Gnome 2.22 Released

kie writes "The latest version of the Gnome Desktop is being released today. New features in 2.22 include Cheese (an application for webcam photos and videos), window compositing, PolicyKit integration and much more. The full details are in the Release Notes."

Re:Window Compositing?

[calebt3]

Nevermind - Drop shadows and transparency, for now.

Evolution actually working?

[BlackCreek]

BTW, does Gnome now allows switching the spelling language of an application during the use of it?

Like switching the spell checker of a chat session during the chat session? Or the assumption is still that everybody only ever uses one language at a time.

Seriously. I'm not flaming, I mean to ask the question. One of the reasons I stopped using Gnome, after many years using it, was that in order to use a Dutch spell checker in Gaim, I had to restart Gaim using a dutch locale environment (and be stuck with a Dutch spell checker for the rest of that Gaim instance).

Re:Not faster...

[baadger]

GNOME (Or more accurately GTK+, glib, Cairo and X) has got faster steadily since the GNOME 2.12 days. GTK+s UI's are just as snappy for me as Qt equivalents. I noticed significant improvements after several video/X driver updates and updates to Cairo 1.4.x (from 1.2.x).

Re:Evolution actually working?

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution can switch spelling on-the-fly, and even do multiple language spelling.

pidgin however still has the problems you describe, the FAQ/help has the following to say about that
----
How do I change the language for the Highlight Misspelled words option?

Pidgin currently only supports spell checking in your locale language. This is because gtkspell 2 does not offer a good way for us to know which dictionaries are available or to switch between them. This functionality has long been promised for gtkspell version 3, which has been delayed somewhat indefinitely. See gtkspell.sf.net.

There is, however a simple plugin called switchspell that can change the spell check language on a per-buddy basis.
----
http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Pidgin [pidgin.im]

Re:Evolution actually working?

[JanneM]

BTW, does Gnome now allows switching the spelling language of an application during the use of it?

I don't think spellchecking functionality is a desktop-wide feature by itself; I think it will depend on the application how exactly it is implemented. I do know that Gedit, the standard editor, does allow you to set the language on a per-document basis at runtime. No idea on Gaim.

Re:Evolution actually working?

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

If only there were a property to allow setting the locale in the shortcut/launcher thing...

You should be able to do this with a tiny script. Not quite as simple as the launcher GUI, but not bad. Simply create in your home directory (or wherever you like):

#!/bin/sh

LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pidgin

And call it "pidgin-en_US". Make it executable and set the launcher to use that script to launch pidgin and you should be good to go.

Better still, if the launcher config lets you give arguments to the program you tell it to execute (I think you can), you can make just one script:

#!/bin/sh

LANG=$1 pidgin

Call it "pidgin-lang" and in the launcher, set it to execute "/home/foo/pidgin-lang en_US.UTF-8" or whatever other language you want.

Re:Evolution actually working?

[qwer_tea]

Pidgin (formerly known as Gaim) uses your locale language for spell checking.

There is, however, a third-party plugin called switchspell [guifications.org] that allows you to switch the spell checking language on a contact-by-contact basis.

Re:Evolution actually working?

[Daengbo]

Not trying to flame here, but Pidgin/GAIM is not a Gnome app, so the question you asked can't really be answered. In fact, Empathy [gnome.org] (based on the Telepathy framework [freedesktop.org]) was set to be the default chat client for 2.22, but it didn't make the final cut. It's still slated for 2.24. When that happens, we'll have well-integrated text, voice, and video chat. Yipee!!

Re:KISS

[ReinoutS]

What you mean I cannot have a preview when selecting an image to attach?!)

You can, but it's up to the app to enable this. As a matter of fact, Epiphany 2.22 just gained an image preview in the file chooser.

Re:Window Compositing?

[petermgreen]

the traditional way to do a windowed gui was to limit each apps drawing area so that it could only draw within it's own window and force the app to redraw stuff when it's visibility changed. This system has the advantage of being light on ram and being low on CPU when windows aren't moving. However moving windows is a relatively expensive process both because of the need to ask apps to redraw and the need to actually move data arround in the screen buffer (this is why many older systems use a dotted box drawn with XOR to indicate window moving and only move the window when the user has chosen the final location). Also it is virtually impossible to support any kind of partial transparency or rotozooming under this system and even non rectangular windows are a pain.

3D games work in a totally different way. They work with a (large) set of textures and the scene is redrawn every frame building up from the back to the front and rotozooming everything into place. This makes transparency, drop shadows etc fairly easy and of course rotozooming is a fundamental requirement of a 3D game.

A compositing window system (afaict under X this requires support from both X itself and the window manager) draws each window into it's own buffer and then treats that as a texture. Then a frame for the screen is built up in much the same way a 3D game builds up a frame. This enables all sorts of effects from simple stuff like drop shadows and inverted colors to advanced stuff like a window selector that shows a thumbnail of each window or a desktop selector that puts the different desktops on the surface of a cube. Different window managers will obviously choose to use theese capabilities to different extents and in different ways.

Re:Evolution actually working?

[MSG]

Or you can set up a launcher that executes:

"env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pidgin" ...and skip the ridiculous shell script entirely.

Re:Evolution actually working?

[psmears]

Better still, can't you just have something like:

/bin/env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pidgin

as the command to launch, and not use a shell script at all?