GNOME 2.20 Released

Gimli writes "GNOME 2.20 has been officially released. There are a number of enhancements and improvements to things such as power management, Evince (the GNOME document view), Totem (the video player), and note-taking application Tomboy. There are also some changes to GNOME's configuration utilities with an eye towards streamlining them. The timing is impeccable, too: 'This release coincides with the tenth anniversary of GNOME's existence. The project has evolved considerably since its earliest incarnation and has become a global phenomenon. Used as the default environment in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora, GNOME is widely used by Linux desktop users and is supported by a growing community of companies and independent developers. GNOME 2.20 will be included in the next major releases of many mainstream Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 7.10, which is scheduled for release next month. Users who wish to try it now can use the latest Ubuntu 7.10 live CD images, or the latest build of Foresight Linux. You can also check out the release notes."

Re:Power Management?

[Jeffrey Baker]

All previous GNOME releases had a problem where the volume control would wake up every 100ms to poll the mixer settings, which prevented the CPU from entering and maintaining deep sleep states. The new volume control does not do that, which may be good for a few watts at the outlet. Other applications have undergone a similar treatment.

Re:Power Management?

[drgonzo59]

As you said, the job of the desktop environment is to

Supply some form of UI for the user. I understand that GNOME would have to give some details, to either the kernel, or some module about user activity,

and that's exactly what it does. It lets the user control the power management features better. There is a nice power history graph too...

Feisty

[Creamsickle]

Packages are already in ubuntu feisty.

just do an apt-get update and then an apt-get dist-upgrade :-)

Re:Power Management?

[orra]

As I understand it, GNOME Power Manger runs a DBUS service. This can be used by clients to inhibit sleep. This is very useful; it means when you're watching a movie in Totem the screensaver won't cut it in, and nor will your monitor turn off, merely because you haven't touched the mouse during the last 5 minutes of intensive movie watching. So I'd say there are good reasons for your desktop environment controlling power management.

Re:Feisty

[Jeffrey Baker]

I'm sure you mean Gutsy. I just updated my Feisty machine and there's nothing new, and I wouldn't expect a new major GNOME release in an existing Ubuntu distribution.

Re:I have to ask...

[Constantine XVI]

From the version currently in Gutsy, they basically threw all the appearance-related apps into one mega-app. I haven't noticed any missing functionality (in fact, the fonts and toolbar applets are unchanged), though I would appreciate if Ubuntu came up with a more useful "simple" Compiz app (it's currently "off", "on", "insane")

Mono isn't part of GNOME

[DreadSpoon]

Most of the core GNOME developers were (and many still are) against Mono. So I call bullshit on your assertion. Also, just to clarify a bit, Tomboy is not a required component of GNOME, nor does GNOME in any depend upon Mono. It's an officially sanctioned add-on application, which essentially means nothing more than "we host the source and Tomboy follows our release schedule."

Re:tomboy

[OmegaBlac]

I hope these improvements mean Tomboy has been taken out. Right, please?

You could always remove it yourself. It is just an applet that can be removed/added easily to the toolbar.

Re:power management?

[Tribbin]

You try to sleep and then ...

Gnome mixer asks: "Did alsa change volumes? Did alsa change volumes? Did alsa change volumes?"

It would distrub me; as it would disturb your laptop.

Like somebody sleeping next to you repetitively asking: "Are you already asleep?".

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=302979&cid=20675217 [slashdot.org]

Re:Lameness

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm a hardcore Gnome user"

Oh, so you're not a programmer.

"...they chose to use C and then load the language up with 500 different code generators and other shit shoehorned in so that it's hardly recognizable as C anymore."

It's still very recognizable as C. GObject might not be ideal, but it works, and it's not required that you use it; you can write perfectly functional applications on top of Glib without touching GObject. Of course, GObject is more powerful than straight C and arguably more powerful than most other object oriented languages (though admittedly, violates many of the principals of OO languages, for example Encapsulation is entirely broken in GObject).

"If you're going to do it in C, just give a nice clean API and screw all that Glade, Pango, Orbit, yadda yadda yadda shit. Or, even better, use C++!"

Glade isn't necessary anymore; GtkBuilder replaces Glade from a programmer's POV, Glade the UI designer tool just outputs an XML file that you can read in your App and generate a perfectly functional UI, which to me is just plain elegance. No more having to programatically design and update UIs. Pango is not a code generator either, it's a Font Layout system that supports complex font layouts. Orbit is a deprecated piece of hold-over bullshit the GNOME people haven't gotten around to officially deprecate yet, and shouldn't be used with new code (use D-Bus instead).

"I'll never understand the OSS community's C++ phobia. Of course, most of the C++ that comes out of the OSS community makes me want to take up trepanning, so maybe that's not such a bad thing..."

Which is exactly why the OSS community is C++-phobic. Not only is most community-generated C++ terrible, it's very hard to make build across all of the dozens of "standard library" implementations. GLib was invented and written in C to give the OSS community a truly standard library that they could control across platforms, and because GLib is written in C, most follow suit and write their applications in C. Of course, the environment has changed quite a bit and most platforms have a more-than-acceptable C++ STL implementation, so if we ever wanted to drop every single piece of code we've written to date and rewrite everything from the ground up in C++... yeah, you can see why we're all against it.

Re:Totem

[miscz]

Install Xine backend for Totem, it becomes quite usable media player. It still lacks external subtitles support though.

Re:Unix Gnome

[vorpal22]

CDE (Common Desktop Environment) has never been open source. It is available for Linux from Xi Graphics [xig.com], but you'll pay for it and in the end, it's more hassle than it's worth due to the fact that you need to use their "Accelerated X Server" to run it instead of your standard X.org installation.

There is a petition [marutan.net] to open source CDE that looks like it may be successful. I, for one, sincerely hope so; I know that CDE is well outdated, but I got used to using it on our school's Sun boxes during my grad studies, and I wouldn't mind at least having the option to run it at home.

Re:Unix Gnome

[vorpal22]

I take it back; it looks like Xi Graphics has stopped selling CDE, so as things stand, it is not available for Linux in any capacity.

performance?

[bcrowell]

Is any work being done on Gnome's performance? When I first tried it, ca. 2000, it was just painfully, ridiculously slow on my hardware. I would click on an icon and literally get up for a cup of coffee while it was responding. My sister told me about fluxbox, and I've been using it ever since. Today, I have a nice modern system (AMD x64, dual core), and Gnome is still not anywhere near fast enough that I would choose to use it every day. It takes 32 seconds to start up, and when I click on a menu there's a noticeable delay before the little icons show up. If I was forced to use it, I would, but its unresponsiveness is just embarrassing when I'm trying to convince other people to try Linux.

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Randle_Revar]

Please don't point to GTK-Webkit on SF, that is an abandoned fork/port. GTK support (and QT support) are now part of the main Webkit project.

I am not a dev, but I would think that there will at least be an option to use Webkit with Epiphany by Gnome 2.22. Failing that, I think it would be in by 2.24.

Re:Unix Gnome

[fm6]

There are actually only three major Unix vendors left: Sun, IBM, and HP. All provide GNOME as the default desktop.

SGI is still around, but they no longer sell systems that run Unix. Their flavor of Unix was IRIX, which only ever ran on MIPS, and that CPU is no longer cost-competitive for big iron. So SGI sells Itanium and x64 systems running Linux. FWIW, their default desktop is GNOME.

Dell is also a Unix vendor of sorts, since they sell a fair number of servers running Solaris. Guess what the default desktop for Solaris is?

It's silly to call Apple a "Unix vendor". Yes, MacOS is built on top of Unix. But they're not part of the Unix marketplace. Almost nobody buys them to run Unix software, by which I mean software that's coded against traditional Unix APIs. Almost all Mac software is coded against Apple's proprietary APIs, and isn't available on "other" Unixes. The fact that Apple found it convenient to code those APIs on top of Unix APIs is an implementation detail that matters not at all to 99% of Apple's customers.

BSD has no vendors. Just a few enthusiasts.

That leaves SCO. Do we really want to talk about SCO?

Re:Dons the asbestos suit....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hackish, but it was already possible.

http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/WebKit [gnome.org]

Re:I have to ask...

[garbletext]

As with many things gnome-related, the configuration utility is not installed by default so as not to confuse users. Advanced users who care to adjust the eye-candy will presumably know how to get the software, i.e. apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager . In this case, I think it's a wise move, since this utility is as insanely fine-grained as the old beryl configutation manager, except it has about 10 new plugins. OCD people could spend hours tweaking the window spring model alone.

Re:Great names.

[ir]

actually they do label them with human-understandable names in the gnome menus.

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[bheekling]

Every release since then has been slower.

Actually, I found 2.18 to be _much_ faster than 2.16. To quote a friend of mine, "gnome-terminals are popping up like popcorn :D"

12 meg of RAM for GDM? Give me a break. Its a freaking login box.

/me fires up htop
Hmmm, its using 2mb on my computer...

Sure, and meanwhile, Program Manager (Windows 9x) and Presentation Manager (OS/2) did more with less memory (Two Meg), back in 1995.

2mbs in 1995! Computers back then had 16mb of RAM remember?
Right now, on my computer, Firefox is at the top of the memory list with 125mbs, followed by thunderbird at 25. Neither of them are gnome apps. The core gnome component using the most amount of memory right now is nautilus (which does half the work in gnome) and its taking up 12mb. [ Now, what were you saying about memory in gnome?

Re:Lameness

[Anonymous Coward]

On the tendonitis thing... I'd recommend workrave... it's stopped me killing my wrists before

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[Daengbo]

Interesting. I've been looged in to 2.20 all day, and my top processes right now are:

• Epiphany (8 tabs) 80MB
• Deskbar 24MB
• Nautilus 16MB
• Rhythmbox (playing) 15MB
• Tomboy (50+ notes) 14MB
• Ekiga 10MB

My panels are stuffed to the gills, I've been running all day, and I'm still only using 309MB of memory. I'd call that really good for requirements on modern hardware. We can talk later about what happens when I open OO.o, but that's not a Gnome app. ;)

Re:IMHO Gnome 1.4 was the best

[juhaz]

Yeah, right.... You do know what ps -aux columns mean?

Do _YOU_? Well, stupid question, obviously not.

As Rudd said, 12.5M is VSZ. 2.2M is RSS, and yes, it _does_ include shared memory (which ps doesn't show, see top for example).

When a greeter is not running, total amount of non-shared memory taken by GDM is few hundred kilobytes. Here, it's 1148kB RSS, 748 SHR. That's 400 kilobytes. Memory hungry my ass.

The greeter is pretty hungry, but it is not in use when someone is signed on.

Re:I have to ask...

[tjwhaynes]

for the former users, too many options are a bad thing. for the latter, there is no such thing as too many options. it would be a tremendous step in the right direction (and trivially easy to implement) if there was simply an option to turn on/off "advanced mode" in gnome/kde/any other wm/de.

There is an equivalent to advanced mode for GNOME. It's called GConf and it allows access to all sorts of bells and whistles that aren't visible in the main Control Center. All sorts of tricks are hidden in there, from lists of screensavers for GNOME screensaver to run to custom keybindings running scripts. The only extra I use for advanced window management is Devil's Pie [burtonini.com] which matches windows and performs window modifications based on a LISP configuration file. If that isn't hard core enough for you, you'll have to rewrite GConf in ML.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes