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GNOME GUI

GUADEC Reports 57

Posted by Hemos from the state-of-the-gnome dept.
Havoc Pennington writes: "Some reports from the GNOME Users and Developers Conference are coming in; see one on the O'Reilly site and in the weekly GNOME Development Summary." Sounds like some good stuff was accomplished -- a GNOME Steering Committee, work towards 2.0, and setting up a non-profit among other things.
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GUADEC Reports

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  • Re:GTK+ in 21 Days (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I would also like to vote for Havoc Pennington's Book. It covers a lot of concepts in great depth. It got me going on abiword development and was a useful reference to solve some problems I found in abiword. At times though I had to refer to header files - just as Havoc said I would need to in his book. We need a version 2 though to cover stuff like corba and bonobo. Yes I know about the web references but books are much easier to read on trains and planes. Plus the author gets a bit more fame and fortune. Thanks Havoc! Martin Sevior
  • The FAQ [gnome.org] states:

    GNOME stands for "GNU Network Object Model Environment". GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix", and
    has always been officially pronounced "guh-NEW" to minimize confusion. Since GNU is GNOME's first
    name, GNOME is officially pronounced "guh-NOME".
  • It was intended to be both a user conference as well as a developer conference. In practice, it was more of a developer's conference, though.
  • Just in case anyone wondering XMLRPC:

    It's a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet. It's remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. It's designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned.

    Probably using something like SOAP. (Encapsulating objects in XML basically)
    I went to a (Microsoft) lecture on this a week or too ago, and they were talking about it being used to allow servers to get data for each other. (ie travel company gets list of flights from flight company, etc.). Quite cool.

    Glynn
  • So far only RH comes with Gnome as a default.
    Everything else is configured with KDE - and rightfully so !
  • I am a total dweeb, but what is the official pronunciation of GNOME?

    Is it G-NOME, Gun-owe-mmm, nome, ??????

    Thanx!
  • This will most likely change over time. Programs just have get updated to compile with the new libs. I'm sure that most everything in the gnome-cvs will only take a few weeks to get upgraded, at most. Sorry like when glibc and libc walked away from each other. It'll just take time.

    What I would like is a beta i386 bin of evolution. I know that the mailer isn't up to snuff yet, but I'd like to give it a whirl and see if it's worth not getting another mailer (besides pine) in the mean time.

    I guess that will be soon enough. April GNOME isn't _too_ far away. :-)
  • someone mentioned porting GNOME to palmtop PDA devices

    So, could we run gnome-pilot on our Palm V's then?

  • OK, so you're saying that we could have Gnomish WinCE devices. But could they run gnome-pilot in that case? In which case, I could Palm my WinCE, and just go with the Gnome.

    I think my head hurts now ...

  • Not 3com Palm OS specifically, just palmtop computers, more likely something with a display that could handle GNOME, like a WinCE device.

    The main point of the comment was the amusing name he gave it.

    -JD
  • This is true to an extent; the book is written in a very dry style; It would have been better if the book had included more examples of increasing complexity. There is a real need for meatier tomes like the 'Motif Programming Manual (O'Reilly)' by Dan Heller and Paula Ferguson. But Havoc's book is published under a Open Content License - so, folks like Mr.SUCKS can always modify it and publish their own.
  • The havoc Pennington book SUCKS to. I hate to say it but example code does not work, and the book is dry boring and it overall pissed me off. Just use the GTK tutorials/references and hack code youll learn more.

  • hehe okay so I was just pissed that i learned about the open content license after I bought the book :p

  • stop repeating what your kiddy friends say on IRC dude... You obviously have no attempted to even download the latest gnome packages, because if you did, you would have installed them and realized that it is far from unstable...

    now if you were referring to the gnome libraries,bonobo, nautilus, etc,.. you may have point that there is some instability or Lacking of features.... yes, this is true to some degree (especially in nautilus since it hasn't even been released, and lacking of features in bonobo.. sure, its brand new though , what do you expect)..

    Think for yourself before you post.
  • Well.. I totally agree with you. In fact, the *only*
    advantage of XMLRPC, SOAP, etc. you-name-it, is that
    ... it's *not CORBA* ! That's why MS is behind it. How could
    they say now: go to CORBA, it's the way.. They can't! :-D
  • I don't know about you, but I'm sticking with fvwm95 until gnome gets some real features.

    Not to be too pedantic, but GNOME is a desktop environment, fvwm95 is a window manager (and IMO, an ugly one). Neither precludes the use of the other.

  • > We all know about how the camel is said to be a horse designed by committee

    Actually, if I were to go to a desert, I'll find the committee specifications for the camel were good. Don't forget horses are very unstable beast, which need constant care and lots of food and water. Camel are more durable and sober.

    So, if Gnome designed by a committee will be more stable and bugfree than the previous Gnome, I will maybe find an use to it. You see, I found Gnome prettier than KDE, but some nasty crash made me prefer the K to the G-shaped foot.

  • Oh well, I prefer to pronounce "gnome", like the name of these fantasy dwarves.
  • You forget Debian. Among the big players in Linux distros, the match is well balanced: Gnome have RedHat, Debian; KDE Mandrake and Caldera. I don't know which side is SuSE. Personnally I think the future is more collaboration between GNOME andKDE teams, and this as already begin like the introduction of XDND or the work toward a common set of specification for WM between these teams.
  • Gnome User And Developer ...

    <SARCASM>

    the user reference in the name is a placeholder for when they will have users.

    </SARCASM>

    More seriously, this was because most Gnome users who went to the conference were also developers. And, GNOME is very young (even younger than KDE :) ), so much things are work in progress, so there was more thing to say about development than about simple use.

  • Re:CORBA? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No, there were no discussions about dropping CORBA, as we are extremely happy with the results we have got from CORBA (And ORBit, Elliot and Dick's thin and fast CORBA implementation).

    GNOME is building strongly on Bonobo -as you might have seen from Chuck's description of the trip- all new apps use it: Gnumeric, Evolution, Nautilus and various apps are being rewritten with it: the panel and the control center.

    Bonobo and CORBA are pretty nice. I invite you to read over the white paper we have (either at developer.gnome.org, or at www.helixcode.com) that describe Bonobo.

    Best wishes
    Miguel.

  • Telsa's GUADEC trip report (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... is here [linux.org.uk].
  • One, fvwm is a window manager, gnome is something else. Are you sure you are current, for example, Red Hat 6.1 seems badly out of date, my Krud Feb 2000 (Red Hat 6.1 with curent versions of everything www.tummy.com/krud/ $55 for a cd a month for a year) system is MUCH better.

    Yeah, they need a really stable benchmark release to get out there, but I think they are closer than you think.

    I'm not sure what you mean by feature poor, give us some examples.
  • More costly, but so much simpler to implement and to interface, and so much independent of the medium. The main problem with complex systems like Corba and such, is that most developpers (esp. the code drones in closed source software companies) don't read the specs, RFC, etc. They copy and paste some code, or look at the file, et voila. That works. Some times. Take for example SMTP. It's simple. It's been here for ages. Yet there's a significant portion of the MUA and MTA which don't respect it fully. XML, on the other, being human readable and having some built-in checks, will make interoparability easier.
  • Isn't KDE moving towards XMLRPC?
  • What features do you think Gnome lacks?


    As far as stability, I'm a bit confused. Have you tried the latest October Gnome builds? I have found them to be extraordinarily stable. The builds that shipped with RH 6.0 were pretty poor, and the ones that shipped with 6.1 were a drastic improvement but still left something to be desired in terms of stability. October Gnome, however, is very solid.


    The latest 1.1.X (Helix, etc...) include many more features, but still need to be hammered on a bit more...that's why they're labeled "BETA." I expect that the April Gnome release will come a long way towards smashing these stability bugs.
    ----

  • The latest, stable release of GNOME, the October release, is very stable. I haven't had it crash on me once. I've been using GNOME since the 0.33 days, when it used to crash every couple days, if not every day...
    ----------
  • No, Qt 2.x is not backwardly compatible to 1.x. But they have managed to achieve a level of backwards compatibility that is still very good. All of the 2.x releases will work together. The 2.1 beta is out and it works just fine with 2.0. No recompiles necessary.

    Compare this to the Windows world where every program comes with yet another copy of the MFC, VB or DX runtimes because the compatibility gets lost from month to month.
  • In other news, Miguel and I [Havoc] presented the new development roadmap; the steering committee will be fleshing out some of the details and monitoring progress[.]

    Actually, if this project really demands a committee (and how else would they get the various companies to cooperate?...), this is the way to do it -- have the design declared by one or two people, and have the committee apportion the gritty-details work and make sure it goes according to schedule. We all know about how the camel is said to be a horse designed by committee, and I'd hate to see what a committee could come up with in trying to be the next MS killer. Something tells me it would look too much like USB[2] -- too much for its original purpose, and like the camel, quite cranky.
  • Slightly off-topic...but someone mentioned porting GNOME to palmtop PDA devices. They proposed calling it Palm GNOME.

    Think about how that would look. [jdueck.org] :-)

    -JD
  • TurboLinux also comes with GNOME now.
  • yeah a private exclusive list with more than 400 people on it

  • I suppose my point is that all the developers, translators, and documenters (anyone doing work in CVS) are on the list. So it only excludes people who aren't doing any work. And of course that's the point of the list. (Seen the signal-to-noise ratio of the public lists lately? Point made.)

    If you think the Linux kernel developers or any other large project's developers make all decisions on a public list, you're just mistaken.

    However most discussions of a technical nature (such as new gnome-libs features) are encouraged to be held on gnome-devel-list.

  • The article mentions the book GTK+ in 21 Days. Don't bother, that book isn't very good. (like most of those 21 Days books). You want a good book on GTK+ snag a copy of GTK+/Gnome Application Development by Havoc Pennington. Much better. Sharkey
    www.badassmofo.com [badassmofo.com]
  • I think Gnome will be the "standard" desktop as the big distributors supports it, and the licensing issue with KDE(OT).
    I use Gnome myself(and sometimes KDE) but i do not want KDE to stop developing, choices is always good.
    Hopefully the new version of the two will support each other better.
    Keep up the good work Gnome and KDE developers!
  • First KDE hasn't dropped CORBA. They just weren't holding it in the 1.X branch. You can't drop what you don't hold, huh?

    Second, KDE2 do have CORBA support, only it is activated only when needed and deactivated then. This means they need a daemon to lurk for CORBA call. This maybe better if you stick with KDE-based apps, but if you use true CORBA applications often, it will slow down your PC.

    Also, don't forget the DCOP is particuliar to KDE, as it needs both Qt and X, whereas CORBA is a standard. You have CORBA application on Unices, Windows, BeOS, MacOS, etc. You can't port DCOP to windows because you won't have X even if you have Qt. And you can't port DCOP to Qt/Embedded for the same reason. And you can't port DCOP to GNOME because you don't have Qt. I'm a KDE-fan, but I'm not sure in the long run it was the best thing to do.

    Third, CORBA is an advance in desktop computing. CORBA on unices was pioneered by GNOME, and you say that CORBA-lack was pioneered by KDE. Nonsense.

    You've well deserved your troll rating.

  • Lots more reports at Advogato (Score:3)

    by raph ( 3148 ) on Thursday March 23, 2000 @12:56PM (#1179417) Homepage
    For some more informal reports, have a look through some diary entries at Advogato [advogato.org], including mine [advogato.org].

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