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GNOME GUI

GTK+ 2.0 110

Posted by michael from the purty-pictures dept.
Some random reader sent in: "Gtk.org all of a sudden (?) says version 2.0 is available. There is a FAQ for 2.0. Here is a mail from the gtk-devel-list with some 'pre-release release-notes' :)."
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GTK+ 2.0 More

GTK+ 2.0

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  • Isn't it ironic that this article [slashdot.org] (23 seconds kernel compile) was posted just before the GTK+ 2.0 article, knowing that compiling GTK+ probably requires just about as much time to compile as the Linux kernel ?

    But then, there are Qt, Gnome, KDE ... Doh, need more CPU :)

  • Wow.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Warped-Reality ( 125140 ) on Sunday March 10, 2002 @08:41AM (#3137477) Journal
    I tried the devel branch for 2.0 not too long ago, it turned out to be hideously unstable... have they really fixed all of those bugs in such a short period of time?

    • Re:Wow.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by chabotc ( 22496 ) <chabotc AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday March 10, 2002 @08:59AM (#3137496) Homepage
      Actualy, yes a amazing amount of bugs have been fixed in the last months and weeks. Ofcource it is worth keeping in mind this is a .0 release. So all critical bugs should've been found and fixed, but there's bound to be a slew of little ones left.

      More exiting though, is the fact that they can now begin on the next gtk release, which amongst other things will include a new file selector (open / save, etc) dialog ! This is something that a _lot_ of users are hoping and waiting for.

      (check http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2002 -March/msg00179.html for notes on the file selector.

      • Here is a link [gnome.org] that works.

        Ben

      • Re:Wow.. (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Man have attitudes changed. I remember the days when we worked on projects ".0" releases meant "we fixed everything we could." These days ".0" releases mean "We put it out, now let's find the bugs"

        • Re:Wow.. (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          There are a lot of people depending upon this library, and to just not release it for months and months due to trivial bugs would be much worse, and it would get just as many clueless Slashdotters bitching about it.

          Applications like GIMP don't suffer from this problem so much because everything in the world doesn't depend upon them. If GTK 2.0 never got released onto the world because there is some obscure bug that only affects Irix users with a certain configuration, or something ridiculous like that, then applications like GIMP and GNOME could never release their next versions either.

          GTK 2.0 fixes everything that needs to be fixed, leaving the minor details for later so that people can begin linking applications against the new libglib-2.0.so and such.

      • Re:Wow.. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by spudnic ( 32107 )
        The main three things that annoy me about many open/save dialogs that I encounter are the inability to create new directories, no tab (or some other) completion, and the inconsistancies between them. Sure, let all the folks create their own systems, but at least create a common API at some level so that if I'm using a KDE app in Gnome I get the standard Gnome open save dialogs.

        It really shouldn't be that hard, especially for something as simple as this.

        Now don't even get me started on clipboards... ;)

        • The worst thing I see is a lack of a consistent way to select whether dotfiles are shown or not. I'd really like to turn these off so that my wife doesn't have to page past the ~100 config files in her home directory to get to her StarOffice docs, etc. but I can't turn this off in StarOffice, in Netscape, or in the standard GTK fileselection box. If you want to talk about a simple UI difference that is annoying to almost all ex-Windows users, this is it. Application programs (that wouldn't normally open dotfiles) should be set up by default to hide dotfiles, and allow the user to uncheck the box in order to see them - anyone who really wants to open a dotfile would know to change the setting in order to see them, anyway.

    • I agree with that entirely. On Solaris GTK-1.3.15 is pretty much unusable, segfaulting all over the place.

      I'm on a bit of a downer though, having spent *ages* building GTK-1.3 and the GNOME-2 beta and finding roughly every other operation I try causes a crash. :-(
      • I agree with that entirely. On Solaris GTK-1.3.15 is pretty much unusable, segfaulting all over the place.

        I'm on a bit of a downer though, having spent *ages* building GTK-1.3 and the GNOME-2 beta and finding roughly every other operation I try causes a crash. :-(

        Is that GNOME or Gtk, though? The GNOME stuff is only beta...

        What happens if you run the gtk-demo program supplied with Gtk? I've been tracking the development versions for quite a while (not on Solaris, though) and I've found it pretty stable.

        • To be fair it is mostly the Gnome stuff that's failing, but I've had a few crashes which I *think* are down to glib/gtk.

          Now I've played with the new GTK some more I think I should say I was somewhat harsh earlier. I can't crash the gtk demos, and the gtk-2 based Gimp is pretty solid.

          That said, I'm still very disappointed with the flakiness of the GNOME beta, especially compared to say, the first KDE-3 beta. And that's *NOT* flamebait - just my personal observation!

    • Re:Wow.. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by GooberToo ( 74388 )
      ...have they really fixed all of those bugs in such a short period of time?

      Based on their previous track record for older versions of GTK+, it will be another year or two before the code base stabalizes. And if you report a bug to them, they'll probably tell you to fix it your self or wait for the 3.x series.

      • Re:Wow.. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Havoc Pennington ( 87913 ) on Sunday March 10, 2002 @07:43PM (#3139892)
        Some quick bugzilla.gnome.org queries would demonstrate with hard evidence that you are
        incorrect, if anyone were interested in reality.
        Wait, this is Slashdot. ;-)

        (Apparently I'm in an answer-the-trolls mood...)
        • hehe

          Reality is exactly as I put it. They had bugs in their linked list implementations for a VERY long time. When I contacted the developers about this, they told me they knew about it and that it had already been fixed in the current development tree. I asked about a patch for the current "stable" (which had lots of other causes for it to crash too). I was told to fix it my self or wait until they got around to it. Furthermore, they said they probably wouldn't get around to it because the next major release was out "ANY TIME NOW". Wow, two years later, here it is. The bug that they knew was there for over 4 months since I reported it, was finally fixed a total of 8 months after it was known to exist.

          Take your queries and come back to planet earth were reality and experince matters.

  • Excellent! But... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Emil Brink ( 69213 ) on Sunday March 10, 2002 @08:55AM (#3137488) Homepage
    As the developer and maintainer of a little GTK+-based application [obsession.se] (plug, plug), I see this is very good news, of course. But whoa, it's going to be a lot of work porting over... Using the deprecated widgets is an impossibility for any self-respecting maintainer, imo. ;^) Also, I sure do hope they managed to get the speed up a bit from the 1.3.x series... That was really underwhelming. Which was sad, since 1.2.x is very snappy.

    • Re:Excellent! But... (Score:2, Informative)

      by cyborch ( 524661 )
      here [gnome.org] is a nice list of changes from version 1.2 to 2.0.

    • Re:Excellent! But... (Score:2, Informative)

      by JanneM ( 7445 )
      I've found that a lot of the slowness of gtk+2 that I saw was due to the use of AA. Turns out xft isn't the snappiest piece of code around when it's antialiasing. Turn off AA, and things are a lot smoother again.

      /Janne
      • Turn off AA, and things are a lot smoother again.

        Haha, did you ever realize the word play there?
        • Haha, did you ever realize the word play there?

          Yes, I certainly did, and had to restrain myself to avoid doing something incredibly cheesy with it. :)

          /Janne

      • Re:Excellent! But... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Emil Brink ( 69213 ) on Sunday March 10, 2002 @04:25PM (#3138941) Homepage

        Well, now I've downloaded all the four libs and actually stresed my machine through building and installing it. The classic testgtk application that serves as a rather comprehensive demo of the various capabilities program is still around. And it's not anti-aliased on my machine (no xft, as far as I know), so even if turning that off helps, I'm still not happy. It's really annoying, since there's not that much visible improvement, although I'm sure everything is nice and new under the hood.

        While typing this up, I had this brilliant idea: there are these things known as "benchmarks" which replace vague bitching with hard numbers... Aha!

        I dove into the testgtk.c source, for both this new 2.0.0 release, and the last stable release, 1.2.10. In the "clist" demo (which is very interesting to me, since my app (mentioned in the thread root) uses GtkCList heavily), I added simple instrumentation to measure the time to add 1,000 rows with pixmaps. The results, based on running the code 10 times, dropping the min and max, and averaging the remaining 8 values:

        • GTK+ 1.2.10: 0.081 s
        • GTK+ 2.0.0: 0.787 s
        Difference: a factor of 9.6 slower. Ouch. Oh, and please note that these times are for the "core" loop of the test case, which is enclosed in calls to gtk_clist_freeze() and gtk_clist_thaw(), meaning (afaik) that this does not include the time it takes for GTK+ to actually render the list. It's the internal bookkeeping only. Can you say "dramatically slower"? I know I can.

        The annoying thing with this 10X performance loss is that my next machine isn't all that likely to be 10X faster than my current one; it's simply too large a step. Bummer.

        There, I think I've ranted enough on the topic for this moment. Thanks for listening. :^)

        • Re:Excellent! But... (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Your test was based on the GtkCList widget, which is deprecated in GTK+ 2.0. It's probably not a very good test.
        • to enable AA, just export GDK_USE_XFT=1 (or setenv GDK_USE_XFT 1).. works for me :)

          Michel
          ps It is still a bit slow though, but since I compiled with debugging enabled I did not thought further about it...
      • That should be a non-issue, when QT first had AA it was dead slow with any apps that I turned it on for, but now I don't notice any speed difference between having AA and not in opera (and other apps). Blaming xft on gtk's slowness with AA isn't the be all and end all, sounds like the AA in gtk still needs more work. Also my machine is a 166Mhz so I would think that any changes in the speed would be noticed immediately.

  • Real (draft) release notes (Score:5, Informative)

    by tal197 ( 144614 ) on Sunday March 10, 2002 @09:02AM (#3137501) Homepage Journal
    The linked message only talks about proposed changes to the draft release notes... here are the release notes themselves (also draft):

    Draft release notes for Gtk [gnome.org]

    • New font system (Score:5, Informative)

      by tal197 ( 144614 ) on Sunday March 10, 2002 @09:21AM (#3137526) Homepage Journal
      One of the main new features is the completely new font system:
      • Everything is in UTF-8 (so no more charset headaches :-)
      • AA fonts using XRENDER (do GDK_USE_XFT=1; export GDK_USE_XFT in your .xsession to enable them).
      • Sane font-chooser dialog, where you just select the font name, weight and size, instead of the previous multi-paned mess.
      • Lots of routines for laying out paragraphs, positioning text cursors, etc, for people doing their own text layout.

      On the negative side, the new font system seems much slower than before. Also it's completely incompatible with Gtk+-1.2, so anyone working with fonts has a massive updating task ahead.

      One cool new feature is that the default font is stored on the display, using the new XSettings system. This means that when you run a program on a remote machine, or as another user, etc, you don't lose your settings.

  • GTK 'plus' (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Sunday March 10, 2002 @10:01AM (#3137585) Homepage
    With the version number jump, you'd think they would have taken the opportunity to rename it from GTK+ back to GTK, which is what everyone calls it anyway.
    • Yes and also chang the meaning of the G from 'GIMP' to 'GNU' or something else (Gawd-why-not-do-it-with-a-real-object-oriented-la nguage comes to mind :)
      • Just use gtkmm.

        /Janne
      • GTK's object orientation actually survives past compilation time, which is very nice. this is not the case in the language you probably mistake for being object-oriented (I'm taking a somewhat-educated wild guess, yes).

        (and anyway, why does the implementation language matter for you? there probably is a binding for the language you like.)

      • Re:GTK 'plus' (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        - Yes and also chang the meaning of the G from 'GIMP' to 'GNU' or something else (Gawd-why-not-do-it-with-a-real-object-oriented-la nguage comes to mind :)

        OO is a way of looking at problems, thinking and designing software, not a language. You can write pretty good OO programs in plain C and other "traditional" languages too.
        • And you can also write OO in asm if you wish. Just no one does it because _tools have been written for that specific purpose!_

          Ever try using a screwdriver to pound a nail in?
          Didn't think so.

          • Re:GTK 'plus' (Score:1, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Ever try using a screwdriver to pound a nail in?
            Uh, yes, I have. The question is whether I've used a hammer to screw a nail in. No, I haven't. Didn't think so.
      • It's more fun to say GTK = GIMP ToolKit where GIMP = GNU Image Manipulation Program where GNU = GNU's Not Unix where GNU = ...

        Personally I think in the spirit of Grecursive Gnucronyms it should be named the GTK ToolKit.

        I agree on the OO bit though. It's silly that there are projects like gtkmm around just to compensate for the stupid decision of writing OO in a procedural language. It's like bolting a networking, windowing OS on top of DOS.. wait, someone actually did that...

      • The reason they did it in C was so that all the functions could be used from C programs and so that bindings could be made for every other language out there, including "object oriented" languages like Ruby, Objective C, Java, OCaml, Perl 5-6, etc.

        Only an insane person would actually try to write an ordinary program that uses GTK in C (unless they're using GladeXML).

        Cryptnotic

  • Whence Gtk-Perl and others? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I find it kind of disturbing that people who use gtk-perl seemingly are out of focus as to how Gtk-2.0 affects them; or if it will.

    Are any of the language bindings going to keep tracking Gtk, or is 1.2 going to be "it" for everybody? I've noticed the PyGTK people are still whacking away, but it's been pretty much quiet on the western front otherwise.

  • Any one knows if an upgrade from the rpm's will replace Gtk+ 1.x rpms?

    I really want to try it, but dont have a very good computer nor enough space (unless someone can tell me how to use a FAT partition as if it were ext2, so i can execute there) and not a fast processor either .

    anyway, i might just risk myself.
    • unless someone can tell me how to use a FAT partition as if it were ext2, so i can execute there

      You might want to try either 'man mount' or 'man mke2fs'. Or umsdos.
    • That shouldn't happen, then you have a faulty rpm. In debian both gtk libraries works fine together.

    • Re:replace (Score:2, Informative)

      by NotoriousQ ( 457789 )
      By your comment, it seems that you mean that you have a larger win partition:

      try adding this to your fstab:
      /dev/hda1 /win32 vfat defaults 1 0
      do not forget to change the first argument to the harddrive where your fat partition is, and the second to your chosen mount point (can be anything as long as it is a real existing directory)

      after that, just issue mount /win32 or whatever your mount point is

      As for the replacing GTK -- no no no no. These gtk's are not truly compatible, and thus you will need both libraries. do not worry as the default install should just put them together. I also would not be surprised if you have GTK 1.0 and 1.2 on your hard drive also, so do not replace, and if you are using rpms, you would not even be able to.

      Enjoy
    • no

      the rpm package called "gtk2" instead of "gtk+"
      glib2 instead of glib
      pango & atk doesnt exist in gtk+-1.2.x

  • They seem to imply that GTK application execute on X Windows, Frame buffer, and Windows ! the former Win32 port was not integrated in the main release ! does it mean now that with just a recompile I can get my GTK applications running in Windows 9x or XP ?

  • In Related News... (Score:4, Informative)

    by suwalski ( 176418 ) on Sunday March 10, 2002 @01:37PM (#3138147)
    news.gnome.org is reporting that Gnome Beta 2 ("I bastun bor vi allihopa!") is out!
  • I've been using the beta for a while; it's nice to know it's stable. The Gnome 2 release is something like the 28th of march, so presumably GTK+ is revving up for this Remember, GTK+-2.0 does not replace GTK+-1.2. They can both coexist peacefully.
  • Wouldn't a gimp topic icon describe this article more then a Gnome topic icon?

    Afterall, Gtk was made for the gimp..
    • GTK was originally made for GIMP, but scince the GNOME project decided to adopt it, GTK+ has become part of the GNOME project.
      • By that logic... about half of the programs that compile on Linux would use the gnome icon. It's first and foremost the "GIMP ToolKit". The fact that it -happens- to be included in GNOME (and that GNOME is based upon it) is irrelevant.

        • At this point, there are far more people who would be interested in GTK+ for using with GNOME than GIMP.

          Taken from gtk.org:
          GTK+ was initially developed for and used by the GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Therefore, it is named "The GIMP Toolkit", so that the origins of the project are remembered. Today GTK+ is used by a large number of applications, and is the toolkit used by the GNU project's GNOME desktop.

          You can see how it's really moving to GNOME more.

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