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Ximian

Ximian gets new CEO 84

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-nat-is-gonna-hafta-code-again dept.
miguel writes "Today we announced that David Patrick has joined Ximian as our CEO. Nat which we all love has stepped down from this role and will now be in charge of our products (he insists that people call him `VP of Product Management' although to me he will always be Commander Nat "Fleebety Jeebits" Friedman). David is a great guy, his experience in the field will Ximian and GNOME tremendously." He's got old timer creds (Wordstar? Geezus).
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Ximian gets new CEO More

Ximian gets new CEO

Comments Filter:
  • What the hell's a "Ximian"?

    --
    Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?

  • it's been about one month i'm checking red-carpet AND helix-updater to see the gnome 1.4 ximian update,
    and still nothing. I'm currently stucked with the beta release
    (which was unstable, but i was warned and dont't complain about it).
    SOOooo... What the hell are they waiting for a 1.4 release ?
    May be they estimate 1.2 to 1.4 leap was not that important,
    or feared to have their user disgusted when faced to the hard nautilus reality (too many Mo used for so little functionnalities...
    and i don't even bother speaking about slowliness -what about some MozNautilus project... anyone ?-)
  • What's the status of Ximian's dist. of Gnome 1.4?
  • <humor>

    This is terrific. Finally, Ximian has some good leadership. This kind of thing will get their stock up and rising, even in this troubling time of economic strife. A radical change like this will energize the Ximian stock, and so...

    *whisper whisper*

    Wha... I sold that stock last week? Why didn't you... It's climbed HOW FAR?!?! What do I pay you for, anyways!?!?

    Nevermind that shit about high stocks. Ximian sucks.

    </humor>

    ------
    That's just the way it is

  • Hate to answer this if you're joking, but in case anyone else is wondering the same thing, I'd assume that "Ximian" is some sort f reverse phonetical treatment to the word simian, relating to monkeys or apes. Hence the dancing monkey logo.

    Kind of reminds me of a joke I used to play on two really stupid girls @ college. I'd see them at a party or something, and I'd always say, "You're looking positively bovine today" (They were portly lasses.) Either they never heard me well enough, or they didn't know what bovine meant, but they always thought that was great. If only they had money...

  • When is Ximian going to work with Redhat 7.1? The current go-gnome install downloads the non Redhat 7.x installer. If you go to the manual install page, you can get the 7.x installer. However, in 7.1 at least, after all the downloads are done - the installer crashes! How poo is that? I go with the RedHat 7.0 install and it says upgrade to a compatable distro, even though going from 7.1 to 7.0 would be a downgrade - go figure! The other way crashes. Please fix this soon - I love ximian (and redcarpet, AND EVOLUTION!)

  • Is that a verb? (Score:3)

    by Ronin X ( 121414 ) on Wednesday April 18, 2001 @07:49AM (#282299)
    David is a great guy, his experience in the field will Ximian and GNOME tremendously

    How do you Ximian? I didn't even know it was a verb? Can you GNOME? Is that some kind of dance?

  • Re:Gnome 1.4? (Score:5)

    by Deadbolt ( 102078 ) on Wednesday April 18, 2001 @07:51AM (#282300)

    Apparently they're working their collective asses off on it. Supposed to be something special. See here [ximian.com].

    I hope they get it done soon; I actually used KDE [kde.org] the other day and found it a well-designed usable environment! Horrors! <using non-FSF software shake> :)

  • Why? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Open source is supposed to be a better way. If that is the case, why is it that slashcode has so many bugs that have existed for so long. Example, the article search is filled with articles that have only a handful of comments. Anyone whose been here knows that there is no way these articles only got 3 or 4 comments. Obviously the comments have been lost, or the article disappeared before more people could post. So, where are all the eyeballs that are supposed to find these bugs? Where are the patches? Shouldn't the developers be lining up to get this fixed? What's up? How many times has YOUR story been lost when it should have been available for discussion?

    Just a few recent examples:
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/17/233921 2
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/17/185022 4
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/09/164522 6
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/04/084213
  • It's great to load the /. front page and not see a single article by that asshole Michael. It's nice to see that you, Hemos, Timmah! and Cliff are finally back from the rings of Saturn or wherever you've been.
    On behalf of all /dotters I'd like to say welcome back!
    --Shoeboy
  • Ximian has great potential.
    I hope they do well. If they stay creative, they will. The thing I'd like to see most from them & kde folks, is working towards interoperability regarding a good printing framework, themes, middleware and other "backend-ish" stuff. There is so much innovation possible in the interface and this is where gnome & kde should battle it out. Penguins won't reach the desktop when J.Random Computer User can't work out how to cut and paste between gApp and kApp.

  • Too distracted? (Score:4)

    by mholve ( 1101 ) on Wednesday April 18, 2001 @07:57AM (#282304)
    Is Ximian too distracted these days, with all these changes going on? Name change, CEO change, etc.

    It's been ages since they've released their latest warez, yet very few of them are actually available! Solaris packages haven't been updated in AGES and still have old GNOME, etc.

    Considering how much they're in the spotlight, along with GNOME - through Sun and HP... You'd think they'd be a little more diligent.

    Don't drop the ball on this, Ximian - this is MAJOR!

  • And (Score:2)

    by wiredog ( 43288 )
    Is it legal?

  • Re:Is that a verb? (Score:3)

    by woggo ( 11781 ) on Wednesday April 18, 2001 @08:02AM (#282306) Journal
    I've clearly been reading slashdot for too long, because I didn't even notice that. I think longtime /. readers must develop some neural pathway that auto-inserts missing words, swaps transpositions, and corrects spelling mistakes. That's kind of like how if you cover one eye with your hand, you can "see through it", I'd imagine.
  • <Bad_Senator_Palpatine_Voice>I will make it legal.

  • Re:More importantly (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You might have gotten "bitchslapped". That's a punishment automatically applied to slashdot users when the system thinks they are being abusive. Unfortunately, it sometimes hits the innocent as well. Try writing to pater@slashdot.org if this problem persists.

  • Re:More importantly (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    edit your /etc/redhat-release file and change the version number to 7.0 and all will work. Not a good solution, but it does work. Did it last night.

  • moming from Ximian, is an all inclusive package where one wouldn't have to download all those other dependencies just to build something.

    It gets tiring having to download umpteen amounts of extra baggage via way of additions (glade etc.) just to get something to run. Even moreso gets more tiring searching for those packages hoping they've been updated to follow suit to newer revs of the original product (gnome).
    Aside from that for those with limited space, it would serve them greatly to have Ximian products include only the neccessities to build the product and not the whole library (whenever possible) to save space.

    why hackers scare me [antioffline.com]
  • Now that's a mission statement - "We want our product to kick total butt"!
  • It also happens when you read news papers. Sometimes you have to read twice to make sure if that is what they wanted to say.

    Now I got the bug...the above makes no sense

  • Why don't you email them instead of complaining on Slashdot?
    ------
  • The big problem with this is that gnome.org is telling people to go to Ximian for binaries if they want them. So we either have a choice of compiling the source of Gnome 1.4 (which, easy as it may be, simply isn't really an option quite a lot of people want to consider), or waiting for Ximian to realease Ximian Gnome 1.4. But if there is going to be such a significant difference between Ximian Gnome and just plain Gnome that it takes 2.5+ weeks to get it ready, what about the people that want just plain Gnome as binaries? It's all very well for gnome.org telling people to go to Ximian to get 1.4 binaries, but if they do users can reasonably expect the binaries Ximian provides to be those of the same product - as it is that seems unlikely to be the case, even if the differences are mainly aesthetic.
  • It makes me question how to pronounce GNOME.

    Most of the ways I hear it pronounced are Guh-nome or just nome. Once I saw Ximian and helix code and all of the evolution references I thought that maybe GNOME was pronounced gee-nome. (as in mapping the human GNOME :)

    So then how the hell do you pronounce gnutella?

    And how would the bovine lasses having money change anything?

    -pos

    The truth is more important than the facts.
  • There was a time when I checked Helix/Ximian regularly. But there were two things which helped get me off it. First, upgrades which broke things. There is cutting edge and there is bloody mess edge. Too frequently the upgrades were from the latter group. Then after the Red Carpet problems, all was silent on the update front.Stability and regularity. I understand there is no controlling the time factor (other than delays). I also understand 0.x means not all there, but come on. Not all there used to mean something beyond a screen flash should have functioned.Hopefully a change at the helm will be a change for the better.

  • Re:Too distracted? (Score:3)

    by Kostya ( 1146 ) on Wednesday April 18, 2001 @08:28AM (#282317) Homepage Journal
    They are working, just maybe not on the stuff you care about.

    Evolution sees regular updates and snapshots. But that is a beta channel on Red Carpet, so maybe that isn't a fair comparison.

    But if they are focusing more on Evolution, that's very good. Evolution is kind of like Gnumeric--it's a test bed. Unlike Gnumeric, which is nice and cool, Evolution is everyday-useful. People need it. People like it. People use it every day. And so, it serves as a better test bed for fleshing out Bonobo.

    Some people might pu-sha that notion, but Bonobo is extremely important. It will provide the component and compound document model needed to give GNOME the next leap forward. Then GNOME can go from being a nice shell (which is all it is right now) to a fully intergrated desktop.

    I'm a GNOME user, so I'm not dissing GNOME unnecessarily. I think GNOME has the right idea (except for the C instead of C++ part--grin). Right now, however, integration in GNOME isn't very slick. And slick is important. DnD that was actually useful as opposed to functional would be a huge step forward. Note that Nautilus is heavily Bonobo dependent as well.

    Additionally, if Evolution becomes a full Outlook replacement (i.e. it can do everything Outlook does and can be used with Exchange servers just like a normal Outlook client), I think Ximian might have their killer app that puts them on the map permanently. Did you see the latest figures on how much of MS's revenue is from Office? It's something like 30% or more. Not that Ximian will suddenly get that kind of money, but the money shows how important Office-like apps are.

    Now if only AbiWord would take off, I'd be damn happy!

  • I've been a loyal GNOME user for some time and have been using Ximian/Helix GNOME on Debian. After trying KDE 2.1.1, I've pretty much switched over to KDE. A great web browser, mail client, and other apps that all work. I'm afraid GNOME has a good bit of catching up to do. I tried Eazel's Nautilus. What is this thing supposed to be? A file manager on steroids? It doesn't live up to the hype at all.

    Choice is good though...I hope the competition of both GNOME and KDE will help to make both better desktop's. And hopefully with some interoperability between the two.

  • I've done some work with Miguel and Nat and I'm glad to see this. They are both great developers but it's good to know when you need to focus on developing and hand the business over to someone who can deal with all that crap. Nat was definitely swamped up to his eyeballs when I was trying to get him on the phone about 6 months ago and I'm sure it hasn't gotten any better!

    It's funny- when you do something well, you get promoted and promoted until eventually you end up in a position which has nothing to do with what you do well. Management and running a business is a whole different skill set from coding and hacking. You have to deal with (ack, evil) sales, marketing, human resources, legal issues and all sorts of garbage which has nothing to do with what you love to do and do well. So you either suck it up and learn how to do the new job (accompanied by a steep learning curve) or you hire someone who knows and likes that stuff so you can spend your time doing what you love.

    This is a good move on Ximian's part and a move that most of the Linux companies out there are going to have to make sooner or later. At some point you have to move towards running a business and worry about messy things like profitability.

  • Re:It makes me question.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    GNU, and thus all gnu-based prefixes are pronounced with hard Gs.
  • "...his experience in the field will Ximian and GNOME tremendously..."

    Uh, I'm confused. is there supposed to be some kind of additional grammar object in there?

    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
  • Hey David Patrick, why not give GNOME some hope and lower the number of librarie's gnome relies on? You know, GNOME might be cool if I didn't have to download 20 other libraries and applications to get a GNOME app working.

    - Linux allows sloppy coders
  • All press releases should be worded like this.
  • Sorry, I wasn't very clear on the monet thing (It made sense in my head...)

    Basically, if they had some money, I could probably have conned it out of them.

  • I hope they get it done soon; I actually used KDE the other day and found it a well-designed usable environment! Horrors!

    Isn't the GPL free enough for you?

  • now that ximian is getting all corporate on us, how long will it be before they follow redhat's lead and start charging for the updater?

    Never.


    -----
  • That's part of why there is an incitive to start the GNOME Packaging Project [gnome.org]. That way there can be official GNOME binary packages. Read the link for more info.
  • ximian... simian... monkey... ape... banana eater... poo thrower... pea drinker... you know?

    Dude, please. Monkeys don't drink their own urine. But they do fling their own dung. You're next.


    -----
  • They ARE working on it. If you want evidence of this, track the ximian-support list. (The list archive is here [ximian.com].)

    I'm as impatient as the next guy, especially since red-carpet and evolution are becoming more rad with every release, but it's pretty clear that they've got a lot of work to do to ensure that Ximian works perfectly on all of the platforms that they support, and releasing polished builds is currently less important to them than ensuring stability and consistency (as it should be).

  • Give the po man a break, he's Mexican.
    -----
  • Obviously this is all package based, but it works with deb and rpm. There is a menu option in RedCarpet 0.9.2's pulldown menu called "Install Local Packages". It will install and remove programs necessary to install the program you specify. (It tells you exactly what its going to do before it does it)

    As an added bonus, it automatically verifies crypto signatures on everything.

    I'm finding myself using this tool more and more for these reasons, even though I've become proficient in using RPM on the command-line for the past four years. It's just too convenient.
    ---
  • Truly. New verbs abound. How can I Ximian, and what does it mean to GNOME? The second one sounds vaguely kinky...

    -Puk
  • Additionally, if Evolution becomes a full Outlook replacement...

    Well, I tried Evolution some time ago, and it crashed just as often as Outlook does on the ol windows box - looks like they have at least THAT Outlook "feature" working!

    --

  • Okay, here goes my precious karma..

    The only thing i can see that Ximian has produced to date this year are press releases and the two "big" projects started way last year - namely Red Carpet and Evolution.

    Is anyone besides yourself actively involved in this project anymore? And if so, why is KDE kicking our asses in the progress department?!

    Not only is GNOME falling impossibly far behind KDE in terms of in the scope and variety of apps, but we are not even updating our existing applications anymore.

    And what about platforms other then i386? As a PPC-based user i cant even get Red Carpet (see it in the FTP directory [ximian.com] anywhere?), in addition, i have not seen a single (and i'm dead serious about this) update in the Helix GNOME Updater since last year.

    I have recently installed and begun using KDE 2 and i am donwright shocked as to how far they have come in the past year while we, the GNOME community, are still sitting here using GNOME 1.2.

    On behalf of the hundreds of users i have encountered both on and offline, Why have the updates to Ximian GNOME stopped? And, if Ximian has chosen to abondon all PPC distros, then i would like to see the Ximian site updated to reflect this, so that we can all move to KDE (of which there are plenty of current packages [linuxppc.org] available)and keep enjoying our Linux experience. And lastly, if Ximan/GNOME needs some help - why are we not asking for it?

    I'm not trying to bitch too much (although i dopubt you can tell :-), but i especially feel the pain due to the fact that i am one of your application developers! I have a GNOME project on sourceforge with thousands of users, and it pains me to see them all leaving for KDE!

    At this point i have no choice but to begin using kdevelop to port my GNOME app over before all my users leave me.

  • Re:hmm nice.. now get some work done... right now! (Score:3)

    by ahaile ( 147873 ) on Wednesday April 18, 2001 @10:05AM (#282335)
    This is what I've been able to pick up from rumors and inuendos on the various mailing lists:

    Ximian could have released 1.4 shortly after the Gnome announcement, but let's think about what the 1.4 release meant. It meant that all the individual packages that make up Gnome were ready to release. It didn't mean that those packages played well together, or interacted in a way the user would expect. Because Ximian, being the integrator of all those packages, wanted to produce a desktop where all the parts worked together seamlessly, they still had a lot of work to do.

    Here's one example: Miguel recently posted a lengthy patch [eazel.com] to the Nautilus mailing list which would allow gmc and Nautilus to use the same desktop directory, so that when users switched back and forth between the two, they would retain all their launchers and folders. That's a very nice integration feature, but one which Nautilus didn't have in the version released with Gnome 1.4. It takes a good deal of code to make Nautilus understand GMC's .desktop files, and it takes time to write that code.

    The indications are that Ximian does not think that 1.4 is "not that important." Rather, they think it's very important. They also think that their role as the integrator means more than just compiling all the packages into binaries.

  • I get a really bad vibe from Ximian sometimes. It's kind of a "we know what's good for you" vibe that feels exactly like what they portray as the vibe from Microsoft. Why do we have to wait to see what they've decided GNOME will look like while they complete it?

    Why all the internal secret pulling together of software? How is that a free software community? It seems to me that their heart is in the closed-source business but something in their brains is switched to GPL-everything-no-matter-what mode. Make up your minds!

    If you are easily amused I strongly suggest you waste your time at http://news.getschooled.com/

  • what is ximian coded in? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    c++?
  • Except that it might be nice to refer to the outgoing CEO as a person, not an object.

    "...Nat, which we all love..."

    Kevin Fox
    --
  • you have to wait because it takes a while to make the packages and test them. theres nothing secret going on, the main differece between ximian gnome and stock gnome is a few patchs, icons, and a nice default setup for the packages. it takes a while to get this together and test it. gnome 1.4 has only been out for a couple weeks. a few days after the release happened GUADEC happened, which took a couple of days away from developers. so chill and stop thinking everything is some big corparate consiracy. when it is released it will be good, just wait :)
  • This didnt seem to fix the fact I crash on install. Very strange indeed.

    the rpm3 installer is what is downloaded on the go-gnome site and it gave me the upgrade error

    The rpm4 installer runs and such - but it crashes when I go to install - I tried to send a bug report in but Im such a massive newbie that did not work to well!
  • >But if there is going to be such a significant difference between Ximian Gnome and just
    > plain Gnome that it takes 2.5+ weeks to get it ready, what about the people that want
    > just plain Gnome as binaries?

    There will indeed be substantial differences between the plain-vanilla 1.4 and Ximian GNOME 1.4. Namely, Ximian's version will have fewer bugs and more features (easier to install, Red Carpet 1.0, etc).

    Those who want just plain GNOME can do what they have always done: compile it. It's not Ximian's job to be a compiling service for gnome.org, it's Ximian's job to produce a truly excellent desktop, which is what it will release as Ximian GNOME 1.4 as soon as it's ready.

    a.

  • Amen buddy.

    KDE quietly builds products instead of throwing out press releases. Good quality / good looking / seamlesly working products. They don't engage in flame / feature / license wars (or I haven't noticed!).

    Example, look at Konqueror (kde 2.1.1). In the browsing department it wins hands down. I stopped using Mozilla/netscape long back when I found Konq. When I first saw it, I wondered why there was not much hype about this fabulous product. Instead there was a humble press release.

    KDE believes in mind share by superior products. Not by 'ethics' or 'religion' associated with CDEs (qt/gtk, c/c++). I certainly believe they have made the right choices so far.

  • I have a serious question (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why is it that Ximian gets its own Slashdot icon (instead of being listed under the Gnome icon) while Qt does not (it's always placed under the KDE icon)?

    Ximian is much more tied in to Gnome than Qt is to KDE. Qt is an independent company with many or mostly non-KDE interests. The last story about Qt 3.0 generated a lot of irrelevant noise about KDE due, in part, to the fact that the story was presented as a KDE story. Many comments were of the sort "Well, how do these Qt developments help KDE". This, while the story had little or nothing to do with KDE per se.

    I'm not complaining that Ximian has its own category. But journalistic integrity demands that Qt have one as well. Who do we write at Slashdot to make this request?

    Samawi
  • Erm, I think you're mistaken. What most people have 'always done' is to install packages provided from gnome.org. It's great that now there's Ximian there should be value added packages, but what aobut those that want plain gnome and don't want to have to compile it. I don't think that's particularly unreasonable, and evidently (from other posts) there is a movement to get such packages...
  • Gnome.org never provided binary packages, really. Red Hat used to build RPMs, but they decided that Ximian's packages were a lot better. Debian still has people making .deb packages for gnome. So I don't really see what there is to gripe about.

  • I have another, serious, question... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why is it that Ximian gets its own Slashdot icon (instead of being listed under the Gnome icon) while Qt does not (it's always placed under the KDE icon)?

    Ximian is much more tied in to Gnome than Qt is to KDE. Qt is an independent company with many or mostly non-KDE interests. The last story about Qt 3.0 generated a lot of irrelevant noise about KDE due, in part, to the fact that the story was presented as a KDE story. Many comments were of the sort "Well, how do these Qt developments help
    KDE?". This, while the story had little or nothing to do with KDE per se.

    I'm not complaining that Ximian has its own category. But journalistic integrity demands that Qt have one as well. Who do we write at Slashdot to make this request?

    Samawi
  • Is anyone besides yourself actively involved in this project anymore? And if so, why is KDE kicking our asses in the progress department?!

    The answer is, they aren't. GNOME is in a transitional phase as we try to build a really solid and flexible platform. Many of the new technologies upon which future GNOME applications will be build are just now ready for prime time. The arhitecture upon which apps like Evolution, Gnumeric, Nautilus, etc. are based is now ready. GNOME 1.4 is a stepping stone to GNOME 2.0; applications will begin to take advantage of gnome-vfs, bonobo, etc. The process of porting to GTK+ will take place. Service delivery platforms such as reef and SOUP are coming into their own. .NET has nothing on the GNOME project except maybe a few months developement time. We have apps, lots and lots of them. Just take a look at The Fifth Toe apps to get a small picture of some of the really solid, tightly integrated applications available for the GNOME platform. Nautilus is being developed at a blistering pace. It's only been a month or so since 1.0 was released and already the new developments and features I've seen in the nightly builds from CVS are incredible.

    At this point i have no choice but to begin using kdevelop to port my GNOME app over before all my users leave me.

    If your application is useful and you keep up with existing GNOME technologies and developments, your users won't go anywhere. GNOME has an estimated 1.5 Million Users and one of the focuses of GUADEC was to think outside the box, coming up with ways of getting new users. One of the ways to do that is not to compete with KDE as such; let's share the same user base. Expect to see a lot more cooperation between the KDE and GNOME projects in the coming months and years. I personally have demonstrated GNOME to probably about 20 - 25 windows users in the last year--every one of them has been impressed, several have asked me to set up a cheap box for them with GNOME as the desktop environment. People get excited about GNOME. I know I do. The future is very bright.

    I don't know how many GNOME applications you use regularly, but here are a few applications I have fallen in love with:

    • Galeon They have come up with more browser innovations than any other project I've seen. Tabbed browsing kicks arse!
    • GnomeICU, Gabber, X-chat The dynamic trio of chat programs. All are outstanding.
    • Gnumeric and Abiword These should cover most of your spreadsheet/word processing needs. Both are being developed rapidly and are incorporating new GNOME technologies for tighter integration and use of components.
    • Nautilus Wow. The basic architecture is there. To you skeptics who look at Nautilus and say "it doesn't have feature X" or "it's too slow" I say, watch development closely, check out the hourlies, watch CVS commits, read the mailing list archives. A lot of cool stuff is coming.
    • Evolution If you use the snapshots, you might find that at times it's rough around the edges or unstable, but it's coming along nicely and promises to be a very good PIM suite. I love vfolders.
    • Ximian Setup Tools Looks great so far and so much more is planned. Good-bye, Linuxconf.
    • Red Carpet Only in beta. If you're testing the beta you're not going to see updates nearly as often as you will in the coming weeks. But, RC is slick.

    ----
  • ERROR 650: Invalid humor tags. Contents are not funny.

    (a)bort, (r)etry, (c)ancel

  • You are talking out of your ass, obviously. What is "some time ago?" V0.01? Try the nightly snapshots. Of course they sometimes break, they are snapshots after all, but in general you can witness evo get better day by day. It's been my mail client for > 2 months now and it rocks .
  • Hence the dancing monkey logo.

    Most people don't realize this, but it's NOT a dancing monkey on their logo. It's a closeup of a nose with a spider crammed inside the left nostril.

    And you guessed it! The spider's name is "Ximian".

    --

  • sponsored? I wish. cheerleader? No, I tried out but didn't make the team. :) I'm just a computer consultant working for a hospital network who contributes to the GNOME project where I can in my spare time.
    ----
  • It's better to have everything i one huge package or what? Statically linked? Libraries and components are a Good Thing
  • I'm passionate, what can I say?
    ----
  • I think (speculation) that the Ximian installer does not handle very well cases when rpm thinks that the Ximian packages are older than the ones that come with 7.1 (which is the case). I'd have to throw it in a debugger to really see why it's crashing, but I don't have the time.

  • Wordstar? Geezus

    Damn, Taco, it's cool to be Atheist and all, but "Geezus"? Come on. That's one right you have for being religious, is the ability to shout out "Jesus!" There is no "Geezus". What is that?
  • I can agree with you there. There have been rather simple bugfixes I have submitted that are -still- sitting as "NEW" under Bugzilla... not even assigned.

  • no, but I am sure they don't use every feature of every library. Why not just rewrite the functions needed? The more libraries an application depends on, the easier it is to break and more difficult it is to fix bugs and such
  • Wow, it does look like a nose w/spider.

    Somebody get this guy some ink blots. I want to see what else he sees.

  • Mandrake 7.2 and upwards???
    --
    Azrael - The Angel of Death
    posted with: Mozilla (0.7)

  • Strange. I have a mpg with a monkey pissing itself in the mouth - looks funny too.

  • I was looking at pr0n and my keyboard cable became entwined on my Ximian! It's chocking it! Help! Help! Oh no! It's foaming at the mouth! Stop it! Quick!
  • Why not just rewrite the functions needed? The more libraries an application depends on, the easier it is to break and more difficult it is to fix bugs and such

    The more you duplicate the same functionality in different places, the easier it is to break and more difficult it is to fix bugs and such :)

  • Yep, I have to say Evolution is going to be fantastic.

    I'm not so worried about the mailer as I am about the Calendar / Task list / Contact Manager. When I gave up windows and Schedule+ full time, I was just not satisfied with Gnome Calender / Address Book. The integration with other programs was weak. The customisation facilities were limited. I just gave up managing my personal information.

    My life became even more chaotic than it originally was.

    I missed appointments, I drifted aimlessly, not knowing from one minute to another what my days goals were. I forgot peoples phone numbers. I even forgot my own address.

    Weeek after week I would apt-get upgrade, watching for Evolution updates. Sometimes there would be a point release. It would always crash. Sometimes no update came. Sometimes the update came and refused to even start. I began to apt-get less and less. My friends stopped speaking to me. My mother didn't recognise me when we passed each other in the street.

    But finally, last week, I ventured into Debian Sid and found that the PIM part of Evolution 0.9 WORKS! It's a little ragged (I can't sort my tasks by priority :-[) but I finally feel order creeping back in to my life. Slowly. It's not a revolution. It's an evolution.

    Thanks, Ximian :)
  • I wouldnt argue with that, I would argue with the fact that when I want to build Gnome, I have to download about 30 or more files. I'd like to see one great whacking 20-40 meg package where I untar it, run ./configure exactly once. then type make, and it actually makes everything. That is my idea of cool.

    I dont want to have to track down 30 files across 5 ftp sites, sourceforge and everywhere else on the planet, find out what is out of date, look at dependencies, try to compile something, realize that gnome-applet requires gnome-vfs, which requires a header file that is in gnome-applet, that needs to be copied to /usr/local/lib to work, try to compile it, then watch it fail because some obscure dependency that the configure script doesnt even check for isnt there. find out what package contains that, track that package down everywhere, find out there are ABOUT 7 COMPETING LIBUNICODES, none of which are compatible with any others, and that I need a specific one, called libunicode (gee, how specific), that is buried on ftp.gnome.org after all.

    Then try to compile sawfish, which has its own dependancies. Then try for evolution that again, has its own....

    Screw that, give me a tarball. I want a make World, like XFree86. I dont want any griping about dependancies, etc. I just want it to work.

    This is coming from someone that just spent all night downloading/compiling gnome, just so he could get Evolution to work. Poo on that.

    dammit!

    Andrew
  • Oh, and before you call me a moron for not using the libunicode on gnome's ftp server, well, um it was in unstable. You see, typically when software is released there is the release stuff, which should be reliable and build correctly, then there is the unstable.

    In this case something required to build the *stable* Gnome was in unstable only, hence why I didn't look there before. Great thinking on their part.

    Andrew
  • ?

    we are not duplicating functions. For example, we have library 0.1. library 0.2 comes out, and now gnome apps no longer work. we must change all apps. Now imagine if 5 libraries get updated. Why should we depend on library if we only use 1 or 2 functions from it? All it does it add space to your harddrive, unnessacary memory usage, and more change for bugs.
  • Themes all depend on the WM. That isn't something that will be happening.

    That said, there is a whole mailing list dedicated to KDE-GNOME interaction. And in whole, the WM Spec mailing list got very good interaction from WM developers, KDE developers, and GNOME developers.

    You'll see more in Gnome 1.4 and above.

    --etrnl--
  • I honestly think the conspiracy theory is true. I know Mandrake, for example, had stated that 8.0 would contain kernel 2.4, KDE 2.1, and GNOME 1.4. Within a day or two of the KDE 2.1 release, Mdk 8.0 went beta. Beta 2 had some bug fixes, but not GNOME 1.4. GNOME 1.4 went beta in time for Mandrake to do a beta 3, which otherwise was pretty close to beta 2. Had the 1.4 release not happened when it did, Mandrake 8 would probably have been released without it. The next Slackware release has been delayed quite a bit as Pat waits for GNOME 1.4 and the kernel to stabilize. And I think Caldera was ready to go with KDE 2.1 and GNOME 1.2 if it hadn't been for the timely GNOME release.

    Also, there's no way GNOME 1.4 is release quality yet. The Nautilus 1.0 release was really rushed (for perhaps other reasons) and required libraries that conflicted with some of the packages in the 5th toe release (e.g. Evolution). Not to mention the fact that it can't stop crashing. Also, note that GNOME 1.4 was released _before_ the Bonobo 1.0 release.

    The 1.4 release reminds me a lot of the 1.0 release. It's unstable, it has library dependency issues, it was announced prematurely, and binaries have been slow to appear because there is still development & testing going on.
  • Not if the MPAA/RIAA monkeys catch you...
  • You gotta admit it has more punch than "A computer on every desktop."

    Although with Microsoft's historic instabilty I sort of wonder if way back when someone make a mistake and read it as "A desktop on every computer." It would explain a lot.
  • As an early PC'er, hailing from the S-100 days (actually helped a friend solder up a MITS Altair), there were many times I gave thanks for WordStar. It fit on a floppy and could be found anywhere, being one of the first programs widely pirated. Where do you think vi's commands originated? Just substitute 'ctl' for 'esc' when you're changing direction...
  • If you unistall evolution for the time it takes to install red carpet, you can reinstall evolution from it's red carpet channel and everything works fine.
  • * * Nautilus Wow. The basic architecture is there. To you skeptics who look at Nautilus and say "it doesn't have feature X " or "it's too slow" I say, watch development closely, check out the hourlies, watch CVS commits, read the mailing list archives. A lot of cool stuff is coming.


    Not trying to be flamebait here, but what do you say to us skeptics who say "all Nautilus did for me that was impressive was consume 160MB of RAM and make really great thumbnails for my pr0n"?

    Seriously. It's chock full of "feature X", but YTF do I NEED feature X? More importantly, why do I need it more than 160MB of RAM?


    -
  • I wish there was a way to mod stuff down for being just plain wrong. Qt is not a company its a toolkit like GTK+. Ximians product is targeted to most of the /. demographic (desktop). TrollTech makes Qt, they dont target desktop users.

    -Compenguin
  • Sorry. By `Qt' I meant the company Troll Tech. My point was that Troll Tech, the makers of Qt, should have their own category and that stories about Qt should come under that label instead of under the KDE label. And Troll Tech does have its own logo that /. can use. Samawi

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