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GNOME 2.8 Released 506

Posted by timothy from the it's-slippery-and-cute dept.
damogar writes "The GNOME 2.8 Desktop and Platform release is the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment, out today, with an awesome schedule time. Some pretty cool improvements have been made, specially the Nautilus file manager, the new MIME system and others. Release notes are already available, as well as screenshots and a variety of sources. Enjoy!" jimmy_dean adds a plug for the new GNOME Journal, which is meant to be a source of "good written material surrounding GNOME and the opinions of the community."
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GNOME 2.8 Released More

GNOME 2.8 Released

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  • A screenshots mirror... (Score:5, Informative)

    by tcopeland ( 32225 ) * <(tom) (at) (thomasleecopeland.com)> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @09:50AM (#10256181) Homepage
    ...is right here [cougaar.org].

  • BSD/GNOME! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Negatyfus ( 602326 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @09:51AM (#10256194) Journal
    Let me be the first to say: what the hell does this have to do with BSD, specifically?

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @09:52AM (#10256201)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • cool (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chuck Bucket ( 142633 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @09:52AM (#10256202) Homepage Journal
    I'm still happy with the progress Gnome/KDE keep making even though I've moved on to Openbox and/or XFCE4. We need Gnome/KDE for new adopters, truthfully perhaps very few of them will ever want to move to something simplier (or more complicated in their eyes). WIth the HIG ideas of Gnome I think they're leading the way with a consistant and (somewhat) easy to learn desktop.

    When I get my mom on Linux, she'll be in Gnome, as I think it'll be the shortest step from WinXP(ee).

    Also, first "BSD?" post? LIkely not.

    CVBalkjsfdj$#@$#@

    • Re:cool (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:21AM (#10256516) Homepage Journal
      We need Gnome/KDE for new adopters, truthfully perhaps very few of them will ever want to move to something simplier (or more complicated in their eyes).

      I've been using Unix pretty much exclusively since 1997, and I love KDE because of its configurability. I'm glad that you like Openbox and XFCE4, but don't assume that only newbies are using Gnome and KDE.

      I liked WindowMaker 0.5 and Enlightenment 14 even back when you had to edit their config files for pretty much anything complicated, but now I dislike the relative lack of functionality in non-KDE/Gnome systems today. Some of us honestly happen to like full-blown desktop environments; it has nothing to do with our lack of ability to use the other available options.

      • Re:cool (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Enahs ( 1606 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:46AM (#10256773) Journal
        Ditto. Using UNIX-style systems since late 1996, and I use KDE. I get so sick of the gits on Slashdot assuming that only drooling morons use KDE and GNOME.

      • Re:cool (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Billly Gates ( 198444 )
        A UI are more than just graphical effects.

        If we wanted those Enlightment would be it.

        KDE/GNOME have a nice configurable taskbar, great applications, and an integrated programing model where you can include objects and parts of other applications into yours.

        Also KDE and I think gnome is totally scriptable to make things better.

        Its also nice that the newer beta's of KDE have a preview option of a closed app like MacOSX when you scroll the mouse botton over the icons in the task bar.

        Previews in Nautalous

    • Re:cool (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Lussarn ( 105276 )
      Gnome and KDE are frameworks for building applications. It has nothing to do with early adopters or how long you have used a computer. What you probably mean is the gnomepanel and metacity are for early adopters. The underlying libraries which is the bigest part of gnome is for everyone who don't want to reinvent the wheel over and over again.

  • screenshots now mirrorred (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chuck Bucket ( 142633 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @09:54AM (#10256222) Homepage Journal
    Ah, the screenshots always kill a webserver don't they ;) Here's a mirror of just the screenies for Gnome 2.8: screenshots [cougaar.org]. Firefox users remember; center-click is yr friend! ;)

    CB_)(^%#

  • xorg (Score:5, Interesting)

    by barcodez ( 580516 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @09:55AM (#10256227)
    I know xorg 6.8 has only just been released but does this new version of gnome support any of the new features like transparency, damage or shadow?

    Either way it's an outstanding feat the gnome team have achieve - will in installing it tonight!

    • Re:xorg (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nadir ( 805 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:20AM (#10256507) Homepage
      metacity (the Gnome window manager) can be a compositing manager, but it is disabled by default (a configure switch) so that only users who know what they are doing enable it.

    • Re:xorg (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sunspire ( 784352 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:38AM (#10256671)
      Getting all the new cool stuff like compositioning working will be a major focus of GNOME 2.10, to be released in March 2005.

      That's one of the benefits of GNOME's rapid 6 month release cycles. At the beginning of this year nobody could have seriously expected all of this cool development happening with X.org or predicted the demise of XFree86. Already we have compositioning in CVS, but 6 months from now GNOME will be ready to take full advantage of it as we now make it a priority for the next release. The extension itself will also have some time to stabilize in X.org.

      We're also seeing some very nice timetable coordination between X.org, GNOME, and Fedora Core as all projects move to shorter mutually supporting cycles, resulting in new cool stuff getting to end users faster than previously.

      • Re:xorg (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mrcparker ( 469158 )
        This is what I love about the new GNOME release schedule - it is results-oriented. They work out what they want in 6 months, create a list of things they need to do to get there, and then work towards the result that they want. At the end of 6 months the developers can look back and really judge how close they got to the result they wanted.

        Then they can plan the next six months based on what worked the last 6 months. Wonderful way to schedule a major project.

    • Re:xorg (Score:5, Informative)

      by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:43AM (#10256740) Homepage Journal
      You can get these effects with any desktop running on Xorg6.8

      just run
      xcompmgr -c

      (in an xterm) and that will give you proper dropshadows and compositing (no-more window trails)

      and the
      transset
      (in an xterm)
      command will give you a point-and click crosshair to make any window have real transparency.

      Here's a screenie [blackapology.com] of my desktop demonstrating it.

      You should be able to get similar results using any WM from TWM upwards, just make sure you have a enough beef to enjoy it fully.

      Nick...

  • Memory usage? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:01AM (#10256298)
    This isn't flamebait, as I appreciate the work the GNOME team is doing, but when are they going to concentrate on performance and memory usage? Right now it's _terrible_ - just as bad as Windows XP. And if we want to convert Windows users over to Linux, we need to provide incentives. There's no use telling a newcomer to run Lynx and Blackbox to get a fast desktop; they want the integration, the flexibility and the features.

    This seems to be a problem afflicting many open source projects now. OpenOffice.org is slower and heavier than MS Office. Firefox is slower and heaver than IE (not by a great deal, and it's still a superb browser). GNOME/KDE are slower and heavier than WinXP. I mean, I can run Office, IE and Outlook together SMOOTHLY on a WinXP box with 128M RAM.

    Try running OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Evolution and GNOME on the same system - it slows to a crawl. There are LOADS of people with 64 and 128M boxes out there who can't run a modern, desktop Linux effectively because it's getting so large and sluggish, and there are endless posts around the Net from newcomers who're puzzled as to why Linux is 'so slow'.

    This really needs to be sorted out. It makes Linux look half-baked, when we know how powerful it is. I supposed we have to look at open source in another way: it may lead to secure code, and it may lead to bugfixed code, but it doesn't lead to efficient, clean and elegantly-written code. Otherwise we'd have the speed advantage, and Linux's flagship products wouldn't be heavier and slower than Microsoft's.

    Just a thought. Good luck to the GNOMErs, but if Linux is going to really take off, it needs to offer some kind of speed advantage over Windows. Fewer users will switch if they just have to follow the upgrade treadmill.

    • Re:Memory usage? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:14AM (#10256420) Homepage Journal
      I sort of agree with what you are saying, and the problem of memory usage / speed on lower specified machines is a key issue. The problem is not wholly with bloat or crap code but more with the fact that the common linux desktops (gnome/kde) on newer distro's are getting heavier on the eye candy. This eats up memory increases dependancy on swap-space and starts to eat up CPU.

      Its no secret however that Linux can be configured to run beautifully on lower spec machines. Dont expect to be getting great performance with KDE 3.3 on X-Org (with composite manager installed) fancy icons/fonts and the rest of it - on an old P2 , thats asking for trouble.

      What is really needed is a better distinction between your flashy prosumer desktop linux distro's and the linux distro's aimed at "giving that old PC a new life" . We shouldnt stop advancing the progress of linux and the desktop just because the newer distro's are running slower on those older boxes.

      Secondly ... I've been meaning to try Yoper linux on that box thats too slow to compile gentoo...

      • Re:Memory usage? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:42AM (#10256730) Journal
        Its no secret however that Linux can be configured to run beautifully on lower spec machines. Dont expect to be getting great performance with KDE 3.3 on X-Org (with composite manager installed) fancy icons/fonts and the rest of it - on an old P2 , thats asking for trouble.

        If you turn every thing on, yeah it will be as slow as GNOME. But if on start-up, you decide to turn off all goodies, or even a number of the goodies, then it runs great

    • Dude, I totally feel what you are saying. Gnome is beautiful, but freaking bloated. I fluxbox on my desktop, but on my girlfriends laptop she has Gnome because it's pretty. The laptop is a 2.6gig P4 with 768meg 0' ram. It runs "ok" when plugged in, but when its unplugged and puts itself into speedstep mode it becomes unusable. I think it would almost be awesome if Gnome/KDE developers created a lightweight version of their software, so people in this situation or people with just slow boxes could keep the f
      • Strange. I run KDE on my P2 366mhz with 192MB ram laptop and it runs great, plugged in or not. Sure, it uses up 75% of the availible ram, but I can run kismet, firefox and thunderbird at the same time with out much trouble.
      • Odd. I run GNOME 2.6 on my P3-600 laptop with 192Mb and it runs fine.

    • Re:Memory usage? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bill, Shooter of Bul ( 629286 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:25AM (#10256547) Journal
      I supposed we have to look at open source in another way: it may lead to secure code, and it may lead to bugfixed code, but it doesn't lead to efficient, clean and elegantly-written code. Otherwise we'd have the speed advantage, and Linux's flagship products wouldn't be heavier and slower than Microsoft's.

      No, not neccisarily. Clean and elegant code is usually not the fastest or lightest weight. Linux's code is probley more elegant and cleaner than microsofts, simply because it doesn't have so many workarounds for bugs in other third party applications. But I agree with you completely, on the surface you appear to be correct.

      However, openoffice desends from star office, a propitary project that was always slow. Open office has been getting better. I find firefox to be faster than ie, at least on windows. I'm more of a kde guy so I can't speak of experince for Gnome or Evolution. Linux, the kernel, is probely the best argument against your view. Its fast, lean, mean, and clean.

    • Re:Memory usage? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Lispy ( 136512 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:26AM (#10256570) Homepage
      "I mean, I can run Office, IE and Outlook together SMOOTHLY on a WinXP box with 128M RAM."

      No, you cant. Stop spreading FUD. If you have a slow CPU it might be usable if you have at least 256MB, but SMOOTHLY is something entirely different.

      "Try running OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Evolution and GNOME on the same system - it slows to a crawl. There are LOADS of people with 64 and 128M boxes out there who can't run a modern, desktop Linux effectively because it's getting so large and sluggish, and there are endless posts around the Net from newcomers who're puzzled as to why Linux is 'so slow'."

      You are right. But you wouldnt be able to use WinXP on the same machine either. I just pointed this out. Whats more: Gnome 2.8 and KDE 3 is about the latest and greatest as it gets on Linux. Please consider this. It is not a slick environment. It is a complete up-to-date Desktop environment up on par with OS X and WinXP (SP2). If you try a few offroad distros you might still get a performance boost. Gentoo and Slackware ARE in fact significantly faster than SusE or Fedora.

      I agree, OpenOffices startup time could be faster but on a decent system (eg. an Athlon 1400 with 512MB and a 7200rpm HD) it takes about 12 seconds for startup. I cant even guess what you mean with Firefox slowing to a crawl though.

      "Fewer users will switch if they just have to follow the upgrade treadmill."
      Agreed. But its a trap: Look, if we dont have the latest and greatest they wont even consider it. Dont underestimate the amount of GNOME ready desktops out there. We really shouldnt try to strip down on features and looks just to get all those crappy 128MB/p200Mhz boxes. We have them already. Noone uses them for real work though. What we want is their main machine. The multimedia/websurfing/office PC. We cant get that with Fluxbox (no pun, i like it) and lynx.

      • Re:Memory usage? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "No, you cant. Stop spreading FUD. If you have a slow CPU it might be usable if you have at least 256MB, but SMOOTHLY is something entirely different."

        Actually, I have tested load times for a AMD K2-400MHz with 128MB and 256MB RAM. WinXP gave better load times of 'intergrated' apps than 'RedHat FC2' with like apps. So I do believe that the parent that you have quoted is correct in the sense that many apps that rely on features already loaded by Windows' OS are faster.

        Personally, I believe th

        • Re:Memory usage? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Lispy ( 136512 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @12:41PM (#10258007) Homepage
          As you put more work into a reply than I got ever before on slashdot I will respond. You have a valid point that those older systems are sometimes put to use. I agree with you that there should be a way to run them with Linux, and run them safely. This is not the same as continue using Windows98 and connect to the internet wich is frankly not a very smart thing to do.

          I think that's what older or specialized distros, Fluxbox and remote Xservers are for. But NOT the Gnome Desktop in it's latest incarnation.

          My quote "We have them already" was driven by my experience that I keep installing Linux on older machines all over the place. Friends want to try it on their obsolete hardware but that means that they won't get the full performance and often turn it down in favour of their shiny, new XP box. Still, dualboxes sometimes show the behaviour you described. Even OpenOffice or Firefox seem to run faster on Windows. I don't think that this is Gnomes mistake, though. The examples were given by the grandparent and clearly show the library issue as it was pointed out.

          Gnome itself is not bloatware, it is just a complete, cutting-edge desktop with a lot of bells and whistles and this comes at a cost. Most of the time it is just a RAM issue that can be solved easily without a big investment. This is all I was trying to make clear. I am just tired of this: "Gnome is bloated because it doesn't run on a 128MB machine." talk. It is simply not what it was designed for. Same with Doom3. ;-)
    • >This really needs to be sorted out. [...] when we know how powerful [Linux] is. [...] open source [...] doesn't lead to efficient, clean and elegantly-written code. Otherwise we'd have the speed advantage, and Linux's flagship products wouldn't be heavier and slower than Microsoft's.

      Not trying to troll here, but is that possible?

      Windows (95, 98, ME) were coded specifically for the low-end x86 PC architecture, and consequently use a bunch of tricks to streamline their performance.

      Windows (NT, 2000, XP

    • Re:Memory usage? (Score:3, Informative)

      by LordK2002 ( 672528 )
      OpenOffice.org is slower and heavier than MS Office. Firefox is slower and heaver than IE (not by a great deal, and it's still a superb browser).
      Comparing the launch of Firefox on Linux with Explorer on Windows is not fair, since most of the functionality of IE is loaded when Windows starts up.

      Office tends to work similarly, with a lot of the code being loaded at startup. This increases the Windows start time but decreases the time taken to start an Office application.

    • Once you beat the bottlenecks, it's very snappy. (Score:5, Informative)

      by AntiOrganic ( 650691 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @11:00AM (#10256963) Homepage
      Right now, there are a two main reasons that GNOME feels so slow in comparison to lighter-weight desktop environments like IceWM and Fluxbox.
      • Many users on nVidia graphics cards install the proprietary nVidia drivers without setting
        Option "RenderAccel" "true"
        to enable Render acceleration, which greatly speeds up font rendering, alpha blending, and other tasks by offloading them to the graphics card; GTK+ depends upon this ability greatly. Additionally, the support for this is fairly flaky in nVidia's proprietary drivers and doesn't seem to work without working AGP and AGP Fast Writes. Try opening a large menu without and then with Render acceleration enabled. Go ahead.
      • Pango, the GTK+ font layout library, has much better Unicode support than Windows' GUI libraries. The downside to this is that it's not optimized for a Latin code path (yet), and the generic code path is somewhat slow. However, on a fast system (2 GHz+), you escape the bottleneck and GNOME is much snappier than Windows XP. I'm not saying "look, it's awesome on fast machines so it's really better and you should just upgrade," but it's important to note that GNOME currently has one single bottleneck killing its performance, and once that's optimized, it will be much better. It's not like the whole environment is much too weighty and slow.

    • Re:Memory usage? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by joib ( 70841 )
      The problem here is resource allocation. As GNOME and KDE (or any other project, for that matter) have finite resources (i.e. volunteer time), if they spend some time on improving performance, it's less time spent on something else (such as the features that attract people to kde/gnome in the first place).

      IMHO, KDE and GNOME have their priorities pretty well laid out as it is. The nice thing with FOSS is that KDE and GNOME doesn't have to be everything for everyone as MS trie with windows. E.g. if you want

  • hope they finally got rid of some annoyances ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drmancini ( 712059 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:02AM (#10256315) Homepage
    ... like:

    - gui option to switch off spatial nautilus
    - improved gdm which doesn't cause random system hangs on logout (with a dual display GeForce setup)
    - faster nautilus
    - fixed constantly non-functional (without necessary tweaking) file preview (audio and video)
    - more keyboard mapping options (I mean only having a gui option to toggle Alt click or Ctrl click to move windows sucks ... even an option to turn it off would help)

    ... i know that you can cope with most of these with enough forum hunting, GConf editing and XML hacking ... I did ... but come on gnome, you're soon gonna be 3.x ... these things should work out-of-the-box

    and I hope the new MIME implementation will finally be usable ...

    all in all ... can't wait to get home and ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge gnome ... ebuild anyone? :-P

    • Re:hope they finally got rid of some annoyances .. (Score:4, Informative)

      by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:10AM (#10256374)
      - gui option to switch off spatial nautilus

      Yes

      - improved gdm which doesn't cause random system hangs on logout (with a dual display GeForce setup)

      Never heard of that before. Check bugzilla

      - faster nautilus

      If you use spatial nautilus it's extremely fast. If you don't, then it's not so fast. Pick your poison.

      - fixed constantly non-functional (without necessary tweaking) file preview (audio and video)

      It always worked for me out of the box on Fedora, though you may have to enable it in the preferences for remote mounts.

      • I personally have experienced the problems with gdm. I would have to ssh into the machine and manually kill gdm and restart it before it would work again. And, I was not using a geforce, dual or no. I don't think it was an nvidia-related problem...
        • For me it's not "random", in contrast to what drmancini describes.

          After having done a su, stopped any daemon with "service SERVICENAME stop", and ctrl-D'd back to my account, then the desktop will mysteriously freeze if I choose Log Off (or whatever it is in the English locale) from the GNOME menu.

          It works when I first choose Log Off from the menu, but hit Cancel instead, and then stop the daemon and choose Log Off again.

          This doesn't seem to be dependent on what daemon I'm stopping, nor on how long time
      • I've had plenty of freezes with GDM on logging out - mostly fixable with a ctrl-alt-backspace, but it means session saving rarely works.

  • Must be a bug (Score:5, Funny)

    by 3terrabyte ( 693824 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:04AM (#10256331) Journal
    I wish they'd test their releases first!
    I'm having trouble installing it. XP keeps telling me it doesn't know what to do with a .tar file.

  • Here is some info, too (Score:3, Informative)

    by yakobusan ( 752091 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:06AM (#10256342) Homepage Journal
    GNOME 2.8 Desktop and Developer Platform Unveiled

    Just click here: http://www.mysan.de/article19429.html [mysan.de]

    Greetings, Jakob

  • Inofficial Mandrakelinux packages (Score:5, Informative)

    by Götz ( 18854 ) <waschk.gmx@net> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:10AM (#10256375) Homepage
    GNOME2.8 came too late for Mandrakelinux 10.1 (just as KDE 3.3), that's why I've created my own packages. You can get them from a urpmi repository [uni-rostock.de]. Remember to add the Mandrake Cooker (soon to become 10.1) and Contrib repositories as well for some of the dependancies.

  • Too slow (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:18AM (#10256474)
    I'm a GNOME user at heart, but I've found modern versions of GNOME way too slow on my Duron 900. GNOME 1.4 was lightning fast, and 2.0 and 2.2 were reasonably fast. 2.4, 2.6, and 2.8 seem to have regressions in speed.

    PLEASE focus on speed rather than new features. Comparable modern desktops like Windows XP and KDE 3.3 are very fast on this box. I'm running xfce4, which isn't really comparable to GNOME in features, but is very fast, so I use it.

  • Q: sandbox playtime? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:29AM (#10256595) Homepage Journal

    Can I use garnome to automagically build, install and test drive this latest Gnome without impacting my default installation or corrupting my ~/.g* files? As a non-root user, too?

  • There's talk on the Fedora-devel list [redhat.com] of getting Gnome 2.8 final into the already slightly delayed FC3 T2... Here's to hoping....

  • Installed programs? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:31AM (#10256619)
    I'm not sure if Gnome handles this or not, but I was curious if the newest Gnome handles shortcuts properly. In the latest incarnations of Mandrake and SUSE, when you install a program, it simply disappears, with no shortcut anywhere to be found to the newly installed program, making both distributions that I tried completely useless in my opinion. Hell, even when I installed Firefox (what I thought was one of the better known, better made open source apps), I couldn't start the goddamned program after I installed it! But then again, this could be a distribution-level problem that Gnome doesn't have anything to do with... I have no idea.
    • Well, that problem is a combination of things. Firstly if you used the official Firefox installer, then this offers no integration into the host system at all. None. Not even menu items.

      If you install packages from your distro then you will *probably* get menu items. This is assuming that there is an up-to-date and correct package for your distro of course. If you install software from source, you may need to set the prefix to be /usr to get menu items, or change the configuration of your system (if you d

  • The Infamous "Lightweight" argument (Score:4, Insightful)

    by debian4life ( 701155 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:49AM (#10256814)
    Let me begin by saying that I switch back and forth between Enlightenment and Gnome/KDE, so I am familiar with both sides of the argument. For the record, this takes place on a PIII 800 laptop with 256MB of RAM so I am in the middle of the curve. But I never have performance complaints with any of these. They all run better than Windows.

    That being said.......

    I see the point of wanting something lightweight on underpowered hardware. That is where the the Openbox's and XFCE's of the world come in. But what about those who have a big machine. If it can handle it, why not have something that can take advantage of it. It would seem to me that there should be a niche for that. Hardware specs will keeping increasing, not decreasing. So therefore, why wouldn't a GNOME or KDE take advantage of that.

    I see more variance from distro to distro than I do from window manager to window manager. For instance, Gnome on Fedora to me is much slower than Gnome on Gentoo or Debian. But that is just me.

    You can drive a Hyundai because it gets you where you want to go and gets great gas mileage, but that Corvette sure is good looking and fun to drive. And quite fast I might add.

  • very fast screenshot mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by morten poulsen ( 220629 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:56AM (#10256903) Homepage
    ... available here [afdelingp.dk]

  • Menu Editor? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by X_Bones ( 93097 ) <danorz13 AT yahoo DOT com> on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @10:59AM (#10256935) Homepage Journal
    I'm extremely happy because it looks like file type handler has finally been fixed, but I read through the release notes and didn't see a word on my single biggest problem with GNOME 2.6: the damn menu editor. Specifically the fact that there wasn't one, and that adding or removing items was confusing at best.

    Not that weather forecasting applets and new themes aren't nice, and not that I have a right to tell people what to work on, but shouldn't the GNOME guys worry more about basic functionality instead of minor things?

    • Re:Menu Editor? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Abjifyicious ( 696433 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @12:28PM (#10257866)
      Here's how to edit the Gnome menu;

      Adding items;
      Open the menu you want to add an item to.
      Right click.
      Choose "Entire menu->Add new item to this menu".

      Editing items;
      Right click on the item you want to edit.
      Choose "Properties".

      Deleting items;
      Right click on the item you want to delete.
      Choose "Remove this item".

      Gnome doesn't have a menu editor application because it doesn't need one.

  • VNC support? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by deragon ( 112986 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @11:31AM (#10257286) Homepage Journal
    Have you seen the VNC support description? Is this feasable now? Usually, you could not remotely see the desktop of a remote user. You could start a VNC server with no window to a CRT, and have multiple users share it with VNC clients, but to look at the actual X desktop that shows up on the console, this is a feature that never existed before.

    Anybody care to comment this? This is a neat feature if it works as described. However, how does this work when I run an accelerated Xorg server?

  • Epiphany Extensions (Score:3, Informative)

    by noda132 ( 531521 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @11:48AM (#10257450) Homepage

    Just thought I'd add a quick plug for Epiphany Extensions. We worked on a couple (Page Info and Select Stylesheet) right before the deadline, so now we've got a somewhat reasonable bunch.

    Epiphany is still a browser centred around simplicity. But the extensions can give you those features you wish you had from other browsers.

    The full list: SSL certificate viewer, dashboard connection, HTML/Javascript error viewer and link checker, mouse gestures, page info dialog, stylesheet selection, "smart bookmarks" (right-click on selection -> search the web), tab grouping (open new tabs directly next to the current one), tabs menu entries.

    However, it's not until GNOME 2.10 that there'll be a UI to select extensions.

  • Everyone has lost their minds (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Proc6 ( 518858 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @12:09PM (#10257660)
    or fired all their user interface designers.

    I always thought the whole CONCEPT of a Windowing system / GUI was to provide a single, stable, cohesive "standard" to which all applications adhere. By doing so you've obligated the end user to learn the functions of a widget and application only once. Each new application learning cycle builds on the knowledge of the previous ones.

    Think back to Windows NT 4.0, as it's *maybe* _one of_ the best examples. During that time, most every application used the same look at feel (as in, identically), even Windows Media Player. The launch mechanism for most every application found its home in the Start Menu -> Program Files folder, and so on. OSX, (though my time spent with OSX is limited so far) seems to also build on this paradigm. Clean, but most importantly cohesive.

    But as the years have gone by, instead of refining this basic concept, subjecting users to minimal UI enhancements, but rather continually refining the model, the development cycles have gone completely the other way. Its a [geek] feature war and a designer war. Applications (like Media Player on Windows) deviate horrifically from the solid foundation of UI standards with a glowing trainwreck of 3D buttons and glass bevels plastered all over custom window framing. (I love the insanity that ensues when you move between full mode and windowed mode, that spawns another window with just an icon in it, someone get me a revolver.) While a "Media Player" can possibly (barely) be argued for a "custom experience", its spilling over into everything else. DVD ripping software, the entire Office suite, even Macromedia Flash uses a zillion windows with their own fucked up grips and icons.

    But now, it's moving into the desktop. The actual UI. Everyone (again, except maybe OSX so far, and based only on what I've seen) is to blame. Windows and Linux both. Longhorn is a god awful nightmare of confusing combinations of task and event driven models. Checkboxes by each filename in Windows Explorer? Redundant clocks and taskbars? Wizards and dummy-versions of everything like the (currently in XP) Control Panel that can be in classic mode or the new re-organized gay-mode. The implications are exponential learning curves and nightmare support models "Click Start -> Control Panel -> Network Settings... you dont have that? Hmm, oh wait you're in gay-mode for the Control Panel, okay well first click Classic Mode on the sidebar, THEN start over." . Linux distros have their craptasic methodology of installing every useless thing they can (X-Eyes anyone?) by default and the "Start Menu" clones of KDE and Gnome are a maze of "Start -> Settings -> System, Start -> System -> Preferences, Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Settings." with redundancy and gray deliniations of whats where.

    I dont know, when I see applications putting icons to launch them in

    • Start -> Programs -> MyApplication
    • Start Menu's commonly used bubbling app list
    • Start Menu's Pin-to list
    • Icons on the desktop
    • Quicklaunch icons on the quicklaunch toolbar
    • Mini-icons in the tray
    • Icons on taskbars of other apps (like editing a webpage with Word icon inside of IEs toolbar)
    • And being able to launch fucking Age of Empires from MSN Messenger (at least you used to be able to, I dont know if you still can, I stopped running it.)
    It makes me want to hang everyone thats in charge of this bullshit. Windows needs to quit providing more wizards, carnival buttons, redundant ways to do the same task and per-application custom UIs and Linux needs to stop ripping off everything every other OS does and sticking it all together into a disorganized mess.

    * Prediction: As soon as Longhorn comes out with its secondary taskbar littered with useless widgets like picture slideshows and analog clocks (like OSX is doing now I believe too), no matter how bad of an idea it is to start with, all major window managers in Linux will have one too. It's the, "What! They have something we don't have?! Who cares if it sucks, IMPLEMENT IT!" mentality.

    • Re:Everyone has lost their minds (Score:4, Interesting)

      by P-Nuts ( 592605 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @01:21PM (#10258394)
      The parent post makes some very good points. I've used Windows, Linux and OSX quite a bit, one of the things I really don't like is the way the Desktop is used. I always feel I'm fighting against the computer to persuade it to use the Desktop as what it should be - a temporary working area.

      I don't want to launch programs from it, even commonly used ones. That's what a programs menu is for [skip to the last paragraph now if you're skimming], though it is convenient to have a shorter route to the commonly used ones, so it's a good idea to have a toolbar next to the complete menu. Gnome does quite well in this regard, in the default setup you get a programs menu next to launch bars, Windows is close to getting it right, but you have the Quicklaunch bar, the recently used start menu bit, the Internet/Email bit, the top level of the Programs bit, which is overload. If you drag Applications to the Dock in OSX, then you get a launch menu too.

      Then I remove all the icons from the desktop that shouldn't be there. By hard disks, home folder and any applications have no place there - I'll launch a Explorer/Nautilus/Finder to navigate them. As directory/folder navigation is important, I might like to be able to have several special places to start off in set up, as subitems of the file navigator icon. XFCE allows for this quite neatly.

      Then, clearly separate (oposite sides of the screen in Gnome and XFCE) I like to have some way of navigating open windows (and multiple desktops). OSX gets this a bit confused, as the Dock launches and resorts, on top of that Expose performs this function.

      Anyway, I like the Desktop to be a sort of in-basket. If it doesn't have anything on it except a pretty background, I have achieved a sense of calm. Stuff on it is awaiting filing somewhere else in my home folder, or deleting. I don't want anything else to be in my face. This is the computer analogue of my real world desk (well, the half of it not occupied by equipment).

    • Re:Everyone has lost their minds (Score:4, Interesting)

      by JCholewa ( 34629 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @03:21PM (#10259666) Homepage
      > Prediction: As soon as Longhorn comes out with its secondary taskbar littered with useless widgets like
      > picture slideshows and analog clocks (like OSX is doing now I believe too), no matter how bad of an
      > idea it is to start with, all major window managers in Linux will have one too. It's the, "What! They have
      > something we don't have?! Who cares if it sucks, IMPLEMENT IT!" mentality.

      You can already have a secondary panel (what you above call a "taskbar") in both GNOME and KDE. Heck, you can probably have more than that. Both environments are built around the idea of having multiple panels which contain the taskbar, pager, notification area ("system tray" in winspeak) and multipurpose applets. I run KDE with a top and bottom panel -- the top has a news ticker, a dictionary field, the apps menu and a list of currently mounted media (CD-ROM discs and so forth), while the bottom has my taskbar and notification area, as well as a digital clock, a binary clock, the show desktop button, a weather applet and some system monitoring stuff.

      Yep, that's right: KDE and GNOME were *first* with the idea of a "secondary taskbar littered with useless widgets". Heck, I didn't even tell you about the "fuzzy" clock. "Half past ten" indeed!

      We like having the best of all worlds. That's why you can change between applications using any or all of the windows way (task bar), the Apple way (Kompose, which acts like OS X's Expose) or the Unix way (multiple desktops plus focus-follows-mouse. The beauty of it is that any of these features that you don't like can simply be deactivated so that you never have to see them again.

      --
      -JC
      http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/
      http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main

  • GNOME/Debian? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @12:19PM (#10257766) Homepage Journal
    GNOME 2.8 will be fabulous running on top of Debian Sarge. We've got the desktop now, when will we get the OS itself? Or is the latest daily build of the RC1 good enough? Maybe we should wait until Sarge has been fully released, by which time GNOME will likely have released a patch to 2.8.1, and the relative haste/prudence of the two releases will be synchronized?

  • My Gnome 2.8.0 experience (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dpw2atox ( 627453 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @01:21PM (#10258405) Homepage Journal
    Well ive been running the 2.7.x devel series and I gotta say gnome keeps getting faster and better in my opinion. HAL is amazing and I think that it really will make a nice environment for new linux users to take advantage of. I for one though am very pleased with this release. Instead of trying to do a ton of new features they instead only made a few new features and spent a lot of time on fixing bugs and doing little touches. Even during the code freeze I saw several bug fixes get pushed for outstanding issues in nautilus and eel2 which will make a better user experience. There were a few things I wish that they did do such as work on the menu code, and also to switch over to firefox as the default browser but mayde this will happen for 2.10. On a seperate note one thing that really disapointed me is that gtk2.6.0 isn't released yet. They did a few nice performance improvements in the 2.5.x devel series, specifically with screen window resizing, so as soon as its released I recomend giving it a shot with gnome 2.8 and then post your comments on the performance of gnome.

  • Prevolution? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Wednesday September 15, 2004 @11:59PM (#10263282) Homepage Journal
    According to the GNOME 2.8 release notes, it includes Evolution 2.0. But Novell hasn't released Evolution 2.0 (though we're in its promised "2004Q3" delivery window). Is the Evolution 2.0 included with GNOME 2.8 a stable version? Is there any reason to wait for Novell to release it on their own?

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