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GNOME GUI

Gnome 2.0 RC2 Asks For Abuse 214

Posted by timothy from the or-forever-hold-your-peace dept.
A nameless reader submits: "The GNOME Desktop 2.0 release candidate 2 has been released! Gnome 2.0 should be coming out soon! The release notes have some good information."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Gnome 2.0 RC2 Asks For Abuse More

Gnome 2.0 RC2 Asks For Abuse

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  • Crime? (Score:5, Funny)

    by KnightNavro ( 585943 ) on Sunday June 23, 2002 @03:42AM (#3751847)
    Isn't Gnome abuse a felony in most states?
  • when the final version will be released? I'm looking forward to trying it.

  • RC code name (Score:5, Informative)

    by joeykiller ( 119489 ) on Sunday June 23, 2002 @03:52AM (#3751870) Journal
    For those of you who don't understand swedish too well: This release's code name, "Glad Midsommar", means "Happy midsummer". The swedes love a good mid summer party.
    • The swedes love a good mid summer party.

      Yupp, I'm still having a hangover.. :)

      • If there's one good thing that college has taught me, it's the fact that advil + lots of water not only is good treatment for hangover, but is also a good prevention too! Take it before you go to bed -- unless you pass out cold, then you must suffer!

      • Re:RC code name (Score:3, Informative)

        by bokmann ( 323771 )
        OK, this is off-topic, but relevant to this particular comment.

        I know the perfect hangover cure. When I have a hangover, I can't sleep... so, oddly enough, after a heavy night of drinking, I'm up early, curled up in the fetal position on a couch cursing my own existance. (At least, when I used to drink a lot thats what I did... but that was 10 years ago).

        OK, here's the cure:
        1) 2 or more excederin (with both asprin and tylenol as pain releivers, it is always good at taking the edge off - and it has caffeine - a plus for this crowd)
        2) a multivitamin, like centrum.
        3) a b-complex vitamin suppliment(a lot of drug stores sell this as something like B-100). Alcohol flushes b complex vitamins from your system, which is one of the reasons you will feel like crap.
        4) Gatorade. Swallow all of those pills with a big jug of gatorade... it contains a lot of the electrolytes you need, but pissed out because your kidneys were dumping all the alcohol.
        5) a high-carbohydrate breakfast. Something like pancakes.

        finally, after doing all of that, melt yourself in a warm shower.

        Seriously... Do all this, and you will feel a LOT better.


        • A hangover is caused by dehydration. To prevent a hangover, you should drink AT LEAST as much water as alcohol before you go to sleep. If you alternate alcohol and water drinks as you are partying, even better. Good luck!
    • Its not just Swedish, its all scandinavians like finns and norskes too. We, finns, are burning huge bonfires to celebrate midsummer and murder/drowning statictics go skyhigh because of the alcohol use.

      • Re:RC code name (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Hep, Danes included.
        We should all party together.
    • we dance around a big pole...

      hmmm... wonder what that stands for..?!!
      ;)

  • abuse! (Score:5, Funny)

    by koekepeer ( 197127 ) on Sunday June 23, 2002 @03:57AM (#3751881)
    hey. if they are asking people to abuse gnome 2.0 rc2, why the hell are all the trolls modded down?

    maybe i'm just being stupid, but trolling seems a very appropriate reply to such an ill-formulated headline ;-)

    have a nice day!

  • Garnome (Score:5, Informative)

    by Spock the Vulcan ( 196989 ) on Sunday June 23, 2002 @03:59AM (#3751889)
    As always, if you want to give the latest Gnome a whirl without messing up your existing system, try Garnome [gnome.org]
    It takes a while to build (about an hour on my 1.0 GHz PIII), but it doesn't touch your existing install - everything goes into ~/garnome.
    • I'd love to, but the current version is still 0.11.0, which works with RC1, right? I guess we'll have to be a little more pateint for Jeff to release the garnome version that works with RC2.
    • Only a hour!!! How fast compiling gnome is! I took whold day to compile KDE3 on my K6-2-400, and it only includes kdebase and kdelibs......
    • I tried Garnome 0.11.0 after the discussion of the last Gnome release, and I must say how awesome garnome is.

      However, Gnome 2.0 gave me mixed reactions. First off, the speed is unbelievable. Nautilus is actually a USABLE utility now (550mhz Athlon, 288ram), and everything runs SO much faster!

      On the other hand, I just didn't like the fact that I had to re-do all of my config, and wasn't in the mood to toy with it. So i'll keep testing a bit, but I'll be more excited when mandrake does all their pretty menus for me and I don't have to worry about it :)

      Another problem was the fact that I didn't know how to rebuild gaim applet and xmms-gnome for my garnome, and Evolution didn't work. Maybe I needed to re-specify my paths when compiling. I can't live without those 3 applets/programs.

      • One last complaint -- The panel prefs suck - My panel would not span the entire bottom of my screen! Is that fixable? I don't like that half-panel garbage.

        Thanks..

        • I tried RC1 and hated that the panel at the top was fixed! Since the dawn of time all my desktop environments have had the panel to the *left* of the screen, why is it that in Gnome 2.0 I have to have it stuck at the top ala Mac?

          Another *MAJOR* point that will prevent me from 'upgrading' to 2.0 is that there doesn't seem to be any way to have my favorite focus mode: sloppy with 200ms autoraise: there is 'focus follows mouse' but I wasn't able to get autoraise to work (and anyways having half the focus prefs under the gnome config, and half under the sawfish config is kind of lame).

          I also had several other problems with RC1 (preferences not saving, gconfd not being stopped when logging out (maybe related to the first)) but they might be related to my config.

          Personally these RC1 and RC2 felt more like an alpha than an RC, so if the above are fixed (moveable top panel, sloppy+autoraise) I will probably try gnome 2.2 (or whatever the name of the 'bugfix' release is).

          BTW, if there IS a way in RC1/RC2 to get the focus behaviour and to move the panel from the top to the left, I'm all ears!
          • That's not exactly the panel I was talking about. If you right click that menu there, you can add a REAL panel (the ones that you can move around and change the thickness and such). You can also remove the little one up top after that. I don't want Mao OS 9 either.
    • It takes 3 hours on my P3/1ghz, so what did you overclock to get it to compile that fast? ;)
      • I wouldn't know - I am using a Compaq Presario 2700T laptop with a 1GHz Mobile P3 processor and 256 MB memory. I just did a complete recompile, with moderate web-browsing etc going on simultaneously, and the total build time, including download time was:
        real 84m41.180s
        user 49m45.300s
        sys 10m22.790s
        Maybe you have a slow network connection or something?

  • Gnome2 problems (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I always been a gnome user, and i prefer gnome over KDE but i am dissapointed. I have been compiling gnome2 from CVS every 2-3 weeks.
    Things I hope they can change in by release day.
    Japanese Input is broken in gnome2 applications.
    File Chooser is not improved.( I know this is planned for the 2.2 release)
    I was expecting a lot more from gnome control center.
    Default configurations are bad.

    • > Japanese Input is broken in gnome2 applications.

      Have you filed a bug report on this? There was a mention of this on the GNOME lists recently, and others have had Japanese input working. The only way to track down an apparently isolated set of cases is to file a bug report and work with the developers.

  • Missing info at Released note (Score:3, Funny)

    by sebol ( 112743 ) on Sunday June 23, 2002 @04:04AM (#3751898) Homepage
    i've recieve the announcement view gnome announce mailing list. it contained with extra information:-

    "Can we have a special TELSABUG category, and everything gets dropped
    to fix them first?" - Telsa Gwynne

  • Looking forward with mixed feelings (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Karora ( 214807 ) on Sunday June 23, 2002 @04:11AM (#3751904) Homepage

    I've been playing with Gnome 2 for a while now, and I must admit it is starting to feel like a stable release.

    There are a few things that I have mixed feelings about though. The default WM is switching to Metacity, which doesn't have the power and configurability of Sawfish, and that is symptomatic of the general reduction in configurability.

    Someone, somewhere has decided that configurability === complexity, and that a bewildering array of choices is too many for a newbie. This appears to have been translated into a general 'dumbing down' of the interface.

    I can no longer tell Sawfish to remember my window sizes. The Gnome Panel can no longer swallow applications, so all of those WM applets are now useless to me. I can't run the Afterstep clock applet!

    I guess it is the applications job to remember what window size I last used, and to remember it without me telling the WM to do so, but they don't - not even Nautilus2 remembers it's window sizes - every time it opens a new window which is slightly less than 1/4 of my screen size.

    Overall, this is probably a good thing. People should be writing their applications to remember UI things, and having the WM remember those probably makes them lazy, but I can see a bit of pain in my future with Gnome 2, until these issues are solved and Gnome 3 is released, perhaps.

    At least Gnome 2 does seem somewhat snappier than Gnome 1.4, and the styling is better, especially with anti-aliasing available throughout.

    • I don't think you have to wait for Gnome 3.0 for this stuff to be fixed. The improvements between 1.0 and 1.4.x were amazing and I would expect the same kind of thing here.

      Also, it'll take a while for most applications to be ported over to Gnome 2.0. In that respect I think a lot of users might be disappointed since most of what people think of as "Gnome" is really applications. The release of Gnome 2.0 means the new API and a few basic tools are ready, but the real benefits won't be apparent until Gnumeric, Evolution, and other big apps are ported over.

    • Agreement, but reserved. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Sunday June 23, 2002 @05:02AM (#3751958) Homepage
      I agree that dumbing down is bad, but I don't agree with your WM point. Why should every GUI program writer write the same support code? You might as well say that they have to make all their apps stateful by hand. It's much simpler to provide one provably correct code path in the WM, than potentially thousands in all the applications in a system.

      For those apps which are "special," they could simply send a "NON_STATEFUL" token to the WM when dealing with that window.
    • The Gnome Panel can no longer swallow applications, so all of those WM applets are now useless to me. I can't run the Afterstep clock applet!
      Wait, does this mean that Wanda no longer fits in the panel?

      NOOOoooooooo!!!

    • Re:Looking forward with mixed feelings (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GauteL ( 29207 ) on Sunday June 23, 2002 @08:32AM (#3752209)
      Nautilus2 remembers window size now. It was just a bug, it has been fixed. RC2 includes the fix. I'm pretty sure RC1 did too, but anyhow..

      All the apps I use regularly, Galeon, Nautilus, gnome-terminal etc.. does remember window size.

      GNOME 2.0 has tried to decrease the amount of options. This is a Good Thing [tm], because it means that the options that are still there are useful, easy to find and intuitive.

      Metacity is NOT the default WM for GNOME 2.0, it is just an option. It will probably be the default WM some day, but it is still not completely ready for that.

      Swallowing other applets than GNOME-applets is hardly useful for anyone but a very few. It was a great source of bugs, and nobody really wanted to fix it. It was decided that unless someone really wanted it badly enough to fix it, then it would be dropped. Nobody wanted it badly enough.

      The strange thing is that the people that scream about lack of options, are mostly the same that scream about bloat. This is ironic because the huge amount of options it would take to satisfy everyone would lead to an extremely bloated interface both UI-wise, bugwise and probably also memory-wise.

      If someone wants an option or a feature this is the way to do it:
      - Open up a bug report in bugzilla, and argue carefully for your feature or option request.

      There are three issues that need to be addressed before they are accepted:
      1. Do they make sense? That is, are they sensible options or options that either fix something broken (in which case the brokeness should just be fixed instead).
      2. How useful is it, compared to the cost of increasing complexity both UI-wise and QA-wise?
      3. Does someone care enough to code it in?

      The swallowed applet was probably ok for point 1, a little on the edge for point 2, and definitely a miss for point 3. If someone does care enough to code, then state your interest on desktop-devel-list@gnome.org, and it might be in GNOME 2.2 or something like that.
      • The strange thing is that the people that scream about lack of options, are mostly the same that scream about bloat.

        It's not very strange. It just means that options should be organized/categorized/foldered better.

        It might be useful to combine the best experience from M$ Win2k Administrator's console and IBM AIX Smith.

        Also, it would be nice to have typical profiles. Hide some (or lot) of options in "non-super-user" profiles.

        I hope GNOME 2.1 options will be more smart organized than now. It may take knowledge management patterns but it will worth.

        • It's not very strange. It just means that options should be organized/categorized/foldered better.

          And this is what people are trying to do. However, it still doesn't make sense to keep every option ever invented in any operating system in, no matter how well organized they are. If hardly noone uses an option or if noone is prepared to maintain it, it's usually just unmaintained code that may have been broken for years and a source for bug reports. Preferences have a cost. Better organization and careful decisions on what to have and what to keep is what's needed, and that's what people are trying to do.

      • Swallowing other applets than GNOME-applets is hardly useful for anyone but a very few. It was a great source of bugs, and nobody really wanted to fix it. It was decided that unless someone really wanted it badly enough to fix it, then it would be dropped. Nobody wanted it badly enough.

        What about those who wanted it but can't code? Personally the one feature that I wanted it for was for gabber's swallowed applet. This works perfectly in kde3, even though gabber is a gnome app. As I use jabber for all my communication (icq, msn, etc) I really need a decent jabber client that will work in gnome2. If there is one out there, great, but the best I've seen are either PSI (swallowed into the kde dock, as it's a kde app) and gabber (swallowed into the gnome or kde dock, and a gnome app), and it seems that neither of them will work now :(

        </bitch>
    • There are a few things that I have mixed feelings about though. The default WM is switching to Metacity, which doesn't have the power and configurability of Sawfish, and that is symptomatic of the general reduction in configurability.


      Regardless of the default, they're going to have to pry enlightenment from my cold, dead fingers.

      And that's all I have to say about that.

  • "Gnome 2.0 RC2 Asks For Abuse" (Score:4, Funny)

    by Second_Derivative ( 257815 ) on Sunday June 23, 2002 @04:32AM (#3751923)
    Sure thing, "Your mother was a hamster..."
  • Desktop exploded Somebody please kill me now. I was running Gnome. Jesse haiku12.20.beamsplat@spamgourmet.com
    • Desktop exploded
      Somebody please kill me now.
      I was running Gnome.

      I should've hit 'Preview', shouldn't I? I'm such a n00b!

      Jesse
      haiku12.20.beamsplat@spamgourmet.com
    • The last line has six syllables. Remember, it's Guh-nome (probably short for GNU/Gnome :P)

      Pedantry for the day.

      • Actually, the reason it was not a haiku is because it is the truth. Help! My desktop exploded. I was running gnome. I don't have a panel and nautilus doesn't work. I got shoved into blackbox. Ugh.

        Serves me right for being bleeding edge and all.

      • this made me think of the word, gnome. I know the correct was to say it is G/nome with two syllables, but I still don't. It just sounds stupid. I even tried to call it that for a month and felt like a retard. So, I just say gnome with a silent 'g' even though I know it's technically wrong.

        who's with me?!


  • Where is the ChangeLog between RC1 and RC2 ? All the release notes say is that "some bugs were fixed", which isn't really interesting.
    • It's RC2, not a new version. I think any new featues should not be added, or it may need to release RC3, RC4, RC5, etc.

    • You can use bugzilla [gnome.org] to find this information.

      As an example, here [gnome.org] is a list of all bugs with the GNOME2 keyword that are in the RESOLVED, VERIFIED or CLOSED state that changed state between the RC1 and RC2 releases. It is not complete, and probably isn't fully accurate (some changes may have been fixed but no new tarball is available yet), but it gives you an idea of what has changed.

  • No Launch-Feedback and Menu-Editor in Gnome 2.0 (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They couldn't fix menu editing so they simply dropped it completely. Now they say you have to wait until 2.0.1 for it. Why not delay 2.0? Can't they resist pressure of all the firms like Sun who wants to see it released before Solaris 9?
  • I haven't played with the gnome2 desktop until now, and to save (gobs) of time pulling/compiling, I just installed the Ximian Gnome2 developer snapshot.

    However, I can't seem to find where the preference to enable anti-alias fonts is... I've tried selecting largish fonts, but all the rendering is clearly bitmapped.

    Anyone else using the Ximian snapshot having this problem? Are they compiling w/ anti-aliasing off?
    • I too am having anti-aliasing problems with the Ximian Gnome2 developer snapshots.

      I've still had no definitive answer.

      Some have said to set an environment variable, but I don't know which file to put this in. It really should be a standard thing and have a GUI configuration program.

    • First of all, you must enable Xft support (the new font system for X). This is done by defining the GDK_USE_XFT environment variable before running a program. The best way to turn this on for the entire desktop is by defining it in the X startup script (probably ~/.gnomerc, ~/.Xclients or ~/.xinitrc):

      #!/bin/bash
      export GDK_USE_XFT=1
      # set up $PATH and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH if needed
      exec gnome-session

      After doing this, you may still not see antialiased fonts. For instance, on Red Hat systems, the default /etc/X11/XftConfig file has the following lines:

      match
      any size < 14
      any size > 8
      edit antialias=false;

      which turns off antialiasing for fonts with sizes between 8 and 14. By commenting out these lines, AA will be enabled for all fonts. If you have an LCD panel, add a line like the following to /etx/X11/XftConfig or ~/.xftconfig:

      match edit rgba=rgb;

      This will turn on ClearType style subpixel antialiasing.

      • IF it was only that easy. What about XFS? Do you still use the font server? Do we turn it off? How about enabling TTF fonts? Truetype? Does Xfree 4.2.0 (inital) have the truetype support? Does your distro support it? Do I have to recompile anything?

        Man might be nice to have an entire document, for whatever distro, with rpm levels on how to get AA setup. There is too much "turn this on" and it works mumbo-jumbo.

        Back to the real world...
        • It's really not that complicated. Most distros don't ship with XFS turned on anymore, since XF 4.x subsumes most of what it did. Freetype is installed by default in all XF 4.x systems, so that's in there. Basically, all you need is to make sure Xft is there, that you're using GTK+ 2.0 or Qt 2.0+ and hit the little checkbox in the control panel.

        • Xft can handle Type1, TTF and OpenType fonts (and in the version included in CVS XFree86, bitmap PCF fonts as well). Simply add a "dir" line to the XftConfig file for each font directory. No need to create fonts.dir files or anything -- Xft will discover the fonts in that directory itself. One of the nice things you can do is to add ~/fonts to the Xft font path in your local ~/.xftconfig file. Then you can drop fonts in that folder and they become usable to all your Xft using applications.

          You should probably still run XFS, so that older applications (such as gtk 1.2 based ones, and most Xt ones) that use core X font rendering still work. Note that the reason most distros are set up to use a font server rather than leaving the X server to render the fonts is that it adds a level of parallelism. If the X server was rendering fonts, it would block while doing so. With the font server rendering fonts, the X server is free to do other stuff while waiting for the fonts to be rendered, which can take a while for CJK fonts, for instance.

  • I've been running Gnome2 since beta5 on gentoo and it's been rock solid. Becoming better and better for every revision. The only major concern I have is that gnome terminal still seems quite buggy - but there's allways Eterm, Xterm and hundreds of others so it's not a major showstopper.

  • Gnome is Dead (Score:3, Funny)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Sunday June 23, 2002 @08:48AM (#3752222) Homepage Journal
    Oh, wait; I'm sorry. You wanted the Abuse department. This is the argument department.

  • Or is it... (Score:4, Funny)

    by tweakt ( 325224 ) on Sunday June 23, 2002 @09:54AM (#3752364) Homepage
    if you are using Gnome 2.0, you're the one asking for abuse. *ugh*
  • Does anyone know if you can use WindowMaker (0.80) as your default WM with Gnome2?
  • Wasn't the release supposed to be June 21? I thought they were saying all along that they'd be right on time....

    http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/schedule/
    • Yes, it was supposed to be June 21st. I heard last night in #gnome that it might be released on June 26th or something like that. But now that RC2 is out I bet it will be at least another two weeks.
  • I'm not sure if I was abusing Gnome2 by installing it but here's what I did and tell me if I did that wrong.

    I installed redhat 7.3 cleanly. Then I installed all the updates as provided by the redhat tool that comes with it.

    When I heard about the Gnome abuse request, I decided to download the RC2. Well, I downloaded the ximian redcarpet utility and told it to upgrade everything using the Gnome2 development channel.

    At first everything seemed to go well except that my desktop settings weren't preserved. Now too many things are breaking to keep track of. The screen saver doesn't work either. I think I'll wait a bit longer... 'til like Gnome 2.1.
    • it's still in release candidate stage, dude. if you download it, you are testing it to see if it works.

      if everyone had your attitude, we sure would have some shitty software!
  • Does anybody else wish bad mojo on the guy who decided to give Pango yet another font configuration system? I mean I just got a hang of dealing with the standard X11, Xft, and ghostscript font configs, and now somebody introduces another one with Pango? Does the clue train just not make stops in GTK-land anymore?

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