Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
GNOME GUI

GNOME 2.0 Desktop Alpha 390

xer.xes writes: "The first public testing release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop, 'Rolig Liten Hattgubbe,' is ready for your testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download here. Please read the release notes first! Due for general consumption in March, the GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly regarded user interface."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

GNOME 2.0 Desktop Alpha

Comments Filter:
  • For you non-Swedes (Score:5, Informative)

    by Theodore Logan ( 139352 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @04:07PM (#2857491)
    "Rolig liten hattgubbe" is Swedish and translates to "Funny little hat-man" (yes, it sounds ridiculous in my language too).
    • why have they named it like that?
    • by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs.ajs@com> on Thursday January 17, 2002 @04:12PM (#2857539) Homepage Journal
      Sounds like a euphamism for gnomes to me, which would be appropriate.
      • Sounds like a euphamism for gnomes to me, which would be appropriate.

        This is a good observation, and you are propably correct. However, it is still a bizarre name - long and very difficult (I suppose, but cannot tell for sure, since I am a Swede myself) - for non-Swedes. Why is this? Are there unproportionally many Swedes working on this? Are these people in love with the Swedish language? What is going on here?

        This might seem seriously off topic, but I'm honestly quite interested.

        • by jdub! ( 24149 )
          First reason: Codenames don't generally mean anything. They're fairly random, chosen by the people on the release team who are present at the time.

          Second reason: Sweden is the backbone of GNOME.
    • by jonask ( 9394 )
      At a guess they're referring to this:

      http://user.tninet.se/~prv247p/hatt/

      It's a turkish song with parts of it that sounds like swedish, so someone had a bit of fun making a mock video for it and adding 'swedish' subtitles. Quite funny. (At least if you speak swedish. ;-)

      (The same people also made this one:
      http://www.lindqvist.com/externsajt.php?external Si te=http://www.kramgo.se/ansiktsburk&extName=Kramgo
      )
    • "Rolig liten hattgubbe" is Swedish and translates to "Funny little hat-man"

      And as a side-note, it translates *almost* pefectly to the Norwegian phrase "Calm little hat-man"... :) See how much difference a little word can do.

    • Actually, the whole sentence makes perfect sense in norwegian as well, but translates to something like "calm little old, fat and unimaginative man", which may or may not be more suited for Gnome 2 ;-).

      I've always found it funny how swedish and norwegian are VERY similiar, but sometimes the same words have different meaning.

      Personally, I like Gnome.
  • "Rolig Liten Hattgubbe" and "Lagom". There is a lot of Swedish on Slashdot these days! "Rolig Liten Hattgubbe" means "Funny Little Hat Guy". Who is the Funny Little Hat Guy?
  • I'm too much of a pansy to disturb my prefectly configured Debian system, so can someone else install this and post screenshots?
  • Farsi! (Score:1, Informative)

    Yea!!!!

    Persian poetry on GNOME.

  • I use GNOME for only what I have to... it was installed as the only window manager on the webserver that I administer before it came to me, and for what I use it for, it works just fine. I've heard stories from past coworkers that upgrading or replacing a window manager is quite complicated, and if not done exactly right can cause major problems.

    I personally am of the opinion, that unless it concerns security or (used) functionality, don't fix it if it's not broken.

    I guess I'll wait until the other folks here install 2.0 to see 1) what (if any) problems they had, and 2) was it really worth it.

    There is something to be said for using software that is a bit older and has been around for a while. Just look at XP and all the holes they found in the first couple months. I doubt any new exploits will be found for my Windows 98 SE I'm running at home...
    • No new exploits? Like UPnP or something, you mean?
    • Upgrading is not worth it! Note that this release is labeled as "Alpha", which is developer-speak means "not feature complete and will crash on you all the time".
      If you want to live on the bleeding edge, you can install this in addition to your working desktop, i.e. by using the vicious build scripts [gnome.org] from Gnome CVS.
    • I doubt any new exploits will be found for my Windows 98 SE I'm running at home...

      I admire your extraordinary courage and stamina, daring to admit here, at this the greatest of Linux temples, that you are using Windows at home. Using it at home seems to imply that you are using Windows of your own free will!

      I am awestruck seeing such courage. I would never dare reveal here what system I'm using at home.

      Give a man a fish and he eats for one day. Teach him how to fish, and though he'll eat for a lifetime, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
      • Using it at home seems to imply that you are using Windows of your own free will!


        That's exactly what I do. I use Windows98 at home, of my own free will, to play exactly two games: Grand Prix Legends and Need For Speed - Porsche Unleashed.


        At work, I install Linux wherever I get a chance to. Having recently lowered the cost in a project from the $750k that a Windows2000 system would cost to less than $200k in Linux, the Company Management wisely applauds and encourages my attitude.

  • by mark_lybarger ( 199098 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @04:11PM (#2857538)

    5 posts about what a great job the gnome folks are doing

    8 posts about how much better and more advanced kde is than gnome

    7 posts about how you shouldn't do OO programming in C

    9 posts about how OO is a method not a language :)

    50 posts from people who don't give a rat's arse about different desktops and like their gnome

    and finally... 4 posts summarizing the number of other posts for the topic

  • Looks good in the screenshots. I absolutely abhor the current gnomecc, this looks like a step in the right direction.

    Can't wait to try it.
  • ...are available here

    http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/ [gnome.org]

    mmmmmmmm pretty.
    • While a apreciate what the Gnome people are doing, the AA fonts are really butt ugly ! I only hope this will change in the final version.
    • Sorry, but GNOME just look butt ugly on it's default install, and default installs are what matter (so please, spare me the themes, color changes, etc.)

      The only visual improvement I see is the icons on the Gnome Control Center, they look kind of nice.

      The buttons on the "taskbar" on the bottom on the other hand are such a waste of space. Too big and too much empty space there.

      The indicator that a menu or toolbar is draggable is too cluncky and distracting.

      And draggable toolbars are a waste of time. Just because Windows does it, doesn't mean it's a good idea. That's probably one of the stupidest UI design decision since the one button mouse !
  • Congratulations to the GNOME folks for making 2.0 a reality.

    Now if only the number of shared libraries could be reduced... GNOME is currently a huge monster of a system, and I'm sure its size (and performance) could be improved for the next release.

  • by VAXGeek ( 3443 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @04:16PM (#2857595) Homepage
    I'm considering which Desktop Enviornment to install on my new Slackware box, and I'm wondering if someone could post a non-biased comparision between KDE and GNOME. Which do you think is better in terms of speed, efficiency, usability, etc?
    • by reaper20 ( 23396 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @04:23PM (#2857650) Homepage
      At the risk of starting a monster flamewar:

      I find that I prefer the Gnome apps (Evolution, Galeon), but I prefer KDE as whole more. They are both pretty slow IMO. Konqueror is a great filemanager and that alone keeps me in KDE.

      So I just plop the Gnome app icon in my KDE taskbar and let 'er rip. The only problem is a consistent cut and paste between Mozilla, Konq, and everything else, so I usually use the middle mouse button to copy and paste.
    • Install them both and make up your own mind.


      It's just a question of taste.

    • Non-biased -- well, that can hardly be done by a single person. But I've tried both to some extent and am very happy with KDE. True, it is overall significantly slower than GNOME, and if you're on a low-end machine you will probably want to run GNOME or WindowMaker or somesuch (I like ion for productivity tasks, a nice window manager .. "apt-get install ion" and give it a try). If you turn off all the gimmicks in KDE it gets reasonably fast, but it still seems to run a lot more processes, and swap/access the disk more than other DEs/WMs. (The performance differences reported by KDE users on CPU-wise similar machines may relate to different effects of disk access: A high-end SCSI system will probably not mind the frequent accesses, whereas some IDE hard drives / controllers do not regard your CPU with much respect.) Upgrading my memory to 640 MB has made little/no performance difference other than for the obvious memory-intesive tasks (Mozilla etc.).

      KDE is very nice for people who migrate from Windows (or keep using Windows) because after installation it lets you choose a Windows-like theme and keybindings (without losing any of its functionality, of course). GNOME, OTOH, takes a while to get into, especially with sawfish as a WM, but can be set up in a Windows-like fashion, too -- so if you're planning to set something up for lots of end users it doesn't make much of a difference. Overall, I think KDE makes optimal use of existing Windows knowledge, whereas GNOME mostly requires you to learn from scratch -- if it's your first PC ;-) it will likely not make much of a difference.

      Otherwise the differences are not so big. Konqueror is a nice browser, especially with anti-aliasing (which is not really satisfying on Linux, but that's not KDE's fault -- at least you can get ClearType-like subpixel antialiasing on LCDs, which is almost as good as Windows'), but apps are interoperable. The KDE task bar and GNOME task bar are similar, both support little applets, but those are not interoperable AFAIK. I found the GNOME taskbar somewhat more intuitive, but I'm not really happy with either one (yes, I try to submit bugs and suggestions, thank you).

      As regards productivity, it should not really make much of a difference once you've gotten into it. GNOME may be the obvious choice on lower-end machines, although my university has some quite snappy low-end machines running KDE, so with tuning you can probably achieve a lot. Hopefully, KDE performance will improve over time. I think both GTK and Qt are versatile interface toolkits, of which Qt is, by default, more Windows-like, but you can probably create an almost exactly Windows-like look & feel with GTK as well. But I liked the KDE default settings a lot more.

      • KDE it gets reasonably fast, but it still seems to run a lot more processes, and swap/access the disk more than other DEs/WMs.

        Keep in mind (both for KDE programs and for Gnome programs) that with top, Linux reports each thread as a separate process, even though they share their address space.

        --Ben

    • I am glad they modded you up as funny...

      But here is my experience which will no doubt get both sides flaming me, so I guess this is about as unbiased as you can get.

      It depends on how you are going to use your box. I assume that you are planning on using it as a graphical workstation, and so the extra bloat of KDE and GNOME are not a real problem. Also I am assuming a relatively large hard drive since you specify that your computer is new.

      I think that you will find yourself to be far less limited in how you use your system if you install both desktops on your system. Most (but not all) KDE applications run fine in GNOME and vice versa-- case in point, I am writing this on Konqueror within GNOME). In essence, you will have more flexibility and redundency if you install both and use whichever one you like more (you can even run WindowMaker, BlackBox, or a simple TWM if you really really want to ;)). The important thing is that you are installing the libraries for each one so that well written applications can be run in any X environment of your choosing...

      My advice is simple. Run them both if you can afford the additional hard drive space. For higher-end workstations, I much prefer GNUOME, but for that old Dev server, KDE was pretty good.

      But then, I suppose both sides will see this as heresy...
    • by nosferatu-man ( 13652 ) <spamdot@homonculus.net> on Thursday January 17, 2002 @06:13PM (#2858626) Homepage
      Well, for starters, vi is way smaller than Emacs, and it starts up
      much faster. But then, my cat is housebroken, and I've never met a
      dog that was smart enough to shit in a box. Don't forget also that
      the Amiga has a MUCH broader selection of games to choose from than
      the ST, and while the GNU people seem to think that their indentation
      style is superior, it has been proved that K&R is much easier to read.

      I now return you to your regularly scheduled religious war.

      Peace,
      (jfb)
  • Gnome help please (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I quit using Gnome (1.4 IIRC?) since they added Nautilus. It's really pretty, but unbelievably and unusably slow on a 1.4GHz/DDR Athlon, 512M RAM, Mandrake 7.1. Oh yeah, GMC's MIME association editor is now broken, so I can't use it with any app it isn't already configured for. Does anyone know how to fix that? Or better yet, can anyone speed up Nautilus?

    Will 2.0 fix this?
    • Nautilus has made great strides speed-wise since 1.0 days - give the newest one a try.

      (Not that I am pushing Gnome here, I use KDE myself.)

  • by Mr_Perl ( 142164 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @04:37PM (#2857789) Homepage
    I just can't get past clicking on an ugly foot to "start" my computing adventure.

    Feet are smelly and nasty. I just don't want a foot on my desktop.
  • by chabotc ( 22496 ) <chabotc&gmail,com> on Thursday January 17, 2002 @04:39PM (#2857810) Homepage
    Please all keep in mind, that this is a very much alpha style release.

    This means a couple of base packages don't compile without any manual labor, and a few packages won't compile unless you become a leet gnome hacker and fix the source on the fly ;-)

    It's a great way to get a first preview of the platform,but for general consumption or testing, this platform just int it yet.

    If you prefer not hacking to much source, it might be worth wile to wait for the .rpm's of the packages, before you jump into the deep and start testing. The Gnome Packaging project is working hard on these, so i'm sure they will be along soon.
  • Meanies? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Liquid(TJ) ( 318258 )
    ...and many improvements throughout GNOME's highly retarded user interface.

    Geez, they don't have to be so hard on themselves...

  • by Y-Crate ( 540566 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @05:00PM (#2857963)
    "Highly regarded user interface" = "Considered by 6 our of 10 users to be 'the least crappy one on Linux' "

    :D
  • by i_am_nitrogen ( 524475 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @05:07PM (#2858028) Homepage Journal
    Note: this is not a troll.

    My one big complaint about Gtk+/Gnome applications is with the file select dialog. When I click on a directory, it erases the filename that was already typed in! This is lame. If they can improve the file selection dialog, I will be happy.

    That said, if my biggest complaint is something so small, I think things are going quite well. Oh, and it needs to be faster too :). I want to be able to run Gnome and KDE on my 266MHz Cyrix as well, not just my 800MHz Duron. Until that time there's Blackbox I guess, which screams on anything.
    • There's a whole new file selection widget in Gnome/GTK 2.0.. It's very nice, and looks much like the Win32 file selection dialog (but of course, it's better because it's open source and all that :))
  • (u|li)nix fonts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jtdubs ( 61885 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @05:14PM (#2858106)
    I run RedHat on my main workstation and BSD on a bunch of my servers. I also have a PC running Win2K, a G4 Titanium PowerBook and a Solaris boxen.

    I by far prefer the working environment of linux to all of the others, aside from the Mac. Sorry, Mac OS 10.1 is absolutely fabulous.

    The only thing about the unix environment, especially the linux environment, that really gets to me is the complete lack of good fonts.

    Windows, love it or loathe it, has very nice true-type, well-hinted fonts. They are very easy to read, even when small. They have serif, they have sans-serif, and both are beautiful.

    Mac OS 10.1 has even better fonts, I think, although many might disagree. Regardless, not far removed in quality from that of windows, whether better or worse.

    However, what no will will disagree about is that the fonts in linux suck. They are ugly. They are unreadable when small. They are badly aliased. They need to be put out of their misery.

    Some may think this is inconsiquential, but I feel otherwise. I believe that until linux can produce some wonderful fonts of it's own, and use them by default without having to install anything, and have every program use them, even old ones that were written before the fonts were around, linux will never be able to touch windows or mac on the desktop.

    But, hey, I'm just talking here...

    Justin Dubs
    • Re:(u|li)nix fonts (Score:5, Informative)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @05:33PM (#2858284)
      OS-X fonts look good to some people because, in general, Quartz renders the desktop quite softly. In reality, OS-X's font subsystem is rather low tech, it lacks hinting, gamma correction, etc. You can read all about it on the XRender mailing list. [xfree86.org] Personally, I don't like OS-X's fonts, but that's just me.

      Linux fonts are great! If you take the high quality TrueType fonts from your Windows partition, Freetype2 renders the text extremely sharply. The only renderer I've seen that is better than FT2 is BitStream's FontFusion (found in QNX RtP) and the only reason I like it better is because it is less heavy-handed with the anti-aliasing. Certainly, FT2 blows away Windows' font rendering. Compare Arial in FT2 to Arial in XP, and you'll notice that FT2 renders the text visibly more clearly.
      • That is a very good point. I just used TinkerTool to shut off the font anti-aliasing on my mac osx box, and was very surprised about how bad the standard fonts looked!

        One thing though that Mac OSX does very nicely is the multi-level ligatures. I haven't yet seen an app on linux that even has the concept. is there one?

        jeffk
      • The only renderer I've seen that is better than FT2 is BitStream's FontFusion (found in QNX RtP) and the only reason I like it better is because it is less heavy-handed with the anti-aliasing.

        I have to say that the rendering in the GNOME screenshots I see is, while better than none in some ways, ass ugly in other ways.

        My personal favourite antialiasing engine is the one in the Macintosh shareware control panel SmoothType [kaleidoscope.net], which does a great OSX-style job of rendering fonts, and is surprisingly fast too.

        before [cdslash.net] and after [cdslash.net] screenshots as examples. The FT2 rendering seems similar, but there's just something ugly about it that rubs me the wrong way.

        Certainly, FT2 blows away Windows' font rendering. Compare Arial in FT2 to Arial in XP, and you'll notice that FT2 renders the text visibly more clearly.

        FT2 indeed does have beautiful antialiasing, though I can't say whether XP does or not. Most of the fonts Windows uses (in my experience) are not antialiased (MS Sans Serif for example), nor are the common file sizes (12 pt or something), so unless it's changed big-time in XP (which wouldn't surprise me) you don't gain a whole lot from MS Antialiasing.

        On a related note, anyone know of antialising render engine replacements for Windows 98?

        --Dan
    • it's that the entire fonts system on *nix machines is esoteric enough that all the fiddling with suitcases etc on the Mac (as of several years ago at least -- I really haven't played with the fonts on my iBook) is nothing in comparison.

      The fonts available to AbiWord are not the same ones available to the GIMP, for instance, and I'm not sure -- though I haven't pursued -- how to change this. (KWord seems to find the same fonts as the GIMP, though.)

      If I could earmark money toward a useability project for either or both (or any, depending on who's counting) of the Big Desktops, it would be a prettier / friendlier / easier font-control mechanism. Drag and drop, dammit! :) It's nice that both KDE and GNOME now have antialiasing, but I really wish there was a single spot I could drag a downloaded font and know it would then be available to every application which uses fonts ...

      The *next* thing I'd like to earmark money for is an easy to use and freely licensed font-creation tool :) Even if it could be used mostly to create ugly fonts, as long as the capability to creat new / better / improved ones existed, I bet a few nice ones would soon float to the top ...

      Perhaps there really is a nice free font-creation program under Linux / UNIX, I just don't know about it if so.

      In short, I agree and then some!

      timothy
      • it's that the entire fonts system on *nix machines is esoteric enough that all the fiddling with suitcases etc on the Mac (as of several years ago at least -- I really haven't played with the fonts on my iBook) is nothing in comparison.

        Apple has further simplified fonts in OS X by using data-fork TrueType font files (.dfont) instead of suitcases, although old suitcase TrueType fonts, bitmap fonts, and PostScript fonts are still supported (Note also that Mac OS X comes with 100s of dollars of fonts, and they aren't exaggerating, those suckers are expensive! Mmmm, Copperplate Gothic:). They also have drastically increased the max number of fonts to save you from having to make sets, and OS X automatically loads fonts in the OS 9 system folder as well as those in the OS X font library and the user's font library, so you will automatically have every font in either format from either version of the OS available to every application.

    • This is true in the general case, but there are exceptions. Try comparing Courier size 36 between MS Word XP and Openoffice. I updated my resume this morning in openoffice, then tried opening it in word at work: and the Courier font at size 36 in Openoffice looked like letters while in word it looked like one of those 50x50 pixel digital photos you used to pay $10 for at the science center in the '80s.
    • Re:(u|li)nix fonts (Score:2, Informative)

      by MobyTurbo ( 537363 )
      Windows, love it or loathe it, has very nice true-type, well-hinted fonts. They are very easy to read, even when small. They have serif, they have sans-serif, and both are beautiful.

      There's a nice little script included in XFree86 4.x tools called fetchmsttfonts (type that in carefully :-) ) that will (legally, believe it or not) download and install MS's true type fonts. Try it out, you'll get good Arial, Times New Roman, etc.

      BTW, it sends MS's EULA through your pager, press q to exit it to go to the next step.

    • ...running Win2K, a G4 Titanium PowerBook and a Solaris boxen.

      First of all, "boxen" is a ridiculous term. Second of all, if it is too be used, it should be used as a plural. As I understand, it is a play on the -en ending in German (and/or feasably other northern european languages) which is quite common.

      Eine Box, zwei Solarisboxen.

      One box, two solaris boxen.

      -Erik
    • try this: corefonts [sourceforge.net]

      and this:
      webfonts [rpmfind.net]

  • Will we be able to run it on XFree86 4.2 by then? It'd be nice to make the upgrade a REALLY clean one.
  • I hate all these dumb posts that say: "this pointless competition between GNOME and KDE is only holding LINUX back."

    Funny, because competition between GNOME and KDE is *EXACTLY* what has made both GNOME and KDE so mature and stable.

    Why don't you send this kind of messages to gnome-devel-list or kde-devel-list?
    I'm sure you'll hear a lot of things you don't expect (such as that the GNOME vs KDE war does not exist).
  • by Junta ( 36770 ) on Thursday January 17, 2002 @07:31PM (#2859104)
    There is an unfortunate trend in most open-source projects that really needs to slow down. Gnome 2.x will be API incompatible with 1.x, and they are already planning a 3.x that will break 2.x compatibility. Sure, this sort of change means the available APIs can be very nice and slick and not have to suffer the clunkiness of older API design concepts, but it also means that people, organizations, and companies have a harder time maintaining products through time. As much as Windows irks me, they did keep backward compatibility right, similar to the x86 family. Not only are the latest Windows releases API compatible, but also ABI compatible with previous versions dating back to win16 and DOS days. Sure, your API is messy just as x86 assembly is messy, but I think that a lot of open source projects are getting to the point where they should decide on an ABI/API that is "good enough" to keep supporting through future versions. Sure, additions can be made, but breaking exisiting applications in the name of progress isn't popular among businesses that don't want to spend extra development time and money just to keep up with extreme API changes...
    • by Sentry21 ( 8183 )
      Backwards compatibility and the code required is one of the things that has screwed Windows up so badly. That being said, Windows had backwards compatibility in the same way GTK/GNOME will.

      Not only do they have to support Win32 in Win95, but they also have to support Win16, which was different, and DOS, which was radically different. How did they do it? New libraries. 32-bit libs, 16-bit libs, and the DOS crud. 16-bit apps don't load the 32-bit libs Win95/98/etc. use.

      Thus, it is similar to GNOME/GTK. You can't compile a GTK1.2 app against the GTK2.0 libs, but you can compile it against GTK1.2, and they can coexist (or at least, they did on my box when I was testing GTK1.3, the GTK2 test version).

      All it means is that you will have to have GTK1.x libs installed, and GTK2.x libs installed if you want to use both. GTK3.x will require a new set of libs.

      Maintaining source/binary compatibility would cause too many problems, since the GLib/GDK/GTK/Pango/blahblah scenario is being totally redone. It's easier to let old apps use old libs, and write new apps (or rewrite old apps) with new libs.

      --Dan
    • by Havoc Pennington ( 87913 ) on Friday January 18, 2002 @02:37AM (#2860689)

      We've thought about this in detail, that's why GNOME does compat exactly like Windows; instead of breaking old libs, we make new libs with a different name that install next to the old libs. See http://pobox.com/~hp/parallel.html [pobox.com]. So no app has to port until they feel like it.

  • Will GNOME 2 be as broken with Windowmaker as KDE 2 is?
  • There's only one thing that I want changed, and that's the stock "OK" button. If you haven't noticed by now, the "OK" button has the "return" arrow on it. Why does this matter? It's the exact same image that is on my "enter" key. Everytime I see the that icon, I think, "That button looks just like the 'enter' key on my keyboard. That button must be associated with this key." Which isn't a problem if "OK" is the default, but alot of time it's not. Alot of times the default is "cancel".

    But the icon on the keyboard doesn't indicate the default action. Instead a 5 pixel inset the exact same color of the dialog's background is placed around the default button.

    Now I ask you, which is more eye catching, I a 20x20 color image, or a 4 thin black lines?

    Which conveys a sense of what key is associtated with which button? A picture of what's on the key, or 4 thin black lines?

    It's as if, you have a button marked "Q" and when you press it, you get "esc".

To be is to program.

Working...