in the same sentance is
    wrong.

  • > Most of the documentation about KDE development seems to focus on the "soft" matter of "What
    > are the UI guidelines?", with a distinct dearth of technical architectural material.

    My, what a telling comment. That really sums up for me why gnome is like it is. Everyone involved seems preoccupied with these opendoc/taligent/component architecture wet dreams, TOTALLY ignoring the damn UI.

    Just for starters, could someone tell me whether the GNOME people actually understand what the "default ring" around dialog buttons is for? I would estimate that in over 70% of all gnome apps I've used, it does nothing -- hitting return does something else. In fact, I often come across dialog boxes where hitting return selects the non-default button! Is this some kind of cargo-cult thing, where they noticed the circles around buttons on MacOS screenshots, and thought "ooh, we'd better make our dialogs look like that" without actually understanding what they were for?

    Moreover I would nominate the gnome control panel applet for worst UI ever. Even the damn login window is hopelessly confusing for newbies -- it silently doesn't work if the cursor is outside the little login window. The KDE alternative is much, much clearer and easier to use. The gnome panel seems to be more about providing every possible option for power users in an endless succession of nested submenus than presenting a nice, simple, clear way of accessing applications and current programs.

    And if I never see that damn gnome application crash dialog again in my life, it'll be too soon. I've had far more luck with KDE apps, though admittedly I don't run the full thing regularly because it's too resource intensive.

    More and more the whole gnome project is seems to be suffering from too much hype and not enough attention to good solid UI design. Good UI design is damn hard, and it starts with designers setting down good guidelines for app builders to follow. I don't see any sign at all that the gnome people are addressing such a crucial step in anything but a half-hearted manner, and the fact that people like you call it "soft" makes me despair. Why don't you stick with your CLIs?

    Andrew

  • Re:Why vendors hide hardware specs. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's a good conspiracy theory, as these things go... But where's the evidence?
  • BTW, what "small details" are you referring to with Gtk+ programming?

    The small detail I usually look first when I try a new GUI toolkit is: how easy is it to write text on inclined lines? One often needs that for visualizing data on multi-dimensional graphs. It's not so hard on MFC, very hard on Motif and Gtk, and trivial in Qt.

    I got instantly hooked the first time I tried Qt on KDevelop 1.0. I spent all of 15 minutes studying the tutorial and examples, then 15 minutes more to write my first working Qt program, adapted from one of the examples: an analog clock where the numbers are written in the same orientation as the respective hour marks, the hour and minute hands are black, the seconds hand is red. The seconds hand moves smoothly, not jumping each second as quartz watches do. It keeps working smoothly as the window is moved or resized. All in all, the most productive half-hour I ever spent studying any software documentation.



  • Ok, I'm using it right now, it seems pretty good. Maybe the debugging is slowing it down. Java doesnt work, I must have to ad it to the helper applications. So right there's something to turn off users. I see there are no helper app registered except for text, there's something else to turn people off. Flash doesnt seem to work, and if it could work, how much trouble do I need to go through to make it work? A BIG problem I have with it, and will keep me from starting it up again, is that bookmarks cant be added directly to bookmark folders, only appeneded to the main list, as far as I can see. And why not turn off debugging in the binaries??? Is it to scare some users into thinking that this browser isnt good enough to use?!? Does it import netscape bookmarks? If it doesnt, why not make a new user feel more at home by importing bookmarks, and if it does, why is it not telling me nicely "I can import your bookmarks"? Why not do what the competition does (ms) and give it polish even if its not ready for polishing?
  • If you're using a nightly build, you should be warned that it's built directly from the latest CVS every night, and thus some things may work strangely or not at all (and it's definitely not meant to include Java and Flash out of the box). It's meant for developers that are tracking bugs, and for people that want to see how things are going -- it's not necessarily meant to be polished. This also goes for the milestones, though they're supposed to get better with time.

    And to answer your questions:

    * Debugging in the binaries, bookmarks not quite working, no helpers registered: See above about Mozilla's status. If something doesn't work, wait a few days and try a new build, or better yet, report the bug to the developers so it can get fixed.

    * Getting Flash and Java working: For now, you have to install these manually. You can get the Java 2 plugin here [netscape.com], and for Flash, just use the existing Netscape 4 plugin (it'll grab it automatically on Windows, for Linux, copy it to .mozilla/plugins in your home directory).

    -lee

  • Re:Did someone say "Windows 2000"? (Score:3)

    by selectspec ( 74651 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @03:17PM (#590746)
    Top 10 Reasons to Move to Windows 2000 Professional

    1. Value You'll pay lots of money for Windows 2000 and MS support and training, increasing the value of your Microsoft stock.

    2. Reliability Win2k is almost as reliable as unix now!

    3. Mobility Since win2k is completely insecure, anyone can access your computer from anywhere!

    4. Manageability Win2k is easier to manage and support, until you find a bug, at which point your completely screwed!

    5. Performance Win2k has proven to be faster than Windows 95 (its amazing what you can do in 5 years).

    6. Security You'll feel safe knowning that only Microsoft (and some russian maffioso) have ever seen the source code!

    7. Internet You can be sure that our software will never comply with any of the internet standards

    8. Usability Win2k has provided us with many wizards like that Paper Clip guy to make life so much easier!

    9. Data Access By using roaming profiles you can access your data from any workstation, unless its not a win2k box, in which case you'll complelely hose it.

    10. Hardware Win2k runs on the same '86 hardware that it always did, forcing the CPU companies to continue that ass backwards compatibility. Also, win2k fixed that NT multi-CPU bug.

  • Am i missing something or isnt GNU/Linux required to run GNOME?

    You're missing something. GNOME runs fine on other operating systems as well. FreeBSD [freebsd.org] is an example of one such operating system.

  • Hey, someone in the know actually responding to me. I was sure I would be written off as a wacko or something. Thanks for responding.

    Well, I personally don't think a webbrowser needs to be everything to everyone. I would love working with a lightweight browser that supported: HTML, XHTML, CSS, SSL, Cookies and maybe Javascript. That would be great for me. That should be coming to GNOME in the shape of Encompass with GtkHTML2. How hard would it be to make it embed Bonobo components? Then you could even get Flash or Java Bonobo components(provided someone wrote them) going... Hmmm... I like it. And you can make it be a Bonobo Component itself...

    Well, I am very glad to hear Achtung hasn't been abandoned. Looking over the mailing list archives since the announcement of OpenOffice, and checking the ChangeLog in CVS made it look dead. I guess there really isn't a point in posting to a mailing list and doing constant commits if you are the only developer. Go Joe!

    And then OpenOffice(and I think most of this applies to AbiWord as well)... All I can see on the mailing lists is that they want to make the apps Bonobo components. Which is great. But, it looked like they aren't going to be using the canvas, maybe not gnome-print(seems to be some discussion, and seem to be leaning away from it), supporting GTK+ only through their own portability layer(which must be done to get as many platforms as they want) and no use of libxml, gconf, and other such GNOME technologies. Portability layers make things big, and slow in development. I would even love it if one of our GNOME companies forked AbiWord or OpenOffice to concentrate on GNOME only.

    Anyways... I do thank you for responding, and correcting a couple of things for me.

    God Bless,

    Dan
  • those macintosh people were making usable graphical user interfaces. These programmers, along with the rest of the macintosh community, endured cries of 'WIMP' and 'macintoy' and 'idiot box' and lots of other anti-GUI sentiment. And then those hypocrits from old school unix and DOS turned right around and created X and Windows and, in their arrogance and spite for the macintosh, never tried to learn anything from it. They ignored many intelligent, widely appliable usability principles the mac introduced, or did did the exact opposite of those principles, just so they could be different from apple. Tests showed a menubar at the top of the screen can be accessed faster than one on a window, but it didn't matter to Microsoft. Having the cancel button on the left and OK button on the right conforms better to the left-right nature of English than the OK button left/cancel button right we see in windows (and GNOME) dialogs, but that didn't matter to Microsoft, either. And so windows ended up being a legacy to UI stupidity, and GNOME, through their blind emulation of microsoft, ends up being stupid legacy UI. A lot of gnome people (while well meaning) are a bunch of ex-windows people who conveniantly forget about history. Makes you wonder who really deserves to lead to the linux desktop GUI revolution: the people people who led the first GUI revolution, or the people who fought against it.
  • Why would someone who packaged KDE for Debian on his own for a year before QT went GPL and it got into Debian proper, want to sabotage KDE? For that is who packages KDE for Debian now - Ivan Moore (who ran kde.tydc.com).

    There's no conspiracy. There's no one unified Debian opinion on KDE, any more than there's one unified Slashdot opinion on KDE. Yes, there are Debian developers who still harbor grudges towards KDE, but they aren't the ones packaging KDE for Debian.
  • Reliability Win2k is almost as reliable as unix now!

    Err! The source here is not accidentally some M$ marketing literature?

    It required me all of a week and some Canon Digital Ixus software installation attempt to make my Win2k(f) installation behave very, very strange.

    Thanks god I only need this piece 'o shit to occasionally edit a customer document on my way home and there's this 15Gb Linux partition which assists me in actually getting work done.

    Oh my! You have been sarcastic...

  • If moderation had occured, you'd see the reasons next to the score. The score came from the karma he has managed to obtain so far.
  • the speed of interpreter is not an issue when 95% of the CPU time is spent running LAPACK routines written in highly-tuned Fortran.

    I always use LAPACK for solving equation systems. It not only is as quick as it can be, but it has been tried and tested for decades, it should be FULLY debugged by now.

    But this 95% time running LAPACK is not true for most cases. I recently ran into a program where, according to top, the system was 11% of the time running LAPACK and 39% of the time running the GUI. There's a lot of number crunching in rotate/shear/translate/scale the data for visualization as well.

    BTW, the last time I coded in Fortran was in 1985, for a PDP-11/70 running RSX. I will use the old, time-tested Fortran libraries forever, but I'll stick to C/C++ until a better language is invented.

  • There probably was a time when I wished for IE on Linux, but now I have Konqueror. It's very IE-like, in that it renders pages good, it's fast, and is a good file manager.

    Konqueror lacks things like ActiveX, but who needed that in the first place? It also is much more stable than IE (and isn't that the reason we're using Linux in the first place?).

    I'm not quite sure what you're whining about. I'd much rather use Konqueror than IE. So... where is this lost war you speak of?

    -Justin
  • RedHat I believe...

  • What's the big deal on this? (Score:4)

    by jcoleman ( 139158 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @02:01PM (#590757)
    I bought a Dell *HOME* computer in April and it came loaded with *gasp* RedHat 6.0, Enlightenment, Windowmaker, Gnome, and KDE. Sounds like a non-story to me.

  • Good but worrisome (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's a lot more information on this deal available on zdnet here: http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011 ,2659657,00.html

    While it's a good thing that Dell is taking this step, isn't it a little worrisome how Eazel seems to be hyping itself over GNOME and Free Software?

    Some quotes from this longer article that are interesting are:

    "Dell will also start shipping Eazel's network user environment with all its Linux-based desktop and notebook products starting early next year."

    Umm, Eazel's network user environment? GNOME?

    "Eazel Services include its Software Catalog, which allows one-click installation of certified applications from a comprehensive Linux software library..."

    I tried the Nautilus preview, and their installer was pretty bad. It definitely wasn't one click. HelixCode has been installing and upgrading GNOME for a lot longer.

    "But customer needs are always paramount, so while Eazel will be the default desktop..."

    Once again, is it the Eazel Desktop(TM) now?

    I'd rather see a company of Free Software people (Helix GNOME) do this than a company of ex-Macintosh people who seem to forget about the rest of us conveniently enough in press releases.

  • As a daily user of Debian's Gnu/Linux with the Gnome desktop on a Dell OptiPlex GX110, I can tell you how happy this news makes me.

    It took two full weeks to get X configured properly for my desktop; having Dell's support for this hardware would have made things so much easier.

    I hope that Dell begins full support for their laptop models soon, also. That would be sweet.

  • Dell already had Linux servers. Now they seem to ship Linux desktops as well.

    Linux is really well suited for businesses. At home, there's the installation and configuration problems to cope with. The typical home user is either too computer ignorant and unwilling to solve many of the small problems that arise, or always wanting to run the latest hardware for which there's no Linux support yet.

    In the enterprise, on the other hand, they run standardized systems; solve the installation problems for one box and the others will follow. There are professionals to take care of that. Once the standard Linux system is running, there will be no more time wasted on the M$ cycle of crash, reboot, crash, reboot, crash, reboot...

  • Businesses want applications to work for them. Work, as in, accomplish. Text based apps have been "working" for years. Gnome apps can "work" for your business and achieve GUI heaven for your PHB types.
  • Basically I am quite impressed by Konqueror, which is IMHO a first class browser. While Mozilla is nice, too, I do think you miss the point:

    It is not about the browsers, which at least try to behave in a compatible way, its about the plugins and extension beyong html and xml.

    i386-Konqueror and i386-Mozilla can use i386-Netscape-Plugins but it is sometimes a big headache to get all the nice stuff running. With IE/win32 and Netscape/win32 I click two buttons and get a browser, java, manymany plugins and many more stuff.

    And as soon as you use a non-i386-plattform you are totaly doomed... I am using m68k-Linux and really would like to use a Linux-PDA with some StrongARM. Even when you can get sources it most likely will be no easy task to get thing done.

    This should be a primary target for Konqueror and Mozilla: Integrate more stuff into the sourcetree and make it a Internet-Suite instead of a Browser.
  • I've actually had Mandrake crash more than Windows 2000 on me in the past month, for the following two reasons:

    1. I installed Mandrake on two computers with severe hardware problems.
    2. I don't have Windows 2000.

  • I have one thing to say to you Shoeboy (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Fuck off.

    Most of you KDE lovers seem to assume that all the people who don't choose KDE are FSF worshipping Troll Tech haters who can't get over the now-defunct license issues. When in fact, there are a lot of people like me who *have* gotten over the license issues and/or never did think the issues were a big deal in the first place. KDE is not the be-all, end-all of desktop environments.

    People have a lot of different reasons why they don't like KDE. Personally, as a C++ developer, if I were working on Linux applications I would probably prefer KDE. But I'm not. I'm just a Linux user. From a user's point of view, there are a lot of things I don't like about KDE. First of all, KDE is an asthetic dissapointment IMHO. GNOME has some artistic people contributing themes, icons, etc. and it shows. Second, GNOME is both WM agnostic and language agnostic. As a C++ developer, I don't care too much about the latter, but I do care about the former. Yes, you can run KDE apps without KWM, but there are more alternative WMs that are GNOME compliant than KDE compliant. Third, GNOME is definately more flexible and customizable than KDE.

    I also have to question your assertion that Debian is clearly superior. Debian is aggressively hyped on slashdot as well as a lot of other forums (k5hin, IRC, etc.), but I've been less than impressed. The Debian install process is just brain dead. My attempts at installing Debian only seem to go smoothly on the most benign hardware configurations. And even when it does go smoothly, there is absolutely no justification for first installing a "base" system before proceeding to the real installation. It isn't necessary and should have been removed several versions ago. Debian is by leaps and bounds the *worst* distribution when it comes to installation. By comparison, Slackware and Stampede are like installing MacOS. Also, another problem with Debian is the pace of development. The frequency of releases is way, way, way too slow. Every Debian user I happen to know is almost always running the unstable release.
  • For what it's worth, I'm running Debian GNU/Linux on a Dell Latitude CP at the moment (installing Debian on this laptop was my introduction to Unixes in general; sort of a trial by fire!) XFree86 autodetected the video chipset, so X installation/configuration turned out to be remarkably painless.

    Audio, however, was another matter. It was easy to get the Soundblaster (8) compatibility mode to work (just turn it on in the kernel), but if you want to play MP3s or other high-fidelity sounds, the quality is just unacceptable.

    Eventually I managed to get ALSA configured, and now the computer is an absolute dream to work with. It's surprisingly fast for a Pentium 200, and has a tremendous battery life (which averages about 30% longer than it did when I was running Win9x).

    More direct laptop support from Dell would be welcome, of course, but I didn't find there to be any real trouble installing Linux, apart from making ALSA find the Crystal Semiconductor audio chipset, which I notice that Dell doesn't seem to be putting in their laptops any more, anyway.
  • WOW... the sarcasm is running really deep in this thread.

    Funny stuff!

  • The title says

    • Gnome On Dell's Business PCs

    Dear flame warriors,
    I am sorry but this definitely is good news!

    Being a KDE enthusiast myself I cannot but accept the fact that there is now a large PC seller declaring they'll have Linux preloaded on (no, not all but at least some of) their business PCs.

    Why is this good news to a KDE fan?

    Because it is good news to a Linux fan!

    I might be wrong but this could well be the beginning of a new area where at the end people will have to ask for Windows -- in the rare case they insist in buying a copy of it with their new PC.

    That's my dream and I step by step see it become true:

    • OEMs start putting Linux on the machines by default!
    • Users see absolutely no need to still have Windows on their PCs!
    • Instead of selling Windows to each customer, dealers choose give them the better system!

    Of course if it were KDE to be preinstalled I'ld smile even more. But the most important fact in my opinion is - that it is Linux!

    I am looking forward to the day when I can go to any computer shop to get some new machines and they kindly ask me:

    "Would you like us to put the new KDE on the disks or do you prefer running GNOME. (Of course we could also give you just X with the windowmanager of your choice...)"

    Those of you prefering to fight against 'the others', please consider having a short look at this page:

    http://home.snafu.de/khz/Sonne/A_contra_B.html

    I thank you for reading my comment.

    Karl-Heinz
    --
    "Why do we have to hide from the police, Daddy?"

  • Good point. As a Dell consumer we order our workstations with a very primitive pre-load and order our servers clean with no OS. Why would anyone rely on someone else to configure thier machines is beyond me.

    I realize the act of installing OSs/software is a hassle especially for a large deployment but I would rather create my own image and blast it on then using someone else's standards.

    Hey ma look, my first post since getting re-instated YAHOOOOO!!!

  • Now all Dell needs is some AMD chipsets and they'll be all set.
  • Look Mr. Judge: Competition!

    Real competition

    (thanks Dell - good move...)

  • I wasn't going to respond until I got to this line:
    Once again, is it the Eazel Desktop(TM) now?

    Heh. After all those articles and interviews that explained how Unix users had to deal with "the cryptic command-line interface" until Gnome 1.0 was released, I can't help but smile at how Eazel has adopted Gnome's tricks.

    The whole Red Hat / Helix Code / Eazel / Sun thing is going to be very interesting over the next year or two. It looks like Eazel won this round but they're going directly against against Helix with their software updater. (The disk space thing doesn't have a prayer of making money, IMHO.) I'm skeptical about either of them making any money at it, but the North American Linux mafia is so infatuated with Miguel that I've got to think Helix Code will have the upper hand in keeping mindshare. (Remember how Slashdot used to cover every detail of the Enlightenment developers lives? Have you read a word about them here since the E/Gnome split?)

    The great thing is the software is all free. Hey, if venture capitalists want to throw their money away to write GPL software for us, who am I to complain?

  • I've got 11 machines from Dell (10 Optiplexes, 1 PowerEdge Server) that came preloaded with RedHat 6.2 That I've had for 3 months. This IS a non-story.
  • Now that they have gnome computers maybe they'll put elves and dwarves on some too.

  • GNOME was started because KDE originally depended on a non-open library (QT). Its kinda hard to have an truely opensource desktop when a private company has your UI toolkit by the balls and its far from being open.

    If it wasn't for GNOME and the pressure from competition with it, we'd be stuck with a pitiful windows clone that still depended on closed source QT.

    And who are you to say something doesn't have the right to exist? Perhaps it would have occured to you that people picked gnome or KDE for different reasons? Your showing your a complete clueless fuck if you can't admit that one has advantages the other doesn't have and dismiss it as being worthless.

    Whats the matter of choice? Your limited intellect make it impossible for you to evaluate each and pick the one that makes the best sense for you?

  • There is at least some chance that AOL will eventually switch to Mozilla as their AOL client browser. That single action would almost certainly turn the browser war back into a horse race.

  • Al Gore was heard to comment that the use of GNOME for the voters in Florida would be too confusing, leading many to think that they had KDE on their desktops instead.

    Kierthos
  • because if Dell sells it my boss will buy it for me and I'll be able to strip whatever they put on it put Debian on it he won't know the diff and I won't have winders anymore. Thank you Dell.
  • Look at the SuSE [netcraft.com] and Microsoft [netcraft.com] company website uptimes.

    (Unfortunately, Netcraft doesn't have uptime graphs for Mandrake). If the Microsoft webmasters themselves can't get anything better than that, how could I expect to do better myself?

    BTW, my personal record is 8 months for a Slackware system running on a 486-DX80 box. It was turned off to be moved to a different room. If I wasn't away at vacations at the time, I would have insisted on moving it plugged to the UPS, just for the pleasure of seeing the uptime rolling over to 0 at the 497th day! :)

  • The Gnome people are always Whoring themselves in front of Sun, Red Hat & IBM - especially over the last year.

    Yeah cause keeping the benefits of Linux in your parent's basement has worked wonders so far? Have you ever met a regular ole user and shown them Linux? Ever notice they usually mis-pronounce it the first time? Anything that helps get Linux into the mainstream where more people can interact with it would be a good thing. The bickering between GUI formats or distros is silly. It's like women's basketball having two leagues and trying to compete against the NBA. One is clearly the market leader, rather then splitting their resources and draw the community should try to unite around one distro and make it a bad ass.

  • Linux-based computers take up 5% of the computer population in the U.S. right now. With Dell starting to sell linux computers, this number will undoughtedly rise dramatically. The percentege could reach double didgets. This would mean that Billy's operating systems would only be in the 80s. Isn't a monopoly a company that prevents other companies from competing?
  • Why aren't users downloading multiple products and comparing them anymore?

    Normal people (ie: not students, and not geeks) have better things to do than to play with OSes.

  • losing browser war (Score:5)

    by KevinMS ( 209602 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @02:05PM (#590782)


    I'm starting to realize that linux is in real danger in the desktop arena before its even a real contender. What concerns me is web browsers. Netscape looks like it will not keep pace with IE and I'm sure MS realizes this. Mozilla looks like its going to remain a "hobby" for a while now, and konqueror is wasting its time with desktop integration eventhough desktop integration was just a way for MS to try to avoid anti-trust arguments. Maybe opera will help, but could they be moving any slower? MS knows that linux is screwed because of browser-envy, that is probably the main reason why they stopped their porting of IE at solaris and OSX. The linux office apps will be good enough very soon, people will realize they dont need talking paperclips, but when they cant see the webpages or the plugin media they want to they arent going to be happy

  • i agree with you. thats why i said that you need to educate the public about options. i work in a research group, and not using microsoft products was one of the caveats to joining this group. this worked out really well with my advisor since he had planned on using linux on all of the computers except the $2000 word/excel/powerpoint viewer in the corner.

    other students in the group had never used linux until they joined. i take every advantage i can to help them with linux and point out it's strengths and weeknesses. i believe it's my responsibility to pimp linux off on any one i can.

    the revolution will start small, and it will start with individuals like you and i. it will be a better victory if we win without the courts.

    use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
  • So what? Just because they ship the product, it doesn't mean that people will buy it in droves. Companies make unsuccessful products every day.

  • This just proves that we need to have people on the boards of directors of every corporation in America to represent the interests of the people.

    I couldn't disagree more. I believe it shows that each and every board of directors for every corporation in the world should be replace by efficient, highly advanced computers. Preferably, by just one computer, which will lead us all into the age of the machine. Long live our digital masters!

  • Polished and MS office in the same sentance is wrong.

    Now really, I think that MS Office is at least a little bit polished. That talking paperclip is pretty shiny, he must have gotten a little polish.
    _____________

  • you underestimate 'corporate america'. probably because you are just talking with no practical experience at large corporations to back up what you say.

  • I'm just tired of seeing an article about GNOME or KDE (with the article not even bringing up the topic of the other) and seeing 1,000,000 posts about how the other is better, etc.

    Instead of discussing that "wow, a mainstream hardware company is bundling linux with desktop machines preconfigured now!" people are saying "bleh. GNOME sucks... its too corporate.. GNOME sold their souls". I guess its a crime for a company to sell an opensource based product. Better call up all the distro makers and support companies and tell him.

    I remember the slashdot articles dealing with the Gnome Foundation and how most of the posts were KDE users and advocates complaining about it all the while the KDE developers were playing catchup in that regard. Hypocracy?

  • Well, yeah... And I think that a good deal of AOL users just use the basic browser and don't bother trying to find another. Although is trading a Microsoft-controlled arena for an AOL-controlled one really any better?


    -RickHunter
  • Many of Dell's newer laptops seem to have LCD display artifacting problems under X... Customizing XF86Config can eliminate this, but I haven't found a distro that will support their LCDs and chipsets out of the box. Linux on Laptops [utexas.edu] is a good resource for making laptops work with Linux, however.
  • uh, so you're saying that you don't think "corporate america" is going to demand basically a double-click to full usage?

    you're arguing that "corporate america" is fine with nightly builds?

    what corporations have you worked for that would put up with this? you're suggesting that I have my salespeople and business development people and the CEO and CTO use nightly builds of mozilla?

  • A good point... I did find that somewhat annoying when using Galleon, that the scrollbars looked and felt different from everything else. However, M18 is kind of different... With the Classic interface, the entire browser takes a lot of cues from my GTK+ theme. Which is nice, as I'm one of those wierd people who cannot use a dark-on-light interface for long periods of time. And the form widgets (independent of theme) now seem to be GTK widgets, or at least feel a lot like them. At first it felt kind of odd, but now I think its a nice touch. Not everything is totally GTK, but the integration seems fairly good.

    (Unfortunately, there were a few bugs with the theme integration... Most of which are fixed now, IIRC)

    I agree with you that a GNOME web browser would be best, though. If there was a good one, I'd switch to it from Mozilla in a heartbeat. But there (unfortunately) isn't, and I don't have nearly the time or skills needed to write one. :-( Then again, GNOME is still very much an under-development platform, so we can hope...


    -RickHunter

  • Umm... Mozilla is most definitely not a "hobby." I'm running it right now (M18), and aside from a few very minor problems (most related to the (admittedly odd) theme I'm using), its fine. I've got a good number of plugins installed, more than I've ever had under any Windows browser, and there's very few sites that I come across that render improperly... And most do odd things in other browsers too.

    Yes, Internet Explorer is going to remain the browser of choice for a while... Because most computer users aren't knowledgeable enough to consider that there's something out there that might work better. That'll hopefully change eventually.


    -RickHunter
  • ok i admit i am not talking from experience... i do not work in corperate america(i work in municipal government), but i'm just taking a stab at what might be desired based upon what i read and making possible comparasons with the it people i'm used to dealing with... of course i could be off base if government tends to be more conservative than corprate(which is very possible)
    besides.. how much of what is said here can truly be backed up with anything substantial?
  • That's good news, but it won't matter much.

    Everyone is shouting about linux's 5% of the computer market. How many of the users running those computers actually KNOWS enough about linux support it? Knowing to run "./configure;make;make install" or 'rpm --install' doesn't cut it. As a tech support person, I still want windows on the desktop because I know windows better than linux. Lets be honest, many other tech support managers and employees who like linux will say the same thing.

    Sure, some companies will buy these machines. But with the extremely small pool of knowledgeable linux users, I don't see this happening for the same reason there is a tech worker shortage: not enough good people.

    Saving money on the OS or other software won't make a difference when you have to pay for training.

  • Sure it is, if the control that AOL has is limited to the amount of control that it has over Mozilla.

    For example, let's imagine that Mozilla took over the entire browser market (unlikely in anything but the extreme long term). I could still take the Mozilla source code and change it so that it did exactly what I wanted. I could have a 100% AOL compatible browser with my own special additional features.

    Yes, AOL is evil, but Mozilla is good.

  • Yeah, but this is a business machine. And business desktops is one area where Microsoft has a nice, strong stranglehold on the market. As twenty years ago, no-one got fired for buying IBM, now Microsoft is the "safe" choice, loved by PHBs everywhere.


    -RickHunter
  • Linux on Laptops [utexas.edu] is a good resource for laptop configuration tweaking and driver support. They might have information about an open source driver for your audio chipset.

  • For a web browser, check out Galeon [sourceforge.net]. Its based around the Mozilla engine, but has a totally GTK+ interface. There's GNOME office projects too, IIRC.


    -RickHunter

  • Rant about GNOME (Score:3)

    by danfarrell ( 206179 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @02:08PM (#590800)
    I was looking for a place to rant about GNOME, and then this was posted, which gives me my opportunity.

    First let me say I am an avid GNOME user, use it all the time, love it, etc, etc, etc... I wish I had the programming skill/desire to help out.

    Anyways, here is the rant: I HATE CROSS PLATFORM APPS!!!!!!!!! AGH!!! I have been reading mailing list archives lately, trying to find a good place to be able to contribute. In my opinion the things holding GNOME back are lack of a couple of key apps: Word Processor, Presenter, and Web Browser. Every GNOME company(who have the best programmers) seems content to accept XP apps for these. OpenOffice is not gonna be the GNOME Office I want, it's way too bloated and XP centered. Follow Gnumeric's lead! Make very good totally GNOME based apps! AbiWord, OpenOffice and Mozilla are not what I want! They all sacrifice what could be, and can't make the best use of what is available in the GNOME platform. I have been looking at Codefactory's gtkhtml2, which could be the webbrowser base needed, but Achtung has been abandoned... and where oh where is a good word processor! Okay, I think that's the end of it... I need to learn GUI programming better so I can make it happen, I know... I'm working on it...

    Alright...

    Peace out...

    Dan
  • What happens when that one company with billions of dollars to spend makes the consumers unaware that there is anything to BE unhappy about.

    - No, your cars are SUPPOSED to leak fluids, get horrible gas milage and randomly lose control and possibly harm you or bystanders.
    Those other cars that don't do this?
    Oh, they're either lying or being run by a bunch of wierd people.
    WE know what's best for you. Trust US.

    - OK, sounds good.

    --
  • Yeah, FLTK is definitely cool. Imagine if the GIMP would have used FLTK in the beginning --> no horrible C based gtk+ API :)
  • Actually, it did. Dell has been shipping RedHat pre-loaded on workstations and servers for quite some time now. I'm not sure exactly, but it's probably been at least a year - so I don't see how exactly this is news.
  • To say W2K rarely crashes must be wishful thinking. I picked up my new Dell latitude laptop just 3 weeks ago, and have experienced around 7 BSOD's, and two lockups requiring the power be pulled and the battery removed to reset the damn thing.
    It only has Win2k (plus service pack) and office 2000, with very little other 3rd party software. I can't wait to get my partition magic cd out and clear some space for linux.
    I've also got to get the thing working with my samba server (which runs on solaris 8 on an ultra 1) which is currently setup for roaming profiles for my win 98 desktop and laptop (both dual boot SuSE)....I've heard this could also be fun....

    I admit W2k does look good (nice cd player) but there is still work to be done.

    BTW , whats with 'built on NT technology'? Didn't NT stand for New Technology, (even if a lot was recycled from OS/2). Did microsoft forget this, or is it just an example of how marketeers now run the company?

    -David

  • A good point... But I seem to remember that the Mozilla project has an agreement with Netscape through which Netscape doesn't have to release the source to their browser? And isn't AOL going to use the "Netscape" version of Mozilla? (Despite the fact that, compared to the Mozilla milestones, it sucks)


    -RickHunter
  • Guys, Why do we care if Dell is bundling Gnome on some of its business pc's? Most of us will just build our own box, won't we? It's lots cheaper and guess what, we get to choose what we want on it! Gee, what a great idea.
  • i am saying that 'corporate america' does not believe windows is the ideal solution. Some companies probably do, some don't.
  • FYI, my Windows 2000 crashes less than my Mandrake install (Don't flame me about using other distros). I think it is time that people stop with the Windows crashing jokes now that Windows 2000 is here.

    And besides, who cares? Linux users are obsessed with uptime, because that's where Linux shines compared to other desktop systems. But the reality is:

    • Despite what you read here, NT and W2K rarely crash under desktop use, W9x falls over once a day or so and MacOS versions after 8.0 are equally stable. There must be some additional Slashdot Effect that causes readers' computers to crash constantly. (What I, as a Mac/Linux/Solaris user find completely unacceptable is having to reinstall Windows. That shouldn't be.)
    • Linux may not crash, but those newfangled desktops lock up X all the time, which requires a reboot if you're a typical home user. And rebooting Linux is a lot more damaging than restarting an OS that expects crashes.
    • In any case, you still need to save your work every minute because even if the OS doesn't crash, Linux office apps constantly do. Linux zealots somehow have the idea that their apps are crashproof, too.
    • And most importantly, so you have to reboot once a day? So what? I'm vastly more productive using a polished office suite than I would be struggling with the current Linux alternatives, even with the extra 60 seconds I'd have. Uptime is useless without the ability to get work done during it.
  • I don't get it. I've already made two purchase orders for Dell machines here at work in the past, and they came pre-installed with Redhat, and Gnome as the default environment. How is this anything new? They already do this. I don't understand how there is any difference between their "business", "education", and "home" deals. Why not just offer all the models with sets of pre-installed software and not bother calling them "business" or "home" models. There really isn't any important difference - you can take a "home" model and add and subtract options to make it just like a "business" model, and visa versa. I don't understand their categories.
  • I love Dell's. I'd Love them 1000 times better if they had AMD chipsets.

  • Wintel whore #1 takes a stake in Eazel?! (Score:3)

    by _|()|\| ( 159991 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @04:17PM (#590812)
    Sounds like a non-story to me.

    I was stunned when Dell started preloading Red Hat on Dimensions. At first I was surprised when it charged the same for Red Hat as for Windows. I shouldn't have been.

    Two things make this a story. The ZDNet link says Dell is now loading on "business PCs"; i.e., OptiPlex, Dimension, and possibly Latitude notebooks. Second, the eWeek article [zdnet.com] says that Dell "has taken a significant stake in Linux software developer Eazel."

    Gateway introduced the AMD-based Select line in response to Intel supply problems, then dropped it, then reintroduced it as the Athlon surpassed the Pentium III in clock speed. Now, even as everyone else has introduced Athlon systems, Dell has stuck with Intel. Likewise, it has been a big Microsoft partner in bundling Windows and Office. Dell is a PC powerhouse because its deals with Intel and Microsoft cut expenses. Now, in the wake of the anti-trust trial, Dell preloads Linux. The investment in Eazel is a vote of confidence on the potential of Linux on the desktop.

  • Debian has tried to merge the installation process with the kernel compilation. Installation should be quick and easy; after you install you start the process of optimization and configuration, which you can take as long as you wish or need to. Debian tries to put all the optimization into the installation, which appears not to be what most users want.

    BTW, Red Hat isn't the sales leader anymore, Mandrake seems to have overtaken them. Myself, I use Conectiva, the best for me.

    (PS: when I say me I mean myself, not the later version of a half-witted so-called "operating system")

  • Bigotry obviously runs high! (Score:4)

    by Christopher B. Brown ( 1267 ) <cbbrowne@gmail.com> on Thursday November 30, 2000 @02:19PM (#590819) Homepage
    From my certainly-biased perspective, it's nowhere near as evident where manifest superiority lies:
    • Is Debian superior, because it doesn't suffer from the RHAT thing of releasing weird customized versions of kernels and compilers, or is it inferior because it took longer to get The XFree86 4.0.1 [debian.org] release out?
    • I no longer use RHAT these days, using Debian instead; the long times between Debian "stable" releases is legitimately a pain against which the questionable robustness of RHAT "dot 0" releases must be balanced.
    • On Debian, I've had a whopping lot more success running GNOME applications than I have had with KDE applications; your "clearly superior" code has tended to suffer badly from segmentation faults. I've never gotten any of the prepackaged KOffice stuff running.
    • I tend to prefer the architecture of GNOME to that of KDE, particularly because information about it is actually published and available.

      Most of the documentation about KDE development seems to focus on the "soft" matter of "What are the UI guidelines?", with a distinct dearth of technical architectural material.

    • I could argue that KDE, by largely forcing developers to program in C++, this represents its own "denial of passion for excellence."

      After all:

      "C++ is more of a rube-goldberg type thing full of high-voltages, large chain-driven gears, sharp edges, exploding widgets, and spots to get your fingers crushed. And because of it's complexity many (if not most) of it's users don't know how it works, and can't tell ahead of time what's going to cause them to lose an arm." -- Grant Edwards
      :-)

      GNOME, by being agnostic about what language you are expected to use, does not force you into

      "Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS." -- Alan Kay

    The notion that GNOME is necessarily terribly awful and that to use it means denying any notion of "passion for excellence" seems to me to be a ludicrously unfair way of characterizing it.

    At one time, GNOME wasn't much more than a counterreaction to KDE's adoption of the then-rather-more-proprietary Qt toolkit; that is certainly no longer true.

  • Re:Rant about GNOME (Score:3)

    by fejjie ( 192392 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @02:40PM (#590821)
    GtkHTML2 is not a web-browser replacement. We currently use GtkHTML in Evolution and it renders HTML fine, but has no support for CSS. GtkHTML2 will support that but it will still be a lightweight HTML rendering widget and not a full-blown web-browser ready engine. At least as far as I know - contact Anders Carlsson to find out for sure.

    As far as achtung, it hasn't been abandoned - Joe Shaw is still hacking away at it in his spare time.

    OpenOffice I believe itends to be fully GNOMEified, but I dunno for sure.

  • This is ridiculous.

    Debian KDE packages are packaged by people that like and use KDE - they have no reason to sabotage it like that. That's totally absurd.

    It also doesn't explain why I have the same experience under RedHat and Mandrake - the last of which is a distro that defaults to KDE contributes to KDE aggressively and quite clearly is in love with KDE.

    Gnome has it's drawbacks too. I don't use either on a regular basis personally - I use both occasionally (usually for a few days after the release of a major rev) so as to be familiar with them in case I need to support them. So I consider myself fairly objective on the issue. Other than aesthetic preferences, there isn't much difference from the end-user perspective. KDE has bit fuller complement of applications, Gnome is more customizable and happier about working with other WMs... *yawn*. It's just silly that so many KDE people (not just random slashbots, but posters on the official KDE site do this on a regular basis too) continuously assert their technical superiority, and come up with all these wild conspiracy theories to explain why even though they have the clearly superior product some people choose to use something else.

    The answer is simple. The product isn't so clearly and self-evidently superior as you want to think. Get over your bad self. Do what causeth you not to wilt and all that stuff - but for your own sake, lose the superiority/inferiority complex and the conspiracy theories, or at least learn to keep them to yourself. They just make you sound like a kook.

  • Re:Rant about GNOME (Score:3)

    by _|()|\| ( 159991 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @04:49PM (#590828)
    here is the rant: I HATE CROSS PLATFORM APPS!!!!!!!!! AGH!!!

    Okay, here's my rant: I HATE PLATFORM-DEPENDENT APPS!!!!!!!!! AGH!!!

    The first thing the GNOME and KDE clowns do is start developing an office suite from scratch. The Mozilla clowns, realizing they have to be cross platform, essentially develop a new platform, in the form of XUL.

    Sure, develop an ICQ client for one platform. (Of course, it won't be complete until it reads email.) If you're developing anything worth a damn, don't depend on any one platform. Don't know how to write a (Win|Mac|CDE|KDE) app.? Fine, but please separate the user interface from the rest of the app. so that someone who knows and cares can.

    The point is, an app. (proprietary or free) is nothing without users. Targeting one platform alienates the users of all the other platforms. Foo 3.2 for the Amiga looks pretty quaint right now. In five years, Bar 2.1 for GNOME will probably look just as quaint. People have criticized Donald Knuth for using an imaginary assembly language to illustrate the algorithms in The Art of Computer Programming [stanford.edu] . Why not FORTRAN, Pascal, C, C++, or Java? The question almost answers itself: "New algebraic languages go in and out of fashion every five years or so, while I am trying to emphasize concepts that are timeless."

  • There are professionals to take care of that. Once the standard Linux system is running, there will be no more time wasted on the M$ cycle of crash, reboot, crash, reboot, crash, reboot...

    In your dreams. I'm the guinea pig; I'm the one who fought to be allowed to buy a Dell notebook with Linux. And the terms were that I not only do my own system administration but teach the network admins their way around a Linux system.

    And, no, I'm not a professional sysadmin. I'm a professional polygon pusher and part-time electromagnetic egotist.
  • I have a sony vaio, which I bought for the light weight and small size. I haven't been able to use the built-in winmodem in Linux yet, and I had to (shudder) buy a driver for the sound chip. This commercial sound driver is the only software I have found so far that's able to crash a Linux system if it's not handled correctly.

    But there's still hope. I've read that SuSE 7 has built-in support for this chip. Maybe we'll get the same support on other distros yet.

  • It's called the invisible hand. It has two failings: Monopolies, and Externalities. The first is the only one relevant here.

    Wow, we've identified a system created by humans that doesn't perfectly accomplish its design goals all the time, even when working within the design specifications. This is not a problem unique to capitalism. The Invisible Hand does work, provided that the government takes action to prevent the formation of monopolies and to internalize externalities. In other words, laissez-faire sucks just as much as pure communism. That's why it greatly pleases me to hear many of the world's more powerful countries referred to as modern socialist rather than democratic. Balance between ideals gives to the people the power that would otherwise be concentrated in either the left-wing or the right-wing elites.
  • Ok, i'll bite.

    "Gnome has a lot of positive points, but I like KDE better. It's a bit faster, for one thing. And it has better development tools for generating applications."

    Ahh, there's nothing I like better than anecdotal arguments for one over the other. Exactly how is KDE faster? The window manager? The file manager? The application libraries? There's so many variables here I don't know how anyone could say one is faster than the other. Perhaps you meant "Qt is faster than Gtk+" (which is probably true)?.

    And how does it have better development tools? Both are pretty developer friendly in my opinion (though I'm pretty biased towards Gnome development). Gnome had glade/libglade a long time before Qt designer came along. KDevelop is a moot point since many prefer not to use it, and KDevelop supports Gnome anyways (or so it says, I haven't verified this myself unfortunately).

    For what it's worth, I'd say that Gnome is more popular with developers than KDE.

    <useless statistics>

    Freshmeat software map:

    KDE projects: 359
    Gnome projects: 398

    Sourceforge software map:

    KDE projects: 80
    Gnome projects: 129

    </useless statistics>

    What does this mean? Not much, except that you probably can't say KDE is more developer friendly than Gnome (unless the developer is strongly C++ or C biased).

    BTW, what "small details" are you referring to with Gtk+ programming? Gtk+ may look intimidating at first, but once you get the glib/gtk+ philosophy it makes sense and you'll find yourself predicting the APIs.
  • Have you tried to program a KDE app with Perl for instance?

    No. I may be prejudiced, but I view Perl as a "better bash", which makes writing Perl programs "housekeeping", not "development" for me.

    Yes, I use KDevelop mostly. The reason I like Qt and KDevelop is because I write a lot of numeric analysis, digital signal processing, and real-time process control software. I really need the high number-crunching performance only C or C++ can give me, but I don't want to waste a lot of time coding the user interface. I have found KDevelop and Qt are the ideal combination for that.

    You mention several languages that are popular for quickly written one-of-a-kind programs, but when one writes commercial software, one has to watch simultaneously for two factors: the software must not be late for the market and it must be a fast performer. Under these conditions, one's pretty much bound to C/C++ anyway.

  • It wouldn't take much porting to get the GNOME desktop and GNOME applications to work on the Windows 2000 system, seeing as how the Cygwin POSIX layer, the XFree86 server, and GDK/GTK+/Glib are already ported.
  • Unfortunately Microsoft licensing deals with the major OEMs are on a per-CPU basis, so even if you buy a Linux workstation, there is the price of a Win9x license factored into the total cost.
  • A lot of people haven't had Windows training either, all that's required is a Linux+GNOME for Dummies book just like the ones people buy for Windows. On a corporate desktop as well, the relative obscurity of Linux is an advantage, as the users will have to do more than download some crap and double click on it to install. Selling it to the PHBs like that would probably be more successful than the 'more stable than WNT' line as evil hackers writing executable viruses get given more attention than the BSOD.
  • I won't comment on Gnome vs. KDE, but on the matter of Debian, there are some things that hurt debian.
    • Debian cycles times are long - I believe there was a /. post about this
    • Debian doesn't advertise or make deals with book sellers
    • Some people may have a problem with Debian's attititude towards non-free software
    • This is my personal pet peeve - If you want to download ISO images and you're behind a firewall that blocks their ISO pacthing protocol, you can't do it!!!

  • I looked at the press release... (Score:3)

    by SIGFPE ( 97527 ) on Thursday November 30, 2000 @02:53PM (#590860) Homepage
    ...but I couldn't find where to click to find a stock quote for GNOME or LINUX. What the hell kind of news story is that?
    --
  • I must ask. Have you used a recent Mozilla nightly? -- Mozilla user who is never going back to NS 4
  • Hrm.

    >IT'S THE LAPTOP'S STUPID!!

    The laptop's stupid *what*? Pathetic battery? Keyboard? Expensive screen? You've implied that there's something stupid about the laptop, but haven't told us what it is.
  • But it is feature rich, and you don't have to build it. It has many of the nifty features IE has (including instability :)- autocompletion, integration with mail and the desktop, etc. And you can get binaries right here [mozilla.org]. So... any more complaints? Seriously... I do some spare time QA stuff for moz, so any features that you don't think are there I'd love to hear about.
    ~luge
  • Am i missing something or isnt GNU/Linux required to run GNOME? And as such, what distro is Dell going to shill?

    Lets not put the applecart before the ox as they say...
  • I like the Pentium III SpeedStep chip in my notebook just fine, thank you.
  • Everyone knows you execute the elf.

    You debug with dwarf.

  • >>FYI, my Windows 2000 crashes less than my Mandrake install (Don't flame me about using other distros).

    Could you define less than never? Never as in, my Mandrake box never "crashes." And when can we get a copy of your Win2K? It sounds like yours might be better than Microsoft's.
  • Red Hat & Gnome are sacrificing their ideals for the sake of a quick buck. You can't get into bed with the Commercial Devil and not die a little.
    You still seem to be under the impression that 'Free' and 'Commercial' are two incompatible concepts. Have you not been paying attention?
    Part of the reason that the big commercial companies were attracted to the GNOME Foundation was the Freedom provided by GNOME's underlying widget set, GTK+. A Freedom which wasn't available from QT at the time

    If you want to talk about Open Source for a second then QT is incompatible with the majority of Open Source licences as it is GPL, rather than LGPL.

    If the FSF acknowledged the need for the LGPL and created it then why don't Trolltech use it for their QT libraries? The reason is simple, Trolltech's goal was to silence the most vocal (and extreme) Open Source type (ie Free Software proponents) while maintaing the same degree of usage control over their libraries. Any company planning on releasing non-GPL (ie proprietary or an alternative Open Source licence) would be insane to tie themselves to the future licencing whims of Trolltech.
  • Now that they have gnome computers maybe they'll put elves and dwarves on some too.

    What's next, trolls on Slashdot? Oh wait...

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