Ximian Desktop 2 came out of few days ago and I gave it a go. This is not a usability experts review, and probably more of a first impressions thing than a review. I consider myself an intermediate user, (probably advanced intermediate). I installed Ximian Desktop on the following computer:
Please excuse any grammar/syntax errors found in this article.
AMD Duron 1.2GHz
512MB PC133 SDRAM
40+80GB 7200 Western Digital Hard drives
NVidia GeForce 2MX 200 64MB
Creative SBLive 5.1
Genius KB-18M Multimedia Keyboard
AOpen Optical mouse (dual USB/PS2 – used on PS2 right now)
Installation
I will start with the review of the install process. It is not going to be glowing at all. I have this suspicion they tested it from their own offices and their own network because it is giving too many problems they seem to not have anticipated. The idea was very good, but it lacked in the execution department. Here is to hoping for a updated installer for the masses.
Strike 1. It tried to download packages which would have been available from the Cd’s. And to tried to pull them from the Ximian servers which were absolutely swamped. It should have asked for the user to locate the packages if he had them already(such as Redhat Packages), and then downloaded them as a last resort if they were unavailable.
Strike 2. The installer had a local packages section, but this did not work You could have copied the files to the cache so that it skipped downloading them, but the installer is never supposed to assume users know to do that.
Strike 3. Even after copying the files to the cache to install them, it failed to install again. In fact I never installed it using their installer. It would quit without giving reason why, even though I had manually made every package I was installing available. I had to be very creative to install XD2 at the end of the day.
I success they did not try to install it from outside their own network, maybe from across the world and see how it could give problems in the real world.
So my installation was nothing like the recommended. I ended up installing red-carpet 2 first, and then installing the rest of the packages from red-carpet. It had its fair share of problems, but I will not review THAT installation route since it was (clearly) not the intended way to install XD2, although it did work and was easier in that regard.
So what happened now, how is XD2.
Industrial
On first logging in it asks you whether you want to keep your old settings or use the ones prepared for you. I chose the latter and was presented with the new Industrial theme and a very nice looking desktop.
I must say, a lot of thought went into creating the ‘default’ settings.
By default you are given a menu panel and a normal panel at the bottom of the screen. The menu panel has the menu, or course, a clock, three apps (Evolution, Writer and Galeon) if you installed them of course. The bottom panel has the windows list, the ‘Show Desktop’ button and a workspace switcher. Some people do not like using two panel as it “hogs” screen space, but I like it. I will not consider that a scoring point anyway, although it probably does give me a better impression of the whole desktop.
It uses large icons in the menu which make it instantly look much better. The menus are also kept reasonably short hence the large icons do not make menus hog all your screen. This is a simple yet very effective trick. Other theme makers would do good to follow this.
You also have a nice default wallpaper for good measure. The wallpaper changer is slightly changed from the one that comes with Redhat. It allows you to add wallpapers to a list and simply select wallpapers from a list. Nice touch!!
Openoffice.org
The changes to openoffice.org are mostly to the icon theme to make it look more integrated with the desktop. Unfortunately, its still openoffice.org, which means it uses its own widgets to draw its menus and such. I hope it can be made to play better with Gtk in the future. I do not have a printer so I could not see the printer dialogs to review them. It does seem to still use its own printer dialog which is a bit off though. And its printer dialog does not have the print to pdf option ion the GNOME print dialog too.
What I already missed is oopadmin which gave me an easy (somewhat) way to install fonts from other sources. It seems I now have to really learn where the fonts are kept for openoffice.org and copy them there manually. This is for my Microsoft fonts though, it uses the ones that Ximian came with just fine. What is necessary here IMO, is to give a fonts path, or fonts paths in the options where openoffice.org can pick up its fonts.
Everything else about openoffice.org is as expected. That means it is stil a resource hog (I caught it eating 219 MB of my RAm in System monitor). Their work is most welcome though. Openoffice.org just feels nicer to use now and is better on the eyes.
Evolution
Which brings me to the Evolution release. It looks like a port of 1.2 to Gtk2, which is fine by me. There does not seem much difference with 1.2, which probably explains not giving it a 2.0 release number.
Evolution was the last big non-gtk2 enabled app I used frequently. It does start much faster than 1.2.2. It takes about 3 to 5 seconds on first start up. On a 1.2 GHz Duron with 512 MB Ram, it seems reasonable. Outlook takes much longer to start up on this machine anyway under Windows 2000. Evolution finally looks very good and I found it snappy. I have never had reason to be unhappy with its performance here too.
Red-carpet
After a few problems using red-carpet in the beginning, it seems to like me now. The problem seems to be that you cannot start up the front-end until rcd has connected to a mirror. This is bad IMO. I really like Red carpet as a package manager, with or without the update capabilities. They should find a way to start it and make the on-line channels unavailable until rcd has managed to connect. I imagine it is useless without an internet connection like it is. I could be wrong about the whole starting up thing though, but it never allows me to connect until a long while after starting the daemon.
What new in Red Carpet. It allows you to use directories as channels, which is pretty nifty. Since I keep the iso’s for Redhat 9 on my hard drive, I automount them at startup and have added them as channels to Red Carpet. So now I can pull dependencies from there if I am installing new rpms if I use Red Carpet to install them. Pretty neat heh.
Control Panel
This is actually looking very good, but the best (return for Redhat users) is the menu editing. I can now add menu items using Nautilus. I have already customized a few which were not appearing there. The control panel works very well and is ultra intuitive. I remember missing Mandrake’s one, but this is turning out to be very handy indeed.
Galeon
Galeon is used here as the browser. This may actually become interesting as GNOME has adopted Epiphany for 2.4, but it works well. I do not know how to clear my drop down list in the Location bar. This is minor but can irritate. It works well though and looks very nice too.
Other
They have added a few of their own things there. Although it now calls my hard drives CD Roms in ‘My Computer’ and in fact, anything I mount in fstab. This is what it looks like now. The first 2 are my CD Writer and DVD-ROM and the next 3 would be hard drives (partitions) and the next 3 would be mounted iso’s. I have no way of changing this that I know yet.
Acme is provided too for all your multimedia keys, and there is the volume icon for volume changing.
I can also not rename the My Computer icon, or remove it. It may be a little annoying.
The gFTP package provided by Ximian was not compiled with the gtk2 flags, and therefore looked a little ‘old’. I promptly removed it and reinstalled the Redhat provided one.
We also got a new skin for XMMS, which is welcome. The more the merrier I say. It does help to give the desktop a uniform look.
Problems
I have lost the ability to use apt-get to keep my install up to date. Apt-get says there are conflicts there. If we had a contributed packages channel in Red Carpet, this could be not too big a problem, but I was accustomed to installing my 3rd party apps from there. Since I am going to be keeping XD2, apt has had to go. Red Carpet should step in its shoes nicely for all other purposes though. I don’t know which has the problem there though, whether it is Red Carpet or apt.
It would not be a proper review if I did not mention the file selector. It seems a little work can actually go a long way. But the file selector stil needs improvement. It is now much easier to use with its Documents, Desktop and Home buttons. The new Gtk file selector is badly needed though because it ruins an otherwise next to perfect experience. But, then again, I would rather wait for a good selector than have a rushed one.
And this may sound improbable, but even my XMMS seems to be skipping less now.
Final Word
I would like to conclude by giving score for each of the sections I have reviewed.
Installation – (No score). I shall not even score this as it would be embarrassing. Ximian, fix this. An good idea in my opinion is to provide a iso for the installation. Then people could run an automated install from a CD. Could help matters immensely here.
Look and feel – (9/10). I rate what they have done very highly here. Everything looks top notch and is very professionally done here. It goes to sow that at times, you just need a budget(for maybe user testing) to get these things correct. This is not done by people scratching an itch, (Unless money counts as an itch), therefore it is focused for ease of use and providing excellent defaults
Customizability – (8/10). Its GNOME and therefore you will have to dig into Gconf to make much headway. But what is provided is adequate, especially comparing with Windows where you cannot change the look and feel of widgets that much.
Speed – (8/10). It does feel faster than the default Redhat GNOME, but Redhat has never been a speed demon anyway. But everything looks tweaked well.
Defaults – (9/10). The defaults provided are impressive. The only thing that prevented it from getting a perfect 10 was that the theme seemed a little too light colored and at times lacks definition. Otherwise impressive.
Usability – (8/10). Openoffice.org, whilst probably being one of the most important apps here, badly needs serious integration with the rest of the desktop. A lot of the integration here is on the surface, but it still suffers from using its own widgets. Maybe it is time to make a full fledged Gtk port whilst retaining full functionality and document compatibility. But then again, getter said than done. But the whole thing is still usable overall.
Provided apps – (8/10). The desktop comes with nearly everything necessary to have a fully working desktop which does not need too much more. The productivy apps are good, but could use even more polish and full Gtk port. (What ever happened to the Gtk port)
About the Author:
Maynard Kuona is an undergrade student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He is doing a third year in Actuarial Science (damn hard course), and he enjoys computing immensely.
What’s the difference between Ximian Desktop and Gnome?
Nice to read something GNU/Linux-related from South Africa! How’s the state of the OSS onion down there? I remeber reading something about a Cape Town based OSS company called Obsidian and the government arguing with Microsoft about prices. But that’s about everything I heard about Free Software in South Africa. Can you give me a short update?
To not be completely OT: Very nice review. I just love XD2 but the installation was horrible.
Finally, an actual *review*, that tells me interesting things, that is engaging to read and has screenshots where the author didn’t immediately change all the defaults.
Why is it so hard for other people to write reviews like this? Let this article be a lesson to them
“What’s the difference between Ximian Desktop and Gnome?”
Gnome is one of the many graphical user interfaces for Linux.
Ximian Desktop is a Linux-based product of Ximian that uses Gnome to provide the graphical user interface,
Be sure to get it using the BitTorrent link and then install off local media…
This slashdot article explains it all…
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/09/0111209&mode=thread&tid…
I installed it fine using the install script. I started it before I went to bed and in the morning it was a slam dunk.
The selection to use existing preferences or install the xd2 defaults does not work. I expected to see the desktop look mostly like my rh9 desktop did…bein gthat there is only the one takbar on the bottom. nope. just for kicks I reinstalled rh on another partition and tried the whole process again…the setting doesn’t matter. it installs xd2 desktop settings no matter what.
Curiously, my copy of Star Office 6 that I got with Ximian Desktop Pro for Red Hat 7.3 would not install. I had to manually install the rpms, and it even had to download another file….which thankfully worked. It did not create menu entries though….and try as I might, I can’t edit the menu. Any changes I make don’t appear. Why does gnome have these silly menu issues? And why wouldn’t my ximian edition of star office install properly? silly if you ask me.
Plus, you don’t gain anything really killer with this. Bare in mind that I am a simple home user….but it doesn’t install any new multimedia apps or anything that makes my life easier…but that can only be expected when they are targeting enterprise users.
The whole enterprise user thing kinda bugs me though. I work in an “enterprise” with 1000+ people….I have to go online to view various client websites, and many times that involves dealing with flash, java, streaming media, etc…..if that ability isn’t installed by default in a linux client enviroment I think it’s a problem. The mp3 thing doen’t bug me, but you need to tools to view all the major multimedia formats online.
I don’t really like gnome though………and I don’t see anything major enough for me to think that XD2 is soooooo much better than plain gnome.
One big difference is the drastic improvement of file open/save dailog boxes in Ximian-enhanced apps. They come closer to the functionality of KDE’s open/save dialogs.
One annoyance: XD2 breaks compatibility with current versions of apt… Very annoying to have to download 30 packages manually, versus one apt-get line, but I’m sure it’ll get fixed soon.
And I concur; the installation was terrible. It kept segfaulting, because one package was corrupted, but it never told you that (figured it out w/manual trial and error).
Outside of that, pretty slick (OOo is MUCH improved). I’m running XD2 on a RHL9 box also.
I asked about this in the interview with Nat. Another Ximian employee replied that adding fonts to the users’ .fonts directory (through the fonts tool in the control center thing) will add them systemwide for any app that uses xfs, including Ximian’s OO.o.
I tried this in my install of XD2 and can confirm that it works. The only gotcha is that you can’t see the fonts listed in the .fonts directory until you restart the gnome session (or restart X). But, the point is, adding them to this directory does add them to OO.o too. You don’t need to do it manually.
I totally agree, the installation process is completely awful and un-functionnal under the few RH9 I played with.
I ended up with downloading half packages through RedCarpet and the other half from their crappy installer with the packages in cache.
XD2 could have been something really cool, but unfortunately, it’s perfectly unuseful, irrating and time-consuming, for very little benefits in comparison.
Come on, Miguel … try again.
Anyway, still good work in the GTK2 port of Evolution (when will we see junk mail filters as in all major mail clients ?)
>Come on, Miguel … try again.
Miguel has nothing to do with XD2 pretty much. His sole focus is Mono lately.
The reviewer mentions how apt-get has to go. I’ve encountered this also, and it’s the most disappointing part of using XD2, which I am very much in love with.
Red Carpet works – but it’s the packages that freshrpms.net has that Red Carpet doesn’t – from fun little games like lbreakout2 to the must-haves like xine, ogle, mplayer, especially with the plugins offered.
If you’re going to install XD2 do your apt-getting first!
Silwenae
The reason apt isn’t working in XD2 is that the db4 rpm built by Red Hat contains a conflict with the db1 rpm by Ximian.
There is a fix and a new rpm that a user built that apparently fixes this problem. I have not tried so cannot verify. (As an aside, yum works fine with the freshrpms yum repository. Too bad there aren’t more yum repositories!)
Anyway, here is the bugzilla entry with a description of the fix and a link to the rpm that is supposed to fix it:
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=44442
I really like the new XFCE4. But I had to rewrite my top 5 desktop environments for linux, and here it is:
1. XFCE4 – light, but still powerfull, nice themes
2. RedHat’s KDE, as fast as any KDE, but with defaults that I like
3. XD2 – the fastest GNOME I’ve ever seen, it’s only weakness is the moment when you open a directory with at least 500 files in it. Nautilius cripples GNOME.
4. Plain KDE, bloated, bloated, but I still like it
5. Plain GNOME less bloated, but slower.
I tried installing it but it always bombs out on a RH 9 system. Won’t even get past 5% or so. I like the product but I wish I can use it.
Nice review! I must have been one of the lucky ones, XD2 installed like a charm first try. XD2 professional does come with some nifty stuff over the XD2-free version, like flash, acroreader, realplayer, java1.4, and a smack-load of fonts.
I have to agree that I’ve been using XFCE4 and it works great! It’s VERY fast and has all the features that Gnome does that I use.
The only think to mention (it doesn’t bother me, but it may bother some people) about XFCE4 is that if you want to edit keyboard shortcuts you have to manually edit a text file.
I normally use KDE in Rh9. So I thought I’ll check out XD2. As the author said the installation was trying at best. Eventually it installed.
However, it BROKE my KDE. The Kicker has lost most icons. The icons on the desktop are mostly generic now. Given that KDE and GNOME are different environments, it seems that you would have to go out of your way to destroy the KDE desktop.
Will we read 2 years from now an excerpt of an internal Ximian email talking about how to “accidentally” ruin KDE, as we did in the msdos vs. drdos court case?
Anyway, as XD2 goes, it looks nice, though I find the default RH9 setup (with a single toolbar on the bottom) better. I don’t feel it gives you anything that you didn’t already get with default RH9 install, except for Evolution.
As far as OO goes, it still sucks. I don’t care what clothing (icons) you put on it, the issue at this point (and has been since 1.0 release) is not the looks, it is the startup speed. I can’t use it, if it takes 20 seconds to come up on a 2Ghz box. I prefer either KWord or Abiword, both of which come up nearly instantly.
I can’t seem to get my MS fonts working on RH9 with XD2… they look all squished at size 8… I usually use the Tahoma font all over the place but it doesn’t even look like it should, anyone got a clue?
MS Fonts look weird under RH9 because by default, RH doesn’t build freetype with the bytecode interpreter turned on (due to licensing issues).
I’d stick with the Bitstream fonts, which look quite nice under RH9 (make sure to setup Galeon to always use the fonts as well, under “Appearance”)
As for enabling the bytecode interpreter, I’m not sure how under RH9 but would like to know also. I’m guessing the .src.rpm provides the option but I don’t know
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=44442
… it destroys my RH9 🙁
KDE icons are gone (ok, i shouldn’t convert the Desktop to Ximian’s style), apt-get isn’t working as described. OO is only a nice Icon add-on (maybe they should used the 1.1b2 of OO).
And Gnome isn’t getting better in compare to KDE with Ximian’s “add-on’s”. No “right mouse button” context to “copy/move to…” a file/directory.
And no File manager in my panel to easy access some special network directories.
And I can’t change much of my windows movement, only use a “filled style” window movement again.
What they have programmed in this long time to XD2 final??
XD2 = original Gnome2.2 with nice icons & wallpapers.
Not much more.
Maybe I have thought (and hoped) to get more because it takes a relative long time to release…
Only one app is really really fantastic: Evolution 1.4
Sad, I must install nearly all of the Gnome2 stuff to run it. Maybe we have a gtk2-only Evolution & Gnumeric. With Gimp, Abiword and Grip we don’t need to install the Gnome2 stuff and used the best for the rest:
KDE 😉
Now, after a destroyed RH9 ;-), I use now again my Slack9 with KDE 3.1.2 from Slack-current (it’s the 486 one)
And it really fly’s if I compare it with RH9-Gnome/KDE *yippie* 🙂
Thank’s Pat 🙂 … and Ximian for Evolution 1.4 🙂
So has the bug fixed worked for people?
Surprisingly my install of XD2 was absolutely painless using the official installer from ximian.com, albiet the download was a little slow, using a fresh install of RH9 on my PC. I also have apt for the ‘other’ critical packages I would ever need…
Just a few comments:
And its printer dialog does not have the print to pdf option ion the GNOME print dialog too.
I find this quite serious, esp. for people who actually used the pdf export feature…anyone have any clue how to fix?
And its printer dialog does not have the print to pdf option ion the GNOME print dialog too.
Not sure though, for me all fonts in ~/.fonts were automatically picked up by OOo.org
I do not know how to clear my drop down list in the Location bar. This is minor but can irritate.
I’m not so sure myself, but I think clearing the caches in Edit -> Preferences should do the trick…
btw I’m myself using XFCE4, for RH users who haven’t tried it, you really should. There are rpms available from the official sourceforge site…
Linux for desktop is still a real drag.
What it lacks is concept. Instead of developing responsive and usable user environment linux programmers stuff Gnome and KDE with nice but unnecesary gadgets. They should learn from Beos and … Windows. Yes, I’m sorry to say but windows is 1000% more responsive than linux, whichever desktop it runs.
i also installed XD2 on RedHat9, and i didn’t have any problems using their oficial installer.
it downloaded & installed everything without any problems..
Well I tried out XD2 on a RH9 machine, because it is supposed to be *the* desktop environment for Linux systems.
XD2 has the exact same problems as every other Linux DE.
What the hell are the GUI metaphors? What single driving concept are all aspects of the GUI and the underlying system trying to drive home to the user. Windows treats the user experience like browsing the web. Apple treats the user experience like actually sitting and working at a desk (or they did before OS X). Etc, etc, etc.
There is a tremendous lack of cohesive concepts and impelementations in the Linux development community, and the desktop environment/software realm of the communities efforts seem to be the most obvious evidence of this.
All these GUI’s and DE’s are designed to look pretty first, organize the sprawling mess that lies in every Linux system second, and actually try and fix the broken or completely lacking usability and/or system metaphors that make Linux such a pain in the neck to turn into a desktop or media machine.
Append the word “last” before the final period on my previous post.
Such that the final statement reads:
All these GUI’s and DE’s are designed to look pretty first, organize the sprawling mess that lies in every Linux system second, and actually try and fix the broken or completely lacking usability and/or system metaphors that make Linux such a pain in the neck to turn into a desktop or media machine last.
Yup, the installation was an absolute pain here too. Took me four or so days. In addition to all the suggestions already made, please consider seeding into Bittorrent next time.
And while some of the polish is good, XD2 is behind the stock Gnome/KDE in many aspects. There’s absolutely nothing spectacular or jaw-dropping here. Some of the icons look butt-ugly and retrogade. Almost all look mechanical. And the system generally feels heavy and slow. Talk about being industrial. Generally, the industrial themework is not nearly as pretty as, say, Mandrake’s galaxy.
My guess is that Ximian committed minimal resources to this project. It took so long, and yet it has very little extra to offer. Some parts of it are not even nearly as good as the default Gnome or KDE.
And yeah, am I the only one who thinks the default font on the terminal is ugly? God, I can’t use that .. feels way tooo slow ..
I tried XD2 on my Red Hat box. It looks fantastic, possibly the nicest interface i’ve seen. Unfortunately a good chunk of the KDE menu icons were gone, my printer stopped working and Evolution 1.4 is broken with my ISP’s (and several others) pop server. The application fonts in gimp were blocky looking non AA’ish. I also had trouble with the local hard drive installation, even after following the support directions for doing so. I coulnd’t find a way to uninstall XD2 without removing basic parts of the system (kernel) so I ended up having to nuke RH9 and reinstall from scratch. I did reinstall the themes though
.
I’d like to reinstall OO but I see that will remove redhat-printer-config, which I don’t want.
I installed XD2 on two differents RH9 machine without any problem except for the installer… XD2 installer sucks too bad!
anyway XD2 is the best Linux Desktop Environment out there.
If you buy the enterprise edition of XD2 from Ximian it does install Flash/Java/Adobe PDF reader for you.
And as for the install issues everyone seems to have had – maybe it’s because of other random RPMs around the place, I don’t know – but on a virgin install of RH9 everything installed like a dream (and my guess is that in an enterprise, it’ll be installed over fresh machines).
> Miguel has nothing to do with XD2 pretty much.
He is the Chief Technology Officer of Ximian. He has something to do with anything they release. If he ignores those responsibilities for his pet project then he is doing Ximian a disservice. If XD2 has in fact shipped with a borked installation routine then the problem should fall on his shoulders. If the coders, testers, package builders, etc… report to him, then the problem is his.
> His sole focus is Mono lately.
A CTO can’t have a sole focus. If he is actually ignoring everything for Mono then the Peter Principle is coming true at Ximian.
well you are complaining about responsiveness.
sorry to hear your problems.
my redhat9 w/gnome is just as responsive as my os x jaguar, winXP and win2k workstations.
freebsd 4.8 -stable with KDE is faster yet(on slower hardware)
perhaps you should ask for some help from someone who has experience with such things.
After a seamless install I quickly adopted XD2 as my main desktop over xfce and quickly exterminated any reasons I was thinking of getting a mac for OSX – I might be going overboard a little but I really like this on my dell laptop – I would recommend it to anyone.
anyways I was really suprised to see a terminal server client. I tried it out and got the login screen however when I tried to login I recieved the error “You are trying to connect back to your own computer”. Has anyone seen this before? The hostname and ip’s are different and I can connect to the XP pro through terminal server from another computer….thanks
QAK
Same problem with the installation I already try 3 times, all fail 🙁
Did anyone have luck with de local media installation?
I already got 81% of the package
This guy was ahead of me:) I’m also preparing a review, but the install is done on my brand new laptop…
I have to agree with the general concensus here in that the installer is pretty broken. I’m on dialup here, and when it WAS downloading it was painfully slow. It stalled again and again, and about half the xd2 packages, i had to install by hand.
The overall feeling for me is than Ximian have been spending their time on Mono, and not enough fixing red carpet….how they can justify $99 for THIS is beyond me….but i’d never even think about paying that! i’d rather download over a modem….
Evolution is a gem however, they’ve done well there
well, if you don’t like it, don’t use it. It is a goos system after all, and yes, they did allot of work. but from where you talk you look clue-less and ignorant. just go back to windows.
Yes I noticed that the fonts show up. It seems they take a little while to show up though.
Clearing cache does not seem to work either. the location bar gets really full. It should be cleared with history IMO.
I think the theme does what it is supposed to do, icons and all. It looks quite alright, maybe not drop dead gorgeous but fine by me.
“Finally, an actual *review*, that tells me interesting things, that is engaging to read and has screenshots where the author didn’t immediately change all the defaults.”
I agree that the text was well done but changing a screen to another theme supplied by Ximian doesn’t change anything. A color is a color. A theme is a theme. And if it is supplied by Ximian – then it should be accceptable to show.
Why is it so hard for other people to write reviews like this? Let this article be a lesson to them
“
Because the people writing aren’t as smart as you.
Yeah – kill the other bastards. And when you complain then don’t forget to add that precious emoticon so you can later say you were “just joking” and no one should take it personally.
PS. The author of this article really does deserve praise for a job well done. I hope he writes more! But Mike needs to go back to the autopackage project and get some work done rather than taking pokes at other reviews.
Not much here. There are a few active LUGS around but I have yet to attend one. Its still Microsoft, although the government is looking very serious in its effort to rid itself or the Microsoft burden. Another reason I see, IMO, is that it is a bit painful to support Microsoft, which is a foreign company when government world over seem to favour their local companies for tenders. So in a way, some sort of empowerment. And we do have a Ximian distributor here.
How to fix apt-get:
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=44442
Works for me. Of course, I was the one that posted the fix. But on two desktops and a laptop, I haven’t run across any problems. It’d be nice to hear how it worked for others or have a Ximian employee look at it and determine whether there’s any possible problems. It really was a fairly trivial fix to RedHat’s db1 package…
Installing the appropriate RedHat packages without having the Ximian installer hit the Ximian main mirror:
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=44583
Renaming/Remove the “My Computer” icon:
Edit/Remove the “My Computer” file in ~/Desktop
(similarly for the Trash or your home directory icon)
XD2 is behind the stock Gnome/KDE in many aspects.
Only if you take unstable GNOME. That’s not the point of Ximian, the point of Ximian is to take stable software and test it EVEN MORE, polishing it EVEN MORE and making sure that everything just works for their corporate customers or people who prefer not to mess with unstable software (like me these days). XD2 is definitely NOT behind RH 9 Bluecurve or stock GNOME 2.2 in any way and it has a lot more professional polish to it. One I had the system installed and rebooted, I have yet to have any problems and I didn’t hear of much from other users.
Generally, the industrial themework is not nearly as pretty as, say, Mandrake’s galaxy.
When it comes to artwork, obviously not everyone will agree, as there are no measurable comparisons. Your opinion doesn’t seem to be the most common though:
http://gnomedesktop.org/pollBooth.php?op=results&pollID=37&mode=thr…
Personally, I rather use the GNOME defaults than Galaxy.
My favorites at the moment are Industrial and the new Gorilla (which unfortunately lacks a few icons).
And yeah, am I the only one who thinks the default font on the terminal is ugly?
This certainly doesn’t look ugly to me, don’t know about you:
http://213.133.111.182/Temp/Screenshot-Gnome-terminal.png
It is really sad that you feel the need to troll everywhere now and attack people personally who didn’t like your review… anonymously. You aren’t really showing your maturity here.
I have XD2 on my PIII laptop with 256MB and it was dog slow until I downloaded the source for the kernel from http://ftp.kernel.org and rebuilt it. RedHat has patched the scheduler and I was having huge problems with the disc trashing when I had a few apps open. Putting a standard unpatched kernel on has fixed those problems and 256MB now feels enough (as it should be frankly). With OOo, Galeon, Mozilla, Evolution and Nautilus open it still responds quickly. If you are having trouble with RH9 and disc trashing a kernel rebuild dumping the RH patched version works wonders.
Oh, and XD2 is really quite nice although Nautilus is somewhat unstable but I expect they will fix that shortly.
Not to mention that MP3’s will stop skipping as well. I’m very dissapointed with RedHat’s kernel.
so I get the xd2 installer and start downloading the files, at ~200KBps, the installer reaches somes 400MB and comes to a crawl, something like 2KBps, annoyed I check with another mirror and the same thing happens at 400MB.
Not to be discouraged, I went ahead and fixed up a local mirror to be accessed via http://localhost. A quantum jump in speed, alas at 400MB it comes to a crawl, mind you this is a local loop. Is there something funny going on here.
I tried to run the installer in debug mode, but there are no symbols to be had.
So failing to come up with a technical reasoning I came up with this idea “Ximian doesn’t want people doing a net install, they want to get paid for a CD-ROM and some subscription fee”.
just my $0.02
you can reach me at snkmoorthy at netscape dot net
The problem here is that Ximian will install non-XD2 packages (which are required for it to work) from the Red-Carpet server. The installer has no option to select the Red-Carpet mirror (though I assume it would use the one you selected in Red-Carpet if you used that before), so the server is/was completely hammered. :/ You probably wouldn’t have this problem with RCE or if you selected another mirror in Red-Carpet before (can’t tell for sure).
A good work-around for this is, when you get to the list where it tells you all the packages which are about to get installed, look for all packages without a “-ximian” in the name. Then install those packages using your distribution tools (like up2date) and re-run the installer.
It is no conspiracy to make you pay.
While I though the article was well written, the installation was not in any way shape or form difficult. I tested XD2 on Red Hat 9 during the beta period for my company. I had ZERO installation issues, and no technical issues. It installed and ran cleanly. I am certainly more impressed with XD2 over XD1, and for the engineering staff, my company will be standardizing on it.
Dave
I, too, think that the installer is getting a bit more flak than it deserves. However, it really has a few nasty issues when it comes to working around problems or duing “unusual” things. I’m sure if the servers aren’t overloaded and the system isn’t using unusual packages, that it would work nice. And let’s not forget, that XD is pretty much the only desktop which comes with a nice and easy to use installer and they don’t make any money with the free downloads (they even pay a lot of bandwidth).
I’ve Got RH 9 too… and as soon as I saw that Ximian released XD2 I went on to install it… And my experience was just like that of the writer of this review… theri werver was so clogged up that I went on to use mirrors like… http://public.www.planetmirror.com/pub/ximian/ then the download process was fast… but after all is done… It gave me a ridiculous msg. saying it could not install XD2 cause of problems… “I already had some softwares installed”… I was getting really frustrated then I decided to download redcarpet… then the installation just happened… like magic… And Ximian has really done well… I’m using it right now… Its really good.. good feel & look….
damadol
Thanks for your information. Today I surfed tectonic.co.za and found the following: http://www.tectonic.co.za/default.php?action=view&id=147&topic=Open… . Sound very interesting.
Thomas
“However, it really has a few nasty issues[…]”
yeah, like erasing the already downloaded part(s) when one server’s stucked and you are clicking back to another mirror to continue the download, or if you quit and later restart the installer!
to say that this sucks is definitly an understatement.
“The problem here is that Ximian will install non-XD2 packages (which are required for it to work) from the Red-Carpet server. The installer has no option to select the Red-Carpet mirror (though I assume it would use the one you selected in Red-Carpet if you used that before), so the server is/was completely hammered.”
sucks also big time! i downloaded all the f*cking ximian packages directly from the ftp while thinking that would be all that’s needed, but alas, was i ever that wrong…?!
those issues need to be addressed.
maybe dumb question, but does someone know why i can’t install no new software under rc-available software, is that for paying customers only?
Ok, I did the little db4 fix. Thanks for posting that, BUT.
XD2 installed,
apt-get update worked,
apt-get upgrade worked,
reboot, X-windows got all types of confused and bombed out because of fonts and config’s. While I could probably fix this, it isn’t nessacary. I think a company should take into consideration a lot of things people MIGHT use. I know a lot of people run apt-get for RH. Otherwise RH really sucks to work with dependency problems.
Anyway, XD2 looked nice while it worked???? But I’m either going back to Libranet or Slackware. I’ll use RH at work and that is enough for me.
Later,
I like your style.
Finally someone who actually knows about what’s going on!
You are pretty careful to mention any shortcomings (the way in which you word it).
I really like the review, you point out things that I personally find very relevant (the good things, and the bad things).
Keep up the good work!
I wrote Terminal Server Client. I haven’t had that issue reported. Please visit my site and find my contact info. Use it to send me as much info as you can if you want it fixed. Thanks!
http://www.gnomepro.com/
PDF export still works, it is simply built in already. From the print dialog, choose “PRINT TO FILE”. Then choose PDF as the format. It is actually simpler than the old method (having to install via SPADMIN). But it is not as simple as the new EXPORT TO PDF button coming in OpenOffice.org 1.1
I even like it better than WinXP! I had no probs and installed to several RH8 and 9 systems plus SuSE. The author must be more of a beginner user than intermediate as claimed.
I have installed from differnet mirror sites with no issues either….
I installed XD2 with abolutely no problems at all. I suspect most of the problems that people ran into were related to the servers being overwhelmed rather than something wrong with the installation program. Try picking a mirror closer to your location or better yet, download the bit torrent iso that is linked from slashdot. Someone mentioned that the print to pdf option was missing, but it was there for me along with a print to ps option. The whole print dialog is excellent along with the file dialog(I’ve never had issues with the normal gtk file selector dialog though because I’m mostly a shell user and tab completion is a god-send). I held onto redhat for a couple more days as a result of XD2(switched to gentoo, I wanted a more up to date distro with better package management, apt4rpm just isn’t there yet because there aren’t enough different apps and up to date apps out there). The entire industrial theme set is awesome. All in all XD2 is an excellent product. But I still perfer pekwm(http://pekwm.org) and maybe a gnome-panel in the corner.
To me, an absolutely inexcuseable flaw with X2D is that it destroys your KDE desktop (under RH9, at least).
I enjoyed playing with X2D for a few days. It’s a very pleasant desktop, paticularly if you favor Gnome. But I returned to KDE to find the desktop trashed: missing icons, broken devices…what a mess. It was like walking into an apartment after a burglary.
I *want* to like Ximian, but there’s no way I can recommend it until they fix the KDE problem. And, yeah, the install was painful. Took two days to finally get all the files through the network install (which is problematic security-wise, anyway). I was never able to secure a working mirror through Red Carpet.
What a good review. I have to say that the apt breakage is unsurprising since you’re using packages not in an apt source.
btw, fonts for openoffice are installed like any other… by dropping them in fonts://
HELP !!! been running XD2 for about 2 weeks or so and I cant get more than 16 workspaces. For the last week I’ve maxed out my work spaces and it is annoying.
If I’d known this I wouldnt have gone for XD2 since I need at least 30 workspaces to be efficient @ work.