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GNOME GUI

Gnome 1.4 "Tranquility" Released 128

Roanld Bultje writes: "According to this article on LinuxToday, Gnome 1.4 has just been released! Gnome and all other required packages can be downloaded from Gnome's FTP or a mirror. Medusa seems to have been removed from the final release due to some bugs that were found recently. Let's hope that this new release puts Gnome next to KDE's 2.x-version." Download.gnome.org will pick a mirror site for you automagically.
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Gnome 1.4 "Tranquility" Released

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    Sawfish is just as capable yet it is much faster.

    Sawfish is just as capable??? I don't think so. Here are 10 things off the top of my head:

    1. E can iconify windows. Sawfish can't. You're stuck running the GNOME taskbar thingy if you use Sawfish. E also provides more control over icon appearance (including snapshotting) and icon placement.

    2. E has a snapshot pager. Sawfish has no pager, so you have to use the GNOME pager. The GNOME pager does not snapshot desktops. It doesn't allow you to drag windows around. You can't place the individual pager subwindows arbitrarily. You can't hide them. The GNOME pager isn't as themable - you can only change the GTK+ theme.

    3. You can slide/drag desktops around in E. I don't use this, but many people do.

    4. E has a bunch of animations. Again, I don't enable them, but many people do.

    5. E root menus are much more configurable.

    6. E is much smarter about window placement.

    7. E supports slide-out menus and buttons placed just about anywhere (e.g. "drawers" on the desktop, slide out buttons on window decorations, etc.)

    8. E supports dock-like Epplets placed anywhere you want. Using Sawfish, you need to embed the applets in an instance of the GNOME panel.

    9. E supports fully colored fonts through fnlib.

    10. Finally, almost every feature in E is far more configurable than the comparable feature in Sawfish+GNOME.

    Basically, E is a complete window manager while Sawfish is just a component of GNOME. Realistically, you can't run Sawfish without several other GNOME components present to handle iconification & task switching, desktop paging, applets, menus, etc. The combination of Sawfish, GNOME panel, and a set of common applets uses more memory than E plus a set of equivalent Epplets. Last but not least, I don't find Sawfish any faster than E when using equivalent themes (Sawfish using gdk-pixbuf). If anything, the menus are slower in Sawfish.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    I've looked at your links. Your February links are inaccurate. The internationalization problem that was mentioned is application specific, not global. For instance, Evolution is fully internationalized. Essentially, you have to design for internationalization -- it doesn't come for free. KDE and all operating environments has this problem BTW. Read the read the thread attached to your email for proof. As for the architecture concerns, you're dealing with February, the time when things were still being hashed out. Follow the thread to the end (in March), and you'll see most of the concerns are taken care of. As for accessibility, again, you have to design for it. Sun is very keen on making sure that GNOME is accessible to people with diabilities, so of course they'll be good harsh critics and proponents of major work items. KDE is no where near as accessible as Windows or the Mac, yet either. There's a lot of work ahead for GNOME and KDE but both are up to the challenge.
  • http://gtk.themes.org

    Or, just look in your gnome control panel under "Themes"
  • You can get KDE 2.1.1 for potato or woody by putting "deb http://kde.tdyc.com potato main crypto optional qt1apps" in /etc/apt/sources.list. I have been using it since the KDE 2.0 beta days, and it has been great. The only thing is that it also updates some packages (like openssl), that are not directly KDE, since they are used for things like https in konqueror.
    >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  • Submission:

    • 2001-04-03 00:20:09 GNOME v1.4 Released! (articles,news) (rejected)

    Submitted, last night. Rejected.

    Not to mention this tasty morsel, which was also rejected. Worried that Andover.net is next?

    • 2001-04-02 19:35:28 Red Hat (RHAT) Makes cnnfn.com's "Top Ten Stocks to Avoid" (articles,news) (rejected)\

    Fascist Slapdork bastards.

  • Actually, it is an important story. It's about the single most important commercial entity in the Linux realm.

    It's certainly more important than a software announcement. That's what Freshmeat is for.

  • Yes, if you downloaded it yesterday, you would not have downloaded gnome-vfs, bonobo, nautilus, or the like. It is a little fuzzy, but basically its just that GNOME is a bunch of separate projects with a common roadmap. They all go their own directions, but meet up at McDonalds on highway 10 every few miles. The release marks the meeting point of the development versions of several different packages.
  • by johnnyb ( 4816 ) <jonathan@bartlettpublishing.com> on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @07:34AM (#319027) Homepage
    A GNOME release is much like a distribution release. It is just a collection of packages. The difference being that they've all been tested together. Why they decided to release GNOME 1.4 is that they've added several new things, and updated existing ones. They have added:

    bonobo (component architecture)
    gnome-vfs (allow anything to be viewed as part of a filesystem)
    nautilus (new file manager)
    xalf (launch feedback for panel launchers)

    Some of these were around in beta form before the release, but the release of GNOME 1.4 marked the inclusion of these packages. It was a major change, so they had a package versinon number change.

    However, the process isn't much different than that of a full distribution, only its covering only the desktop portion.
  • When installing a linux system, you should put at least /tmp and /var on separate partitions.
    I always make: / 200 MB
    /tmp 500 MB
    /var 300 MB
    /usr >2000 MB
    /boot 20 MB
    /home whatever you need

    sometimes you need to make partitions for these as well:
    /opt
    /usr/local
    /data1, /data2 etc.

    but if /var is full, you get trouble anyway of course.
    ------------------------------------------------ --------
    UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
  • /opt is network mounted over here. Distros should support network mounted /usr better, notably SuSE. If you remove /usr and try to mount it from a server instead, it will fail, because critical files having to do with rpc are on /usr, and that is not mounted yet.
    In your case you should make some perl/shell script that does all the removal of old logs for you. Then you can put it into a cron job and your worries are over.
    ------------------------------------------- -------------
    UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
  • You should be running the unstable tree if
    you want to keep up with the latest versions of
    stuff. Unstable already has the gnome 1.4 packages available.. Testing is a frozen set of
    packages, so the versions there aren't gonna
    change much.
    Omar El-Domeiri
  • In the future I'll always be putting /opt on its own small partition, because if you install RPMs that are not from your distribution or build from source, some packages will create /opt and populate it for themselves. This is a good way to fill up / quickly too. I don't know if KDE still does this but it used to at one point.

    There really should be a standard that no install procedure can create a new directory off of / without confirmation from the user. I have my filesystem set up the way I like it, and I'm not interested in changing just because I installed KDE today!

    Another good way to fill up /var: my Mandrake install (originally 6.1 upgraded to 7.2) has problems with log rotation where it tries to gzip and rotate the previous batch of gzipped log files. After months of idly wondering why the disk would grind so hard when running logrotate (especially since I don't run any real servers that would be generating log files), I discovered a full /var with literally thousands of mail.log.gz.1.gz.2.gz.4.gz and so on. I'm not sure how many files there were to begin with, since I got tired of waiting for "ls | wc -l" to complete, but more than halfway through the "ls | xargs rm" process it counted 13000+ files!

    Of course, this could be my misconfiguration since I've messed around with a bunch of stuff on this machine, so I can't necessarily blame Mandrake. Has anyone else seen this happen?

  • The cron script is eventually what I decided to do. Also I decreased the logrotation for mail and news either from daily to weekly or weekly to monthly, I can't remember which ATM.

  • by ethereal ( 13958 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @05:30AM (#319033) Journal
    last time I tried medusa, it slowed my machine to a crawl while it was running

    You might almost say it turned your machine to stone :) hee hee

    ...or maybe not.

  • Responsive, fast, smooth, clean looking, no errors up the arse, and konqueror.... that alone puts the mozilla/gnome guys to shame....

    Shame? I feel no shame. I feel quite proud of my meager contributions and I know the Gnome hackers feel similarly. Gnome 1.4 is quite a step forward.

    It just prves once and for all that qt IS a better toolkit... whether they lik eit or not.

    What proves that qt is a better toolkit? Your statement? Proof requires evidence. In the world of computer programming; we want numbers and facts. Not trolls, blantant assumptions, or FUD. Give some real meat to discuss.
    ----

  • by Skeezix ( 14602 ) <jamin@pubcrawler.org> on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @07:41AM (#319035) Homepage

    PRESS RELEASE -- The GNOME Foundation announces the release of GNOME 1.4. The release offers a stable, powerful and tightly integrated platform that features the most extensive documentation to date, making the help features very user-friendly. GNOME 1.4 includes Nautilus, the new graphical shell for GNOME that features advanced file and Internet browsing capabilities. Developers will find a set of new and updated tools, making GNOME the ideal programming platform.

    "GNOME 1.4 has a wealth of new features, from an updated Sawfish window manager to enhanced support and interoperability with other desktop environments." said Havoc Pennington, GNOME Foundation board chair. "This release represents a major leap forward in the GNOME desktop environment. Users will instantly see an improvement in the usability and power of components like Nautilus. Developers will enjoy the strategic advantages of improvements to the component architecture and streamlined tools for greater internationalization and localization of GNOME-based programs."

    New or enhanced features of the GNOME 1.4 desktop environment include:

    • Nautilus - a new file manager and desktop environment that allows users to easily manage their files, browse the web and access web-based services through a sophisticated, customizable interface. For example, GNOME users can select any word in a text document and do a Google search on that term or look up the word in an online dictionary.
    • Better support and interoperability with KDE and legacy X applications
    • New Application Launch Feedback lets the user know when a program is in the process of being loaded.
    • Sawfish window manager is now a standard part of GNOME. All aspects of the user interface are customizable through Sawfish, including complete configuration of the look and feel of the desktop.
    • Easier to use and more intuitive help browser and help system, boasting extensive documentation covering all aspects of GNOME operations.
    • GNOME Fifth Toe, a broad collection of applications that run on GNOME.
    • Medusa, the new GNOME searching/indexing package. Medusa is a content and file indexing system that performs quick searches of a users hard drive.

    GNOME 1.4 will also include a number of enhancements for developers, including:

    • GNOME-VFS - The GNOME Virtual File System provides an abstraction to common file system operations like reading, writing and copying files, listing directories and so on. GNOME-VFS is extensible and usable from any application on the GNOME desktop.
    • Updated Bonobo Component Model - 1.4 will include developments in the interfaces that provide standard component programming and program interoperability in Linux and Unix.
    • Xml-i18n-tools - a set of tools for better internationalization and localization of GNOME. Xml-i18n-tools contain some utility scripts for internationalizing various kinds of XML files. In addition, it has a merging feature, which will be extended to handle desktop and MIME files in the future.
    • GConf, a sophisticated system for storing configuration information. It provides a notification service so applications can be notified when a configuration setting changes. changes. Gconf also allows for pluggable storage backends (text files, databases, etc.) and gives administrators control over default and mandatory settings.
    • Enhanced Language Bindings - facilitating the use of GNOME from a number of programming languages. Language bindings included with GNOME 1.4 for Gtk+ include C, C++, Objective C, Ada, Perl, Python, Guile, TOM, Eiffel, Dylan, JavaScript, Pike, Pascal and Haskell. Many of these languages also have support for GNOME widgets available.
    • Enhanced GNOME Display Manager - A re-implementation of the well-known xdm (X Display Manager) program that features X authentication, default and per-display initialization scripts, pre and post-session scripts, pluggable authentication modules and TCP wrappers for access control.

    "Since the GNOME project is a free software project, we were able to incorporate advances from some of the most talented programmers in the world," said Maciej Stachowiak, head of the 1.4 Release Team. "Hundreds of people from every part of the world contributed to this release. The result is a mature, stable, powerful and fun-to-use desktop, with the promise of a host of new killer applications, due to the programming enhancements."

    GNOME is a free software project that is developing a complete, easy to use desktop for GNU/Linux (more commonly known as Linux), BSD and a variety of other Unix and Unix-like operating systems. The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. More than 500 computer developers, including over 100 full-time, paid developers, contribute their time and effort to the project.
    ----

  • The Gnome Project releases packages in source format. It will take a bit of time for Ximian, and others to incorporate their patches, build, and bundle the release and get it out on the red carpet channel. The source release always comes first...binaries will follow.
    ----
  • Enh. Your point about the importance of having seperate partitions is well taken, but that's more work than I should have to bother with for a home box, especially one that I dual boot anyway.

    Besides which, having the separate partitions would have prevented the original poster from having run out of space on / , but it doesn't really help with the chief problem, which is that Medusa spews an assload of data while logging. Pity, dat.
  • I'm just re-reading what I wrote and shaking my head. I completely trashed my home Debian system on Tuesday, and because it was all on a single partition, I was forced to erase everything (except what I could SCP off reasonably). When I put the system back together, I carved up my single partition into seperate mounts for /, /usr, /var, and /dev.

    In other words, completely disregard the first paragraph in my previous post. :)

  • It is not yet gone for good... but I don't really understand why create something all new instead of just improvind on GNU findutils.

    --
    Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete Dutra
    DBA, SysAdmin
  • For one thing, Enlightenment isn't nearly as dorky a name as "Sawfish." ;)



    --
  • by ole ( 19909 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @05:47AM (#319041) Homepage

    If you want to run a public FTP mirror of the GNOME FTP site, please send us the URL to the mirror and the adminstrative contact address for the mirror, and we'll be happy to add you to our mirror database and provide you with the required password.

    Thanks,
    The GNOME system administration team

  • No idea, but since they are in the business of selling prepackaged gnome installations on CD, I can't imagine it will take them long to update their site. Rumor has it on debianplanet that they already have some .debs for nautilus. My guess is that they are finalizing red-carpet and will make the new Gnome available as a channel on that. Red-carpet is already very stable on my machine and I have no idea why they are keeping it back, other than perhaps waiting for gnome 1.4 to be released (which is happening as we speak probably).
  • Both problems can fixed easily. For KDE, point your browser to kde.org, find the page with the installation instructions, find the deb sources. Do a apt-get install task-kde. For Gnome, go to ximian.com, find the installation instructions (involves calling lynx and piping its contents to sh). It doesn't get easier. And mind you these instructions even work for potato. All this assumes you have a network connection of course. If you are on a modem, I can imagine you could just put the debs somewhere local.

    So after ximian updates their site you (and I) will be able to upgrade. I love debian for this ease of use. A few days ago apt-get informed me that kde 2.1.1 was available, before that news reached me through the regualar news sites. 20 minutes later it was up and running (required no manual intervention at all, no questions asked).

    I agree that it would be nice if debian was a little faster in adopting these things but as long as I can get them from third parties this way it is fine with me.
  • But you don't mind buying a new CD and reinstalling Linux every few months, or upgrading every package individually whenever there are new versions?


    Mandrake just announce MandrakeFreq, which is an update to their current distro. It's basically an update CD that you throw in and upgrade Mandrake with. You can also install an empty system with one, which gets you 7.2+updates. Their plan is to release one as often as necessary, which would seem to me whenever a new version of a major package is announced. Thought not as useful as apt-get, it will provide updates more quickly than the standard distro release schedule.

    I've seen these upgrade CD's on cheapbytes (RH+updates), but I'm too lazy to wait and don't have a fat pipe at home, so I can just get the iso from work, burn it, and voila, no need to clog my modem line for a long time, and no need to try cooker or an 8.0 beta, which would be more unstable. Hopefully, Mandrake will move to more of a Debianesque system in the future, a more 'living' distribution, for those of us who prefer Mandrake over Debian.
  • by pbkg ( 24307 )
    Can someone on the western side of the pacific please set up a mirror. More specifically, the south western section. mirror.aarnet.edu.au hasn't been updated in over a year (not quite but almost) and the other former mirror, ftp.tas.gov.au has been removed because it wasn't considered necessary for the Tasmanian government....

    Anyone... I would, but I don't think a 56k link would solve any problems....
  • I was a strong gnome proponent...

    that was until i tried kde2.1 with konqueror....

    ALL i have to say is.. wow..

    Responsive, fast, smooth, clean looking, no errors up the arse, and konqueror.... that alone puts the mozilla/gnome guys to shame....

    It just prves once and for all that qt IS a better toolkit... whether they lik eit or not.

    unlike gnome, kde has promised AND delivered....

    ....Just my opinion, of course am right :-P
  • yes, but i forgot to include...

    portability.

    even with gnome's promises of FreeBSD as a supported platform... gnome1.4 doesnot compile freshly. eazel, heh, not even close ...

  • The old default gnome widget set was pretty bad. AFIAK it took most of it's uglier features from Motif.

    You shouldn't really be crying over it though - you could always change it with gtk themes, see http://gtk.themes.org/ [themes.org]

    The default gtk theme is now much nicer. Radio buttons and check boxes are easier to use.
    +++++
  • GNOME doesn't have "a" window manager. Several Window Managers support GNOME, it used to be Englightenment (huge, slow, extremely configurable, did I meantion huge?) but now the default WM is Sawfish (small, light, very configurable, fast). WindowMaker works well with GNOME, and I believe that BlackBox (extremely fast and very small) is also heading towards GNOME compliance.
  • Medusa indexes file names, attributes, metadata (emblems etc from Nautilus), and contents. Locate just keeps an index of file names. I can't see locate being updated to support that much power.
  • The previews were based on 1.2.9, which was required by Nautilus (at least) due to bugs. I've just checked the Eazel mirror and GNOME 1.4 still uses GTK 1.2.9. To be fair 1.2.10 is a minor bug fix release of 1.2.9 and has only just come out.
  • Many WMs dont' handle the Nautilus "root" window correctly. Mainly because it isn't really the root window, it's just a window which Nautilus would like to pretent to be the root. Or something. Yes, it's a bug in IceWM (Sawfish had it too, being able to drag the root window is weird...)
  • A note to any IceWM users out there: a work-around was put into the Nautilus CVS tree yesterday by good old John Harper to fix the IceWM bug:
    Fixed part of bug 7823 (Nautilus window hints make it unusable with the IceWM window manager):

    * src/nautilus-desktop-window.c (realize): don't include WIN_STATE_HIDDEN in the desktop window's state hints
    IceWM apparently interprets this bit as meaning `don't display the window', despite the GNOME documentation saying that it just means `not on taskbar but window visible'
  • at least 1 of the packages requires gtk+ 1.2.9... can't remember which one though - too many to compile, and I keep forgetting which order they need to be compiled in (one thing the KDE packaging does right -- a few monolithic packages making compilation and installing much simpler).
  • A lot more people will be using Sawfish in the future - it's now the default window manager with Gnome 1.4.

    I've just noticed that it works with KDE 2.1 as well, which has made me a happy bunny (Konqueror's my browser/file manager of choice + Sawfish is my favorite window manager, but I've been trialing pure KDE for a while so haven't tried mixing them together recently).
  • by jonathan_ingram ( 30440 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @05:46AM (#319056) Homepage
    No, you're wrong - this really is the actual release. It confused me at first as well because of

    1. the stupid way they bungled the release (put out a press release saying it's out, then putting out another one saying they were having problems, and then finally getting the release out)
    2. ftp.gnome.org not being updated before other mirror sites.

    If you connect to the sites listed at http://download.gnome.org [gnome.org], (well, certainly to ftp://gnome.eazel.com/pub/GNOME/ [eazel.com], which is the one I used), you'll see that Gnome 1.4 really has been released. Note that 1.4 is still based around Gtk 1.2, and so is really just an updated Gnome 1.2 -- apart from the addition of Nautilus which I am compiling as I write.

  • by Raleel ( 30913 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @05:24AM (#319057)
    Well, I'm sure it'll be back, but last time I tried medusa, it slowed my machine to a crawl while it was running (p2-300, not state of the art, but still...).
  • No. Dissenting opinion. Save troll ratings for the really worthless f1rst p0st junk that needs to stay in the -1 toilet.

    Back to being on topic, samrolken's component model is fine for him but isn't fine for the other half of the users who would use linux as a desktop. This is why the current state of competition in linux GUIs is good.

    For myself, I didn't like E when it was Gnome's wm and much prefer using Gnome with the likes of Sawfish or iceWM. E had its day on my desktop but I've got better things to do then try every WM out there.

    People are entitled to their opinions about what is and isn't worth pursuing. I'm also entitled to completely ignore their advice. E isn't what I want, it's not fine for me, so I will continue to use and contribute what I can to Gnome. My interest, my choice.

  • 4 billion people don't have Internet connection either. That didn't stop the obligatory 'Why isn't this on Freshmeat?' post which I think is stupid but so many people find insightful. Or how about that post about when Ximian will include the 1.4 binaries which is now at 0? This [slashdot.org] isn't Offtopic.

    Unless it is some complete waste of bandwidth (e.g. F1rst P0st or some goatse.cx link), moderators should just leave it alone and let people comment on it or ignore it as they please. With that standard, I at least know I can browse at 1, or even 0, and not see the 'Fuck you.'/'No fuck you' bullshit and, at the same time, not have a relevent post stomped under my radar by some thug with moderator points.

    I'm all for moderating posts down but there are better posts to kick into the -1 toilet than someone questioning why the topic at hand is of any import.

  • I had the problem that Medusa filled up my /var directory with hundreds of Megs of log, and thus my / partition. This caused X not to start anymore as it need space in /var. I ended up getting rid of Nautilaus, it wasn't very useful anyway.
  • They Planet Mirror [planetmirror.com] It's run by the same people as aarnet.edu.au, but on a commercial tips (I think). They keep the mirrors up to date, it's also in the same location as mirror.aarnet, so you'll have that speed you've come to love out of mirror.aarnet.
  • Opens mouth.... inserts foot. That's why one should read the article before posting. Gnome did release Tranquility today, I was confused with yesterdays Linuxtoday-article which claimed the same thing.
  • by selmer ( 37218 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @05:33AM (#319063) Homepage
    If you check the gnome-ftp servers, then you'll find out that the GNOME-1.4 that Linuxtoday is mentioning is actually Gnome-1.4 Release Candidate 1. There isn't a press-release up on http://www.gnome.org either. Guess we'll have to wait a little while longer for the "real" release.
  • I am continually and consistently impressed with the linux community and their development scheme... What I find really funny is that other companies, hint the BIG Guy, would designate whole new version numbers as in 2.0, 3.0, just to give the software buying public something to clearly define one from the other.

    Now that's a downright lie. Big companies do this as much and as little as small companies do - ie the Apple MacOS has numerous incriments on its numbers. If you look at many UNIX OSes, its x.y.z, with x.0 releases being far apart. But this is by no means a norm in UNIX, and Linux distributions definately changed that mentality. RedHat and others boosted their numbers so quickly that people felt almost forced to follow suit, ie. Slackware. FreeBSD decided to follow this marketting system in order to gain attention during the big Linux rush ("boom"), and you can see how changes from 2.x differs from 3.0 and so forth. Even Solaris, from 2.6 went to Solaris 7 (2.7) to 8 (2.8). Marketting, and likely somewhat due to both Linux's attention on UNIX and Microsoft's large version numbers.

    However you could point to the Linux kernel or NetBSD and see some sanity in numbering. Marketting always pushes bigger numbers (the whole '2000' version gimick), and usually comercial products are more distinct between version numbers -> they are released further apart and help ensure a cycle of continous upgrades. The OSS community by no means neglects marketting, just look at all the fusses LUGs make in pushing Linux (ie, going to non-Linux conventions, SVLUG's infamous MS cd rockets, etc).


    -----------------------------------------
  • then you obviously haven't looked further than the 'k' menu and window decorations. KDE has Window stuff and _lot_ more.
  • I have to recommend against installing whole systems of debian packages from third party sources (such as all of gnome or all of kde). Time has shown that they tend to be incompatible with the rest of Debian. I would refer you to threads on debian-devel, but I don't have the time to find them at the moment. Many developers, however, have found it solves a lot of problems just to purge all the ximian/helix packages from their system.

    Usually the stuff in unstable is reasonably recent. I'm pretty sure KDE2 is in there, not sure about the version of Gnome.

    --
  • No, it isn't. Slackware-current has the same as Slackware-7.1 (gnome 1.2), according to the changelog.

    Good thing, actually--I just spent Sunday downloading all of those to install gnome on my system! :)
  • The unstable tree keeps breaking things for me. At one point I had to manually remove all the files for three or four packages, and then use dpkg to reinstall them, then uninstall them to get my system back in working order.

  • Red Hat is on the cusp of profitability, but at 90 times estimated 2002 earnings -- or nearly 2 times the company's long-term projected growth rate -- it is still too high a price to pay for the Linux software maker.

    Ya, I'm sure Andover is worried that their stock will hit 2 times long-term projected growth. /sarcasm

    The reason it wasn't posted appears to be that it wasn't an interesting story in the first place.

  • Yeah.

    His comments are: VI is so bloated, ed is so wonderful

    .

    And: this bunch of punch cards is a perfect component model for me.

    He did not bring anything usefull to the discussion, he just announces us that he doesn't care.

    Well, 4 billion people don't care about Gnome 1.4 and yet they don't flood /. with their opinion.

  • well since they use the sam crappy package format they should be cross-distro installable
  • A) Both KDE and GNOME suck. I'm sorry, but of the two OSs that support the rear channel on my SBLive (good god the new Klipsch 4.1's rock!) I find myself using Win9x because KDE2 and GNOME 1.2 are just too fucking slow! I takes at least two seconds to start up Konqueror, and sometimes you accidentally hit help a couple of times (which causes four Konq windows to pop up) because you forgot how long everything takes to load. This is especially a problem with KDE2, even simple apps like KPM take longer to load than Word does on Windows. Not to menetion anything on BeOS. I really like KDE2, don't get me wrong. KOffice is a killer app, and the whole component thing is very well implemented (it looks good too!) But the speed (not just startup, but the flickering and rubberbanding that happens everytime you reize a window, the shear that happens when you move windows quickly, the jumpy cursor, etc) is just a deal breaker. GNOME is a little better, but its no NT4 (or even 98 for that matter.)

    B) Sure you can use apps from different environments at the same time, but doesn't running different environemnts kind of defeat the purpose of having an integrated desktop environment? I like integration, I like consistancy, and I like freedom (as in freedom to choose my own toolkits and apps regardless of what developers want to use. I'm talking about the standard toolkit ABI, read up on my older posts about it). Neither KDE nor GNOME give me any of these. The sad thing is, with Be's financial troubles, I might have to go back to Windows...
  • You could update your sources list once, by setting it to the unstable distribution.

    Don't be scared away by the name 'unstable' - if you were updating to the latest RPM it would be the same as upgrading to the unstable deb.

    If you run anything older than unstable, you're choosing to be out of date.
    --
    Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
  • by AugstWest ( 79042 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @07:20AM (#319074)
    Red Carpet seemed like a very cool thing at first, but I've gotten a couple of security updates from mailing lists that haven't shown up on there, and now Gnome 1.4 has been released, and it isn't available either...

    It's like they got everything updated and ready for the launch, and then let it go...
  • by Eil ( 82413 )

    Now Mandrake can finally ship 8.0! :P
  • Out of curiosity, how long does it generally take Ximian to update to the latest Gnome? I'd like to update it if only because I'd like to get Nautilis on my Debian system. Yes, I could probably compile from source, but I'd prefer to wait until I can find an installation method that I can screw up less easiy :)

    Chris
  • The new convertable Lexus gives me a woody, in the same way the Titanium Powerbook does.

    I have a great idea for a commercial for Lexus. Guy's driving down the highway, cruising at about 80MPH in some old shit-kicker. Suddenly a car pulls across 4 lanes of traffic and cuts him off at 40 mph. He slams on the brakes and tailgates her to the next exit. They exit, hit the red light at the bottom and he gets out, walks up to her car and taps on the window. She's a really old lady who can barely see over the steering wheel (Is the where's the beef lady still alive? They could use her...) He says, "Excuse me, but you cut me off across 4 lanes of traffic back there..." She looks up at him, shoots him the bird and says "FUCK YOU! I drive a Lexus!"

  • by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @09:49AM (#319078) Homepage Journal
    The Japanese are traditionally a little slow getting into the game, but once a Japanese programming team assembles, you'll get:

    • All the sharing features of Gnome/KDE in the footprint of FVWM.
    • Games involving cute furry animals which for some reason can morph into giant killer robots.
    • The same stability in release 1.0 that Gnome/KDE will attain in 3.0.
    • Applications that commit seppku when they segfault ("Honorable user, unworthy application has segfaulted and is removing itself from your system in shame.")
    • Much more of a right to use a Giant Lizard icon.
    • 5 year/50,000 mile warranty, all for under $9,999
  • I'm still impressed every day when I sit down and in front of a linux machine and find the interface more intuitive than those of other operating systems.
    You're kidding right? In the few times I've used KDE I've been impressed by one thing: how blatantly they lift from Windows 9x for the interface. Its almost shameless. I liked the way it works but lets not go overboard here and start saying how much more intuitive it is than those of other operating systems.
  • Actually many of the dialogs look the same. Lets see: 1: lots of dialogs look the same 2: it has an OLE-style subsystem 3: the K menu is a direct lift of Win9x 4: the window decorations are the same Getting back to the original posters point that KDE is more intuitive than other operating system UIs.....how does that work again?
  • Ooohhh....heres a good one:

    http://www.kde.org/screenshots/large/kde2b3_3.png [kde.org]

    Gee....doesnt that look an awful lot like the display properties in Win9x? Like I said..shameless.

  • nautilus and gmc only compete for the desktop if you run them both at the same time with desktop mode on ;). i really dont understand what you mean about evolution and nautilus dont have a concept of each others existence. as for nautilus having a different look, this is themeable, also, alot of the things nautilus does different from the rest of gnome will be part of the gnome 2 platform. Nautilus was goin to be the core of the gnome 2 platform from the begining, but the release plan for gnome changed, and it was decided one more major release of the 1.x platform would be made be for 2.0. Nautilus will be completely intergrated in gnome 2. xmms uses core technologys, but its interface is made to be compatible with winamps, most mp3 players look different from their platform anyway, so this isnt new. as for mozilla, mozilla isnt part of gnome, nautilus only uses its rendering engine, not the whole browser. its just that most packages for mozilla are for the whole browser and not the core libarys.
  • Currently the 1.4.0 sources are in the unstable directories, and since there are no news on this on GNOME news, I guess this is not the final release yet.
  • No, but it's in unstable, which is perfectly fine on my box. If you're running X, then unstable is probably stable enough, and the dependencies seem reasonably fixed as of now...
  • I agree completely. This is exactly the reason why I don't run Debian - they don't get the tradeoff between stable and current right, for me. That's sad, because I'm sick of Redhat's treatment of downloaders.
  • ftp.gnome.org is just another mirror, no special treatment (it is ftp.acc.umu.se to be exact, I run it, and it is updated daily).

    I am running a manual update right now, we will probably have the new release soon. But as long as the ftp access method is listed instead of http://ftp.gnome.org not many will get in anyway.

    /Mattias Wadenstein

  • this is exactly the reason why i'm going to switch to mandrake. i've been using debian since 1.3.1 and i still think its best distro around, but lately i've been more and more annoyed by its "slowness". i dont want to wait 6 months to update to kde 2.x.

    now someone will probably say "just update your apt-sources list and let apt-get get kde 2.x for you". problem here is that its not only kde or enlightment that is out of date. 60% of other packages are also out of date and i dont want to update my sources list for every package that i need to get up to date.
  • most distros (except suse) can now be updated in the same way debian can be.

    why not use unstable ?, i already tryed, and i have never used more buggier and unstable linux distro than that. i've been using potato year before it became stable and it was always rock stable, but sid is so fucking unstable its not even fun having it just for playing around.
  • use red-carpet from ximian, it get all the updates, and batas if you want, it is nice, try out evolution it a nice program for e-mail.
  • I got it last night at about 7:30 it is there. go to your unsubscribe section and make sure you subscribe to Gnome 1.4 bata and then when you get to the screen after you subscribe click on install page, you will then see all the files.
  • Ok, You are right, but I am sure they will have it by the end of the week. At lest I hope they do. I like to see what is will look like. I have gotten everything else they have, even evolution, now that is a nice e-mail program.
  • i installed Enlightenment instead but thanks for the pointer, it started me off 8)
    .oO0Oo.
  • Kudos of course to all those who have put the hard work in to make this release possible, but from a developer's point of view, coding for Gnome/GTK can still be a frustrating experience.

    The underlying problems seem to be poor documentation and an unwillingness to make incremental updates. In particular:

    • Missing functionality: the GnomeCanvasLine smooth attribute doesn't smooth. The only documentation to indicate this: gnome-libs-1.2.13/libgnomeui/gnome-canvas-line.c:1 192 /* Handle smoothed lines by generating an expanded set ot points */ if (line->smooth && (line->num_points > 2)) { /* FIXME */ } else {
    • C++ bindings with incomplete or missing documentation.
    • C++ bindings with inconsistent memory management policies.
    • Widget functionality (multiple file selection is the best example) that has been debated literally for years, but has not ever actually been incorporated into a GTK release. Much wheel reinvention ensues.
    • Basic functionality missing from core libraries, let alone documentation. There are no docs for libart for example, which makes the complete lack of support for rendering to RGBA image buffers that much more suprising.
    • Much ad hocery - I shudder to think how much would break in the move to support other pixmap formats than RGB and RGBA 8-bit per channel.
    • Inconsistent interfaces - both in the C++ bindings and in the underlying C. Sometimes RGBA is 4 channels, sometimes it is 3 with the has_alpha flag set. Sometimes alpha is regarded as 8-bit, sometimes as 1-bit. Some container widgets in GTK-- support STL style mechanisms, some don't.

    I'm sure these will in time be fixed. Some of these issues can only be addressed by structual changes in the code, making it inaccessible to the external developer without heaps of free time on their hands. The very infrequent development releases of GTK only compound it. When these issues are brought up on the mailing list, they are often ignored or dismissed. For all I know, lurking somewhere in CVS is complete documentation and a perfectly consistent sane and functional package - but if so, it's well hidden.

  • Well, at least it's easy to mirror...


    --
    News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org [geekaustin.org]
  • And most of all, that foot just looks COOL

    If you wish to continue this flamewar, please do so on the NES [pineight.com]. GNOME vs. KDE: Battle of the Desktops is an original game for NES emulators that pits a gnome against the old (pre-dragon) KDE mascot.

  • Since I am being accused of trolling despite my best efforts, here are concrete links that may explain my points better.

    Report on bad status of Internationalization in GNOME:

    http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/ 20 01-March/msg00232.html

    GNOME 1.x Architecture concerns:

    http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/200 1- February/thread.html

    (a lot of it, including emails from Alan Cox, and future plans for GNOME 2.0)

    This isn't a good one but you might want to start reading here:

    http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/200 1- February/msg00064.html

    Miguel and others have posted Roadmaps to deal with some GNOME core problems.

    Also, you should see http://www.gtk.org/ because they ARE dealing with accessibility problems and the such.

  • by Karma Sucks ( 127136 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @10:41AM (#319097)
    I quote someone who was modded down as a troll for pointing out the facts:

    Fact is that Gnome 1.x (including 1.4, /. editor is being generous here) is way behind KDE from the technical point of view. Application integratation, internationalization, accessibility, coherent architecture, etc. etc.

    Even core Gnome developers recognize this and are working for complete overhaul in 2.0 (though there have been some backpedaling from the most ambitious plans).

    This person correctly points out the state of internationalization, accessibility, and haphazard architecture in GNOME. The application integration is self-evident if you use GNOME at all. If you follow the GNOME lists as closely as I do, you would realize all this.

    Fortunately, you do not need to despair, many of these problems have been recognized and are being fixed in GTK 2.0 and GNOME 2.0. GNOME 1.4 is just a stepping stone, and it is by no means as perfect as you would like to believe. I suggest you help instead of making smug false claims.

  • that is the beta, not the stable release. many things have changed since the beta was released on redcarpet
  • It's not an obsession - it is the default with a RedHat install. Once these users get used to it, it's often hard for them to like the other window managers.
  • I highly recommend QT 2.3, XFree86 4.03, FreeType2 and KDE 2.1.1. If your video card supports RENDER (xdpyinfo | grep RENDER), it is worth the time to compile all these things from scratch to get Anti-Aliased Fonts, which Gnome does not support yet. Once you've seen it, you will never want to go back.


    Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.

  • How dare you insult the good Christian Faith like that, in your signature! Do you put the words of a communist SATAN whorshipper like Patti Smith above the gospel of the LORD, who DIED for all our SINS even yours? SATAN has a special place reserved in hell for you, boy.

    -1 Troll, -1 Flamebait, -1 OffTopic


    Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.

  • Fact is that Gnome 1.x (including 1.4, /. editor is being generous here) is way behind KDE from the technical point of view. Application integratation, internationalization, accessibility, coherent architecture, etc. etc.

    Even core Gnome developers recognize this and are working for complete overhaul in 2.0 (though there have been some backpedaling from the most ambitious plans).

  • I will me-too that post: Sawfish is a masterpiece in the making,
    and Konqueror is best thing since sliced cliches on toast. If I it were easier to make Konqueror handle
    all of my multimedia types (Java applets, real, xmms
    for mp3s) I would have ditched mozilla by now.
    Mozilla is wonderful, but what a pig! The Bonobo
    junk is such a bloated waste of human resources too:
    It's chasing after a boat that has already left the
    pier. Nobody cares about COM clones any more. Object-oriented component frameworks were tried and failed, tried and tried, and failed and failed. Now a nice functional interface would win
    you some friends.
  • Mozilla really has nothing to do with Gnome, but if you want a GTK based browser use Galeon (which uses the renderer from mozilla, but nothing else).

    --
  • I've few problems with using unstable.

    Firstly I live in a small town in the UK without DSL, cable or other broadband, and have to use a 56K modem. This is painful when tracking unstable, particularly if a package changes the day after it has been downloaded.

    Secondly I've been hit with serious problems with unstable in the past, broken LILO, inability to compile things and so on. Unstable is just too unstable at the moment.

    Packages just don't appear to be migrating from unstable to testing quickly enough. It can be months before something finally migrates, often due to problems on the lesser platforms. Testing has been around for over 3 months now, and a lot is still grossly out-of-date or unavailable. A lot of this has to do with debconf being updated 2-3 times a week for the past few months, preventing packages dependant upon the newer debconf from migrating. The debconf issue is now fixed, but testing is still too far behind to be of any real use.

  • ...for Gnome 1.4 to appear in Debian testing. :-)

    The version of Gnome in testing is still 1.0.55!

    As for KDE 2.0, it hasn't appeared yet, except for the i18n files, which are no use on their own.

  • Ximian's been really busy trying to get 1.4 out the door. I susupect that in the coming weeks Ximian will return to their old habit of regularly updating packages.
  • by yoink! ( 196362 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @06:15AM (#319108) Homepage Journal
    I am continually and consistently impressed with the linux community and their development scheme. I recall early last spring when Helixcode was distributing the update to Gnome and how wonderful it was. What I find really funny is that other companies, hint the BIG Guy, would designate whole new version numbers as in 2.0, 3.0, just to give the software buying public something to clearly define one from the other.

    Instead we have version 1.4 and people are going to love it because its hopefully more stable and user friendly. I was so impressed with KDE2 when it came out that I stopped using anything else, but made sure the other libraries were installed in case I wanted to run anything. I'm still impressed every day when I sit down and in front of a linux machine and find the interface more intuitive than those of other operating systems.

    We're at a wonderful crossroads it seems. The desktops GUIs of opensource software are really beginning to shine, and will increasingly provide an alternative to costly, closed-source, operating systems and software in the near future; something that clearly benefits everyone.


    yoink
  • Libranet 1.9.0
    based on Debian potato
    XFree86 4.0.2, ReiserFS, KDE2.1.1, XimianGnome1.2 out of the box
    That might be the answer to your problem...
  • Yeah, and it's based on that really poor GUI toolkit called GTK. One day when QT and GTK grow up they will be as good as Motif (maybe...).

    Not a bad troll. Here's a better one though: "One day when QT and GTK grow up they will be as good as the Win32 SDK (maybe)" .. hehe ..

  • Satan is such a wonderful savior of ours. Let us now bow and praise him.
  • nautilus and gmc only compete for the desktop if you run them both at the same time with desktop mode on ;).
    When I ran it, by default gmc would start up first and draw the root window with all its icons. Then the icons disappear and the background turns gray. Then, after a bit of churning away, the nautilus version of the root window appears with completely different icons. To me, that means they're both competing for the desktop. It may be possible to turn this behavior off, but this was default on the beta that I tried.

    i really dont understand what you mean about evolution and nautilus dont have a concept of each others existence.
    It means when I click on a "mailto" link on my browser, instead of Evolution automatically popping up, a box asks me what to use to send mail. Or, when I click on a URL in an email message from within Evolution, Nautilus isn't the browser to pop up. Mozilla is. Sure, you say, you can change that. But this is supposed to be an integrated environment. The applications are supposed to be aware of eachother. Applications should be able to embed themselves within one another.

    as for nautilus having a different look, this is themeable, also, alot of the things nautilus does different from the rest of gnome will be part of the gnome 2 platform. Nautilus was goin to be the core of the gnome 2 platform from the begining, but the release plan for gnome changed, and it was decided one more major release of the 1.x platform would be made be for 2.0. Nautilus will be completely intergrated in gnome 2. xmms uses core technologys, but its interface is made to be compatible with winamps, most mp3 players look different from their platform anyway, so this isnt new. as for mozilla, mozilla isnt part of gnome, nautilus only uses its rendering engine, not the whole browser. its just that most packages for mozilla are for the whole browser and not the core libarys.
    Like I said, I'll give it another try when 2.0 is available for testing. I really hope they have it together then.

  • I certainly hope that adding Nautilus means getting rid of Gmc finally.
    [rant mode="on"]
    When I tried Gnome 1.4 beta, Nautilus and Gmc competed for control of the desktop. When is Gnome going to figure out that for a desktop to be usable it must be unified? Nautilus has such a different look and feel from the rest of Gnome it might as well belong to a different project; oh wait, it does. Evolution and Nautilus don't have any concept of eachother's existence, in fact no Gnome components are really aware of eachother. And Mozilla? Why did they have to drag that beast into all of this? I love the way Gnome looks, I love how there are themes for both sawfish and gtk that work together, but usability-wise, it still has some ways to go.

    A big part of the reason for this is that every component of Gnome is developed by a separate group. Gnome office, composed of Gnumeric, AbiWord, and the Gimp? All completely separate and totally non unified projects. Xmms is the media player? It looks not remotely like any other Gnome application. And the aforementioned Blo^H^H^HMozilla for a web browser? Where's the integration? That's what makes a desktop system usable. I'll give them another chance when 2.0 goes beta.
    [/rant]

  • Ok.

    So now it's a little clearer. But it still makes very little sense. When a ditributer releases a new ditribution it makes sense. People will buy CD:s with it, or download images. When others ask "Which version do you have?" you will say "x.y" and the others will be able to look up which version of a specific library or program you have (unless you upgraded that specific one).

    However in the case of gnome I see no similar system. They send a pressrelease to some newssite but they don't post it in their own "press releases" section. They don't even mention it in gnotices. There is no 1.4 directory in the ftp so you know you are donwloading 1.4.

    What are they saying? "If you downloaded GNOME yesterday, you got 1.2. If you download it now, you got 1.4".

    I am still confused.
  • by stille ( 213453 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @07:16AM (#319115)
    There are several things that could be happening, none of which excludes another:

    a) I'm simply stupid.
    b) 1.4 has not been released, and everybody says it has just to drive crazy.
    c) There is no actual point to talk about gnome this and gnome that. Gnome is just a bunch of individual packages.
    d) It's all a huge joke.
    e) It's all a huge conspiracy (see b).

    Seriously, what's the definition of a gnome release? gnome-core? gnome-libs? gnome-center? All of these have a 1.2.x version number. Or do they simply from time to time say "Hey now Gnome x.y is out" to make people upgrade their packages?

    The webiste (gnome.org) gives no information what so ever.

    Do you feel as confused as I do? Let me know I'm not alone.

    Do you understand totaly and think I'm stupid. Please enlighten me so I will understand as well.
  • by gimpimp ( 218741 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2001 @06:11AM (#319120) Homepage
    Usually within 2 days for RPMS, and Debian packages. I'm not sure about other distro's (Mandrake, SuSE etc.)

  • Gnome comes with better games
    Gnomes are cute, KDE doesn't (Also rolls of toungue)
    Gnome is spawned from GIMP
    Gnomes have axes, and do light gardening
    KDE sounds like a rare skin disease....

    And most of all, that foot just looks COOL

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

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