Submitted by Here’s a tour of the pre-alpha demo release of GNOME Online Desktop included in Fedora 8. Learn more about what it does and how you can get involved in the project, writes Havoc Pennington.
Tour of GNOME Online Desktop
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The article doesn’t say how to enable online desktop. I found that the easiest way is to execute
# yum install bigboard
as root (or with sudo) to install everything you need. Then log out, select the Gnome online desktop in the menu “Sessions” and log back in. Gnome will start with bigboard sitting on the left side of the screen. To use its features and other applets you need to register a account at http://online.gnome.org/account first.
Mind though that everything is still a bit unstable and that things tend crash a lot.
The article doesn’t say how to enable online desktop.
From TFA:
Install the packages “online-desktop,” “mugshot,” and “bigboard.”
– login (gdm)
– chose “online desktop”
As you use Mugshot, we may collect other information relating to you, such as the content of any messages you post and the activities you undertake as you use Mugshot, for example the links you post and the music you listen to. If you choose to install the Mugshot software on your local system, music that you listen to on your local system will automatically be listed in your profile information. You may disable and re-enable this passive publishing of your music history at any time. As part of the Mugshot service we may provide this information to other users of Mugshot. We may also use this information to tailor advertising to you and make recommendations to you about other music, websites and content you may like. For example, if you often listen to a certain musical artist, we or an advertising partner with whom we share your personal information might display an advertisement alerting you to the release of a new CD by that artist.
mugshot != online desktop
as mono != Gnome.
“For example, if you often listen to a certain musical artist, we or an advertising partner with whom we share your personal information might display an advertisement alerting you to the release of a new CD by that artist.”
Which is not entirely terrible. Something very similar goes on with last.fm, which gets the tunes I listen to from Amarok. What I would want to avoid would be incessant reminders of bands and cds that are like the stuff I listen to. Music execs and marketing droids are terrible at gleaning likes and dislikes from playlists.
Except that last.fm has far less information about you than mugshot: Apparantly, mugshot’s main functionality is to register all your online accounts at one central place: flickr, picasa, youtube, gmail, last.fm, del.icio.us, your IM address, your facebook or myspace account – normally these are separate. Last.fm only knows, what I listen to. It does not know my favorite web sites (del.icio.us), nor what virtual friends I have a myspace (I don’t have any, btw!) and what my favourite youtube videos are. mugshot attempts to gather all that information in a single place.
One could say that mugshot looks like an open source version of big brother.
Specific user interface ideas, such as a desktop sidebar called BigBoard.
Now, that’s what I call progress. Geez.
It reminds me of the old Longhorn alpha screenshots where they had a bunch of silly links in a sidebar. I guess they came to their senses at some point between then and the Vista launch, because I don’t think the side bar exists like that in Vista anymore.
So I guess Red Hat is not leading the way in PC desktop innovation like they’d have me believe… those trixy hobbits
Edited 2007-11-14 14:36 UTC
It does remind me of Windows 98 Active Desktop, and their Channels bar they used to have. I do not like the sidebar approach. I don’t use the sidebar in my browser, I doubt I’d use it on the desktop. Of course, to each their own. I do think the technology is cool, but will wait to see how it progresses.
Well I’ve said this before, but the online desktop wiki leaves a bad impression right from the start. The second paragraph starts with “Microsoft will move too slowly.”. The fact that they felt the need to put down competitor’s efforts before they even present their own ideas tells me they are not confident in the value of their offering.
I think the integration with web services and web apps is a good thing, but everyone has been going in that direction for a long time. I don’t really see what this brings to the table, aside from the sidebar, which I’d disable anyway.
Also the fact that you need a gnome account makes it a non-starter for me. Right now it’s free (and perhaps even ad-free, I haven’t checked), but servers aren’t free, and eventually someone is going to have to pay for the cost of maintaining them. So either they put up ads (which I’m not willing to tolerate) or they charge users for access (which will drive most users away) or they pay for it themselves. I don’t like the feeling of depending on something paid for by other people. If that money dries up you’re SOL.
It looks like it to me.
http://fanaticattack.com/2007/a-letter-to-the-gnome-foundation.html
As long as Gnome supports OOXML, I can do without Gnome.
FOSS office packages don’t have the market or mind share to prevent OOXML becoming dominant. The fact Microsoft are even pushing it through a standardization process is a miracle and if they don’t it will *still* have taken over the market. This is a fact.
I’m glad to see there are some level headed people in the Free Software community clever enough to realise this and try and make the most of a shadowed situation by making sure the standardized document is as clear as it can possibly be.
What next? Give up swfdec and Gnash and tell Adobe to go f–k themselves until Flash is open sourced?
first, this entire thread is totally OT in a discussion about online desktops. Having said that, I can’t help myself but reply anyways
flash as it currently exists can’t be used as a shield to hold off competition in two major markets (office productivity apps and operating systems) which is what MS’ document formats have long been used for. If it were in a position to do so then by all means, such attempts should be resisted by anyone with an interest in the expansion of software freedom.
Luckily the current climate is forcing a rubberstamp of “standards compliance”. That is the ONLY reason MS is pushing OOXML to ISO. Some people take the pragmatic approach of using the situation to force OOXML into something useful as a standard, ie implemented by 3rd parties. The alternative is reverse engineering a proprietary blob.
This is too good of a chance to let slip by.
Is that why whole countries are using oasis instead of ooxml?
I for one is kinda skeptic to this whole internet/desktop integration. I would prefer my desktop had as few dependencies as possible, and Internet got to be one of the most unreliable dependency there is…
I am all for diversity and choice, but if this online desktop thingy gets too much attention I am afraid the “old way” becomes unmaintained in comparison.
rather than being an explicit app/sidebar type thing I’d rather just have pervasive, intelligent integration of my choice of online services with my desktop apps.
My photo management software should know what online photo service and blog service I use and give me context appropriate option to integrate with them. The same with apps that have a text engine of some sort… when I select some text one of the available option should be to blog about it, no matter what app I’m in when I do the selecting.
Most of this sort of integration is already available in some apps in some form, what I think would be better would be if the DE contained an API that abstracted all the general online service type stuff so that apps could painlessly include the functionality that makes sense and the actual technicalities of dealing with a given online service could be handled by plugins. Essentially this would be a reflection of the design philosophy that went into KDE4’s solid architecture.
I’ve played with Online desktop a bit. You have to create an account and login to it.
It will be interesting to see where this goes in the future.
This thing not only looks seriously messy it’s also very ugly and completely useless.. They’re just duplicating things that already exist, and they’re even doing a bad job at that.. -.- This could be completely awesome thing if they had actually made online-specific improvements to EXISTING software! Like f.ex. storing your wallpaper, your desktop settings, your IM settings et al on a remote server and thus making it possible to log in from any internet-enabled computer and not having to customize your desktop! Even better: if the remote server had like 100 megs of free space reserved for all registered accounts, the computer you were using might not need to save anything on the computer itself thus also eliminating the need to even create a user-account!
On remote as an option yes, but on the internet…count me out!
1. Install Unix server at home (FreeBSD, Linux, whatever).
2. Install NX server.
3. Carry around the Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, etc version of NX client on a USB key.
4. Start NX client on any system with a USB slot, and connect to your home NX server.
Voila. Instant “online desktop”.
This is similar to what we do in the local school district, where all the schools have Linux servers and Linux desktops (full KDE). If they want to work on things from home, they just fire up the NX client and access their school server.
Edited 2007-11-15 01:22 UTC
Or, if you trust third parties, just use CosmoPod
http://cosmopod.com/
What is the equivalent of this in the KDE world? Has something been cooked up too?
Calling a sidebar with a bunch of notifiers an (online) desktop just does not make sense, apart from being the usual marketspeak.
To try out, I registered at online.gnome.org, but there is absolute nothing of any visible practical use. I simply have no idea, how it could possibly contribute to improving my productivity (presupposing that “desktop” has something to do with being productive, rather than with making gazillions of virtual “friends” at facebook or myspace)
Edited 2007-11-15 08:22