GNOME 2.13.4 has been released. As always, the odd-numbered branches indicate dev-branches, and as such the 2.13.x series is the step-up to the GNOME 2.14 release, planned for March this year. Release notes: platform, desktop, and bindings; downloads: platform, desktop, and bindings.
I like the general idea of the new logout window, but it should not be a movable window. Also, the Switch User button should allow you to switch directly to users already logged in. As it is now, you’re sent to the gdm login window, which will potentially make you log in to an account twice.
The logout window in GNOME 2.13 is still the same.
Ubuntu has a patch against it, that’s probably the one you’re talking about. I’m not a fan of it, though.
maybe i should try out gnome again. the fact they tell you what kind of socks they wear in such an semi-official announcement makes them cool
That laxness in the announcement is indicative of their careless development and planning attitude towards GNOME too. 😀
It is a dev release, they don’t have to be dull about it. Usually people that enjoy what they do are better at it.
don’t be so negative. i don’t really like gnome, but you can’t say they have a careless development and planning attitude. many ‘proprietary’ developers (microsoft!) could learn a lot from their disipline: every 6 months a predictable release, and they DO keep their word (Vista took almost 3 times as long as they promised, and many features that where supposed to be in WINDOWS NT will NOT be included in Vista).
edit: typo. and this is a reply to the person above me, who replied to me. when will OSnews start working properly?
Edited 2006-01-06 17:11
I’m fairly certain his comment was meant as a joke..
Not when it comes from Linux Is Poo.
I’m sort of overbearing with him, since he’s fond of Captain Pirk, but he hates Linux for sure.
When gnome releases a version that doesn’t include important functionality because it didn’t make it in time for the schedule it makes me think that a rigid release schedule isn’t all that great.
If it’s important security wise it will be released on its own.
Otherwise, if you have a flexible release schedule you will just be continually pushing back the release. There has to be a line drawn somewhere.
You can have a little of both.
You could say “We are definitely aiming for a release on _____, and will have a working, releasable product by then, but if a key feature is not complete by that date, we will push the release back to no later than _____. If the key is not complete by the second date, we will release the working product as it was ready without the key feature.”
Why the hell was this modded down?
WTF is wrong with you people?
“When gnome releases a version that doesn’t include important functionality because it didn’t make it in time for the schedule it makes me think that a rigid release schedule isn’t all that great.”
In that case the feature will end up in the next release, which is only 6 months away. And each new GNOME release has hundreds of bug fixes and new features; don’t forget that when you’re waiting for a certain feature, you’re also waiting for all the bugfixes and other features introduced and that are already stable, finished and ready-to-ship.
And you also have to define what’s “important functionality”. In the grand scheme of things it won’t matter if a feature was introduced in GNOME 2.4 or 2.6, but it will matter if you keep the users waiting for hundreds of fixes and features that get implemented forever. GNOME learned that in late days of GNOME 1.4, when 2.0 was still in development.
Who brought Vista into the equation? I don’t get it. Vista is 20x more complex than GNOME, seeing as how … well … GNOME is just a DE and framework, not an operating system with a kernel, window server, audio server, and so on …
Oh, and when you say Vista took almost 3x as long … how do you figure that? XP was released in 2001. Vista will be released in 2006. That’s a difference of five years. Let’s say that when you said “almost 3 times”, you’re talking about 2.5x. That gives us an original 2-year wait. Vista was planned for release in 2003? Right. Where’d you get your information, Mr. FUD?
It is reasonable to say “almost 3x” = “2.5x”
Yes, and I made that very reasonable assumption — yet his statement still doesn’t work out. I’ve noticed an increasing amount of fear of Vista in the hearts of many Linux fanboys lately.
Measured with what, your imagination?
No, realism. Linux fanboys are not in touch with reality.
A major new feature is the search box in nautilus, which searches the current folder and its subfolders for a given string. This solves a big deficiency in gnome. It is also very flexible.
A feature which unfortunately didn’t make it is the ability to set file permissions recursively. See
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/cneumair/2005/12/26/0
and especially
http://blogs.gnome.org/view/cneumair/2005/12/28/0
A major new feature is the search box in nautilus, which searches the current folder and its subfolders for a given string.
Wow! That’s really useful (when wading trough /usr/local/bin searching for a specific binary or something). And to think that it occured to nautilus folks first instead of konqueror developers … I’m shocked.
“Wow! That’s really useful (when wading trough /usr/local/bin searching for a specific binary or something). And to think that it occured to nautilus folks first instead of konqueror developers … I’m shocked.”
You can actually add a find icon to the konqueror toolbar that is better than the Nautilus implementation because it opens a sidebar that actually searches the folder you’re in. I think it’s also under the Tools menu.
Thanks – it is indeed powerful, and it embeds nicely too (metadata search, mod/access time, everything I need
.
This show how important documentation can be. It is probably documented somewhere, (it might even be in kandalf’s tips), but grouping info based on tasks might be more useful (this is not just KDE specific, it is true of GNOME as well). For instance a guide about “organizing your files more efficiently.” 10 items, no more in there, with screenshots (like the kubuntu starter guide). Another guide entitled “Multimedia” – 10 tips again, no more. Etc…
you can add a quicksearch to konqi, which filters on what you type. it doesn’t search in subfolders, but it narrows the view to the given string. its very fast (instantaniously, acutally) but has some minor bugs (and isn’t easy to add).
you can add a quicksearch to konqi, which filters on what you type. it doesn’t search in subfolders, but it narrows the view to the given string. its very fast (instantaniously, acutally) but has some minor bugs (and isn’t easy to add).
You can also use kio-locate, which front-ends the locate database. Just type in locate:xxx in Konqi and it will bring up all the matches it finds, grouped by folder if there are multiple matches in each directory. Not perfect, but it works well. Can even use regular expressions for the searching, if you’re so inclined.
Of course, being kde, it’s politically correct to refer to things like that as “unecessarily complicated bloat” until Gnome has time to add a similar feature, then you can refer to it as “enhanced usability.”
Gnome needs to ad a ‘open command line here’ menu to the right click of a mouse. This should work from anywhere, and display the ‘full path’ of where you clicked on the screen in the terminal window! Also, Gnome needs an option to open Nautilus as super user so you can edit files with ease. This ‘su Nautilus’ window would be password protected of course, as in KDE. It should be available as an icon in the programs menu. I’m tired of installing the stupid script to get the ‘cli here’ to work, and it is under a stupid scripts menu. This should work ‘out of the box’ I can’t stand this weakness! That is why I switched to KDE… Gnome, please fix your crap!!! I am so mad at Gnome developers that I could scream! I’m also tired of hearing how a ‘normal’ user doesn’t need command line. Come on, this is Linux. We need command line! Half the programs available for Linux need to be setup from a command line. Not everything is RPM or DEB and the packages that are, have dependencies that many times need to be installed by CLI. Gnome developers, clean up your act! Most users of Linux are not stupid! If they were stupid, they would be running Windows. I will add this… I do like Gnome’s look! Excellent eye candy! Now if it only worked properly…
The Man
The right click open terminal here was split out of the core nautilus distribution a few releases ago in preference for a nautilus extensions (or nautilus actions – cant remember which) plugin framework. As a result open terminal here is available as a plugin
google is your friend: nautilus-open-terminal
In the set of links, there is a link for bidings that piqued my curiosity. Turns out, it’s the link for the bindings. 🙂
as far as i’ve seen this user’s comments before: i don’t think so.
aaah, i think you’re right, i think the “we release when it’s ready” is very good. but its just i don’t think they are lax – as keeping such an reliable release schedule takes quite some effort and discipline.
are inside the upcoming release apart from heavy Evolution fixes?
Linux is better served if the Gnome hackers will just do the right thing, give up and lend their talents to the KDE project. Did they not hear the verdict about Gnome from Linus himself?
The new gnome dialog in the development version of Ubuntu (Dapper Drake) is an Ubuntu specific patch. As the developer of it has already stated on the mailinglists and IRC, it is not yet ready for general consumption.
It *is* a major improvement over the gnome stock logout dialog and I fully expect it to be integrated into the 2.16 release once the bugs are worked out. To the gnome release team: Great job guys!
Im really looking forward for 2.14 specially for the optimizations.
Vista might very well be a bit more complex than gnome, but then – its not such an advanced OS, its just that its such a mess it takes years and years to make a new release… and Gnome DOES include a toolkit, a soundserver and much more applications than XP has.
btw yeah, and what about winFS and all other features they promised years and years ago?
and yes, vista was promised 2003/2004, 2 years after XP. just like 1.5-2 years after vista the next windows (Blackcomb) should arive (i guess it wont…). remember XP came 1.5 year after 2000, and vista aimed for such a timeframe, too.
what other features they promised years ago, examples please?
Gnome is coming along very nicely, imho. As it grows in complexity, so it’s not realistic to think major major changes can be done well in only six months. Optimizations to speed things up, well that would be very welcome.
Federico Mena Quintero, who posted the announcement, is one of the good guys and any outfit would be fortunate to have him, imho. He also has a great line in fish recipes.
“Gnome is coming along very nicely, imho. As it grows in complexity, so it’s not realistic to think major major changes can be done well in only six months. Optimizations to speed things up, well that would be very welcome. ”
The development work can take more than 6 months. Some features for example are already scheduled for GNOME 2.16, because doing them in 2.14 is not feasible. But we won’t have to wait for these few specific features that take more time to develop to enjoy all the other features and bug fixes they have already ready for us.
Gnome is coming along very nicely, imho. As it grows in complexity, so it’s not realistic to think major major changes can be done well in only six months. Optimizations to speed things up, well that would be very welcome.
I agree with you. IMHO, Gnome 2.10 was a very good release, the one that convinced me to change my default DE from xfce4 to gnome, and Gnome 2.12 is better, but the switch to gtk+ 2.8/cairo penalized it.
Xorg 7.0 improved the situation, because with EXA and the Composite-related bugfixes I can now run with xcompmgr enabled, and moving windows around has never been more fluid, but I’ve got great expectations for the release of cairo 1.2, that should have many glyph-related optimizations, and for the performance improvement in pango.
Edited 2006-01-06 22:04
Hmmm, I may try gnome again when 2.14 is released, but I really hope there are some improvements in speed this time… Gnome > KDE in terms of speed before, but now, at least on my box, KDE > Gnome…. Especially 2.12 is slow.
>Especially 2.12 is slow.
i can’t agree. On Debian i have upgraded to GNOME 2.12 just some days ago. And i’m surpriesed, GNOME2.12 is recognizable faster on my system. I’m curious about GNOME2.14 because there should be some performance improvements too.
By the way some have talked about a new logout dialog from ubuntu. Is there a screenshot available, you just make me curious
Here: http://www.manucornet.net/GNOME/logout_dialog/
It looks good, but is there an update on whether it supports Solaris x86?
Monad?
(because of the database loss i lost some of what i wanted to say but whatever, this is enough anyway
)
a few things i found on the web, from old to new(er):
“Gates received a mock honor of the “Golden Vaporware Award” for his preannouncement of the first version of Windows to preempt entry by VisiOn, a GUI announced in 1983 when by 1985 it still had not shipped.”
what about the promise in 1996 of a 64 bit Windows release?
what about cairo, a totally new and improved windows, promised in the 90’s and never delivered?
http://www.crn.com/sections/news/top_news.jhtml?articleId=
“Formerly known as Palladium, Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) will not be fully available in Windows Longhorn after all.”
and how many times did they promise a secure windows?!?!?
“Formerly known as Palladium, Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) will not be fully available in Windows Longhorn after all.”
and how many times did they promise a secure windows?!?!?
Well the NGSCB (Palladium) stuff has very little to do with security and everything to do with other things. Unfortunately for them there are huge amounts of technical and practical difficulties. You basically get software that locks everybody and everything out to the point where no one can use it.