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GNOME GUI

Nautilus 0.5 PR2 Released 133

Posted by CmdrTaco from the still-waiting-for-me-debs dept.
bratislav writes: "Eazel just released the 2nd Preview Release for the upcoming GNOME filemanager, browser and general-nice-app Nautilus. This new release comes with additional features, improved usability and a first look at Eazel Services. " The integrated network file system stuff is interesting.
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Nautilus 0.5 PR2 Released More

Nautilus 0.5 PR2 Released

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  • That's because Nautilus, gmc, etc. aren't designed very well. In a good object model, it would actually be faster to do common tasks using the GUI. Nautilus and Konqueror screwed that up, big time.
  • I have the full Helix install and all seems to be ruuning well from Abiword to Glade. I have also tried it and Nautilus runs just as well in KDE.

    Great for a fiddle and has not broken anything :-)
  • The GNOME port of gmc is in a separate directory, and is fairly innobtrusive in the mc sources. I imagine they will go away eventually, but they don't really get in the way of mc.

  • I must agree. I looked at some of the feature lists for Nautilus, and I thought "Wait a minute... This is a FILE MANAGER?" The Unix philosophy says that a lot of small bits should work together to provide a cohesive whole. Somehow, I don't think having an MP3 player integrated with a file manager integrated with a graphics viewer integrated with who-knows-what else fits into this idea of how software should work. Wasn't that the entire idea of MIME types (Linux) or file associations (Windows)? That the file manager could work out what program could best handle a file and hand things off to it?


    -RickHunter

  • Re:I'm dissappointed (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Amiga has a very powerful file manager called "Browser II". Basically, a text-only multi-window GUI. The power in this tool is that is allows the user to define commands, either GUI or scripts, to run from pull-down menus, which will be fed any filenames selected in any window as arguments. The working directory for the selected command defaults to the currently active Browser window. This makes a mixed GUI/CLI environment easy to set up.
  • Um, it may require those libraries, but if you have both KDE and GNOME installed will it not work in KDE? The GIMP is a gtk app and it runs in KDE. I have also seen screenshots with the GNOME panel in a KDE desktop.

  • Ahhhh.....I'll have to check that out. That sounds cool!

  • I do agree that there is much redundancy in the open-source world. There are many factors in it which will keep it in this way :

    personal : free software developers may have different agendas; re-inventing the wheel is still a good way to learn and is often more fun that reading someone else's code.

    cultural : different projects reflect different views (even political) about 'computing life'.

    economics : distros and other linux-based companies need a 'flagship product' on which to base ther service offer, and which will allow to be distinguish from others; so they'll tend to develop their own version of whatever they think is 'strategical' for their kind of busingess (e.g. installers, packet managers, ... ). Collaboration will happen when a goal is too difficult to be achieved alone, or when there is already a free software product to use for all ( a product not already 'branded' by another company, that is ).

    Given the above points, I don't think we can expect the Linux world to behave as a single company.As for any real-life system, there will always be redundancy and competition. This will be bad for short-term goals but hopefully good in the long run.

    The cross-fertilization of ideas due to the open-source model will help, I think, as well as the tradition of open standards of the unix/internet world.

  • > There isnt a single OSS project, past or present, that isnt simply a reaction to existing commercial software.

    This is a strange question as by definition OSS / Free Software is a reaction to commercial closed software.

    Anyway, apt could be an example of a trully innovative way to do thing that was not driven by the 'do it like the other guys do'. Or BSD's cvsup way of syncing sources. Another example that come to mind is freenet. Or the various steganographic fs that exists out there. Or the debian concept as a whole.

    From a broader point of view,there is very few software that is not 'playing catch up' another one.

    IE played catch up with Netscape, so is a reaction. Windows played catch up with Mac OS. MS-DOS played catchup with CP/M. Excel played catch up with 1-2-3, Word with wordstar, etc, etc, ad nauseum. You could argue that emacs played catchup with other text editors, etc, etc.

    Even trully innovative software can be considered as catching up in some way. NeXTstep played catch-up with about every other desktop system. ObjC played catch up with Smalltalk, which itself etc, etc, etc.

    But there are ideas and concepts that have been succesfull in their public implementation, and not in their private ones (if any). For instance TCP/IP, or IRC, or HTTPds have about no closed-source competitors. IMHO, as usual.

    Cheers,

    --fred
  • Could be. Are gnomes known to have "perfectionable" spelling? Do they have questionable opinions about members of the media? Do they not admit to DWIs? Didn't think so.
  • Fuck KDE, fuck Gnome. If you're going to use a crap OS that has no functionality then why not just give up entirely and go all CLI all the time?

    Because Win2K and WinME don't let you boot into DOS anymore :)
    ----------
  • Created totally originally and is under the GPL. Before this I don't think I had heard of any news item submission engine +database driven method to store reader comments attatched to articles.

  • Re:3 steps back (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You're right and wrong...

    First, you're VERY right to be cheering about OS/2. The structure of the file manager and how it tied into the rest of the OS was beautiful.

    However, I think you need to realize just how BAD gmc was. Miguel has said that he regretted spending time porting it and that his efforts would have been better spent on a solution that worked from day one instead of a kludge. And I don't mind the direction Nautilus is taking. It's pretty, it's slick, it'll integrate well.. Give it time. (Can't comment on Konq, never used it..)
  • http://ns.soundhub.com/~wolvie/eazel_installer.jpg [soundhub.com]
    I understand it doesn't support Red Hat 7.0, but how are we supposed to deal with new RPMs and Eazel at the same time under 6.2?

  • Re:Debian packages? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just add "deb http://people.debian.org/~kitame/gnome/release/ ./" to /etc/apt/sources.list and then type 'apt-get update && apt-get install nautilus' to install Nautilus.
  • You do make a good point, the field of Linux apps is getting rather bloated, in the sense that there are very many apps to do the same thing, and we may not need lots of superfluous apps.

    The way I see it, though, having used Nautilus, it seems to me to be the "Internet Explorer for Linux" that I tend to think the market needs. Mind you, I'm not a Microsoft fan, but part of the reason that IE and MS are so popular is that they offer user-friendly apps that are intuitive for common folk to use, and are very aesthetically pleasing, IMHO. This is something that Linux desperately needs. Nautilus is a sort of Swiss-army knife that can handle a wide variety of media; it's so thoroughly useful, and I have the utmost respect for the programmers working on the project.

    One problem I have with the Linux-phenomenon (I use Linux as my primary OS, so I'm part of it too) is that it's too fragmented. Only now are we really seeing centralized efforts putting together serious software products (i.e., Helix Code, Eazel, KDE to an extent), and that is something that Linux desperately needs. If Linux is to be taken seriously as a viable consumer desktop OS, it is going to have to have applications like Nautilus.

    I apologize if this post seems redundant or aimless, or if I didn't explain myself well. It's been a long day, so I hope my point is clear.

    /* Steve */
  • Ok I would have normally let this slide but after seeing posts 2 time I think I have a ligitimate right to comment.

    Jeez, don't take this persnally, but lighten up yourself -- it was meant as a joke. It's bad enough I was (errantly, imho) marked a troll within seconds. Although I guess your response justifies that tagging somewhat.

    Slashdot is not just about news, I would say that it isn't even about news primarily... To mangle a Clintonesque phrase, "It's the community, stupid!"

    I don't think my (perhaps less than stellar) attempt at humor is going to slow down the lumbering process of news repurposing here at Slashdot.

    I *do* think that I should have placed a stupid emoticon at the end of my original post [slashdot.org] to avoid becoming a target for reactionary moderation and counter-trolling.

    :)

  • sadly efm is dead :( It'll be brought back with Enlightenment 0.17, but as of a month ago it's dead. The code has been removed from CVS, good luck finding a recent copy.
    treke

  • Let's see...gtk, glib, gnome-core (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    and so on. The amount of extra crap you need for GNOME is at least twice the amount of "baggage" you claim for KDE. And what's worse is that there are new versions of these libs every day, and certain apps run only with certain versions. Yeah, that's clean.

    You really are clueless.
  • >GNOME widget themes are color fixed. They are
    >completely pixmap based. They are incredibly slow

    Hi Denis, this isn't quite true. gtk+ has pluggable theme engines, one of the (many) available engines is the pixmap one, that's the one you are complaining about. There are lots of others.

    >it is not uncommon to see GTK apps redraw
    >themselves

    gtk1.2 is not double buffered (qt is), so you sometimes see redraw. This leads ppl to think gtk is slow .. it isn't. Try timing some apps.

    gtk2 has a nice double-buffer system and looks smoother.
  • Yes, It seems to me that while GBNOME is promising, KDE is further ahead. KDE could probably use the added help from the GBNOME developers.

    However, this post is a little bit off-topic here. Nautilus is actually a file manager for the GNOME project.
    signature smigmature
  • I know this is very shallow and rather sceptical but the fact that the Eazel 'look and feel' is just sooo Apple really bothers me. From the translucent, horizontally stripped navigation and Photorealistic Services icons (very iTools) the whole thing stinks of Apple worship....

    ...not that there's anything wrong with that...

    But come on ANOTHER installer, and yet ANOTHER internet storage solution...

    How about a decent font manager? How about printing services? How about a display control panel? These are all things that actually interest me in bringing a higher level of user friendliness to the desktop. I'm no Linux expert - I've come from a Macintosh background - but I can deal fine with FTP and rpm.

    Nautilus, don't become the gimp to Adobe's Photoshop (or as Dr Evil would put it: the snake to my mongoose....)

    riiiiiiigggggghhhht.
  • One thing I like is being able to mix and match components from G and K. So has anyone tried running it under KDE?

  • Oh look at that installer. Thank you Eazel are the only words that come to mind. This looks so sweet and looks like it could be the solution to the dependency wows, if it is done right. That being said I have a few questions about the two services so I will shoot the out for anyone that may have the answer, as the info on the site is a little limited.


    Does the installer resolve dependency issues automatically by downloading and installing any binaries the software depends on?

    Does the installer get the software from the project source or does Eazel have to keep a copy of the software on their server?

    Lastly, can the remote storage service be pointed at a non-Eazel server without modifying the source code?

  • Honest question (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What exactally is a "integrated network file system"?
  • apt-get update...apt-get upgrade

    Seems like this version of the nautilus .debs don't want to play well with evolution or even parts of helix-gnome itself....

    apt wants to remove evolution and stuff like task-helix-gnome and eog (due to dependencies)....

    Attempting to manually rectify the situation, but these sorts of things should be taken into consideration...

    (btw...the latest evolution preview rules...)
  • Ok, I realize that part of opensource/gnu/posix/*nix/X/etc is that you've got lots of choice.

    But really, how many filemanagers do we need?

    Especially with shell auto-completion and regexs. You've got the best file manager right there.

    Show me a file manager that can mv backup?0*.txt.
  • they are almost head to head in features, its just a matter of choice, and which goes best with your desktop

  • The Eazel Software Catalog looks pretty damn rockin' ... interesting too that there is a drop down list for choosing your Distribution. (seems like a great feature)

    and look at the numbers for 'System' and 'Desktop Environment' ... (858, 508)... obviously.. we got a lot of software goin' on here... i can't wait to install Eazel and check this out...

    is there a list anywhere of all the software that will be a part of the service?

  • >Not to start a flame war, but services aside,
    >what's Nautilus got that Konqueror doesn't?

    You're assuming someone would want KDE2 cluttering up thier drive if (like me) they're not a fan. I love my Gnome setup and am not interested in trading it in. I'm not trying to evangelise here, BTW. KDE2 looks great, but it's just not for me.

    I'm glad there's a choice. Even if it duplicated Konqueror feature for feature, I'd still want it, because I don't want all the KDE/QT baggage required for the installation. I get my work done with Gnome. That's all I have ever required, and I've got it.

    I'm looking forward to a stable Nautilus also because I'm REALLY finding gmc lacking, I must admit. But no more lacking than Explorer last time I had the pleasure of its company, and hell - I've got bash. My needs are met. Anything beyond is a bonus.
  • What protocol does the online storage service use? Is it WebDAV or something else? How secure is it?

    I also notice that Arlo doesn't use Linux; I'm surprised to see a vanilla Platinum screen shot on those pages...
  • Doesn't it suck when you're not the target of a product? I mean, I could care less about the command line, because that's not how I like to function. I like my pretty pictures and visual clues. I remember when DND3 came out and a friend of mine complained that it completely ruined DND. I just mentioned that just /maybe/ he wasn't in the targetted market, so his opinion was of minimal importance.

  • Re:how many do we need? (Score:4)

    by spitzak ( 4019 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @07:09PM (#640574) Homepage
    Which is easier, `cp ~/docs/1999-2000/somefile.abw /mnt/floppy/homework` or dragging an icon across the screen?

    The "cp" is easier if you have filename completion. It is *far* easier if that destination directory has not been "opened" yet in the GUI.

    What about D&D support?

    Everybody should by now realize that the "stupid" Unix middle-button cut/paste is in fact exactly equivalent to D&D, except because you are not holding the mouse button down in the middle of an operation you suddenly realize how limited D&D is and complain that you cannot select the destination location without losing the selection.

    I recommend that "middle mouse selection" be merged with D&D (and split from Alt+XCV cut/paste text selection). All "drop targets" should accept a middle-mouse click and should use the clipboard as the URL that is dropped.

    Selection of an object anywhere should put the URL into the clipboard. You can then drag & drop like Windoze, or middle-mouse click to drop. Selection of text should allow the text to be dropped, the drop target decides if it should be treated as text or a URL (this will allow URL's to be pulled from email or other text sources)

    For CLI there should be a program ("drag"?) that takes it's arguments and puts them all as URLs into the clipboard for dropping, and a program ("drop"?) that prints the URL's (with proper quoting) to stdout. This requires a method for a CLI program to identify the X server, I hope this can be done without too much ugliness.

    It would be nice if terminal emulators accepted drops and middle-mouse clicks and caused the URL to be typed, perhaps with delimiting spaces and proper quoting.

  • While KDE's widget themability support has GREATLY improved with 2.0, it still can't touch that of gtk+/GNOME. (Yes, I know KDE claims to support gtk+ themes. It doesn't do so well - Try the Wireframe theme and see for yourself. Wireframe happens to be my favorite theme, and does a good job showing off KDE's limitations.)

    On the whole, KDE typically wins the award for first implementation of something. GNOME is typically a bit behind, but wins the award for the BETTER implementation.

    I'm primarily a GNOME user. I love GNOME. But I also love Konqueror as a web browser. It alone is worth having KDE libs installed. (Sadly, I have to keep Netscape around because Konqueror's JS support isn't so hot...)

    I still refust to use Konq as my file manager because it's ugly. Even when the current alternative is gmc's braindeadness.
  • catchup vs katsup vs ketchup, Cry Havoc! and let the Holy War begin!
  • I think the original comment was quite subjective, but one that I agree with. Let me continue it further -

    Gnome has -

    a) standardized on CORBA - an open standard

    b) created many "core" libraries that can be used in text-only apps without the bloat of GUI libraries. libxml is an example. glib is probably the best example, because it allows object-oriented programming in C (well, 2.0 will), has an event loop abstraction, and covers for most of the missing pieces of the standard C library.

    c) created using C (stable ABI) while still maintaining a _very_ object-oriented posture

    d) allows the GUI of the program to be changed without a recompile using libglade (note - programs must explicitly _use_ libglade to get this feature, but as far as I'm aware it isn't available at all in KDE)

    e) tends to support more methods of usage. This is very subjective, but KDE tends to say "use _this_ filemanager, use _this_ window manager", while GNOME tends to say, "here's the specs, use any file/window manager that fits - if you don't, that's okay, too, you just don't get all the features".

    Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
  • However, Nautilus works by having every thing as a bunch of small bits. It uses the mozilla embedded widget for HTML rendering (only loaded when needed), and basically has a generic plugin mechanism for all this stuff. So, consider Nautilus as two things

    1) the basic program - very small, with a container and hierarchical architecture

    2) a distribution consisting of the "Nautilus Program" and all of the program components that do nifty things.
  • I'm looking forward to a stable Nautilus also because I'm REALLY finding gmc lacking

    gmc development has been abandoned by its project leader and others, to favor Nautilus, a supposedly more advanced File Manager (and kitchen sink).

    OK, it's their right to do so. And yes, gmc is basically a bad hack of mc. But after so much efforts it has become stable, is not too heavy (I can use it with my 150 MHz laptop) and it has almost all features I really need. It's a pity it has been abandoned just now.

    Yes, I know. If you want it, do it yourself. Maybe I will. I'll name it yafm, of course ;-)

  • Konqueror is very good. I have played around with it. However, I personally think that Nautilus' architecture is better. If you've never looked closely at the architecture, tak e a peek [gnome.org]. Also, in terms of aesthetics, Nautilus does some really sweet things, like the music views, package views, mouse-over sound playing when in icon view, preview of text in icons, zooming in and out, transparent rubber-banded box for icon selection, emblems for icons, notes for any item in the world. Very impressive.
    ----
  • a) I can't remember the details, but the reasons the KDE team dropped Corba support was very valid, and I don't think they would have dropped it if it wasn't because they had very valid reasons to do so - they had done a lot of work before making that decision.
    Furthermore the new standard they are using is of course an open standard, which you are free to use.

    b + c + d) I would rather not comment on, because I don't have any knowledge about it, although I've often read that Qt is a pretty cool API, which the KDE Team has stated many times, was the reason they at first chosed it - it is about choosing the right/best tool for the job. e) This one I can partly agree on, I find KDE more "polished". By that I mean that most applications looks equal - KDE has much more consistency throughout all the applications, there aren't many applications that "breaks" the design of the interface. I think Gnome is heading that way too with Nautilus, Evolution, etc.
    [This is not formulated very well - I hope you get the point]

    Greetings Joergen
  • a -- If you're talking about buzzword compliance, OK. KDE dropped CORBA for technical reasons and went with a lighter-weight alternative, which is fully documented and obviously an "open standard".

    b -- True, but the downside is that Gnome now has, what, 30-something dependencies versus KDE's 2? Of course, you need that rat's nest of libraries to provide Helix Code's business plan.

    c -- A matter of taste. To me, if you're going to rely on objects, why not use a language designed to support them?

    d -- KDE has something exactly like this.

    e -- No idea what you're talking about.
  • Did I give the impression I thought gmc was good? I deeply apologize :) I *HATE* gmc...and I *HATE* that the kde team went with a GMC of their own with Konqueror.

    Now I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to run kfm even with kde2 installed.

    This sucks! I really had high hopes for kde, but that's all gone now *sigh*

  • I think this is a very good point! Why isn't all this stuff that allows the same program to view http pages, ftp sites, the contents of tar files, and the local and nfs file systems put at some lower level so that average programs can take advantage of it?

    It would be really nice if fopen("http://www.slashdot.org") worked.

  • ...current memory usage is through the roof. Unless they've done a lot of cleaning-up and optimizing in the last week-and-a-half, I was having trouble keeping the damn thing running. I found out why. Memory usage, opening directories like my home dir, was around 256MB(!) before it would crash. When sitting idle, just making a pretty desktop (and boy, do it look purdy) it was using between 10MB and 30MB.

    Memory usage is still an issue...even if I had 512MB of memory, I wouldn't devote even half that even temporarily just for the damn file manager.
  • Does anyone know when it will support RH7 or Debian?

    -Compenguin
  • it is...it's called Gnome-VFS. The replacement for this will be Bonobo's monikers.
  • You don't have to pay for the online storage or software catalogue, at least not at this time. It's a free service at this point. I've already signed up and am using it. I haven't and won't pay a dime.
    ----
  • vi2000 rocks!
  • Here's a Critique of RealCD interface [iarchitect.com] which supports what you just said.

    -----
    D. Fischer
  • >> They are incredibly slow, it is not uncommon to

    >> see GTK apps redraw themselves.


    you're probably using pixmap themes here. if you have big pixmaps, it's going to make things slower. same with kde themes.


    Also, the next version of GTK is double buffered so you'll never see redraws.

    --Ben

  • Does this actually modify the system (or perhaps libc) so that the files appear to all programs? As far as I know this is a user-level library. If doing this differentiation there is good, perhaps Linux should be designed so that pipes, devices, sockets, and each disk is a different system call. My feeling is that it is better to put this switching on the other side of the context switch into the system.

    Then again, I really don't know what I'm talking about. libc may actually be doing the entire file system and translating it to disk block read/writes and I would not be able to tell.

    Still, I want "open()" (and not "vfs_fopen()") to read these files, as I don't like complicating the interface with new calls.

  • It doesn't belong there. But there's nothing to stop you using GNOME's virtual file system in an app that has a console-based user interface or just command-line options.

  • Oh. I suppose that sounds a bit better. Actually, a lot better, since other programs can probably also make use of those plugins...


    -RickHunter
  • That is rather rude. I suggest following the instructions from nautilus testing [eazel.com] to get the latest hourly built rpms (or tarballs). I'm using it on Redhat 7, and it works except for the package view.
  • - The Linux Framebuffer? (I kind of wonder where they got the idea, but hey, it's a cool thing :)

    - The OpenBSD tcp/ip stack? (with integrated crypto *drool*)

    - Enlightenment? (commercial software people hate it, but I love it!)

    - mod_perl (Yet another sexy Apache module)

    - slashcode! *grin*

    - Debian GNU/Linux

    (/me stares around his desktop)

    I could go on forever..
    Some of the points I listed are significant improvements of the software/technology on which they are based, kind of like saying that a car is a significative improvement of the wheel.
  • Nautilus is pretty good. Very Flexible. I like the different interfaces for newbies and experts. I also like the idea of online storage. Only a couple things, and these maybe because of the file itself, but in Nautilus, I noticed when I clicked on a MP3 it used XMMS, like I hoped it would but it played it tehn played the same section over again. Almost an echo like effect for the first second or so of the file. When played direct from XMMS it doesn't do this. Now, I like EFM and E, but I am waiting to see E and EFM come out (dr .17).

  • I have to completely disagree with you there. Perhaps GTK+ support in KDE 2 is limited, but I'd take KDE 2 widget themes over GNOME widget themes any day. GNOME widget themes are color fixed. They are completely pixmap based. They are incredibly slow, it is not uncommon to see GTK apps redraw themselves. KDE 2's themes are visually impressive (and you can change the colors without modifying a bunch of pixmaps) and generally superior... A kde 2 app will look kind of raunchy in a gnome environment (consistency is key) but KDE is far prettier then GNOME in my opinion. Any pretty theme in GNOME degrades performance too much to be worth it.
  • I notice very little difference in bootup time between my PII 450 W2K box (256MB RAM) and my Celeron 366A@458 RH6.1 (128MB RAM) system. It's hard to say where the boot process ends, though, but they both seem just as unresponsive when you initially log in, too. Neither system requires anywhere near 15 minutes -- the figure of 3 minutes seems just about right.

    Try holding the power button down for a few seconds, BTW. If Linux had decent/any(?) ACPI [whatis.com] support, it would behave the same way. I question why you would want to do that to ANY operating system, but to each his own. I reckon you would fare much better with your own components as well -- even without the chassis cover, I rarely hear the 30GB IBM Deskstar 75GXP in my PII, and it also happens to be one of the fastest IDE drives currently available [anandtech.com]...

  • Is there a KDE-look-alike theme for GNOME or a GNOME-look-alike theme for KDE?
  • I've yet to see a GUI so well designed that it will outperform the CLI completely. Some tasks CLI completely outperforms.

    The use of wildcards to move around files is an excellent example. Say you needed to sort all that p0rn by file type. In a gui environment you'd have to manually select the types and then drag them individually. CLI you could simply mv *.jpg jpegs and then mv *.gif gifs and you're done...

    Trade-offs to both I suppose. Though I appreciate the and mostly use the power of CLI, I like most also love a pretty GUI. ;)
  • Ouch, that was some really poor writing. Did I really post that? What time is it? Naw, it can't be! Bah, the statements are there, they just look like crap. Sheesh, I do too! Maybe this election coverage is just lulling me to...
  • Don't get me wrong, I love gnome, but konqeror rocks as far as a file manager goes. It's fast, and you click basically anything and it shows up in the same application, all embedded like (similar to the way that ie4/5 do things).

    Nautilus from what I saw of pr1 was nice, had some neat features, but is just too slow (even on a pIII-500/256ram) to be really useful. Personally I do command line 99% of the time, but those are my impressions. I'm waiting for the debs of pr2 to come out so that I can play with them and see how much things have improved.

  • I'm dissappointed (Score:3)

    by psocccer ( 105399 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @09:27PM (#640606) Homepage
    This seems to be a cool project, but I see many people booing it because they can't:

    for FILE in data0??0*.da? ; do sed 's/something/else/' $FILE > $FILE.done ; done
    Sure, I like the shell. Yeah, you'll never make a GUI file manager as powerful as the CLI. BUT if we ever want to see Linux (or any *nix) on the desktop of NORMAL users, there needs to be something easier. It's pretty much already been proven that point and click is easier for most people to grasp than shell pipe streams. If we want to see our favorite OS, or any non-MS OS become common place, things like file management must be made easy for the user, not cryptic. This is the same reason why office suites, email clients, and any other GUI app is good. General users just want the computer to do what it does with little hassle, they're generally not looking for that killer CLI. They just want it to work.

    The other thing here that is important is choice. Just because it's not your ideal file manager doesn't mean it isn't someone else's. I'd recommend emacs for serious text editing, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to a newbie, I'd probably recommend pico. Or if they have figured out how to get X working gnotepad. But is it bad to have all these editors? No. It gives me a choice to have an extensible programmable editor and people without the need to have an easy to use intuitive editor. Try to tell someone that C-x C-c is more intuitive then clicking 'File -> Exit'.

    Most novice users are still figuring out what files are, let alone trying to remember a plethora of commands to attempt to manipulate them. Projects like this are necessary for any "fringe" OS to become commonplace on the desktop.

  • Re:Is this gonna be another... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @08:01PM (#640607)
    Helix GNOME is a GNOME distribution. Nautilus is a file manager for GNOME. Does that clarify the difference? - Maciej Stachowiak
  • actually holding the "soft power" button down for ~5 seconds usually works. If it doesn't though, you're REALLY screwed. A hard power switch isn't bad though anyway.
  • No, you almost certainly use a file manager to do that as quickly as typing it out in a shell, but THAT'S NOT HIS GOD DAMN POINT!!!!!

    The point of a file manager is that it makes simple tasks easier© If you can eye-ball 5 different pictures out of 40 similarly named ones ¥say, just off a digital camera, drag them to a floppy disk, and take the disk with you, that's going to be faster than loading a viewer for your pictures, or even a thumbnail-display program, because the command-line completion won't work quite as well when all the files share similar names©

    And no one is saying the command line will go away! I use it, too© I just changed the optimization commands for my KDE source tree with a one-liner find+perl command© The command line was extremely handy! But I'm glad that I have graphical file managers, as well, because I sometimes like to move parts of my directory structure around relative to others, while still being able to see the big picture; eg, how everything is organized altogether© Just Use the right tools for the job , for christ's sake©

  • GNOME is typically a bit behind, but wins the award for the BETTER implementation.

    Define 'better'

  • For CLI there should be a program ("drag"?) that takes it's arguments and puts them all as URLs into the clipboard for dropping, and a program ("drop"?) that prints the URL's (with proper quoting) to stdout. This requires a method for a CLI program to identify the X server, I hope this can be done without too much ugliness.

    /* Behold, a quickie rough draft of drop. */

    /* This does nothing but copy Cut Buffer 0 of X display $DISPLAY to
    * stdout. Adding the ability to select display, cut buffer, and
    * encoding of the output has been left as an exercise for the reader.
    *
    * I can't be bothered to think licenses today, so this is public domain.
    */

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <unistd.h>
    #include <X11/Xlib.h>

    int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    char* buf;
    int buflen;
    Display* disp;

    disp = XOpenDisplay(0);
    if (disp != 0) {
    buf = XFetchBuffer(disp, &buflen, 0);
    if (buf != 0) {
    write(1, buf, buflen);
    }
    XCloseDisplay(disp);
    } else {
    fprintf(stderr, "%s: Could not open display.\n", argv[0]);
    exit(1);
    }
    return 0;
    }

  • No, I am not crazy. The next big revolution in interface technology will be a return to the command line. Specifically, a graphical command line.

    What is everybody prediciting as the next evolutionary step in interfaces? Voice. Companies like IBM are positioning themselves to get in at the ground floor. Microsoft even put out a dictation package a few years back. And you can bet that all those users with microphones are not going to want to say "Move the mouse 3 -- no, 6, -- pixels left -- up more -- click --" every time they want to do something. They are going issue words as commands ("Launch Emacs. find-file"). The future UI looks like a CLI with a bunch of windows plastered on to it.

    That's why EFM [enlightenment.org] will be at a tremendous advantage. Now, it's great because if you know how to use the command line, you can combine the two (try typing into an EFM window). In the future, EFM will be even better, because it will already have completed the painful evolution other file managers will have to endure. Word will act like Emacs, in that everything will be a text command you can enter.

    I've tried Nautilus, and I love it. But long term, CLI is the future. And after trying EFM, I can take the future for a test drive any time I want.

    As a side issue, who wants to bet every interface company will suddenly invent command redirection? Picture advertisements for a great new feature that looks like this: |.

  • Well yes, it's good that gnome is developing a new file manager. Becuase:

    1. konquerer is a show off. It tryes to become a browser and doesn't even understand the DIV = "center" tag.

    2. the 1.2 gnome file manager is pretty much unconfigurable.




  • optimisation is the last thing they will work on.
  • Yup

    I've ranted on this one a few times and I end up talking to myself every time, too.

    Face it, the kiddies just wanna be smart asses and throw that in your face in *any* discussion about building the perfect filemanager. This is /. and no-one seems to be interested in intelligent discussion--just parroting neat little CLI tricks someone taught them while they stood by slackjawed wondering WTF all the gobbledyook was. It's a pity, because /. could be such a wonderful tool for disseminating information and intelligent discussion. Instead, we get,

    "Fr1st ps0t!
    M0d m3 d0wn fuck3n m0der4t0rZ"

    Sad, isn't it.
  • Um, yeah. Bash someone for using GNOME. Thanks. Exactly why I refuse to even learn about Qt coding, let alone KDE.
  • It uses WebDAV. Arlo does work on a Linux computer. We used Macintosh screenshots to make the point that, once your files are stored using Eazel Storage, you can access them from any platform using a web browser
  • Why does Nautilus take so long to open new windows? I've been trying nightlies and now PR2 and it takes quite a few seconds to open new windows. I'm on a P2/333 384M RAM, w/SCSI. Everything else is fairly quick.

    Don't take this comment the wrong way, Nautilus is awesome, and the latest preview release looks great. Keep up the great work guys!
  • Simple answer to your predicament:

    Click "Sort by MIME type" or whatever its called in the viewer window, then all the gifs are arranged together. Just drag a box around them, and drag 'em all to the right dir.

    I'll agree with you that CLIs are better for SOME things, particularly maintenance-type tasks that can be done in bulk, scripted at the command line etc. However GUI file mangaers are great in that it's easy and fast to arbitrarily select things (because most of the time, you are probably concerned with the *content* of the files, not just the file extensions etc.) and to quickly visualise and recognise things by their icons. Maybe there are some people with an amazing ability to trawl through text, but it's much easier for most people to find the things that you're looking for by skimming over the icons. The colours, shapes etc. are all visual cues to help you recognise things, while on a CLI, you have to parse the text yourself because they all look more or less similar.

    Also for most people, its much easier to actually work with things in a GUI than it is in a CLI, because of the recall/recognition memory thing. It's much easier to right-click on a floppy disk icon and choose format from the list of options, then choose a few options that are presented to you, than it is to remember the correct syntax for mk2fs and all the command like arguments, and if you forget, then looking up man pages.

    You talked about being pretty, keep in mind that 'Graphical' is only 1/3rd of 'Graphical *User Interface*'. It's not just about the pretty pictures :)
  • When you hover the mouse over an MP3, it'll start playing it without opening an external player. It's probably starting to play just as it gets the file to xmms, then stopping when you move the mouse away.
  • Another question is how easy eazel will make it for third parties to provide competing and alternate services. It would be very nice if something like sourceforge or other ftp repositories could provide simple package install services like eazel's.

    It'd be a serious shame if Eazel stays as the only provider of services for Nautilus.
  • On the whole, KDE typically wins the award for first implementation of something. GNOME is typically a bit behind, but wins the award for the BETTER implementation.

    Now I'm not a KDE or GNOME guru, but I would like to see some facts that support that statement. Which parts of KDE2 is badly implemented and where does GNOME have a BETTER implementation?

    Greetings Joergen

  • Nautilus Install (Score:4)

    by weeble ( 50918 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @06:31PM (#640634) Homepage
    The Nautilus install is similar to the Helix install and runns relatively smoothly (RH6.2)

    RH7 is not yet supported. Total install is about 80Mb. It has support for online file space similar to WebDAV [webdav.org]. Upload is earlier this evening was approx 128kb and integrates seemlessly into the file manager.

    Overall interaction is not exactly zippy, however it does seem much more stable than the last incarnation.
  • I'd love to take over the project, but I've got a handful of my own (not counting "finding a job" ;) ):

    First and foremost, The Mutton Kombat Project [fojar.com]. To even get started on this, I'm working on an as-yet-unreleased game for Linus/SVGALib; as a way to build my luaC svgalib bindings. Interesting stuff... I just wish I was getting paid for it!!

    Glad to hear that at least _someone_ cares about making computers more functional, not just more complicated.

    Thanks,
    Steve

  • Konqueror (Score:3)

    by The Sith Lord ( 111494 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @06:38PM (#640638)
    Not to start a flame war, but services aside, what's Nautilus got that Konqueror doesn't? I've been using Konqueror for quite some time, and each time I use it, I'm amazed by it. Just the other day I turned on image preview mode, and woulnd't you know it, it gave a preview of the text files as well!

    It seems that Nautilus may be too little too late. Had it been released before KDE 2, then matters might be different.

  • fast mirror! (Score:3)

    by sheckard ( 91376 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @06:39PM (#640640) Homepage
    ftp://ftp.heckard.com/pub/eazel/ [heckard.com] go for it!
  • I am very impressed with PR2 over PR1.. it's much more polished and solid. It seems more responsive and quick as well..

    I have to agree with you -- my only complaint after playing with it for awhile is the time it takes to open new windows...
  • Hmm... a little analysis

    > GNOME widget themes are color fixed. They are
    > completely pixmap based.

    um, false. Try my fav Xenophilia, among others.

    > They are incredibly slow, it is not uncommon to
    > see GTK apps redraw themselves.

    you're probably using pixmap themes here. if you have big pixmaps, it's going to make things slower. same with kde themes.

    > A kde 2 app will look kind of raunchy in a gnome
    > environment (consistency is key) but KDE is far
    > prettier then GNOME in my opinion.

    This is a matter of personal taste i guess. I wouldn't touch a single one of the top 10 themes on kde.themes.org. The sawmill/gtk ones tend to agree with me much more.
  • I was interested to see how Eazel is planning to make money on this project. I can't say I'm wildly optimistic. The online storage is available for free at many different sites, which aren't making any money. It seems to me that disk space is so cheap relative to bandwidth that users almost always have more space locally than they could comfortably use remotely. Sure, maybe you might want to save a file while you're at someone else's computer but does that happen often enough that you'd pay for your account?

    The software catalog seems more promising, although I don't see users paying for it. They'll need sponsors. It sounds like this line is going directly against Helix Code's business plan, isn't it?

    I'm very interested to see how the whole Gnome / Eazel / Helix Code / Sun / Red Hat thing is going to play out. Unfortunately, I suspect it's going to be like Mozilla where we get exciting free projects to use and to draw from without any great benefit to the people who bet their money on it. It's an exciting experiment, though!

  • If you want to mount ftp sites, you might want to take a look at the hurd. It may not be quite ready for prime time, but who knows, perhaps some of its ideas might make it into more mainstream OSs, like Linux. They have their "translators" that will allow you to do cool stuff like mounting remote ftp servers, IIRC.

    Besides that, I would agree that file managers are not particularly useful for command line users. Once you get familiar with your shell and all those cool utilities that you have on Un*x, you just don't even think about switching to a GUI with all its inherent limitations.

    Some posts have claimed that many file manager GUIs suck because they're not designed the right way. Well, consider this: in any given amount of time, you can enter much more information with 10 fingers (if you're good at it), then with a mouse. That's why there will probably never be a replacement for the command line, at least for the so-called power users.

  • gnome-vfs is cool. A gnome-vfs method is defined by a set of standard interfaces. So any arbritrary filesystem/protocol can be represented, within limits. And it all looks the same to nautilus, which just calls these methods. Some of these methods tell Nautilus about the filesystem (local/remote, etc.)

    gnome-vfs handles HTTP/WebDAV, FTP, and a whole bunch of other access methods. And if something is missing, it's quite easy to write a method and add it.

  • gotta love it (Score:4)

    by jroller ( 86843 ) on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @11:30PM (#640654) Homepage
    I'm sorry, but I gotta say that this nautilus thing is so very slick.

    Sure, currently its slow and buggy, but everything is falling in to place. PR2 is leaps and bounds ahead of PR1 in these terms, plus lots of extra fun functionality. I'm fairly confident that the eazel guys can take care of performance issues, and get things running like a real application some day soon.

    Icons: There's something nice about being able to actually visualize all your files and your contents. No other filemanager I've seen does such a good job of putting a preview of the file in the icon.

    Keyboard: This thing actually has working keyboard shortcuts so often missing from alot of gnome programs (namely gmc). Eazel's focus on getting the user experience correct gives me high hopes that I will actually be able to use this thing without too much mouse action. And it has the benefit of the handy gtk/menu quick key reassignment.

    Services: Currently the software catalog is somewhat limited, but it was sure nice to go click and install Maelstrom. I love this game, but not enough to go search linuxgames, try to find an rpm or tar file, read the installation instructions, etc. The online storage is something that's being done for other operating systems, but the current purely web based solutions are quite lame. This is a service that probably would never hit linux without eazel.

    Will there be a standardized API for making your own services? I don't know if this is something eazel is even thinking about.

    gnome-vfs: I'd be interested in comparisons with KDE2's generic filesystem/IO layer.

    Metafile: The xml file for storing directory state seems to me like a very good idea. It would even allow a transparent ftp session to layout icons, it survives being put into archive files, it inheriets the multiuser security model when you're browsing other people's directories and its easy for me to see and inspect when I'm in bash/vi mode.

    Nautilus shows a whole mess of promise, the only unfortunate thing is its not quite ready to actually use yet.

  • Since you'll never get equal time on slashdot, here's another filemanager [sourceforge.net].

    It's just a file manager, it doesn't try to be a web browser.

    Oh, and it's for KDE.

    Disclaimer: I don't use either one, but the Open Zealotry(tm) here is starting to piss me off.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • OK, I tried to resist, but now I just have to respond. If you're sensitive to plugs, stop reading now. ;^) In a rather nifty GTK+ filemanager I happen to know about (avail abl en here [ibiblio.org], not at the address given in my user block above), selecting all files of a type is as easy as holding down the left alt key while clicking on any file of the desired type. Of course, you can also use the more classic approach of sorting by type and then selecting a sequence of files by clicking the first one, then shift-clicking the last one. Or, you could use the built-in SelectRE command to select using a shell glob pattern or a straight regular expression. OK, and of plug.
  • From http://www.eazel.com/support/nautilusfaq [eazel.com]:
    My machine runs KDE. How do I get Nautilus?

    The Nautilus Desktop Environment currently does not run on KDE. To use Nautilus, you must first install GNOME 1.2 or higher, run GNOME for your desktop, and then install Nautilus.
    This usually means that if someone stupid enough to ask them this they'll say it does no to save them some trouble.
    Or that they indeed don't know how :)

    --
  • Does it interact poorly with Helix? It seems to want to install some of the same libraries...

    ________________________________________
  • As I learn command line stuff more, I'm finding much less use for stuff like gmc, and the upcomming Nautilus. I mean, I have ls and I have apt-get, what will I need this stuff for? I'm more likely to use the pure and free graphical apt than I am to use the eazel software manager thingie. And Nautilus seems like too much bloat. I would rather see some way to mount ftp sites on a normal filesystem, or even a new network filesystem designed from the ground up would be cool However, new users may find this stuff pretty and shiney. Sorry to be such a party pooper :)

  • In Gnomes by Huygen and Poortvliet, the 90 cm tall trolls are always trying to catch the 15 cm tall gnomes. Gnomes are portrayed as the good guys; trolls are the bad guys.

    If you really want to fight it out, pull out an NES emulator [simplenet.com] and play GNOME vs. KDE: Battle of the Desktops [8m.com], a GPL'd NES game.

  • 3 steps back (Score:5)

    by SCHecklerX ( 229973 ) <greg@gksnetworks.com> on Tuesday November 07, 2000 @06:49PM (#640673) Homepage
    *sigh*

    It troubles me to see first Konqueror, and now Eazel chasing the whole windoze file management nightmare.

    KFM was elegant, easy to configure, and every directory or object kept track of its own settings. With konqueror, we lost a lot of that as it became more of an application than a file manager.

    Sometimes simplicity is a good thing. Both KDE and Gnome are losing sight of that. Instead of having a slick, elegant filemanager that seamlessly integrates several other parts of the environment, we are ending up with a big ugly mess that isn't an efficient way to work.

    Just my former OS/2 WPS view rearing its ugly head again. The developers creating these environments could learn a lot by reading this [ibm.com].

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