Release Candidate 1 marks the start of the Hard Code Freeze, on the way towards the final GNOME 2.8 release in a couple of weeks.
GNOME 2.8 Release Candidate 1 (2.7.92) Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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anyone know if g-v-m made it into 2.8?
The sooner we get the new MIME system the better.
2.8 seems like a much less interesting update than 2.4 or 2.6 anyone else think so?
actually g-v-m (gnome HAL integration) is one of the biggest steps forward for desktop linux in years (imho)
I was thinking the same thing. What else has be added/updated?
New MIME system
easier file assocaition
improvements to FTP module
browse networks easier
new printer dialog
Gconf has search
better wireless support
better laptop support
simplifed adding applets
improved nautlius cd burning
new themes
gnome games now in SVG
Gnome System tools added
Evolution added
Vino(VNC server) added
Gnome Volume manager added
and some other minor stuff
Now Linus needs to rush out Linux 2.8 to stay on track! The horror, the horror!
Maybe the kernel will go directly to 3.0, oh!
What Evolution added mean? The mail client evolution is now part of gnome, or there is gnome functionnality that work with evolution?
It tooked me the more than a week to build script and compiled 2.6.2 on my 400mhz celeron. Now I have to restart it. I hope the dependency tree is still intact, so my script could be reused.
What Evolution added mean? The mail client evolution is now part of gnome…
Evolution 2.0 will now be part of Gnome.
or there is gnome functionnality that work with evolution?
There already is some Gnome-Evolution intergration…
-clicking on the gnome-clock would show your appoitments
-*I think* your Gaim buddies show up in Evolution.
Please avoid using bold in this fashion. Use the > symbol and italics for the quotation, not bold. Thx.
BTW, your news submission was already posted on the newsbit sidebar.
Sorry about that
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UPDATED: gnome-volume-manager-0.9.10
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gnome-volume-manager was updated without a NEWS entry.
From http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/desktop/2.7/2.7.92/NEWS (grep for gnome-volume-manager).
It’s quite a changelog and i’m not sure if it contains the 2.7.1 – 2.7.4 devel releases as well.
Wow, GVM seems like it will be great. I can’t wait to see it mount my iPod automatically. I think Gnome is really coming along in the hardware department.
Now the RC is out and i can’t test it because my fsking Maxtor HD is somewhere in Asia since more than a month now – it crashed after just eight months of use.
wasn’t 2.8 going for vectorized windows, menu and general interface?
No.
What do you mean by “vectorized windows”?
You can replace pretty much any pixmap with a vector graphic. There are SVG Icon themes, backgrounds, greeter themes and so on at http://art.gnome.org .
They changed the graphics in most of the GNOME games to SVG in this release. Some games already had this in 2.6. It gives you no advantage other than that it looks better if you resize the window.
maybe you’re talking about GTK-2.8 switching to cairo ?
He is not talking about themes, he is talking vectors and resolution-independant GUIs at the toolkit level, with Cairo.
which features have been removed this time?
are there any visuals of the improvements yet? (screenshots etc) i’m quiet currious, but unable to install it myself.
all these things sound promising and will make my favorite DE even better
>are there any visuals of the improvements yet? >(screenshots etc)
http://davyd.angrygoats.net/gnome-2-8/
> which features have been removed this time?
All of them. It’s just a dialogue box with “No” and “Yes” options. Click “No” will load KDE, clicking “Yes” will wipe your root partition.
Debian peeps can get the latest greatest Gnome 2.7.92 from Debian Experimental.
http://pkg-gnome.alioth.debian.org/package-status.html
I’m very excited for this release.
The Mime thing will be very nice, and I only understand probably a fraction of what this means
This release is actually bigger than many may think, I think the inclusion of evolution alone makes that true. Evolusion at the backend has a lot of potential, I’m very anxious to see what comes about from it.
Furthermore I think standardized tools for common configuration type stuff was very wise as well (it had some opposition among gnome members). I hope they go a lot further and include samba configuration tools, etc. I think a desktop enviorment, if it wants to achieve ease of use, should have a way of changing anything important through an interface.
The hardware transparency stuff appears to be getting a lot better too.
The gnome implementation of vnc looks very cool too. Especially when it takes advantage of damage.
http://pkg-gnome.alioth.debian.org/package-status.html :
Last updated: … 2004-07-01
I guess Evolution made it into the adopted modules. I wonder what kind of integration does this mean? Is Gnome without Evolution still possible? What are the dependencies?
I don’t like Evolution but i like Gnome.
Yes and that status report is partly out of date.
Example 1: ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gnome-volume-manager/
Example 2: gnome-netstatus-applet version .7.90 ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/project/experimental/main/binary-i386/…
The newest .9x’s will probably be uploaded soon, for “experimental” purposes, ofcourse.
This is all wonderful and all, new releases, but what about fixing what is out there already?
I am growing tired of SEGV app crashes and overall memory hog intensive user interface, with tons of bugs and overall just horrible end user time.
I don’t care if they released every day, what difference does it make if it don’t work right…….
I don’t buy Maxtor anymore. I had 3 HDD of them crash for me already, and their “speed” or “price” are meaningless if the thing doesn’t work. 🙂
Though the environment (hot, humidity) and distance (north of Brazil) don’t help them a lot. But right now I’m buying only HDD from Seagate.
It’s cool to see the GNOME 2.8 coming along. I wonder when Dropline will have it.
“I guess Evolution made it into the adopted modules. I wonder what kind of integration does this mean? Is Gnome without Evolution still possible? What are the dependencies?”
Module is the keyword. Ofcourse you don’t need it. Which DE depends on something like that? You can just continue to use GNOME as you are either with or without evolution installed…
Have they given up the spatial crap that everyone hates? It took Mac OS more than 15 years to give it up, let’s hope GNOME devs are quicker.
Does anyone know if the patch included in http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=130308 made it to the RC?
i think they should get some new icons and colors, gnome’s look is just too old fashioned, i prefer kde
>>Module is the keyword. Ofcourse you don’t need it. Which DE depends on something like that? You can just continue to use GNOME as you are either with or without evolution installed…<<
MS Windows 😉
Seriously, i believe that most distributions will include Evolution with their default Gnome then. I hope it will become a “recommended” part in Debian at most.
This kind of super-integration really turns the GNU/Linux DEs into less and less usable GUIs. Just consider Konqueror… brrr.
Thank you.
i think they should get some new icons and colors, gnome’s look is just too old fashioned, i prefer kde
That’s just like saying you don’t like Windows XP because of the ugly default background.
With modern DE’s the default look is a very stupid reason not to use it. Gnome is extremely themeable. (Even to the point of swapping the default window manager out for another one!)
There’s plenty of great themes out there…personally I like Red Hat/Fedora Core’s Bluecurve, but there are plenty of other excellent choices out there.
I personally suspect you don’t like Gnome for other reasons, which is your perogative of course.
What about Gnome nettool – I know it was proposed, but is it to be included..?
>> With modern DE’s the default look is a very stupid reason not to use it. Gnome is extremely themeable. (Even to the point of swapping the default window manager out for another one!) <<
So, can I use Kwin as the default window manager in GNOME?
Yeah, it’s in.
>> So, can I use Kwin as the default window manager in GNOME?
Well, it isn’t the default of course, that would make no sense. But yes, you can use kwin with Gnome.
> Have they given up the spatial crap that everyone hates? It
> took Mac OS more than 15 years to give it up, let’s hope
> GNOME devs are quicker.
“everyone hates”? Actually a good proportion of the elite linux technorati claim to hate it, that’s all. And that’s fine. But do you have a jot of HCI research to suggest either that “everyone hates” it, or that it is inefficient UI design?
I have tried it on its own terms. Didn’t like it at first, and now think it’s interesting and works quite well (though I still jump back to the CLI for any substantial work). Interestingly, I’ve tried the Gnome desktop out on 2 non-computer types, and they both found it very quick to learn, and I think the spatial stuff has something to do with this. Abstracting user data from the contingencies of the filesystem makes perfect sense for a GUI.
I have no hard HCI research data either. But I don’t confuse my reaction with reality. Conservative reaction is just that, not data.
Its really handy once you realize that its not just simply “Directories open in new windows” it remembers everything about the state of the directory when you last looked at it.
So I can easily make it so that any deep trees that I want to use regularly are in list view, in small windows, that are stacked very closely on top of eachother (and then I can close them all at a keystroke)
I’m still waiting for the space-tree nautilus view.
i think they should get some new icons and colors, gnome’s look is just too old fashioned, i prefer kde
Actually, two new themes have been proposed as default. Indubstrial (a modified version of Ximian’s Industrial), and SmoothGNOME. Indubstrial seems like it will probably win (I haven’t tried the development version, maybe it’s already default?). So they are getting new icons and colors. Besides, you can download more themes and theme it however you want! 😉
> which features have been removed this time?
All of them. It’s just a dialogue box with “No” and “Yes” options. Click “No” will load KDE, clicking “Yes” will wipe your root partition.
Is the Yes button on the right or on the left?
I like spatial but it creates too many windows. Ideally for me there would be some way so that it is in “shift-click” mode. Or in other words when you open a new folder the last one closes, always. I know about the middle button and all but having the left button do this would be ideal. (for me)
I like in general. I like GNOME 2.6 and am looking forward to 2.8. Only issues with Spatial is if I want to do some file digging in my system files then I use Browse. As for the navigation of spatial, the shift click is very simple as is using the drop down tree to move back to where you came from. For everyday use of a few heirachial layers deep it can’t be beat.
Recently releaded my Linux system after destroying my partition with a DOS based fdisk (wanting to format a partition of 70Gigs in Fat32 for Linux/Win sharing). Quite enjoying it, just wishing for Cubase SX for Linux.
Blastoid, if you have kept track of the Evolution 2.0 target with the 1.5 release series, you will notice some really good updates to the whole look and feel of evolution. And you will be able to have gnome without evo, just that you will lose some intergration features.
I thought Evolution 2.0 would use Mono? I guess I was wrong, because Gnome isn’t (yet) including Mono is it?
>> I thought Evolution 2.0 would use Mono? I guess I was
>> wrong, because Gnome isn’t (yet) including Mono is it?
Afaik, there’s only going to be Mono-based plug-ins for Evolution, the core application won’t be based on Mono.
…is the new ThoughtPolice(TM) module, which administers little electrical shocks whenever you think of switching to navigational mode, to aid you in your understanding that you know you whish to use spatial, because it is sooo double plus good! <zap> ouch!
seriously, i wonder if they went through much hassle to find a better way of hiding the option to turn it of, because i simply strongly dislike spatial, even though i am used to it from solaris and my goode olde amiga days.
It surprises me how people can claim that spatial was hard to disable in 2.6 without considering it an insult to themselves. There were even click-by-click instructions after all.
Anyway, there is supposed to be a nice simple tickbox in the UI this time, although I haven’t tried any of 2.7 to find this out; (actually, I wouldn’t use it anyway, spatial is great apart from the lack of BeOS like menus for finding deep folders).
there where instructions, yes, but those where difficult to find if you haven’t followed the spatial/navigational discussions, which i didn’t. having installed 2.6 the first day i didn’t even new that mode was called spatial. only throug a forum i was pointed out how to change this after days of at cursing at it.
hanging through gconf is just as bad as windows registry…
if you like spatial or not, that is a matter of personal taste, but i realy don’t appreciate beeing pushed in a direction.
“Ideally for me there would be some way so that it is in “shift-click” mode.”
I would like that too since I use a notebook and do left clicks on the touchpad. Its a bit tricky to hold down shift on that small keyboard. There is no middle mousebutton either.
Would be nice with a setting to always close parent window and use shift for letting them be opened. (A inversed functionality setting)
I’ve alread the website someone mentioned earlier in this thread with information about gnome 2.8. However, I’d like to see some screenshots about the new theme (indubstrial). Is anyone willing to make some? Thnx!
RE: Eugenia (IP: —.osnews.com) – Posted on 2004-09-01 21:03:32
He is not talking about themes, he is talking vectors and resolution-independant GUIs at the toolkit level, with Cairo.
IIRC, there is a move to hopefully get Cairo integration in with GTK with the 2.8 version of GTK ( according to http://www.gtk.org/plan/2.8/ ).
What I think people fail to grasp is how cool Cairo will be, once GTK is Cairo-ised, we will have OpenGL accelerated vector graphics, I don’t know about you guys, but it is hardly something to sneeze about.
Along with Cairo, the release of X11 6.9/7.0 by the time GTK 2.8 is ready, things should really start to hot up on the desktop front for Linux and other UNIX like operating systems on which GNOME can run.
Very cool stuff. Too bad that won’t be till mid next year. Sound like with the inclusion of cairo and pango, along with all the xorg stuff, we can very much expect a desktop that reaches the level of sophistication seen on Mac OS X.
Too bad it’s so long off.
@Bolanski
I never thought of laptop users. I can’t for the life of me figure out why this isn’t a feature in gnome (and I’ve seen no evidence that 2.8 will change anything in this department). They make it simply enough to go back, using the bottom left navigation drop down menu, so why not allow closing the parent.
what about roadmap to next releases?
when they released gnome 2.4, they already had roadmap for 2.6 and 2.8, but now there seems to be nothing.
Ideally for me there would be some way so that it is in “shift-click” mode. Or in other words when you open a new folder the last one closes, always. I know about the middle button and all but having the left button do this would be ideal.
As you mention, double-clicking with the middle mouse button will do this.
Double-clicking with the left mouse button while holding down SHIFT also does this.
And for keyboard junkies, SHIFT+ENTER also does this.
All of this is true for Gnome 2.6, and should remain true for Gnome 2.8.
If you’re asking for a way to toggle into a mode where left double-click is always SHIFT+left double-click, that will likely never happen. Modal interfaces tend to confuse users (what mode am I in?), and are best avoided in practice (even if I do love the modal interface of vim…).
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/2004/indubstrial/
Yes, it’s still about a year off, but you have to remember than Cairo/Glitz is more in Longhorn’s league than OS X 10.{1,2,3}’s. It’ll have full acceleration for drawing, not just for compositing like current versions of OS X have.
Well said!
Also, just like Gnome, the spatial aspect of the Finder is still there if you want it – with both platforms, you can choose how you want to work.
Cheers,
Jason.
There will be no new default theme for 2.8.
However, both Smooth (“Glider”) and Indubstrial (not sure what the new name is) will be included in the gnome-themes package, so they will be easily selectable.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-August/msg00…
well, if a new feature is considered to be better for the majority of operations, i would be upset if i were pushed not to use it. nautilus is now a file manager, and a file browser. since i manage my files more then i browse them, im glad its defaulted to the manager. if you want the browser all the time a la windows, its rediculesly easy to do.
I like spatial but it creates too many windows. Ideally for me there would be some way so that it is in “shift-click” mode. Or in other words when you open a new folder the last one closes, always. I know about the middle button and all but having the left button do this would be ideal. (for me)
There’s a patch available doing that, and some other things as well (bookmarks and stuff, AFAIK).
I think, the patch is available in bugzilla, but I can’t find it anymore. Someone else knows the adress, maybe.
Found it, again.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145427
The one thing sorely missing from nautilus spatial mode is the disclosure triangles in list view that the mac has. This feature alone actually makes spatial way more intuitive AND efficient than navigational IMHO. Whithout that feature spatial is still intuitive, but cumbersome.
Are disclosure triangles comming in 2.8?
(Maybe they’re already in 2.6? the build we have at scool (deb sarge) doesn’t have them anyway)