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GNOME GUI

A Look at the Upcoming GNOME 2.4 401

Posted by michael from the world-outside-KDE dept.
JanneM writes "Gnome 2.4 is arriving early september. Sayamindu Dasgupta has installed the 2.3.5 development release to see what's in store, and has written a very nice overview of the upcoming release." Update: 08/14 16:06 GMT by M : The author has provided a mirror.
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A Look at the Upcoming GNOME 2.4 More

A Look at the Upcoming GNOME 2.4

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  • Is the "typing break". I can sit back in my chair, hands on my head, and when the PHB asks why I'm not working, I just say "Gnome Typing Break" and he says "Uh-hu" and goes away. Totally excellent.

  • Nautilus? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Daengbo ( 523424 ) <daengbo AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday August 14, 2003 @08:49AM (#6694525) Homepage Journal
    not flamebait
    Does it fix any of those annoying problems in the current versions like:
    • Nautilus takes an ungodly amount of memory to run
    • It can't seem to associate file type with applications consistently
    • It has that annoying "feature" where any time I insert removable media, it opens a window of the media automatically. (I was going to bitch about it mounting automatically, as well, but I suspect that's RH's doing, there: god, sometimes I want to dd, you know)
    • You close it and it still takes up the same ungodly amount of memory. If I want that kind of behavior, I'll look for it in Windows, thank you.

    • Re:Nautilus? (Score:5, Informative)

      by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:01AM (#6694617) Homepage
      * It does take up less, I believe (not having done any formal comparison).

      * I have never seen that problem; maybe time for a bug report?

      * That is Redhat, and can be turned off. Go to "Preferences" -> "CD properties".

      * It won't really release all memory until you _really_ close it - as long as you want it to handle your desktop it is still running. Oh, and just like all other Linux apps, releasing memory doesn't actually release the memory as such; the pages are kept around as long as nothing else needs it, and they are still mapped to the app as long as the app is running. Looking at RSS gives you a sort-of reasonable estimate on the memory use, but it too (if I am correct) will overestimate memory use.

    • Re:Nautilus? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by BladeMelbourne ( 518866 )
      I use RedHat 9 and GNOME - and I find that the used RAM slowly creeps up whilst using Nautilus. Now that I have 576 MB it takes a while, but it is still annoying. It would be great if this was resolved in GNOME 2.4.

      Used RAM also increases (at a reduced rate) when I use a lighter file manager. The only way to reclaim that memory is to restart X. Maybe XFree86 4.3.0 has a memory leek in RedHat 9 too?

      FYI the amount of RAM doesn't increase like that in my Windows 98, which is also immune to the Blaster Worm.

      • Maybe it isn't a memory leak (Score:5, Informative)

        by r6144 ( 544027 ) <r6k&sohu,com> on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:33AM (#6694903) Homepage Journal
        As for "used memory" keeping increasing... You just have way too much memory. On most machines "used memory" is almost equal to "total memory" while the system runs fine, because the memory not used by processes can be used for caching (and not just the "Cached" shown by top/free, either). In short, it is hard to know whether or not the kernel or a user process leaks or not just by looking at the memory statistics, even if there actually IS one.

        If you suspect a leak in some process, look at its VM size. If there is a leak, the process will end up much larger after repeating some operation, such as opening a new window, N times (clean up after each time) than doing that once.

        Another way is to look at the swap usage. It usually keeps increasing, but should mostly be stable after e.g. 2 hours of usage, unless you start some other very large applications.

      • Re:Nautilus? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by 13Echo ( 209846 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:44AM (#6695027) Homepage Journal
        The Gnome system monitor does not give an accurate indication of how much RAM is truly in use. Gnome shares memory between apps. If an application requires the memory, later, it will be released. You're most likely just looking at cached memory that hasn't been released.

        It's not a problem, technically. People are just paranoid about their memory usage and don't understand how Gnome really makes use of it.

    • Re:Nautilus? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rewster ( 202842 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:04AM (#6694641) Homepage
      not flamebait

      Debatable.

      Nautilus takes an ungodly amount of memory to run

      Well, it does a lot of stuff... you might not use it all, but it's there.

      It can't seem to associate file type with applications consistently

      This is somewhat confusing, but I found in RH9 and Ximian's XD2, a lot of things are associated correctly from the get-go.

      It has that annoying "feature" where any time I insert removable media, it opens a window of the media automatically. (I was going to bitch about it mounting automatically, as well, but I suspect that's RH's doing, there: god, sometimes I want to dd, you know)

      RTFM? Try "gnome-cd-properties". This isn't nautilus' fault in the first place.

      You close it and it still takes up the same ungodly amount of memory. If I want that kind of behavior, I'll look for it in Windows, thank you.

      Then you haven't really closed it now, have you? What do you think is managing your desktop? If you don't like it, there's always KDE, or TWM if you'd prefer...

    • Re:Nautilus? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Erwos ( 553607 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:06AM (#6694652)
      If I had to posit a reason for Nautilus using so much RAM, folder caching would probably be the reason. Nautilus devs can correct me on that one, but it seems like folders I've opened before open much more quickly than new ones. Fixing your memory "problem" would probably knock down the speed of Nautilus tremendously. Buy some more RAM and get on with life.

      No idea what the problem with file association is. I've just never had an issue with it (and rather like the way Nautilus gives you a menu of programs to try with a right-click). If you're setting new associations, read the choices carefully, as some similar sounding ones do different things.

      You do realize that the _desktop_ is controlled by Nautilus, and thus you really can't close it without killing it, right?

      -Erwos

      • Re:Nautilus? (Score:2, Redundant)

        by htmlboy ( 31265 )
        You do realize that the _desktop_ is controlled by Nautilus, and thus you really can't close it without killing it, right?

        nautilus can be run with the --no-desktop option to lighten it up a little bit. it makes it usable with fluxbox on a dual ppro 200 for me.

    • Re:Nautilus? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FooBarWidget ( 556006 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:12AM (#6694708)
      1) Not sure about memory usage, but it has never bothered me. I never look at the memory usage. If it feels fast enough, then that's good enough for me. Besides, no tool reports the right memory usage.

      2) The current MIME system is severely broken in many ways. This is more of a gnome-vfs problem. They are currently still working with KDE on a new shared MIME system that's better than the current GNOME and KDE ones.

      3) That's a RedHat thing. It doesn't happen on my GNOME desktop. But anyway... but complain about automatic mounting? Everybody else complains about *not* automatic mounting and want drives to work like Windows. Heck, people even call mounting and unmounting a "broken concept".

      4) Don't look at the output of top, it's not reliable. And this is a kernel issue, not a Nautilus issue.

      • Re:Nautilus? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Arandir ( 19206 )
        but complain about automatic mounting? Everybody else complains about *not* automatic mounting and want drives to work like Windows. Heck, people even call mounting and unmounting a "broken concept".

        Windows has had the concept of "mount" and "umount" since the first day it support CDROMs. But no one ever knew it because the hid the automounting from you. But it was there.

        Then came along USB storage devices. Suddenly Microsoft had to bite the bullet and introduce the concept to the user. Plug in a USB dis
    • Does it fix any of those annoying problems

      Unfortunately, looking at latest development versions, probably not. I'm a big fan of Gnome, but some apps have not really shown much of an improvement from a user's point of view. Dunno about RedHat, though; I use Dropline Gnome on Slackware.

    • Re:Nautilus? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by FrostedWheat ( 172733 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:24AM (#6694811)
      Another thing I find annoying about Nautilus is its lack of feedback when double-clicking on icons.

      Sometimes windows can take upto 10 seconds to open on my machine (2Ghz Athlon, go figure), and I find myself clicking on it a few times to make sure I got it, or right clicking and selecting 'Open' - then have three windows appear at once. Very annoying.
      • I thought I was the only one bothered by this. On my machine, I sometimes have to wait up to 30 seconds after double clicking a shortcut - with no feedback whatsoever that anything is going on! Sheesh!

        Maybe we're both missing some configuration item where you can enable an hourglass type feedback (note the question mark in the subject line), but assuming we're not (and I have looked pretty hard) ...

        <rant>
        This is an INSANE behavior. It causes me to doubt that the designers take the most elementa
    • Linux caches any amount of free memory. You will recognize the same behaviour with every other Linux app. Thats just normal behaviour. Just dont worry about your gkrellm settings...ignore it ;-)

      cu,
      lispy

  • slashdotted (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14, 2003 @08:50AM (#6694532)
    What's coming up in GNOME 2.4 - a look at GNOME 2.3 :: What's Changed

    Having nothing better to do (and wanting to do a bit of testing on the localization [bengalinux.org] stuff we are working on), I decided to download the latest beta of GNOME - GNOME 2.3.5 (Jebe) . Since the RC release freeze is imminent [gnome.org], and the feature freeze is already in place, the system that I am running currently will not be significantly different from GNOME 2.4, when it is released on September. In this article, I would be briefly describing the new features and applications of GNOME 2.4. However, I would concentrate mainly on the packages in the core GNOME system, and will not be going beyond those.

    Installing the packages (WARNING: slightly hairy) To GARNOME or not...

    I had heard that installing the GNOME packages in the right order could be a tricky process, and I was looking at GARNOME [gnome.org] and other tools for an easy way out. However, after some poking around, I decided to do the install by hand. This decision was largely prompted by this [karubik.de] document, and I am really grateful to its author.

    The system

    The usual convention before doing a description of any large scale installation process is to give a short summary of the specs of the machine in question, and so, without much ado, here it is:

    Processor: 700 Mhz Pentium III
    RAM: 192 MB
    Swap: 250 MB
    OS: Redhat Linux 9.0 (Shrike)
    Kernel: 2.6.0-test2

    It is obvious that this is not a very modern machine, but such boxes are quite common in where I live (India).

    The installation

    Most of the files needed for compile and install are downloadable from the directory ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/2.3/2.3.5/sources/ [gnome.org]. There are also a few "extras" which are usually included in stock "development machine" installations, like the Docbook 4.1.2 DTDs, etc. If you don't have them, the ./configure script will complain, and you will find them in your distro CDs.
    I did not download the gtk2, the glib2 and the pango packages. More or less up to date GTK2 and glib2 are already included in RH 9.0 and I usually keep in sync with the Pango development process through CVS (I have to keep track of certain outstanding bugs in Pango w.r.t bengali rendering). If you follow these steps, please ensure that you have the devel packages installed as well.
    To avoid a mess, I had decided to install the new GNOME packages under /opt. That meant that the new libraries and the header files would be installed in /opt/lib and /opt/include. So, I had to set the $PKG_CONFIG_PATH to /opt/lib/pkg-config (by issuing export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/lib/pkg-config) so the pkg-config utility searched /opt/lib/pkg-config before the usual /usr/lib/pkg-config. I had also added the line /opt/lib to the file /etc/ld.so.conf. Moreover, the usual ./configure was replaced by ./configure --prefix=/opt so the installation folder was /opt.
    I followed the following sequence while installing packages. It works for me, and it may or may not work for you.

    1. atk
    2. libart_LGPL
    3. libgnomecanvas
    4. libxml2
    5. libxslt
    6. libIDL
    7. linc
    8. ORBIT
    9. intltool
    10. GConf
    11. libglade
    12. libbonobo
    13. gnome-mime-data
    14. gnome-vfs-devel (needed to insta

    • Re:slashdotted (page 2) (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:04AM (#6694645)
      What's coming up in GNOME 2.4 - a look at GNOME 2.3 :: What's New

      GNOME 2.4 is going to have a number of cool, new applications. In this section, I am going to describe them.
      The Browser: Epiphany

      One of the most controversial changes in GNOME 2.4 is the dumping of Galeon in favour of Epiphany as the default browser. Epiphany is based on Mozilla, but is much more light and bloat free and features a much, much, much cleaner interface. I have not used Galeon very extensively, but Epiphany has already become my default browser. Startup is much faster than Mozilla, the interface is much more intuitive and clutter free and it merges nicely with the look and feel of the rest of the GNOME environment. The latest versions (0.8.2 and above) also have a extra experimental plugin which allows mouse gestures.

      Fig 12. Epiphany - The Brand New GNOME Browser. (Click for a larger view)

      It supports popup blocking, tabbed browsing, customizable toolbars, automatic image resizing and all of these, with an extremely simple and clean UI. However, I would like to see the download manager to be a little more advanced (resume support maybe??).
      The PDF Viewer: GPDF

      GPDF has a UI which is similar to GGV (The GNOME Postscript Viewer), and handled PDF files quite well in my system. It is based on xpdf (actually, the "NEWS" file says that it is a port of xpdf to GNOME 2).

      Fig 13. GPDF - The GNOME PDF Viewer. (Click for a larger view)

      As with most other GNOME applications, I found the interface to be nice an clean, but it seemed to have some issues with regard to embedded fonts.
      The Character Picker: GUCharmap

      This new GNOME Character map is quite a fancy tool - a bit too fancy, IMHO. It has support for all the Unicode Characters, and it seems to have detailed information on each and every character.

      Fig 14. GUCharMap Showing Some of the Characters. (Click for a larger view)
      Fig 15. GUCharMap Showing Details. (Click for a larger view)

      The Calculator

      The new calculator of GNOME is also quite improved. There is a handy list of commonly used mathematical constants (pi, e, various conversion factors, etc). It has three modes - basic, financial and scientific.

      Fig 16. GCalcTool - The GNOME Calculator. (Click for a larger view)
      GNOME System Tools

      In my opinion this is one of the best additions to the GNOME software map in a long time. As the README file says, these tools are designed to make (Unix) system configuration easy for desktop users. They aim for what the README calls "unified system configuration", meaning that the same toolset can be used in different flavours of Unix. This is achieved by splitting each tool into two distinct parts - a frontend written in C/Python and a backend written in Perl.
      Currently available tools include a Runlevel Admin, a Network Admin (which lets you specify your hostname, samba hostname and workgroup, DNS servers, search domains, hosts, network interfaces, ppp, ethernet, slip and in a limited way, wavelan). Also included are a Time Admin, a User Admin and a Boot Admin.
      I really liked the interface of each tool, especially the artwork. I think it is a great approach towards making a user friendly set of system configuration tools for the desktop user. Tools provided by the various distros are also great, but since each one has a different interface of its own (and a different set of problems), it becomes difficult for both users and tech support people to handle them.

      Fig 17. GNOME System Tools - Boot Admin (Click for a larger view)
      Fig 18. GNOME System Tools - Network Admin (Click for a larger view)

      More information on GNOME System Tools is available at http://www.gnome.org/projects/gst/.
      The Media Player: Totem

      Yes - GNOME now has a media player of its own (though of recent, it has suddenly disappeared from the module listing withou any warning). It is called Totem, and currently it is based on a Xine backend. However, from the README, I gathered
      • I am only asking for a RPN calculator! Is this too much to ask????

      • UI design (Score:3, Insightful)

        by SeanAhern ( 25764 )
        So typing zenity --question --text "Delete Windows?" gives you a dialog that asks "Delete Windows?" and presents two buttons, one that says "Cancel" and the other that says "Yes".

        <rant>

        What the hell kind of user interface is that? It should either say "No" and "Yes", or it should say "Cancel" and "Ok". Mixing the two paradigms just looks confusing.

        It's consistency problems like this that start giving Linux and other open source projects a bad name.

        </rant>

        (Not to say that commercial apps a

  • Backwards land.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by jkabbe ( 631234 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @08:51AM (#6694543)
    What's with the gum-drops on the right hand side of the title bar? Is this like OS X for left-handed people?
  • ...sounds like an amazing idea, not just for my hands but for my sanity. If I didn't spend 10 minutes an hour meandering arround the office I would probably go insane.

  • On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:5, Informative)

    by CowsAnonymous ( 697884 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @08:54AM (#6694568)
    From the article: > The most significant addition to the Control Center > is a utility for changing the screen resolution and > refresh rate on the fly. This will probably be my fav. It's tough to look "kewl" with Linux when I need to exit the GUI just to change the resolution. Then again, going into that console screen does impress chicks... :0)

    • Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You must not know many real chicks, if console impresses them.

      You fool!

    • Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:4, Insightful)

      by FooBarWidget ( 556006 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:18AM (#6694763)
      One thing I don't understand is why everybody wants to change resolution on-the-fly. Do you change your resolution every hour or something? Everybody I know just set their resolution *once* and never look back again.
      • i'm guessing quite a few webdevelopers change from their normal resolution to 800x600 once in a while to make sure that their newly created webpage/site works in 800x600

      • Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bmj ( 230572 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:22AM (#6694794) Homepage
        Often, if I have to switch hats from programmer to designer (part of the job description when you work at a small shop) that I'll crank up the resolution to fit more stuff on the screen. Once I'm finished and get back to coding, I'll reduce the resolution again so I don't go blind. So, it'd be nice if I didn't have to restart X to do that.
        • Often, if I have to switch hats from programmer to designer

          Why not set up a separate user on your system for this, with different desktop settings, resolutions, etc. Even different video drivers. I do this at home to play games. I have a "gamer" user that launches XFree86 like this:

          startx -- --xf86config XF86Config.gamer

          The XF86Config.gamer file is in /etc/X11. I used this so I could use the fast-but-less-stable NVidia video drivers for games, but still use the stable stock drivers for "business"

        • ctrl+alt+grey + ctrl+alt+grey - anyone?
          Faster, easier and X has it for looong time.

        • Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:4, Funny)

          by sholden ( 12227 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:45AM (#6695045) Homepage
          Have you thought of using bigger fonts?

          You know, like everyone else does who uses high resolutions.
        • "Once I'm finished and get back to coding, I'll reduce the resolution again so I don't go blind. "
          Why don't you just use a bigger font when programing. The text will be cleaner and you will not have to switch. The one thing that could be an issue is if you can not get a high enough refresh rate at high resolution.
      • If you are ever developing for the web you should really be testing your site in multiple browsers/OSes and multiple screen resolutions. That is one off the top of the head actual 'techie' reason for it.

        The other more important one for me is because it's convenient! It's been one of the most glaringly horrible things about Linux GUIs for me. I'm glad someone is finally addressing it.
      • It also comes in handy when you and your significant other use the same computer but like different resolutions. My wife likes 800x600 and I like 1280x1024. This is one of the main reasons my wife hates using linux.
        • You can set up seperate .bashrc files in each users' directory to start X at a specific resolution.

          Here's an example, but you can do it different ways as well.

          http://lists.q-linux.com/pipermail/plug/2003-Jan ua ry/024345.html
      • I change my resolution rather frequently on my work laptop - when it's docked, it's connected to a 1280x1024 LCD screen, but when using its display the resolution needs to be 1600x1200.

        Windows XP used to handle this automatically, but it keeps on getting more and more angry at the dock - I can no longer boot into the dock and now I have to explicitly change the resolution when docking. It's quite annoying. I'd imagine other people have similar scenarios when the resolution needs to be changed. (Another

      • You probably never have your parents over for a visit. Well, I do. And my parents can't read fonts at 1600x1200, so I switch back to 1280x1024.

        On a very simple, very basic, single user setup you never have to change the resolution. But Linux is multiuser. And multiple users have multiple preferences.

      • Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:4, Insightful)

        by larien ( 5608 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:51AM (#6695105) Homepage Journal
        In my case, I sometimes change resolution for streaming videos. The image is usually small (especially for some movie trailers) and even at double size, it's quite small in terms of screen real-estate under 1280x1024. Decreasing resolution to 800x600 usually lets it fill the screen much better.

        No, "full screen" mode is not an option in most cases as the scaling usually makes the image look, well, wrong. Also, not all players provide such an option, especially embedded players in browsers (some don't even allow double size).

      • Re:On-the-fly Resolution Change (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Mr_Icon ( 124425 ) * on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:58AM (#6695170) Homepage

        One thing I don't understand is why everybody wants to change resolution on-the-fly. Do you change your resolution every hour or something? Everybody I know just set their resolution *once* and never look back again.

        If you have over a 100 gnome desktops in your department, you don't want to field "can you please change my resolution" requests from your users, trust me.

    • This shortcut is probably even faster, and is supported directly by X11. Why not use it ?
      • Heh, someone beat me to it. Btw, this toggles through your working resolutions and color depts, and you have to use the numeric keypad + and -.
      • that changes the resolutoion but not the size of the workspace. do that and then move the mouse around the screen edges. see how the screen slips around?
      • you know, this is a bit misleading.

        Unless I'm missing something, this shortcuts just change the resolution of the viewport, not the size of the desktop (eg, I have this configured at home to switch between 1280x1024,1024x768,800x600). It works fine, but the desktop is always 1280x1024, and scrolls around when I use other resolutions). Still pretty neat, since I use this to use movies/activate the tv-out in the geforce4.

        But changing the desktop size on-the-fly would be cool, at least for windoz users, whic

  • GNOME armageddon (Score:2, Troll)

    by Anonymous Coward
    this is the sixth text revision done on 04-11-2002.

    dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

    first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes

  • LTSP (Score:2, Informative)

    by sufehmi ( 134793 )
    People implementing LTSP [ltsp.org] are having serious problems with GDM. Most of them just change to another one.
    Let's hope that they'll fix it.

    Oh yeah, the website is being slashdotted to death right now. Can't check it right now.

  • Great (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mao che minh ( 611166 ) * on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:08AM (#6694671) Journal
    I don't care about any new visuals that they've added or performace enhancements. I just want it to be as easy in Gnome to make shortcuts and use the quick launch bar (Gnomes version of it) and manage display settings as it is in KDE 3 and Windows insert any version greater then Windows NT 4 here.

    I am not a Gnome basher, frankly I find it humurous that people would bicker over desktops. But, I am forced to use it from time to time, so I would it to be at least as good as KDE.

    • I don't care about any new visuals that they've added or performace enhancements. I just want it to be as easy in Gnome to make shortcuts and use the quick launch bar (Gnomes version of it) and manage display settings as it is in KDE 3 and Windows insert any version greater then Windows NT 4 here.

      So flame me as being stoopid, but how does one add a quick launcher that runs as root? KDE has a nice little option in the launcher's preferences, but alas, I don't see anything like that in Gnome.

      • No doubt I'll get flamed for getting the command slightly wrong, but I'm going to give it a try anyway (I'm at work right now, and my Linux box is at home).

        gksu --user root [command]

    • Re:Great (Score:3, Insightful)

      by truthsearch ( 249536 )
      I completely agree. I prefer KDE for the eye candy and the better usability, but Gnome for the performance. But it would be a huge improvement for Gnome to just improve usability. I think that should be first priority. After all, that's what desktops are all about.

  • Neat... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CooCooCaChoo ( 668937 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:27AM (#6694845)
    However, I do have a couple of questions which is kinda off-topic-ish:

    1) Is there a "roadmap" setout in regards to GTK 2.4/2.6 etc terms of functionality one should expect in up coming releases.

    2) I've heard rumbles that gtk2 is still being ported to Quartz, could someone confirm it. I know there is an X11 version, however, it would be nice to have one that does require it, not because of anything political, I just don't want to download that massive 40+ MB XFree86 package from Apple ;-)

    3) Is there going to be a move by GNOME to support MAS as a replacement for esound? having used MAS and seen it action, it would be a really great addition if it was made available.

    4) When running GNOME on FreeBSD I notice that when I select text in a terminal window there is a stall and the whole computer freezes then suddenly comes alright. I haven't experience that with KDE.

    Having run GNOME 2.2 on Linux quite nicely it clearly isn't an issue with GNOME but with the FreeBSD port. Could someone confirm that this is being addressed?

    • GTK+ 2.4 Plan (Score:5, Informative)

      by twener ( 603089 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:35AM (#6694923)
      GTK+ 2.4 Plan [gtk.org]
    • It is a difficult question to answer wether we ever will switch to MAS or not. I mean while we clearly want to get away from ESD, it has also become clear to us that we don't want to ditch ESD for another solution which in its own way is just as flawed.

      So could MAS be the 'flawless' version we have been looking for? Maybe...problem now is that it seems development stopped and it has yet to have a release that made it somewhat usefull to us. For instance we tried making a MAS plugin for GStreamer right aft

  • While I struggle to cope with my KDE and my Gnome day in and day out I hold out hope that maybe today will be the day that I see E17 [enlightenment.org] released un to the world...

  • Any Metacity Fixes/Updates? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mauriatm ( 531406 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:54AM (#6695135) Homepage
    One of the most troubling things to me is still Metacity WM. Maybe this has changed but last I recall you could not change the animation settings (that annoying minimize/maximize ani) and the redraw settings (dragging/resizing would show contents). To make it worse, Gnome in general made it difficult to change your WM. And what bothers me more still is that Sawmill(fish whatever) reduced its settings/options to be minimal like Metacity, although deep config settings could restore most settings back to the 1.4 days. I remember hearing some explanation that Metacity was the only Gnome2 compliant WM, so others were looked down upon. ... Am I misinformed or has this changed?

  • why are they bothering (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14, 2003 @09:59AM (#6695189)
    Gnome's gone downhill since 1.4 in the area of user customizations. The ability to customize behavior is almost non existant compared to what we had in 1.4. I could tweak and adjust 1.4 to create a very cool environment for myself. With the 2.x series, almost all of the capability is gone. It's now just a mindless environment for dummies. Gnome's stated that they're aiming low and catering for the dumber computer users. There was soo much potential for it to develop into a really powerful environment and then those silly studies were conducted and the rest is history..... Oh well.

    • > Gnome's gone downhill since 1.4 in the area of user customizations. The ability to customize behavior is almost non existant compared to what we had in 1.4. I could tweak and adjust 1.4 to create a very cool environment for myself. With the 2.x series, almost all of the capability is gone. It's now just a mindless environment for dummies. Gnome's stated that they're aiming low and catering for the dumber computer users. There was soo much potential for it to develop into a really powerful environment

  • I don't see why they are wasting time on a browser. Why not just use firebird? Is there a compelling reason for *another* browser? Sems that time could be better spent elsewhere.

    And I was underwhelmed with some of the tools. The best example I've seen so far (/.ing has delivery of all pages with all pics) is the screen resolution selector. I think RedHat's version is much nicer. Again - why reinvent the wheel? If they can't use RH's (did they ask?), do something similar. Or better. But IMO the Gno

  • Nautilus Useable? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xjerky ( 128399 ) on Thursday August 14, 2003 @10:32AM (#6695536)
    Sorry, but even the latest Nautilus is noticably slower then Konqueror.
    I have a directory with a few thousand files and Nautilus popped up a message saying something like "There are too many files for Nautilus to display. Exiting" WTF?????? Its the primary job of the friggin app and it won't do it??? Very unprofessional.

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