Ask Havoc Pennington

This week's interview victim ... er, guest ... is Havoc Pennington of Debian and Gnome fame. He's one of the world's most stalwart open source developers, and has recently written a book called GTK+/Gnome Application Development. Please post your questions below. Assorted Slashdot moderators, editors, and hangers-on will select 10 - 15 questions and forward them to Havoc via e-mail Tuesday. Per usual, the complete Q&A session will appear Friday.

Should we resurrect OpenDoc?

[Paul Crowley]

I hear a lot of good things about OpenDoc. They say it was the future of document editing. They say it was the glue that made a collection of small applications into an infinitely flexible document creations system. They say it was a work of brilliance, and, better than that, the Right Thing.

Should it be reimplemented? Should it be part of Gnome?
--

XFce?

[rrwood]

I like Gnome/GTK+ a lot, but find it too slow to use for the most part. What do you think about XFce, which is a leaner, meaner "desktop" environment (assuming you've even heard of it, let alone played with it). -Roy

question

[asad]

With the sucess of the open source movement do you ever wish back for the obscurity of the good old days ?

Dominant GUI for Linux?

[rrwood]

Okay, another question:

For a long time, I've soul searched over the dilemma fo whether to use Qt/KDE, GTK+/GTK--/Gnome for an app I'll be developing. In particular, I don't want to commit to what will be a dead-end technology and have to switch later. After sitting on the fence for a long time, I've finally decided that there probably won't ever be a dominant, winner-take-all GUI API for Linux, which seems to me to be okay, or even a Good Thing.

What's your take on the whole matter? Please feel free to babble a bit.....

Re:XFce?

[Skeezix]

In case you weren't aware, XFce [xfce.org] is based on GTK+ [gtk.org] which you say is so slow.

--Jamin Philip Gray
[e-mail]

Desktop Standards

[Ivo]

Hello, I like both KDE and Gnome very much, but still something worries me: What if a company wants to release software (e.g. Borland releasing Delphi) for Linux and they want their stuff to interoperate with other applications (like cut and paste or DND)... It looks like they are going to have to implement both KDE and Gnome stuff to operate with all popular applications. Or is there any effort to fully standardise things like application interoperation? (I once submitted this as an Ask Slashdot question for more general discussion, but I think it looked too much KDE/Gnome war provoking..) Greetings, Ivo

Re:XFce?

[rrwood]

Yes, I know that XFce is based on GTK. It is much snappier than Gnome, though. Maybe this is more of an Enlightment issue? I dunno-- I just know XFce is more responsive on my (older, slower) box....

Re:Desktop Standards

[Ivo]

ARGH Shame on me!!

I hereby deeply appologise for not using the preview button (otherwise I would've seen that I should've used "Plain Old Text")..

Anywayz.. question itself is still valid.

Greetings,
Ivo

The future of GNOME

[Skeezix]

Could you give us a rough timeline of what we can expect to see coming from the GNOME project in the next months, and years? Could you give us an idea of when we can expect to see the 1.0.50 and 2.0.0 releases of GNOME? And what will those releases look like?

--Jamin Philip Gray
[e-mail]

KDE / Gnome code merge?

[Signal 11]

There has been alot of discussion about merging KDE and Gnome together either via a universal toolkit, or by actually merging the two code-bases together.

What are the technical (and legal?) obstacles that need to be overcome for this to succeed? How does the KDE and Gnome developers feel about such a merger? Is there currently any work being done to further this goal at present (by either camp)?

--

High or Low Level Integration?

[Christopher B. Brown]

OpenDoc [hex.net] suffered from the problem that it provided and required the use/implementation of a rich API of document object manipulators.

Thus, while it would be neat to have a whole lot of those "little applications," if it's Rather Difficult to write them, they may not be as little as you'd think/hope.

The document CORBA and You [gnome.org] alludes to this somewhat indirectly, indicating that

Keep interface exposition at a high level. Not only does exposing low-level interfaces cause increased dependence upon the internal organization of a software system, but it also means you have to put more code into exporting your interfaces, introducing the risk for more bugs and increasing bloat.

*Why* is GNOME so slow?

[Tet]

There have been many half hearted explanations for GNOME's poor performance, ranging from Gtk to CORBA to X itself. However, none of those really cut it. Given the responsiveness of standalone Gtk apps, I think Gtk can be ruled out. Orbit is supposedly 3 the fastest CORBA implementation by a factor of 3, even with all the assertions left in. While the X protocol may be somewhat slower than it could be, X is still quite responsive on my old 486.

I now have an AMD K62-450, and GNOME still feels sluggish, about the same speed as Windows 95 on my P75. That has to be wrong. Yes, GNOME probably does more than W95, including things like network transparency, and the like, but even taking that into account, along with Gtk, CORBA and X itself, you shouldn't be looking at more than, say, reducing performance by half, and that's being pessimistic. In reality, you're looking at GNOME being 3 or 4 *times* slower than it ought to be. Simple question: why?

Future directions...

[Zurk]

What i'd like to see in GTK/Gnome & other such open source projects is : [1] Better collaboration between the desktops. [2] Standard ways for an application to add its icon to the menu of the WM at install time. [3] Standard help systems so the application can add its help at install time. [4] Standard package formats or a simple one click install of *any* package type. In other words, standardisation and interoperability. I consider anything less to be suicide. So, what do you think about standardising everything ? As a GTK/Gnome developer are you biased towards gnome or willing to work for common standards under linux ?

User-friendliness initiatives

[Enoch Root]

I believe the development of solid and friendly desktop environments such as Gnome and KDE is a big step in raising public awareness on Linux and other Open Source initiatives. What are the future projects in this direction? What can we expect to see in the future that will push Linux in the public's mind not only as a reliable operating system, but also the support for clean, professional and integrated applications?

"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

Writing a Book

[SEGV]

Havoc, how did you find the process of writing a book? Can you tell us more about the process? How long did it take? How did you find the time? What were some of the hurdles you had to overcome? Are you as pleased with the final product as you imagined when you began? Would you do it again?

Multi-Environment Apps?

[Tim]

Given the amount of work that one has to put into coding/encapsulating KDE-specific and GNOME-specific routines for multi-environment applications, what future do you see in the development of multi-environment frameworks like wxWindows? In your opinion, are these frameworks the best way to create KDE-enabled *and* Gnome-enabled applications for the forseeable future?

Gnome & GnuStep

[Le douanier]

Is it possible to use Gnome and GnuStep at the same time AND adding the advantages of both application framework, and this for the user point of view (well, when GnuStep will be at this evel at least) and from the developper point of view (being Gnome aware and using some GnuStep facilities).

Of course in this question Gnome could be replaced by KDE if a KDE developper want to discuss about it.

New versions of the book

[Indomitus]

With your book being released under the Open Publication License, I was wondering how responsive New Riders seems to the idea of actually publishing updated versions of the book instead of just updating the publicly available version?
It's a great book by the way, very valuable to GNOME/GTK coding newbies like myself. Thanks.

Programming languages

[Anonymous Coward]

You are known to be a programmer, and a programmer always has some ideas on languages and tools. What of the currently available languages would be your programming language of choice now? What about two years from now? Why? How would you change it so it becomes the ideal language? What's the worst language you've written something substantial in? How would you change it so it becomes the absolutely most evil language?

-- just some language freak ;-)

The name "Havoc"...

[AstroJetson]

...has got to be the coolest I ever heard. You ARE the man! Does the name have a story behind it? Do you have a sibling named "Chaos"? Or maybe twins named "Pain" and "Panic"?

gtk--

[Anonymous Coward]

I found your book very helpful in understanding GTK+. Will you be doing a similar book or tutorial for gtk--, the object oriented version of GTK+? The argument I read is that understanding gtk-- is simple once you learn GTK+, but I think it would be nice to be able to learn gtk-- directly since most of my projects are in C++. Are you seeing gtk-- used widely, or is GTK+ used the most by far? -Derrick

Isn't GNOME lagging behind ?...

[Thomas Miconi]

(OK, this message may be a little provocative)

I want to compare current status of Gnome and KDE. So I open two Netscape windows, one on www.kde.org, the other on www.gnome.org, and I read what's going on in Desktopland.

KDE : "Well, we've just finished reimplementing Visual Studio from scratch (the last beta is shipped with Mandrake 6.1), and we're almost done with Office, but you'll have to wait a little because KWord still flicks every now and then"...

Gnome : "Well, we've got a woooonderful spreadsheet and a nifty little editor, and we're currently working on getting together every piece of productivity software we find to set up some kind of office suite (boy, they call it a 'meta-project' !) and as for develoment tools, well, Emacs is fine after all, isnt'it ?"

Admittedly, the last sentence is forged. But the rest is painfully true. So far, in massive projects as well as in little funny tools, KDE has the lead and doesn't seem anything like close to lose it.

This is even becoming a point in the Oh-So-Holy-War of knowing whether Linux should be called "Gnu/Linux" : The day KDE 2.0 ships (and that seems to be very soon), talking about "KDE/Linux" systems will make much more sense for a significant proportion of Linux users who will spend almost all of their time using KDE tools.

So the question is :

When are you going to remember that you're actually making a desktop environment - not an academic project - and that this time, unlike older GNU success-stories, you have a tough competitor that stands exactly in the same niche as you ?

Emacs took almost ten years to become more or less usable by novice users without spending days and nights trying to figure out how to configure X or Y parameters. I'm afraid Gnome won't have as much time as its glorious predecessor to break through. In ten years, people will already have chosen their side. So far, Gnome quite doesn't look like the winner.

Thomas Miconi

Re:Isn't GNOME lagging behind ?...

[David Roundy]

The day KDE 2.0 ships (and that seems to be very soon), talking about "KDE/Linux" systems will make much more sense for a significant proportion of Linux users who will spend almost all of their time using KDE tools.

GNOME is not the reason people say it should be GNU/Linux. It is all the other tools, without which Linux would be useless, such as gcc and make. Without these tools, there would be no KDE on linux. Actually, I suspect there would be no linux.

Having said that, I may as well point out that I call it Linux, not GNU/Linux. It's just easier to say.

Perhaps GNOME isn't the problem.

[Daverz]

Perhaps it's not GNOME itself you're finding slow, but enlightenment? You might try it with a faster window manager (icewm, perhaps.)

Re:Desktop Standards

[BadmanX]

I think a better way to phrase this question (so that it doesn't instigate a Gnome/KDE war) is, "When do you see Gnome getting some sort of threading capability, like that which makes the Be operating system so integrated?"

Re:KDE / Gnome code merge?

[Kenelson]

It is highly unlikely that there would be such a merger as the technical difficulties are huge.

Creating a "universal kit" which functions perfectly in C and C++ is not very likely. If one starts a code base in C, it will not be able to use some of the C++ features like static casting to get a particular virtual. This is a fundimental pitfall. If it is written in C++ it could not be used to derive a type or override a virtual unless some C++ mechanisms are not used. As a writer of the C++ wrapper for gtk+, I can testify to the difficulty. The only way it can work is if the data structures are shared and the front end is written by a code generator for both (thus allowing for both to make good use of their language features.)

Thus the "best" C kit and the "best" C++ kit may not be the same thing. Therefore, one side would have to settle for a downgraded functionality.

Personally, I don't think either gtk+ or Qt are perfect even in their own languages and therefore there may be room for such a kit. However, switching to it would involve converting thousands of lines of code and debating over which implementation is better for all the duplicated functionality. It would slow the progress of both kits for a long time and since the point of both is to provide a good unix desktop in the near future such a merger would hurt both.

This is just my opinion. And I would be glad if someone pointed out a good way to use derived types, multiple inheritance, exceptions and virtual overriding in a C wrapper of a C++ kit, or full use of virtual upcasting in a C++ wrapper. (I could use both.)

--Karl
Gtk-- Contributor and Libsigc++ author

GPL violations

[DuaneGriffin]

Corel's dumb move [slashdot.org] is just one recent example of companies overlooking or deliberately ignoring the GPL. As free software penetrates further into different areas, especially traditional companies, do you see this as an increasing problem? Given that legal action is expensive, and that there is probably no single entity that could afford to prosecute many infractions, what do you think should be done to address the problem?

Cheers,
Duane.

ok then

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, here's another question: why does Gnome subjectively feel so slow? It's not something you need benchmarks to prove -- it really does seem slower than it "ought to".

Inspirations...

[Ian Bicking]

There are a ton of preceding and current desktop environments: KDE, CDE, GNUStep, Windows, MacOS, Xerox Star, BeOS, QNX/Photon, and a whole bunch of others.

Are there any ideas from other such environments that you think are really neat? Any ideas that you would like to be part of Gnome, or even plan to try yourself?

Re:*Why* is GNOME so slow?

[ajs]

I found something very surprising, recently. I "upgraded" from the stock "stable" GNOME that my RedHat 6.0 system came with, to the "development" version that is under CVS (yep, real bleading edge). Lo and behold, my desktop started performing reasonably on my 300Mhz Celeron / 32MB RAM.... Go figure.

It Works For Me.

[cduffy]

I've been doing this for a few apps. It works fairly well, but is not without its problems (largely stuff as minor as warnings, info and the like coming up to an ugly DOS box... just doesn't help my app's look/feel).

The pthreads port to win32 isn't yet considered fully stable, so you need to be careful using glib threads.

Otherwise... as the subject says... It Works For Me!

Re:Gnome & GnuStep

[Mouse]

GNUStep is a framework that rides atop the environment in which it sits. In order for GNUStep to become GNOME aware, a GTK/GNOME backend must be written. Once such a backend is created, any GNUStep appilcation running atop that backend would look, act, and feel like a GNOME app. The same could be done for Qt/KDE ...

The GNUStep folks are looking for folks to volunteer to help in that effort.

GTK and Cross platform

[johnjones]

Dear Havoc

could you tell me if the port to Windows of GTK(Gimp Tool Kit) is valued by the core team ?

I feel it should be. I understand that a company is porting Gimp to BE O/S and has ported GDK as well so that the great unwashed useing GTK may compile on the BE system (my thanks to you).

Why care about Windows O/S ?
well while the Qt widget set is free on linux and *nix, it IS NOT FREE under windows the Trolls want your Money for it.

Now GTK is GPL and a kind sole (appologies I can not remember your name) ported GTK to windows this ment in my understanding that GTK apps may be recompiled under windows with ease (cygwin for named threads and suchlike)

this means that GTK is more likely to be used as a cross platform toolkit where before I had to try and embed a TCL/TK interpreter(so people may not change the scripts) I may now use GTK.

companys are looking for cross platfrom applications now and could GTK be that for them ?

how do you feel about this situation and what do you think will happen ?

regards

john

p.s. have ordered the GTK/GNOME book look forward to a nice rainy day !


a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)

Commercial OpenSource GUI

[ElitistWhiner]

Is there room in the Open community for a commercial GUI vendor?
Would a commercial GUI, OpenSourced, galvanize the focus of Linux at the desktop level?
At what point do all the pioneers unhitch their penguins from the Linux train and settle on one winner GUI?
Are there any past commercial GUI's if Opensourced you'd consider "good" for Linux?

-Rex Riley

What is the Window Manager Status?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my pet peaves with GNOME is the lack of an integrated window manager. Sure there are many window managers that play pretty well with GNOME, but I don't know of one that plays PERFECTLY with GNOME. I use icewm right now, but even it has some annoying hiccups w.r.t GNOME. What are the most GNOME compliant window managers out there right now? Has there been any progress on GNOME adopting a default window manager (now that E has kind of gone its own way)?

Re:GPL violations

[Stinking Pig]

You know what they say, never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Having worked for and with a lot of large corporations, I find that the people in them who get things done are operating in an atmosphere of information-starvation and idiocy. It's a rare project that inspires the people who get things done to go out of their way (read outside of the company, aka personal time) to look for stuff and get answers.

Re:Desktop Standards

[Guy Harris]

Allmost all of this windows developers release their material in a closed source fashion (you won't change this overnigth just because they are using Linux, is windows culture), then they have to pay Troll Tech money.

Then making Delphi not royalty free (thus changing their policy..., I doubt Borland want this)

"Not royalty-free" in what sense? The Pricing And Availability page for Qt [troll.no] says that

There are no royalties, run-time licenses or other additional costs. You can distribute your Qt-based programs either statically or dynamically linked without any additional charges.

I.e., you have to pay Troll Tech money to get Qt Professional edition, which lets you sell closed-source software, but you do not have to pay them per copy of that software sold.

Glade

[ajs]

I hear things about Glade getting sucked into core GNOME libraries as a way of dynamically reconfiguring applications (an ambitious goal!) How much planning has been done for this, and is it expected to impact application performance?

Re:Glade

[ajs]

Actually, just for other people's context: glade is a GUI builder for GNOME. It's pretty amazing (at least the development version that I've been using). I can do things like slap a generic application shell (that includes menus, toolbar and the framing for the body window) into my program in one click! It then generates C, C++, Perl, and a few other less important languages ;-)

Seriously though, this is the tool that may start major momentum behind Linux as a development platform. Since it generates all of the development goodies (e.g. configure, autogen, etc) it's one hell of a leg up on starting from scratch, even if you only use it once to get the framework in place.

I'll, of course have to write the command-line interface, just to be sick ;-)

Re:What is the Window Manager Status?

[boc]

A lot of people are finding sawmill [warwick.ac.uk] to be a very nice GNOME wm.

Re:Isn't GNOME lagging behind ?...

[drig]

He's talking about actual software releases, not marketing drivel. If you take a look at the KDE pages (and download the _actual software_), you'll see that they have a number of advanced applications that GNOME is simply missing.

Re:ok then

[extrasolar]

I think his comment deserves more thought than that. I've noticed that Gnome goes slower as well but I have no idea how I would benchmark it. The truth is, Gnome *is* slower. There is little doubting it because many people have complained about it. I can testify to two setups that were uncommonly slow (ever try Gnome on a 486? Don't).

I use Red Hat 6.0 with some updated binaries if you must know.

(Just because I don't provide benchmarks doesn't make the problem go away. I kind of says you are trying to ignore the problem.)

I am looking forward to Gnome 1.50 which I hope will top the competition.

--

Lagging behind?

[extrasolar]

I think you just pointed indirectly to the heart of these rivalries. The question is, how does free software compete? It can't. If Gnome is competing with KDE or vice versa, I think they will feel bad if they win and ignore it if they loose. Because there is no win/loose in the free software. Software is much better at cooperating than competing, as the tendancy for software monopolies shows.

So I tell you this, no matter what is tried, neither KDE nor Gnome can loose.

And this isn't about Unix Desktops but it is about free software in general. Software is better when it cooperates. Let us be friends then.

--

I hope Havoc doesn't bother with this flame-bait..

[planet_hoth]

What's up with this rancid comment of yours? Havoc's not out to get you, he's just working on Gnome! It's not like KDE has anything to fear from Gnome, (does it?) I like to think of the 2 projects as *complimentary*.

I think the Gnome word processor and spreadsheet are a lot farther along than you give them credit.
Quite usable, and I think both OpenParts and Bonobo will be exciting tools to work with.

KDE is slightly farther ahead in development than Gnome (2 months is my estimate.) But Gnome is ahead of it in 2 important departments.

1) QT. Calling yourself the "defacto Linux desktop" is quite presumptious when you've built the entire project on a devel library that a significant chunck of the community (think mindshare) is not interested in using.

2) Gnome is more innovative. Gnome had a CORBA ORB first. (yes, Gnome had themes first, too, but I'm talking about innovations that *increase* productivity!) Gnome takes the best features from many UI's and wraps them up into one slick, usable package. KDE is just a win95 rehash for X11.

So please stop your childish taunting of the Gnome crowd. You're reflecting poorly on the KDE community. (There, I've fed the troll. Bah.)

What do you think makes Gnome special?

[extrasolar]

Mr Pennington:

I was wondering, of all the things Gnome does well, what do you think separates Gnome from from everything out there? Why do you think someone should use Gnome as their Unix desktop enviroment?

Thanks for your time,

Kevin Holmes
"extrasolar"
[e-mail]

--

Re:*Why* is GNOME so slow?

[planet_hoth]

* turn Gtk themes off. They are pretty, but they are a hack and they are *slow*.

*The enlightenment that shipped with my red hat 6.0 is pretty slow. Dump it and pick up a copy of window maker.

* Did I mention turning gtk themes off?

* Don't use 1.0.0 RPM's. Get the latest RHAD lab ones, they're fast, phat and rock solid. Yes, Gnome, rock solid.

* You didn't mention the critical system consideration: available memory. On my system Gnome was faster than KDE with 64 megs of ram.

Re:*Why* is GNOME so slow?

[boc]

* Did I mention turning gtk themes off?

non-pixmap themes (such as ThinIce) are just as fast as stock gtk+. It's just that most themes are pixmap-engine based themes, and the pixmap engine is slow.

Re:Gnome *did not* have Corba first!

[boc]

Hi,

I was just looking through the KDE mailing list archives, and couldn't find any references to MICO or CORBA in the months preceding GNOME, and the KOffice list only starts in December of 1998. Do you have a URL or something talking about KDE's first use of CORBA? I am just curious as to why it didn't get into 1.0.

Thanks.

Abstract Desktop API?

[Dr. Tom]

Let me add my voice to the choir of app developers who want their app to run under KDE/Gnome/Any/None desktop environment without major changes. Are there any architectural design rules you can suggest that would make that possible? Are there any libraries/toolkits which provide an abstract desktop API without forcing the choice of a widget set or programming language? I'm not just talking about drag&drop. I'm talking about e.g. writing an applet or standalone app that can be ./configured --enable-kde or --enable-gnome, and have it Just Work on KDE, Gnome, or any future compliant desktop.

Re:It's not about winning or losing

[Droog]

I agree with you: KDE is ahead of GNOME. However, the way you describe the superiority of KDE is unfair to both the KDE project and the GNOME project. You make it sound as if KDE and GNOME are still fighting like they were in the pre-QPL days when in actuality they are cooperating more and more each day (consistent standards for Drag and Drop, Desktop files, and I've heard that they're working on standardizing the sound daemon for both environments as well).

Koffice is ahead of GNOME's Office app projects (GNOME Workshop), but at this point it is very difficult to try out KOffice because the KDE 2 libraries and KOffice are a moving target and they require gobs of memory and processing speed to compile in your lifetime.

On the other hand, there are RPM's available for GNOME's spreadsheet and it is usable right now.

We will see in about three months which environment and Office suite is the best...the KDE Krash (1.89) release will at least give you alpha-level KDE 2 software to play with (and it will hopefully come in binary packages!) and I'm sure the GNOME folks wil have made a lot of progress on their projects too.

KDE and GNOME CORBA integration

[Droog]

KDE and GNOME have different ways of implementing CORBA functionality and use different ORB's. Is there any way to get the Bonobo and KOM/Openparts working together so, for example, I could embed a KDE part into a GNOME part? (for example: embedding a KDE text editor into a GNOME mail client) Are there plans to add this functionality in the future if it is not already there? Is this sort of interoperability difficult or impossible?

gnome

[MaxAttack]

what inspired u to write gnome ?

Re:First mention I found was 1997/07/20

[boc]

Thanks!

(the start of the thread is here [kde.org])

BTW, do you know when they actually started using CORBA?

Thanks again :)

Re:Miguel claims he wants to port KOM/OP

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I have not been saying that. You got the story wrong (my original post should be nicely archived somewhere)

I said I wanted to provide a port of Bonobo to Qt, not a port of KOM/OpenParts to GNOME. But that would depend on my time, and right now I have exactly none, for the next year or so. Of course, www.gnome-support.com, could be hired to do such a port if you feel like hiring them :-)

Miguel.

Re:*Why* is GNOME so slow?

[Puff]

Gnome feels slow on your K62-450? I run Gnome on a Pentium 100, and it goes quite nicely. And I even use the Marble3D theme, which is based on pixmap. And Enlightenment, even though I really should be using WindowMaker.

guppi and gnome

[Mathieu]

I have two questions:
1> What is the future of guppi? There wasn't any release since a long time and Miguel said he will begin something else.
2> Why gnome people do always thing different: sgml (latex exist), OrBIT (mico), GtkPix (imlib), a new window manager (enlightenment and Window maker), etc. Rewrite everything seems crazy to me.

Don't take it bad, I am a gnumeric user.

Re:We Look For Things To Make Gnome Go

[boc]

Since my panel is very stable these days, it is hard to fix crashes in it :)

That's why it's important for users to post bug reports of the panel (and other GNOME programs) to bugs.gnome.org [gnome.org].

Please include stack traces and detailed descriptions of what you were doing... especially if you can reproduce the crash. Otherwise fixing the bugs gets pretty tricky.

Also, in the upcoming 1.0.50 release, you shouldn't get complete panel settings losses when (if) things crash, but maybe an applet or two if Murphy is out to get you.

How do you do it all!

[grek]

Havoc, You just finished writing a book, you write the Gnome weekly news, regularly post on the newsgroup, you code, are involved in Gnome and Debian, and work for RedHat. Man, where do you find the time? Do you have 36 hour days or what? Please share you organizational/motivational tips. grek

CORBA and Joe User

[ciuli]

Dear Havoc and fellow /.RS,

Maybe it's just me, but it seems that lately everything on the acme of OpenSource movement for desktop integration revolves around this (otherwise marvellous) concept named CORBA. I'm a programmer myself and can appreciate more or less any means which can help standardizing and reusing code. But still, I think that should be done paying maximum attention to the possible performance loss.

Programmers often come up with things like OOP and such to make their life easier. I'm not saying AT ALL that OOP or CORBA are bad, but I don't think Joe User has the slightest interest in the CORBA foundation of his spiffy PIM. All that he cares about are stability, speed, and, if possible, looks (at least that's what I imagine).

Those being said, I would very much like to know what is your view on this subject. How much does CORBA integration affect the performance of Gnome ? Would it have been better to let CORBA come into play at the time where the (affordable) hardware will make little difference with respect to the sheer software performance ? Is it just some hype born from some kind of Programmers Pampering Themselves movement or is this the real Wave of the Future - or, like they say, A Good Thing(TM) ? Will we live the day in which a newer version of a piece of software will actually be smaller and maybe have fewer features, but will need less resources and run faster ?

(OK, the last two questions here have nothing to do with Gnome, but I had to ask them anyway)

Last but not least, I must say that I really like Gnome and, in case some war is (or will be) going on, I'm definitely joining the army of gnomes. And kudos for the great book :)

Well, I hope this gets in time for the submission ...
- ciuli

Re:Gnome and Murphy are good friends...

[boc]

Can you get some stack traces and do some bug reports? It is hard to fix bugs that aren't known to exist.

Re:*Why* is GNOME so slow?

[Tet]

You didn't mention the critical system consideration: available memory. On my system Gnome was faster than KDE with 64 megs of ram.

I didn't mention KDE at all. It was slow, bloated and ugly on my Sparc 20, so I dumped it and have pretty much ignored it ever since. FWIW, I too have found GNOME to be quicker than KDE, but both are too slow. Regarding memory, I have 128MB, and the box was had one user (me) running X, GNOME and nothing else.

Re:guppi and gnome

[Mathieu]

Miguel in the gnumeric list ask for a list of feature a graphic program he intend to write.

Considering latex vs SGML, I use latex since 5 years without worrying. I didn't ever managed to use or install SGMLtools

I test Mico and certainly agree it's bloated. GdkPixbuf is maybe a good idea. Considering the Window manager I use window maker (previously I use Afterstep, kwm, fvwm) and feel useless to make another WM.

Personnally I prefer one powerfull well documented program (like gimp, gcc) to several buggy, undocumented programs.

Re:*Why* is GNOME so slow?

[Skeezix]

I also run GNOME/Enlightenment on a K6-2 450. Mine has 128 Mb RAM and 8Mb Video RAM, and it is blazingly fast. I also run GNOME/Enlightenment on my P166 box with only 24 MB RAM and 1Mb video memory and it runs perfectly adequate. It's comparable to when I run Win95 on the same box. As some of the others have suggested, get the latest RPM's. That could be a big part of your problem.

--Jamin Philip Gray
[e-mail]

What?

[VinceJH]

All of those programs are still used. Try using gnome without esound, imlib, or ORBit. I wouldn't describe any of them as forked also.

Re:guppi and gnome

[VinceJH]

About Latex vs SGML. I hate Latex. But more importantly, SGML was certainly not invented by GNOME, and SGML is easier to write with. It just is, as I assume more people who are willing to write documentation know HTML (which is some form or whatever of SGML) than Latex.

BIG FAT RAMBLING BELOW
About the new window manager. Well, I hope they do it. A lot of people complain how gnome doesn't feel as slick as KDE, and how it isn't as intergrated. No window manager intergrates well with gnome. You have to screw around just to get rid of the functionality that gnome already has (like a taskbar/panel/wharf/dock), and even then, they use seperate themes.

IceWM for example. You have to compile it with gnome support (or I guess if you use debian, it does that already). Then you have to get rid of that taskbar. It looks OK, but it still doesn't intergrate theme wise with GNOME. A gnome window manager would probably just house windows, and use gtk. It would also have the main GNOME menu when you do some keyboard shortcut. I am happy with gnome now, but it would seem a lot slicker if it just had it's own.

Re:*Why* is GNOME so slow?

[planet_hoth]

> I didn't mention KDE at all.

Sorry, my bad.

> Regarding memory, I have 128MB, and the box was > had one user (me) running X, GNOME and nothing
> else.

Wow, that's pretty strange. I have a near-identical setup (Celeron 333, 128Mb, single user) and Gnome is fairly sanppy. I can get booted up and logged into Gnome as fast as I can into Windows 95. As I mentioned (superfluously) KDE is a little slower. I use window maker on my account, it loads nearly instantaneously on login. I gave my wife Gnome, I thought it'd be easier for her to get used to. She likes it because "it's faster than windows 95".
Back to performance. This seems to be an isolated, but fairly common complaint. It's hard to diagnose from afar, but I usually suggest uninstalling all Gnome components, and reinstalling with the latest RPM's or .deb's or .tar.gz's. The latest round of Gnome update RPM's were noticable faster, and cleaned up a ton'o'bugs.

GnuStep

[Le douanier]

"The GNUStep folks are looking for folks to volunteer to help in that effort."

I haven't contributed to any Free Software project yet but plan to do so soon but I have a little problem: I am in a foreign country for my studies and I don't have a Linux box around. I may have an account to use some X terminal but I'm not sure of that neither of when.

So, the way I could contribute would be either to write some documentation (I'm not sure i have the skill) or to do some localisation/translation in French (my language). Is there some need for these kind of skills on the gnuStep project right now or is it too early right now?

About Debian and Red Hat

[juhtolv]

You work for Red Hat Software in their Advanced Development laboratories and you are Debian Developer. How is this possible? What people in Red Hat Software and Debian think about this situation?