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You shouldn't be using Gnome on that machine. You should be using fluxbox or something similiar. And forget about Mozilla or Firefox on that machine too. It's time for an upgrade buddy.

I used firefox and gaim and xchat at once on fluxbox on a machine with, effectively, 56MB of RAM. The swapping was hardly noticeable. Well, of course certain kinds of websites weren't any fun to browse (ones with lots of decent res pictures).

Since when is it your place to tell somebody else to upgrade? Any sane person will upgrade when their computer no longer serves their needs, or the cost and loss of time become are less of a consideration than lost productivity. A person's financial situation is also a consideration, as are their priorities (though it is probably safe to assume that computers are a high priority among people who visit OSNews).

I know that I have a couple of 680x0 machines (sub-33 MHz) in use, and they are great for the jobs they are used for. That isn't to say that I would run any version of Gnome or Firefox on them, but they are more than adequate for email, IRC, writing, (fun) programming, and so forth.

Any sane person will upgrade when their computer no longer serves their needs, or the cost and loss of time become are less of a consideration than lost productivity

Any sane person wouldn't be running modern Gnome on a p-200.

I don't know about that. I'm running Gnome 2.8 (Ubuntu Hoary) on my Toshiba 460CDT (P166, 160Mb RAM). It's slow, but not unbearable.

Yes, it will be a problem. On a similar machine I have used WindowMaker and xfe. Xdm as the login manager. They run very fast. Konqueror seems to be the fastest of the web browsers, though Firefox will run, and I don't use OO, but Gnumeric and Kword - they run just fine. K funnily enough seems faster than Dillo. I found the best way to get to a stripped down install was using Debian Pure and doing a manual package install. You need to get wmakerconf to set it up easily. It takes a few minutes to get to know WM, but once you do, its easy, fast and painless. The trick with not having a desktop in the usual sense is to put xfe always open in another desktop.

It probably has more power than my 400 PII as well, but my PII is a lot more useful to me than a PDA .

Cairo does indeed rock, in terms of incompatibility and ABI breach, something Microsoft never does, not even in a decade.

Yes, well - since they've not actually released a 1.0 version yet, that's not surprising. We don't expect Microsoft to maintain compatibility with it's own development releases either.

You'll note that the weblog isn't actually complaining about the changes, just reporting them. Projects that have elected to use non-final APIs live with the fact that they have to change their own code from time to time. That's why both the article and weblog are dealing with development versions, of Gnome and Mozilla respectively.

That said, they seem to have committed to the final version of the API now, since that's one of the things the Gtk guys were waiting for before releasing 2.8.

> Yes, well - since they've not actually released a 1.0
> version yet, that's not surprising. We don't expect
> Microsoft to maintain compatibility with it's own
> development releases either.

Why do you tell this nonsense? Didn't you understand the text? GTK 2.8 is *released*, it *depends* on cairo, no matter if i's < 1.0, and it is *incompatible* with GTK 2.6. This is nothing about "development versions", the *stable* and *released* version of GTK is *incompatible* with the previous stable of GTK. Please don't tell me something about "development versions", this doesn't apply here, or is GTK 2.8 now a "development version" again?

That's false. GTK-2.8 is backward compatible with GTK-2.6. If you coded your applications well, you do not need to change any code for your application to work with GTK-2.8.

> That's false. GTK-2.8 is backward compatible with
> GTK-2.6.

Is Firefox pure imagination?

> If you coded your applications well, you do not need
> to change any code for your application to work with
> GTK-2.8.

Please make a decision:

[ ] Applications work unchanged with GTK 2.8 and Firefox is imagination
[ ] Firefox does not work unchanged, but it's my fault because I use a released version of GTK which depends on an unreleased version of cairo

We have two contradicting explanations now, which one is correct?

Firefox is not a pure GTK application. It uses many hacks to get GTK working well with it. Please inform yourself.

[ ] Applications work unchanged with GTK 2.8 and Firefox is imagination
[ ] Firefox does not work unchanged, but it's my fault because I use a released version of GTK which depends on an unreleased version of cairo

We have two contradicting explanations now, which one is correct?

Firstly, the development versions of Firefox use Cairo directly, so Firefox itself needs code changes if the Cairo API changes. That's what the weblog entry posted earlier was talking about, nothing to do with current Firefox releases (which don't use Cairo).

Secondly, GTK 2.8.0 was released in parallel with a a major version jump in Cairo, from 0.6.x to 0.9.x, which included an API change. It's my understanding that this release was only made once the Cairo developers confirmed that this was the final version of their API that would be in 1.0.

As it is, apps compiled for Gtk 2.6.x should run unchanged on 2.8.x. However, apps compiled for 2.7.x might not, and apps that use cairo directly probably won't either. As I said, if you run development releases, you expect to live with a bit of pain.

Firefox does not really use GTK. It uses what little it can of it to get the look of the theme that is in use.

GTK applications work unchanged. Applications which only use GTK so they can mimic the look of it, not actually use it will probably break.

I think be meant binary incompatible. Which I'm sure is false as well.
Of course, independent closed minded (err closed source) vendors can always statically compile against gtk anyway. Then they'd have no problem. That is ... what they do on Windows (except with Microsoft's libraries).

Actually cairo IS 1.0.0 as of ... right now

Not necessarily a DRI card - just one with hardware acceleration, such as the nVidia drivers provide. So a GF2 ought to work, even if not quite so well as a more modern card...

As for timeframes, it's not something that's really linked to Gnome, since that just uses underlying libraries like X and cairo. So that will come whenever the lower level projects are ready, not as part of the KDE or Gnome release cycles.

If a GF2 with nvidia closed drivers can't handle drawing the screen then I doubt ANY of the OSS drivers on any card could handle it. I'm sure he will be fine for the next 5+ years for everything except maybe 3D games.

It's sad just how bad the OSS drivers really are.

hehe.. I just love quotes like "Gnome was unsuable without clipboard management"..classic...

Now, back to reality...

It took them this long to get it right. It took KDE this long to get it right too. The disadvantages of the not-right solution were greater than the advantages.

Why when news about KDE comes out, gnome fans dont say anything, but when Gnome news come, everybody starts trashing it. Just a comment.

No, I think it's fairly well balanced actually. Whenever one of the projects releases a new version, all the nutters who favour the other show up to make a noise about everything they like about their project and hate about the other.

If you look at some of the recent KDE announcements on OSNews, you'll see they produced much the same reaction. KDE trolls hang out on Gnome threads, Gnome trolls hang out on KDE threads.

Gnome fans don't say anything?

You must be new here....

You mean the GNOME/KDE merger plans that don't exist, never have, and most likely never will?

What's the latest about the plans of converging Gnome and KDE? Didn't freedesktop.org also start some steps in that direction?

If by 'converging', you mean working together to use common code where possible, then yes, that's the main role of freedesktop.org - to provide a place for that kind of cooperation to occur. Things like the specs for menu files and storing recently-used files. Software like xorg, dbus, hal, etc

But they're certainly not talking about merging the projects entirely. And talk of plans is misleading - people simply come up with proposed standards, document them, and try to get people to use them. Other projects choose to follow those standards if they think them useful, else come up with their own.

"New theme for GNOME 2.12

Is not finished yet.

http://stellingwerff.com/cl-cairo/wip5.png "

Ooo... not bad, not bad The minimize-maximize-close buttons are a bit squashed for my tastes, but otherwise overall it looks pretty nice

The minimize-maximize-close buttons are a bit squashed for my tastes

The titlebar is just Richard's quickly hacked together XFWM theme. He does not use Metacity himself. Earlier he used the Opus theme on screenshots, but that led to some confusion...

> New theme for GNOME 2.12
> Is not finished yet.
> http://stellingwerff.com/cl-cairo/wip5.png

The screenshot above shows a new version that will be rendered by Cairo. The current version can be considered as finished.

that is awesome

That shouldn't keep you from useing Gnome.
You can use SMEG (Simple Menu Editor fo Gnome) right now in GNOME 2.10.

To install it you will also need some stuff from free desktop org. For more details on download and install, see: http://www.realistanew.com/projects/smeg/

Of course it will! It's true that Ubuntu is in a feature freeze right now (since Aug 11 I think), but Gnome has been in feature freeze since July 13th according to http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning_2fTwoPointEleven -- so Ubuntu will continue to pick up bugfixes from Gnome as they get them (and fix their own distribution bugs).

It's no coincidence, as I'm pretty sure that Ubuntu is currently basing their freeze and release dates around Gnome's schedule.

"Please tell me which one has a future, so I only use that one. Dont want to waste time."

Whichever one you're currently rooting for, of course.

If you don't like the default theme, you can always change it, look through art.gnome.org and don't need to spend money for an application like WindowsBlind.

Actually, I see more and more people getting tired of bluecurve (on Fedora, where it is the default)... right now I consider gperfection2 to be the absolute best _icon_ theme.

As for the gtk theme I stick with ClearLooks (one of the bluish ones), since I find the gperfection2 color scheme to lack contrast (dark grey text on olive/brown widgets).

"Actually, I see more and more people getting tired of bluecurve (on Fedora, where it is the default)... right now I consider gperfection2 to be the absolute best _icon_ theme. "

Fedora has not used BlueCurve as it's default theme since either FC2 or FC3, it now uses the clearlooks theme (I think the swap was made when Fedora started shipping with two bars).

But they were talking about the icon theme and Fedora still uses the Bluecurve icons. In my eyes, Jimmac's icons are clearly superior though. If people just want a brighter folder icon, there are better ways to get that than to switch to a completely different icon theme... Both Jimmac and the designer of Bluecurve now work for Novell, so I'm curious what they'll come up with next.

If you refer to those talking of "bland" icons, I think they were talking about the gnome stock ones. Someone suggested BlueCurve as a better set, and I replied that actually bluecurve is starting to look old, and has not been that goodlooking from the start (too much "windowish" yellow folders, for starters).

As for the toolkit i use ClearLooks BlueSky (or something similar :-) ), but I'm open to changes (for example to a brownish theme ubuntu-style).

I use the Clearlooks-graphite theme, it has much better contrast than the gperfection one. I honestly think that the gperfection or the graphite suite should be the new default, it's very nice o the eyes.

They have nothing to do with each other. Cairo can use FreeType to render text, and that's about it. Cairo is a vector drawing library, FreeType is a font rendering library.

- Simon

With all the hoop-la surrounding antialiasing in Cairo I wasn't sure if Cairo implemented font rendering in addition to vector graphics. Thanks for clearing it up.