A Preview of Ximian's Gnome 2.0 Desktop

TweetZilla writes "Dennis Powell has a good preview of Ximian's newest desktop. But does anybody care at this point? How many people still use Ximian's desktop? As opposed to Evolution?"

We do...

[eyeball]

How many people still use Ximian's desktop?

A lot of Solaris users (including myself) that don't want to spend days downloading and compiling dependencies for Gnome.

Re:Ximian Desktop 2.0

[l0ki]

Read the article- it's (will be) based on 2.2. I'd say that with the polish and finish that 2.2 has brought vs. 2.0 that this was a lot of the code maturity and consistency that Ximian was waiting for. - you have to remember that although they are not up to CVS speed for getting this out.. (I know I know it's taken them freakin forever) that they wanted to wait for a good solid "Gnome Distro" to be tested and ready. They don't target this neccesarily towards the techie crowd- but more as a corporate (easy to roll out and maintain via Red Carpet (and RC enterprise) desktop solution WITH a company in the back to optionally support it (important seling point to some mgrs.). Also it's an easy to install/maintain and 'fairly' quick intro to Gnome for a lot of folks who won't/can't/don't want to compile and put up with problems with bleeding edge code...

Ximian Gnome & Red Hat 8

[the_rev_matt]

I used Ximian Desktop right up to the day I installed Red Hat 8.0. Which Ximian doesn't support yet. As soon as XD supports RH8, I'm using it again.

Who cares?

[SiliconJesus]

I do and others like me who use non-Linux X servers like Solaris. I use Ximian Desktop because Evolution isn't well suited for a Ultra Sparc IIi 400 mhz with 128 mb of RAM, whereas the Ximian desktop is.

Think before you spout.

Re:Poisoned My System!

[Brackney]

That's true. If you're trying to upgrade a Redhat install that's had Ximian overlayed, you need to IMMEDIATELY do a Ximian upgrade afterwards or the system will be unstable. I've been through 3 Redhat upgrades with Ximian, and have been just fine as long as I've followed that procedure. I'm stalled at Redhat 7.3 (which is no bad thing IMO) until Ximian gets this new desktop release ready for use.

Re:Probably quite a few

[4minus0]

Slackware users should check out Dropline [dropline.net] Gnome.
The maintainer Todd Kulesza has done an awesome job with it. It is installed as easily as any other Slackware package.
Updates are easy as cheese too.
Highly recommended for Slackers.

Re:Ximian Desktop 2.0

[avalanch]

You need to read the article. It is based on GNOME 2.0. The only reference to GNOME 2.2 was that GNOME 2.2 will have been out for a couple of months by the time Ximian releases their 2.0 desktop! It never states that Ximian Desktop 2.0 is based on GNOME 2.2

Re:Ximian Gnome & Red Hat 8

[ajs]

Ditto on that front.

If you're running RH8.0 and want to use a version of Gnome that's a little more current, may I suggest that you check out Garnome [gnome.org]? It's a very nice ports-based Gnome distribution based (currently) on the latest 2.2RC1 (2.1.90)

I installed it on my Laptop which is running RH80, and it fixed a lot of things that were pissing me off. Upgrading galeon from their site didn't hurt either.

Re:clue. lack of.

[schon]

Windows and Linux interpret font sizes differently

Actually, no. Internet Explorer interprets font sizes differently than everything else..

what looks good on windows just looks too small on Linux, and we have to zoom in to the page

Again, what looks good on IE looks too small on Netscape.. it's a result of the browser wars.. MS deliberately made the equivalent font sizes one size larger, so if someone was designing a page and viewing it only with IE, they'd make the fonts too small to be readable on Netscape, to 'encourage' Netscape users to switch.

Re:I still use it

[bwalling]

I know what your saying about the ease of installing Ximian, but using KDE for comparsion was a really bad example.

I used KDE on purpose. It astounds me that there is no installer for KDE, nor is there a Red Carpet-like tool. Those are what keep me with Ximian. They are easy to use.

Yeah, sure, I can pop open a console and use apt. I don't want to have to. I like clicking on an icon and getting a nice gui with my updates. I have better things to do with my time than to root around looking for information on what to add to my sources file for apt, or to download the ton of RPMS that KDE requires, and then get all the versions right for QT/aRTS. It seems I always have trouble with QT and with aRTS.

Re:File Dialog...

[ElGuapoGolf]

I'll take Swing's file chooser any day over the suck-ass one that's the GTK/Gnome file chooser.

At least Swing's has the basic buttons I like. Home. Up a level. Create a folder. And it lets me sort files by different options.

GTK has none of those. The fact that swing has them really elelvates it waaay above GTK's selector. It is so not close to "almost as bad".

Easy...

[DarkDust]

How many people still use Ximian's desktop? As opposed to Evolution?

Ask corporations which use Linux on the desktop and want some support :-) My company is doing a roll out of Linux based workstations (actually thinclients) to a health related organisation, and if budget would be higher it'd be nice to have more software for which you pay but get support when some problems occur...

How to make GNOME 2 kick ass like GNOME 1

[0x0d0a]

Edge-flipping and viewports are both in GNOME 2. Annoyingly enough, the GNOME people took a page from the KDE people and decided that no one would *ever* want one big desktop, so their default now sucks. It's quite easy to get things back, though.

I use sawfish. Add the following to ~/.sawfishrc: ;; set up viewports
(setq customize-command-classes '(default viewport))
(setq viewport-dimensions '(3 . 4))

(or whatever size you want -- I like 3 across, 4 high.

For edge flipping, be sure you've turned it on in the sawfish config dialog.

Finally, a bunch of the kickass features in GNOME 2 are off by default to accomodate less-than-technically-ept Windows users. You probably want them on too.

Add the following to ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

gtk-can-change-accels = 1
gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"

This will give you emacs style keys back again. Once more, ctrl-a will go to the beginning of the line, ctrl-k will kill, etc. It will also let you rebind menu items by simply hovering the mouse pointer over the item so that it's selected and then hitting the desired key combination.

And I agree about the Evolution/Desktop thing...how did this ever get on Slashdot?

Re:The nature of Ximian

[tzanger]

KDE people are trying to essentially produce a clone of what MS has done, and directly compete with them for Windows users. Smaller, programs more tied to each other, less independence for individual projects. GNOME people are trying to take an umbrella of projects and "condense" them into a desktop environment. Larger, more modular, programs more independent and simply packaged together.

Funny, I think that KDE has got the market on modularity. I can embed bits and pieces of practically any kpart-enabled KDE app into a bigger, grander app (think the Kroupware project, kvim integration to any text edit place, DCOP...)... My KDE desktop is nothing like my Win2k desktop -- I can do far more with it in terms of configuration and getting it to do exactly what I want than I could ever do with Win32, and that includes things like litestep and the other explorer addons/replacements.

Gnome has no corner on integration or modularity. In fact, I think it's hindered by GTK's insistence that C can do OO as well as C++.

HOWTO Add edge flipping to metacity...

[Mongoose]

No diff, b/c this works in CVS, debian, etc builds...

In the file src/window.c

In the function constrain_position(...)

In the else {} block after the if else (window->maximized) {} block

After the function call:
meta_window_get_work_area (window, FALSE, &work_area);

Add this code: // Mongoose: This is a hack and it's not ideal, however it took me several _minutes_ to make this! // I might make a real patch later, but for now here you go and I'll make it shift window position if asked // Quick and dirty edge flipping hack, // looks for mouse cursor touching edge during window drag

#define EDGE_FLIPPING_HACK
#ifdef EDGE_FLIPPING_HACK
if (1) // turnOnTheEvil
{
static int transition = 0;
int threshold = (window->rect.width/2);
int left = 0;

if (transition)
{
if (!(x work_area.x + work_area.width - (threshold + 16)))
transition = 0;
}
else if (x work_area.x + work_area.width - threshold)
{
MetaWorkspace *workspace;

transition = 1;
workspace = window->screen->active_workspace;

if (workspace)
{
int index = meta_workspace_index(workspace);

if (x work_area.x - threshold - 40)
{
++index;
left = 1;
workspace = meta_workspace_get_neighbor(workspace, META_MOTION_LEFT);
}
else
{
--index;
if (index 0)index = 3;

workspace = meta_workspace_get_neighbor(workspace, META_MOTION_RIGHT);
}
} // Hack to allow 'ringed' edge flipping needs to use index

if (workspace)
{
meta_window_change_workspace(window, workspace);
meta_workspace_activate(workspace);
}
}
}
#endif // Please remember metacity is a pretty poor code base w/o any documentation I could see and this is the quickest entry to produce this // IMHO havoc should take the carrot out of his ass and add features and fixes instead of bitching

Re:I still use it

[Sokie]

I just discovered Konstruct with the KDE 3.1 release and I'm very impressed. It's a collection of Makefiles that allow you to use these two commands to install KDE 3.1:

cd meta/kde
make install

That's it. It downloads, checksums, extracts, compiles, and installs everything in the right order. I set it to running (installed a libpcre-dev package when it complained) and let it go overnight. When I woke up in the morning I logged out and logged back in and bam, I was using KDE 3.1. Very slick.

I was worried that since I had KDE 3.0 installed from packages (RPM's from Mandrake 9) that it would have trouble getting everything installed and working smoothly from sources, but I didn't have to do anything.

There are other subdirectories that let you do the same thing for koffice, quanta, and several other parts of the new release.

http://konsole.kde.org/konstruct/ [kde.org]