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A Look at GNOME 2.14 602

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the pretty-new-toys dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Gnome has a nice preview of their newest version 2.14 posted which should be hitting the streets around the 15th of March. From the article: "As well as new features and more polish, developers have been working around the clock to squeeze more performance out of the most commonly used applications and libraries. This is a review of some of the most shiny work that has gone into the upcoming GNOME release."
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A Look at GNOME 2.14 More

A Look at GNOME 2.14

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  • Coral Cache Link (Score:4, Informative)

    by Breaker_1 ( 688170 ) * on Monday February 20, 2006 @05:49PM (#14763514) Homepage
    Before they get slashdotted: http://www.gnome.org.nyud.net:8080/~davyd/gnome-2- 14/ [nyud.net]

  • Biggest change: (Score:4, Funny)

    by Musteval ( 817324 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @05:54PM (#14763549)
    The "File" menu has been disabled in all programs. GNOME proponents stated that the change is to ensure that end users "aren't confused by all of the big words, like 'exit' and 'print.'" The Edit menu has been removed in most programs.

    • Re:Biggest change: (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hackstraw ( 262471 ) * on Monday February 20, 2006 @05:59PM (#14763577)
      The "File" menu has been disabled in all programs. GNOME proponents stated that the change is to ensure that end users "aren't confused by all of the big words, like 'exit' and 'print.'" The Edit menu has been removed in most programs.

      Yes, that is funny!

      However, who in their right mind would put 'exit' under the "File" menu? 'print' and 'close' makes sense, but 'exit' is to exit a program, not do anything with a file.

      • Re:Biggest change: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by modecx ( 130548 )
        It's clear that you've never encountered users who "Click out of a file", which seems to be most of them. I'm still not quite sure how that one is supposed to work, but I've also known my share of users who "Exit a file", which they apparently took from File->Exit. Anyway...

        • Re:Biggest change: (Score:5, Interesting)

          by jacksonj04 ( 800021 ) <nick@nickjackson.me> on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:24PM (#14763729) Homepage
          I've encountered users who have not realised that applications could be closed. They called site support saying their system was slow. I walked in, saw their taskbar full of apps and just hit the power button. I would have said that on their double-layer taskbar there was only 5 or 6 pixels per active task.
        • GStreamer, the official audio backend for GNOME, will include DRM plugins [gnome.org] developed by a company called Fluendo, which hopes to make money by restricting the users' rights and turning GNOME/Linux/"the Free Desktop System" into a Vista-like nightmare [slashdot.org] controlled by the entertainment cartel [downhillbattle.org]. Why? Because Fluendo is on the GNOME Foundation's Advisory Board [gnome.org]. I can't believe I've been so stupid to actually give them money, so that they can turn around and stab Free Software in the back! Never again will I trust t

          • Re:GNOME's audio backend GStreamer to use DRM (Score:5, Insightful)

            by diegocgteleline.es ( 653730 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @07:27PM (#14764102)
            Vista is much worse than just a plugin, they're planning to control via DRM absolutely all the path that the media content follows from your DVD to your screen.

            DRM is just a propietary file format to keep people tied to a software just like CSS is a very succesful way to control the dvd-player market. It's not there to keep people away from seeing video. By implemeting DRM support you break the main purpose of DRM

            The one reason why itunes sells DRMed songs is because in 5-10 years, everyone who bought itunes songs will NEED to buy a ipod to listen those songs, no matter if by that time ipod is the worst and more expensive player of the galaxy. You're stuck with apple products

            The same goes for DRM'ed .doc documents. Has microsoft published the office stanrdard to let people steal market share from a product which is 30% of the total income of microsoft? Hell, no. Publishing standards in office 2003 looked nice to governments. In the real world, office 2003 also includes DRM. All documents DRM'ed with office will need...office to be opened again in the future. No other software will be able to open them if Microsoft doesn't let them. Office standards being "opened" is just a lie. DRM being "secure" is just a lie. I can do everything office DRM does with PGP - even allowing people to see documents remotely through a "DRM server"

            So DRM is just a closed document format. But instead of being a standard closed format which can be reverse-ingeniereed, they use crypto to make the "perfect closed format": A closed format that can't be reverse-enginereed. By allowing people to use DRM in other systems you break the purpose of DRM. But yes, DRM should be avoided. It's ironic that DRM has been created in the country that is supposed to love capitalism - DRM keeps me away from choosing products from other companies which is what the capitalism is about.

          • Re:GNOME's audio backend GStreamer to use DRM (Score:4, Insightful)

            by 0racle ( 667029 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @07:29PM (#14764107)
            restricting the users' rights As opposed to, oh I don't know, some random person advocating restricting users rights to run what they choose to on their system.

            Some people are going to want to run and use DRM-ified content. You are trying to restrict their rights to do so by demonizing a technology that can not be evil so as to push forward your own agenda. Information does not want to be free, it can't want anything. Software does not have rights, computers do not have rights. People do have the right to use their system the way they want, and that includes choosing systems that use DRM.

            A truly free system allows the user to choose how to use it, it is not one where the developers force their agenda.

          • Re:GNOME's audio backend GStreamer to use DRM (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Pecisk ( 688001 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @08:50PM (#14764549)
            Yeah, yeah, right. What about DVDs I would like to see? What about DRM-enabled bought files from iTunes?

            Lets be clear. DRM is not evil. Abuse of it's functionality and usage from RIAA/MPIAA is, well, it is close to stupid and shortsighted (at least so far - region coding for DVD for price fixing, requesting DRM for bough songs in Internet shops like iTunes). But there are lot of LEGAL and UNDERSTANDING uses of DRM in multimedia, even for small media companies.

            I understand that music and movie cartel actions is something is should not taken lightly, however, such hyperbole which are claimed by RMS and other "wisle blowers" are too much. Fight companies which abuse DRM, don't fight DRM itself. Because by itself it is just one of technologies to allow copyright holders have their rights fullfilled. If it is abused to limit anything.

            It is NOT a black/white situation. And claiming that Fluendo is doing just to give "control of Linux desktop media to cartels" are plainly overblown and childish claim. Fluendo actually created LEGAL mp3 plugin for you to use, freerly. you can download it at their webshop, put it in your home directory, and vola - no half-legal repositories, no endless searching. It is just works.

            And by the way, Xine is illegal to distribute in US with mp3/divx/quicktime support. It is just by the way. Mplayer too.
            Of course, there is "nothing wrong" with these apps in geeks view. But it totally wrong to think that any distro will get ANY kind of support for those prioritary formats out there with such attitude. Oh, you don't want prioritary formats? What about your XVID videos? What about divx movies? Mp3? Quicktime trailers which geeks love so much? Haven't got enough?

            Be real. There is world out there which are seeking compromises not always screaming about something they don't like. And trolling (yes, such claims about Fluendo ARE trolls) won't help not your cause, nor KDE, nor Linux desktop overall.

          • Re:GNOME's audio backend GStreamer to use DRM (Score:5, Informative)

            by VStrider ( 787148 ) <{ku.oc.oohay} {ta} {zm_sinnaig}> on Monday February 20, 2006 @10:49PM (#14764962)
            Noone is forcing anything on you. DRM plugins will be in the "ugly" module. You don't have to install this module. GStreamer will still work perfectly fine with the rest of the plugins.

            From gnomejournal: [gnomejournal.org]

            Most distributions, for legal reasons, only ship a small subset of GStreamer 0.8 plugins. Because GStreamer's plugins are built from the same source module, each packager was forced to split it up to remove components that were illegal or unwise to use in their particular area of operation. The amount of custom code caused a number of problems for users. To solve this, 0.10 has five plugin modules called base, good, ugly, bad and ffmpeg. Base and good contain plugins that any distribution can ship without fear of potential legal issues. Ugly contains well-maintained plugins which may or may have legal issues of some form, generally patent or license issues. Bad is an incubation area where new plugins mature before moving to good or ugly. If a plugin never matures, it may remain in bad for the rest of its life. ffmpeg contains wrappers for all the codecs in the ffmpeg package. This new scheme will allow downstream packagers to have more consistent package naming and installation scripts, making it easier for users to discover and install the plugins that they need.

            The base package is not intended to contain all the plugins required by a typical GStreamer setup. Instead, it contains one important example of each type of GStreamer plugin. The code and documentation for base plugins will remain current so developers will always be able to create new plugins from a known working code base.

            • Noone is forcing anything on you. DRM plugins will be in the "ugly" module.

              The whole reason why GStreamer started was to create a framework that would enable these "ugly" DRM plugins. GStreamer has hurt the multimedia effort on Linux and the Free Desktop because they stole talented developers from much more mature projects like Xine [xinehq.de], MPlayer [mplayerhq.hu], and VLC [videolan.org]. In other words, they further fragmented the developer base purely for the selfish, immoral purpose of ramming DRM down Linux users' throats.

              Of course, th
              • Xine is more stable, but GStreamer has the better design (it already surpassed Windows' DirectShow). Also, with Xine, VLC, and mplayer, it is impossible to play DVDs legally. Thus, GStreamer's closed-source modules are a good thing. No DVDs means no new Joe Averages for the Linux desktop, no increased market share and therefore no greater influence useful for fighting MS lock-ins by giving standards weight. Right now, Linux distros work out-of-the-box with standards like Ogg and OpenDocument, but MS can sti
      • I guess exit is in the file menu for historical reasons. There used to be a quit command under file menu in virtually every old macOS app. With OSX apple correctly chose to move that command into the apple menu.

        BTW i am actually using XFCE4 because of its old macos usability bonuses: 1) black cursor, easier to spot on mostly white windows 2) custom layout for the window buttons, the close button on the left, the others on the right.
    • That NOT true!

      The File menu has simply been integrated into the Edit menu. The Edit menu was then dropped.

  • Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the_rev_matt ( 239420 ) <slashbot@revmat[ ]om ['t.c' in gap]> on Monday February 20, 2006 @05:55PM (#14763558) Homepage
    Makes me want to fire up my linux box again. I particularly like the admin tools and the "save your search as a folder" feature. OS X admin tools are sometimes a little restricted for my taste.

  • Progress! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hackstraw ( 262471 ) * on Monday February 20, 2006 @05:57PM (#14763564)

    It looks like I'm going to have to admin a lab of Linux boxes soon, and I'm pleased with the progress that is coming on the nebulous "Linux desktop".

    Although, both Gnome and KDE are still 90'ish, at least Gnome is now knocking off OS X instead of Windows.

    Now, for the confusing part. Why was their previous allocator so lame compared to malloc()? Its worth a read to check out this [umass.edu] for an allocator. Being that multi-core/"threads"/CPUs are pretty common today, its worth using that to one's advantage.

    • Re:Progress! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:07PM (#14763615)
      Gnome is now knocking off OS X

      Why not call it collaboration instead. OS X is using like 50 GNU programs straight off, source and everything. Gnome (Which is part of GNU) is borrowing some ideas, but not code from OS X. "Knocking off" seams like a bad thing when both GNU and Apple are using eachohers ideas and it's probably benifitial for both projects.

    • Re:Progress! (Score:5, Informative)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:15PM (#14763666)
      Now, for the confusing part. Why was their previous allocator so lame compared to malloc()?

      Because glibc's malloc() is actually a pretty fast and scalable piece of code for a general-purpose memory allocator. Even GNOME's new special-purpose allocator only gets about twice the performance of glibc's.

      • Re:Progress! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by xenocide2 ( 231786 )
        What I don't get is why they reinvented the wheel poorly. Did the old allocator work faster on scenarios not covered by the malloc-old-new benchmark?

      • Re:Progress! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:57PM (#14763944) Homepage Journal
        Call me crazy, but why bother coding it then? Isn't the trusted stability and consistency of glibc malloc() worth more than a minor speed increase?

        • Re:Progress! (Score:3, Funny)

          by pchan- ( 118053 )
          Call me crazy, but why bother coding it then? Isn't the trusted stability and consistency of glibc malloc() worth more than a minor speed increase?

          Obviously, because malloc() doesn't start with a G. And to think, they could have easily sped up their allocator years ago just by doing:

              #define gWhateverTheirAllocatorIsCalled malloc
    • Can you explain your comment about Gnome and KDE being "still 90'ish?"? I don't understand what you mean by that. I also really don't understand what you mean about knocking off OSX. Please provide examples!
      • I also really don't understand what you mean about knocking off OSX. Please provide examples!

        Network Manager has an interface pretty much exactly like the wifi config app in OS X.

  • SW Dualprocessing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @05:58PM (#14763567) Homepage Journal
    I really hope they've got the xcompmgr debugged so it works without freezing on my Inspiron8000. Factoring all display rendering operations out of the CPU onto the GPU in OpenGL will really squeeze a lot more performance out of GNOME, across the board.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Congrats to the developers, I'm really looking forward to trying it out when it goes stable!

    Just curious if anyone might know if Gnome 2.14 is making the cut for Fedora Core 5 or the next Ubuntu?

  • I think... (Score:5, Funny)

    by sheepoo ( 814409 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:02PM (#14763592)
    it's sexy
  • Aaaaaaand queue the slew of posts about how Gnome is a giant step backward in computer usability.

  • GNOME rocks (no offence to KDE) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stikves ( 127823 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:08PM (#14763620) Homepage
    GNOME has definately become a solid desktop with the recent releases (after 2.6 or 2.8). Now everything "works" perfectly (almost) out of the box. (USB sticks, iPods, DVD burners, all kinds of multimedia, SFTP/DAV/SMB/etc integration, openoffice, and many more).

    It has replaced Windows XP as my current primary desktop, and I can finally recommend Linux to my friends without hesitation.

    (btw You shouldn't have "DDOSed" the poor server. It contains really nice information.)
    • (btw You shouldn't have "DDOSed" the poor server. It contains really nice information.)

      I tried not to, but the other Slashdotters pushed me into it. Honest!

    • State of Gnome (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ajs ( 35943 )
      There are a lot of good things about Gnome, but some bad. Circa the FC4 desktop that I use, here are some things (I'll assume all is improved in the latest version) that I either love or hate:
      • Music and CD playing are primative, but work. XMMS doesn't play well with Gnome because it wants everything to be skinnable, so your window manager binding customizations don't affect it, it doesn't obey focus rules, etc. The default CD player is just kind of primative, but nicely behaved.
      • Evolution is bloated. I lov

      • Re:State of Gnome (Score:4, Interesting)

        by stikves ( 127823 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @07:23PM (#14764085) Homepage
        I have a similar setup of FC4, too. However I've upgraded GNOME from 2.10 to 2.12 using nrpms [nrpms.net] repositories, and I use several additional mono applications.

        My situation is roughly the same, but I have to add several things:

        • I currently use XMMS only for "testing" audio files. Rhytmbox or Muine does not have the problems you mention. (I actaully use BMP instead of XMMS, BMS is GTK2 port/fork of XMMS).
        • Integration of P2P lacking. I cannot comment much, since I only use azureus and it works well. However "magnet" urls (and any other scheme) can be handled easily in gnome (see /desktop/gnome/url-handlers key in gconf for ideas)
        • CD writing. Actually I installed k3b like you did, but have never used in the past several months. Nautilus burner is more than enough. (Yes no fancy options, however it's sufficent for me).
        • Movies I'd recommend VLC for H264/HDTV and mplayer for anything else. There has never been any format I could not play lately (including VMW9, QuickTime, H264, AAC, etc). (Did you install win32codecs package?)


        Anyways it's nice to see another fellow using a similar setup (OK, there are millions like us).

  • Program Naming (Score:4, Insightful)

    by caerwyn ( 38056 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:11PM (#14763635)
    Why do so many linux programmers insist on such crazy naming conventions. Sabayon? Changing a perfectly servicable and pragmagic GNOME Meeting to "Ekiga"?

    I use linux both at home and at work, so I'm not some anti-linux zealot or something- I think it's a legitimate question to raise. On my mac laptop, I have a handy app for browsing mDNS networks called Rendezvous Browser (since mDNS was once called Rendezvous). The name is simple and describes perfectly what the program does. On the other hand, 90% of the linux applications available have names that look like they were chosen by picking random letters and squishing them together. I'm sure that the programmers think they've very clever by choosing a name that means something in some obscure language- or they just thing the name sounds cool- but that simple lack of meaningful names is detrimental. If I start up a GNOME session and want to use network meeting functionality, how is there any possible way that I could guess that "Ekiga" is the application I'm looking for?

    • Re:Program Naming (Score:3, Insightful)

      by qbwiz ( 87077 )
      Rendezvous Browser
      Yes that name makes perfect sense. What exactly is Rendezvous, again?

      If I start up a GNOME session and want to use network meeting functionality, how is there any possible way that I could guess that "Ekiga" is the application I'm looking for?

      The menu will probably say "Internet Telephony" next to it. GNOME is pretty good about labeling the programs.

      • Re:Program Naming (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Queer Boy ( 451309 ) * <<dragon.76> <at> <mac.com>> on Monday February 20, 2006 @09:13PM (#14764635)
        Yes that name makes perfect sense. What exactly is Rendezvous, again?

        The French word meaning "a meeting". Maybe in your attempt at making a point you meant Bonjour [apple.com].

        The point he was making was that a perfectly meaningful name was intentionally obscured for who knows why. Also I've never heard ZeroConf Networking Browser on any platform, but I know of Bonjour on Windows and Macintosh, as well as being listed on a lot of printer boxes lately.

    • Re:Program Naming (Score:3, Informative)

      by soupdevil ( 587476 )
      Part of it is geek speak, but I think a large part of it is due to the cost and time involved in researching, registering and defending "traditional" names for companies and products. Odds are that no one will sue you for using the name "Ekiga," but it might take a large corporation to defend a sexy and often used word like "Rendezvous."
    • I am *so* with you on this:

      "Also in the new Admin Suite is Sabayon. This powerful tool allows administrators to create profiles for groups of users"

      Under W*nd*ws, this would be called the 'Group Profile Creator' and everyone would be happy AND would recognise what the tool did when they tripped over it.

      Those at the core of the Linux development world need to recognize that the names they choose can actually hinder adoption of their creations. I'm still uncomfortable promoting 'Kubuntu' to the board and I do

      • That's why I don't push Ubuntu or Kubuntu; I use the specific releases like Warty Warthog, Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger or Dapper Drake. Oops, that's The Dapper Drake.

    • Re:Program Naming (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Yaztromo ( 655250 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:30PM (#14763774) Homepage Journal

      While I don't disagree that a lot of OSS software uses poor naming onventions, as an OSS developer myself, I can understand the reasons behind it.

      Let's face it -- the obvious descriptive names are typically already taken. OSS developers want to write software -- they don't want to have to spend a lot of time doing name searches in order to ensure they aren't infringing on a trademark used by some tiny software house out in BF Nowhere, and they typically don't have the resources to fend off a legal attack. Thus, the tendancy these days is to pick (or make up) some sort of really obscure name that hopefully isn't going to attract negative attention from litigation-happy corporate lawyers, and then hopefully make a name for yourself.

      Naming is difficult, even within the corporate world. But at least within the corporate world you have people who can do research on existing trademarks, and will hopefully come up with a suitable name for your new product -- and then have the lawyers to fight it as necessary. OSS projects don't have such resources.

      Just take a look at your own example -- "Rendevous". Apple was forced to change the name to "Bonjour" due to trademark infringement with another company.

      If Apple, with its bevy of lawyers and billions of dollars, can run into such a problem, what is the poor OSS developer to do? Picking some obscure name that nobody is likely to call their product is a good (but hardly guaranteed) way to avoid the problem in the first place.

      Yaz.

    • Re:Program Naming (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:34PM (#14763795) Homepage Journal
      If I start up a GNOME session and want to use network meeting functionality, how is there any possible way that I could guess that "Ekiga" is the application I'm looking for?

      Because if things have been installed and set up properly "Ekiga" will be under the "Internet" sub-menu of the "Applications" menu, and the entry itself will read something like "Ekiga video-conferencing" with a tooltip saying something like "Communicate with others using text, voice phone calls, or video conferencing". You hold up "Rendezvous Browser" as a well named application because it's clear what it does, but it really begs the question: what the hell is Rendezvous and what does it do? I think the GNOME approach - to choose a distinctive name and pair that with a concise description - is a very good one. You can't have everything named after what it does or else things quickly get pointlessly confused, so distinctive names are good - as long as you pair that with a description of what the app does so people can find it easily. You'll find GNOME conforms to that pretty well, and the result (always having descriptive menu entries and explanatory tooltips for those entries) actually makes for a system where it is easier to find what you want.

      Jedidiah.

    • Re:Program Naming (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fossa ( 212602 )

      My personal preference is a word, made up or no, followed by a descriptive subtitle. So, Ekiga Softphone, GIMP Image Editor (ignore the redundancy), Sabayon Administration Tools (or whatever it is), and so on. I really dislike the coopting of generic terms like "Windows" or "Word". Granted, they have the adjective "Microsoft" in front, but Microsoft also claims a trademark on "Windows" (and "Word" too?). I would prefer something like Microsoft So-and-so (or just so-so) Word Processor as the full name.

      T

    • Re:Program Naming (Score:4, Insightful)

      by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @07:34PM (#14764142)
      You're right. They should have called it something meaningful, like Skype.

  • The Linux desktop is finally coming into it's own (Score:5, Insightful)

    by carlmenezes ( 204187 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:11PM (#14763641) Homepage
    You have Gnome and KDE - two very different approaches that manage to co-exist side by side. I'm a KDE guy myself, but I must say that Gnome's looking really polished and I can see Gnome and KDE standing beside, if not taller than Windows in the near future. I won't be switching because I like KDE's direction, but there are probbaly a lot of Gnome users who say the same and I can appreciate that.
    We also do need to thank the artists that put in the time to create the icons and mouse cursors for us. You can put in all the anti-aliasing you want, but if something like the icons dont look good, people get put off. I'm just really happy for the Gnome guys and all I can say is, "keep it up, you're doing a great job!"
    Linux is about choice. I wouldn't want either Gnome or KDE to wipe each other out. They need to co-exist simply to show Windows users that there is a choice available if not for anything else :)

  • speed! (Score:2, Informative)

    by bcrowell ( 177657 )
    I'm thrilled that they led off the article by talking about performance improvements. For the last 5 years or so, I've been staying away from Gnome because of its poor performance. I still remember the first time I tried it, ca. 2001 -- after clicking on a folder, I literally had time to get up and get a cup of coffee before it would open. Although I've been pretty happy with fluxbox recently, there are times now and then when it might be handy to have more of a full-featured desktop environment. I'll have

  • Beware the Ides of March! (Score:3, Funny)

    by dumbnose ( 190140 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:19PM (#14763695)
    Didn't anyone tell them that this is a dangerous day for this?

    Et tu, Bill?

  • using 2.9.13.9x for a week in Ubuntu 6.10 betas (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pyros ( 61399 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:22PM (#14763711) Journal
    There are some nice improvements. Gnome-power-manager adds a slick interface to configuring stuff like hibernate on critically low battery, what actions are taken for closing your laptop lid, sleep/power buttons, and stuff like that.

    NetworkManager is much improved, too. At least in Ubuntu 6.10 betas, you don't need bind do use it! Instead it finally uses the existing functionaly of the DHCP client to write /etc/resolv.conf. I don't think the VPN stuff from CVS is going to make it in though.

    Rhythmbox 0.9.3.1 is pretty nice. It has [iTunes] playlist sharing built in (reportedly, don't anything to share with). I don't have an iPod but I think that should be supported practically out-of-box too. So you might wonder what improvements I actually do notice. You can finally specify a watch folder to sync your library with, import an audio cd, scan removable media, and queue songs from your current playlist. The queue is viewable as a sidebar pane like the cover art display in iTunes. No support for displaying the cover art yet, though.

    Gstreamer 0.10 has cleaned up the plugin code, and reorganized their plugin classifications. Good plugins are open source and highly functional. Ugly plugins are legally questionable in some jurisdictions but are highly functional. Bad plugins are ones that may have bad implementations and I guess are more likely to not work. Unfortunately the faad/faac plugins are in the bad package, which currently has to built from source on Ubuntu 6.10. Hopefully that will be added to universe or multiverse by release. Everyone post from someone who has built it reports that AAC files play just fine (including me).

    I am having some trouble with dbus/hald not showing desktop icons for hard drive partitions mounted under /media. I set the gconf key for volumes_visible, and that works for CDs and such. But I have to restart dbus/hald after logging in to get partitions to show a desktop icon.

    Lastly, I haven't yet got xgl+compiz working yet. But compiz seems hard coded to use Mesa so far, so some people are reporting it's actually slower than plain old xorg with the Ati/Nvidia binary drivers.

  • Naming (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SnarfQuest ( 469614 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @06:30PM (#14763772)
    Ekiga, formerly known as GNOME Meeting,

    Oooh! Ekiga is a much more meaningful name than GNOME Meeting. GNOME naming just gets better and better. I know the last time I wanted to search for font information, overly sexually active monkey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo [wikipedia.org] was the very first thing that popped into my head.

    • Re:Naming (Score:3, Funny)

      by ScrewMaster ( 602015 )
      I've been sick for the past five days and I need a good laugh. Thanks for that!

      But yeah, naming is getting far out. For example, their new configuration manager is called "Pessulus". I don't know what that means and I'm afraid to find out.

      • Re:Naming (Score:3, Informative)

        by gerardlt ( 529702 )
        Tssk. What, do you know nothing?

        "A delicate bar of cartilage connecting the dorsal and ventral extremities of the first pair of bronchial cartilages in the syrinx of birds."
        From The Free Dictionary [thefreedictionary.com]

        Surely everyone knows that!

  • The most usable UI (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    On the principle that users hate choices, here's the new Gnome with the fewest options ever. The entire UI has been stripped except for two huge, beautifully rendered buttons in the middle of the screen. The red one says "on|off", and the green says "DWIM".

    Unfortunately the half terabyte of AI this requires also makes this the fattest gnome ever.

  • Congratulations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by theolein ( 316044 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @07:13PM (#14764040) Journal
    It's looking very polished. In the looks department it certainly is good enough for corporate users. It might not be 100% of where OSX is or have the fancy glass effects that Vista will have, but it's certainly light years ahead of what it was just 5 years ago.

    I just wish for one thing, and that is that the Gnome and KDE people would cooperate on clipboard and drag and drop standards so that software from one would work in that department at least in the other.

  • The l337 jargon has me confused . . . (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gcauthon ( 714964 ) * on Monday February 20, 2006 @07:38PM (#14764161)

    From the article:

    GNOME 2.14 should be called Searchable GNOME, with the addition of powerful new searching systems in Nautilus and Yelp. Both have a traditional search mode plus a fast, superhot mode for those of you who are Beagle-enabled!

    Can someone put this into words that an average user can understand?

  • Might I suggest. . . (Score:3, Informative)

    by lord_nimula ( 839676 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @08:24PM (#14764443)
    For those who find KDE and Gnome to be a bit much: http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/581/ [freshmeat.net]

  • Where's an integrated spellcheck? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Sark666 ( 756464 ) on Monday February 20, 2006 @09:27PM (#14764686)
    Kde has had this for awhile now, so in kedit, konq, kchat whatever you have a spellcheck available to you. Simple idea but when integarted into the os, it's really handy to know it's always there.
    Why hasn't gnome got on the ball with this?

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