Last Thursday OSNews had the opportunity to meet Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome, Ximian and among other things leader of the much discussed, Mono project. Miguel is a talented and versatile developer but he is also a very intelligent businessman able to understand the industry on many different levels. Talking to Miguel guarantees that you are very quickly taken away by his enthusiasm and optimism and his thoughtful strategies and vision on how OSS will take over the world.
The patent issue
The discussion quickly got steered into the patent problem. Miguel is very aware of the patent situation in US today and the dangers this [will] mean for Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS). He acknowledges that most patents today should be invalid, as they were filed over trivial technical solutions, but the US patent office seems to be doing a poor job seperating the valid ones from the trivial ones. This situation creates many lawsuits every year in US and according to Miguel, this will only get worse with time. Apparently, for many companies, this is a fast way to make some easy money by suing other companies (over trivial technical matters sometimes). The F/OSS developer community hasn’t had the problem upon them yet, but as F/OSS becomes more and more popular, Miguel believes this will eventually become a real problem.
Regarding Mono and the Microsoft .NET patents, Ximian is now splitting the “non-free” parts of .NET in Mono, and so OS providers can decide if they want to include in their products the “non-free non-ECMA” portions or not. Apparently, even without the non-free portions, Mono is fully usable, complete with the GTK# bindings, database and other free parts. Miguel knows that a completely “clean” Mono will still find resistance from some OS/distro makers for political reasons, rather than legal or technical ones, and he is prepared for it.
Ximian met with Microsoft executives a few months ago — as part of a symposiuym — and it’s not a secret that Microsoft is aware of the Mono developments. Miguel explains: “If there is indeed a new technology that Microsoft holds a patent to and they do not explicitly allow us to use, we will remove that code, or rework the code in a way that does not infringe the patent. We do not like the current patent environment in the US, but we have to play by the rules.” Miguel also gave us a number of technical examples around Corba having technologies for years that Microsoft only now starts to be using in their products. “Longhorn’s Indigo or Avalon, all was done before by us and others”, said Miguel. “Most of the new technologies in Longhorn have existed in the past in one way or another, but they failed to get shipped with a vehicle as Microsoft Windows to users, so they live only on CVS repositories, old research papers, and old systems.” He has so many such examples it that makes him sleep tight at night and not worry about such things. Besides, “it doesn’t make sense to not create something just out of fear that it *might* infringe on some patents somewhere,” he said, meaning that if developers would be driven by this fear, no developer would be able to develop something today with this huge number of patents in US. But software development does go on, if more carefully than in the past.
Taking over the world
Because patents will most probably be the cancer of the tech industry in the near furure in US, Miguel is having an alternative plan on how to ‘take over the world’: starting with the third world. “Poor countries don’t have the money to buy and maintain Windows; this is where open source software is becoming a real and powerful alternative,” he said. More developed countries also use Linux: Miguel mentioned the 200,000 Debian machines in Spain running Gnome and many other smaller projects using Linux and OSS at many levels: schools, government applications, servers, even on home desktops. And long as EU won’t adopt similar patent laws like US currently employs, Miguel sees Linux (and F/OSS in general) becoming a major power in the industry, competing head to head with Microsoft in a few years. “Even the Linux desktop is almost usable today”, he said semi-joking and continued “if the whole world is using Linux in the future, US will have to ‘switch’ eventually too, regardless of patent problems. And when that happens, there’s no stopping”.
But Miguel’s world take over plan doesn’t only go through the third world first, but also through Windows. He believes that what matters are the applications (and the OS as an extension), and if people are using F/OSS applications on any operating system, this is a win-win situation for the F/OSS future. He mentioned the Mozilla, OOo and Gimp examples, applications that thrive on Windows as well as on Unix. Ximian is working on a native port of Evolution 2.0 to Windows using the WIMP engine to make the application look XP-native. Having replaced –with capable alternatives– the browser, the office suite and now the corporate mail client/PIM application on Windows, this situation can drive adoption of F/OSS faster. Miguel realizes that while, for example, OOo doesn’t have all the MS Office features, “it’s good enough” and that’s a great start for the majority of users.
Mono on Gnome and Mac OS X
We asked about Mono getting included with a Gnome of the near-future, but Miguel is not overly occupied by this thought. If the Gnome community would like to use Mono, great; if not, life goes on and Mono will find application on other parts of the industry’s ecosystem.
We asked whether a Mac OS X native version of GTK# or Cocoa# is planned, but the answer was negative. Ximian is not working on OSX native toolkit bindings (and he doesn’t think that Apple is working on something like it either), however all the other parts of Mono 1.0 will be able to work on Mac OS X natively (and with GTK# via X11). Miguel told us that Quark is using Mono for their next major Quark Xpress release! Apparently Quark is working on Obj-C bindings for Mono. However, the graphical toolkit bindings will be minimal (an update on this here), so he hopes that Mac enthusiasts will jump in to complete a full Cocoa# solution, or natively port GTK+ 2.x (“shouldn’t be too difficult,” he said) in order for GTK# to work on top (using the Appearance Manager) and without the use of the awkward (for many Mac users) X11 on top of Aqua.
Novell’s competition
Not everyone is as enthusiastic to use Mono though. Mr Curtis Sasaki of Sun Microsystems told us last September that there are zero chances of Sun including Mono in their Gnome-based JDS desktop. We asked Miguel what he thinks about this and he replied, “That is good news for the Novell-based Linux desktop! This means that they won’t be able to use the new Evolution, or F-spot or the handy iFolder. This adds more value to our solution at Novell.” He believes that the Glow project (an Evolution-clone based on OOo and Java) started out by Sun exactly because of Sun’s fear that Evolution will be using C# in the future, but Miguel is not concerned about Glow, as Evolution is already 4-5 years ahead in development, and he is confident that the high level language of C# will speed up their development even more. Besides, Ximian is also working to achieve interoperation between Evolution with OpenOffice.org.
We expressed the thought that the purchase of Ximian and SuSE by Novell must have being quite a shock for Red Hat — the number one Linux provider in US –, however Miguel is optimistic. The two companies work together on Gnome, and in fact, he believes that the relationship between the two companies is better now than it was in 2001.
Miguel is actually a Debian fan: “In terms of adoption, Debian is larger than anything else. What we hope to bring to the table ourselves is not direct competition to Debian, but an enterprise/commercially supported version of Linux.” He is aware of how widespread Debian is: “you can find Debian maintainers everywhere else in the world, something that isn’t the case for other distros. If anything, we want to *learn* and work with Debian as much as possible, given that its users are a huge contributor to enhancing open source in general.” “Its community commitment is fantastic, but is a very hard platform to support for an ISV,” he wrote last year on a paper.
We asked Miguel about Mandrake, and he said that Mandrake was kept a bit behind developments the past year because of their financial problems, a problem that happened because “they kept funding every F/OSS application out there that they found ‘interesting,’ without evaluating sensibly if some of that money can come back to the company,” Miguel said.
Gnumeric and desktop plans
The internal co-operation with SuSE and Novell is going great, we were told, with Nat Friedman (co-founder of Ximian) heading and steering the desktop happenings at Novell. Novell itself is moving on deploying SuSE Linux internally to more than 3,000 desktops, and that’s a very exciting moment for the company.
We asked Miguel about the Gnumeric spreadsheet, a project that Miguel started many years ago. “Jody Goldberg, the new maintainer, loves the project,” he said. Miguel is very happy with the developments of Gnumeric, he mentioned
that it is now possible to separate the GUI from the engine part, and to use Gnumeric as a library inside other applications.. When compared it to its KDE counterpart, Miguel said: “Last time I checked KSpread had more subtle problems: the computational engine was behind (no dialog box poping up, but definitely not as advanced as Gnumeric, but its not visually obvious from a screenshot).”
Near the end of our meeting, we asked Miguel to consider developing a home video editor, as part of Novell’s new desktop initiative. Miguel acknowledged the need for such a tool on Linux that is well-designed and usable by normal users, but he mentioned that “in the F/OSS world things are created only if the developer needs them” — a point he believes is one of the shortcomings of the F/OSS system. “Developers should realize that they don’t make applications just for themselves anymore,” he said earlier over our UI/usability discussion too. However, Miguel told us that he has already talked to Nat Friedman about a Ximian video application, and that the idea is under consideration while he asked us enthusiastically “and you do know what language that would be written in, right?”.
“GTK# on Mono, of course,” I replied smiling.
I liked the article but, It seems that it implies that Spain is a third-world-country!! We are not!
Me
That was not the intention. The Spain example was used after the mentioning of the poor countries and their adoption of Linux.
I’m glad to hear of Miguel’s interest in Debian. I purchased “Connector” a while back but gave up its use as there were so many problems getting it to work in my Debian based Xandros distro. Please pass it on that one customer would like to see some Debian support for Connector.
Thanks
They’re rewriting Evolution in C# and porting it to Windows? Kewl
Now maybe I can get my friend off Outlook once and forall (I’m tired of supporting it), assuming you can get it to sync contacts and such with Pocket PC devices.
I don’t think it is a full rewrite. The new version of Evolution has some bits in C#, but it is still mostly in C. But GTK+ and GTK# are already ported on Windows, so it doesn’t matter which bits are written in what, it’s gonna work anyway.
How’s the GTK+OSX project going?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gtk-osx
Will it be mature soon enough so that GTK# bindings can be developed upon it?
No. This is a GTK+ 1.2-only port while GTK# requires GTK+ 2.x.
> No. This is a GTK+ 1.2-only port while GTK# requires GTK+ 2.x.
I see. Thanks.
Cocoa#? hadn’t heard of that one. There are so many candidates for an open alternative to dotnet Windows.Forms that it’s getting confusing. Which one is in the lead? And will Cocoa# be cross-platform?
>hadn’t heard of that one.
That’s because it doesn’t exist. Please read more carefully, that was a question if such a project is under work, not an affirmation that such a project exists.
>…an open alternative to dotnet Windows.Forms…. Which one is in the lead?
As an alternative, GTK# is one the lead. Then it is wxWidgets# and then Qt#.
>And will Cocoa# be cross-platform?
Probably not. GnuSTEP doesn’t support the full Cocoa API, so if a Cocoa# was to exist, it would most probably be MacOSX-only.
Now that ximian is not a little tiny company fighting for survival anymore, why do they not open source connector? This is really key and lots of other projects could use this work. They should just include it by default with evolution as part of its standard support for imap/pop/ical/etc.
“Even the Linux desktop is almost usable today”, he said semi-joking and continued “if the whole world is using Linux in the future, US will have to ‘switch’ eventually too
The rest of the world doing things differently doesn’t bother anyone in the US. You’re talking about a country that still uses Imperial measurements and hasn’t yet discovered A4 paper. The US government will simply mandate that all communications with it must be in MS Word format (departments like USAID already do so), and everyone else will comply, especially third-world countries that need the aid money.
The beginning of the Cocoa bindings are on Mono CVS,
they were written by Urs Muff from Quark, and with the new
found stability of the Mono JIT, and the easy-to-install
PPC packages, we hope that the native Cocoa bindings for
Mono will soon take off.
To access the Evolution data store, you can use today C#
bindings. We will keep working on improving those as time
goes on, and as we learn of new use scenarios.
Regarding our pesimist friend Rayiner: all of us writing free software are in the business of changing the world. Ever since day one, people did not believe that free software would one day be this popular. We hope to prove you wrong as well.
miguel.
or ports GTK#.
I would love to be able to have a crack at developing apps on C# on OS X.
but with apple, who knows. they might have a build of Cocoa# internal and are just waiting until Mono reaches 1.0 to announce it.
and getting GTK# native to aqua would be great as well since one could easily port apps from Linux to OS X, all one would need to do is tell the app GUI to use the universal menu bar rather than the app menu bar just like you have to do in Java ATM.
“The rest of the world doing things differently doesn’t bother anyone in the US. You’re talking about a country that still uses Imperial measurements and hasn’t yet discovered A4 paper. The US government will simply mandate that all communications with it must be in MS Word format (departments like USAID already do so), and everyone else will comply, especially third-world countries that need the aid money.”
Incredibly simple observation and directly on target. There is no battle for the OS market in the U.S., and it’s likely to remain so for the duration. Wish what you want to wish, dream what you want to dream, however a lot of the lockdown has already taken place.
Eugenia,
You mention at the end of the article home video software. Can you tell me what’s wrong with kino-0.7.1 as a non-linear video editor for linux? I use this application almost every weekend to edit home video off my digital video camera. I find it easy to use, and with plugins has a lot of useful effects and transitions (not that I use many, because they usually detract from the material, rather than add anything). I find, when compared to friends home videos done on Windows software, that mine are consistently of higher quality. I don’t know if that’s them, or the software they use, however, it indicates to me that linux is no further behind in terms of home video editing tools than Windows.
Please enlighten me….
Matt
>I find it easy to use
That’s the thing: I don’t. I would like something more well-presented, more welcome and easier to figure out, like iMovie. Anyways, I have already talked about this here: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5335 no reason to start that discussion again.
Regarding our pesimist friend Rayiner: all of us writing free software are in the business of changing the world. Ever since day one, people did not believe that free software would one day be this popular. We hope to prove you wrong as well.
I’m actually quite an enthusiastic supporter of free software. I do believe that it has a good chance of succeeding, in the long run. However, transition in the US will not happen, as you suggest, as a result of international pressure. We in the US are perfectly happy to wallow in our inertia, oblivious of the rest of the world. Even if everyone switches to something else, we will still use what we want to use, and mandate that anybody who communicates with us use our software. Both my father and I work for US government contractors, and I have seen repeatedly that when you do business with the US government, you do it by their rules, or risk losing their business entirely.
I agree with RH but deep down I hope Miguel is right!
As you will be aware, things move forward in the OSS world. Kino has been ported to GTK+2, and the UI has been enhanced in 0.7.1. All the things that were missing from previous versions (like effects/transitions, comprehensive export to all major formats, including DVD, (S)VCD, and divx) are now there. The comments in the article you linked to seem to be short and dismissive and don’t really analyse where the shortcomings are. Might be worth you having another look at kino to see how far it’s come since you last looked. Not wanting to start a discussion, just saying that things have moved on since that article, and might be worth a revisit.
Matt
>Kino has been ported to GTK+2, and the UI has been enhanced in 0.7.1.
I know, I actually have it installed on my Slackware. However, I find the new UI (with all these tabs coming and going from all directions) better, but still bad.
If people in the third world cannot afford Windows, how in heavens name can they afford the rich hardware to run, say, GNOME? Desktop Linux is inordinately resource hungry, which is odd as it has a fraction of the functionality (on the desktop) that OS X or Windows does. I really wish the F/OSS community would get their heads out of the clouds and be logically consistent in their efforts.
Oh, well, fair enough. You can’t please everyone. I find it easy to use myself – but that’s me.
Matt
Why does he compare Gnumeric with KSpread? And who knows when was his “last time”. Shouldn’t he compare it with OOo Calc?
I will have to agree with you, in part. I still run XP on my dual Celeron 533 Mhz with just 256 MBs of RAM, without a single problem. Installing Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE or even Slackware on this machine, their desktop come to a crawl, I can’t use Linux or FreeBSD on that dual Celeron machine.
When I started using Linux in the end of the ’90s, a generic Linux desktop with KDE/Gnome *was* faster/responsive than Windows 9x/ME. Today, I don’t find this to be the case anymore.
On the other hand, my Slackware will work fine on a 1.3 GHz AMD Duron machine with 256 MBs of RAM, which is a Linare/Walmart machine that costs about $220 USD (with 17″ BenQ monitor ( http://www.benq.com/display/crt_p774.html ) for $80+tax). I think ~$300 for a full machine with Linux, is not that bad of a price even for a poor country’s citizens.
Yes, it could have being better if these poor countries could use old 200 Mhz to 1 GHz machines for much cheaper with 64 or 128 MBs of RAM, but even with the above configuration running a modern Linux, it should be fine. I do agree though that the Linux desktop in general (both KDE and Gnome) need further optimizations. The overall responsiveness of the desktop experience is not optimal even on my AthlonXP 1600+ with 512 MB RAM.
It’s been said that the biggest power in the US are its consumers. There was a time when companies would be made or broken by consumer uptake. Consumer-oriented groups in the 70’s and 80’s were the biggest forces to reckon with, and manufacturing companies would make sure to consult these institutions or suffer being snubbed to oblivion.
Of course, that power has been significantly weakened by wily attempts by the US government and large producers and manufacturing companies by either trying to make the US citizenry more passive or by effectively dividing the nation as much as possible. However, I still believe that when properly incensed, the sleeping giant consumer would raise its lethargic head.
Take, for instance, software development and support call services. It was totally unheard of before for companies to outsource en masse such jobs and services abroad, primarilly because of patriotism. Now, huge companies which are consumers for these outsourced services are continually pouring dollars outside of the US and getting their government to support it because it’s economically sound to do so.
The point it, F/OSS makes sense both technically and economically. If US companies and the US government do not realize this, capitalize on it and even spearhead the future direction of F/OSS (like the NSA did with SELinux), then good riddance.
Is Ximian involved in the development of glade 3? Ive been using QT for a few months now but really want to get into gtk. I just cant stand glade 2, it just sucks so much.
Rayiner,
I refer to the patent issues. The software issue is one that is actively changing, with various components of the US government itself starting to adopt Linux and open source software.
The situation is one of patents: if everyone in the world starts using software that infringes on bogus patents and we got everyone running our software, we will likely have more supporters to eliminate bad patents.
Miguel
My desktop machine is a pentium II, 400 Mhz with 384 MB of RAM , running MDK 10. It flies.
I have seen some problems with specific GTK apps, such as straw that are fairly slow as is Evolution and Mozilla.
But kscd, Totem for DVDS, konqueror, kontact, koffice and openoffice work really well.
I spoke about Gnumeric as Eugenia asked me directly about it during our lunch 😉
My position is still that OpenOffice is the best way of getting open source adopted everywhere as its the most complete suite. Both the Gnome office and KDE office are good intentioned attempts of builinding an office suite, but they are many years away of solving the general problem that Open Office solves today.
Novell is working extensively to improve OpenOffice: the whole company is moving to it, and there is no better way of improving and enhancing the software than using it yourself.
Miguel.
We are not currently working ourselves in a video editor.
I think that in the future video editing might be a required component of a standard desktop solution, as both Windows and the MacOS raise the expectation bar.
If I were to write something from scratch, I would use Mono and Gtk#, but if I were to reuse/contribute to something that has already a large codebase (maybe Kino, maybe something else), I would probably develop bindings for it, and use Mono as an extension language to do it.
Miguel.
Euginia: Firstly, that’s $300 **US**. Secondly, how much do you think such hardware would cost in your typical third world country? They’d be lucky if they could get such a system for for **600** USD.
I think you over-estimate the resources the typical citizen in these countries has at their disposal. 300 USD for a computer? Yeah, as soon as they figure-out how they’re going to eat tomorrow. 600+ USD? NO WAY, forget it. IT IS A NON-STARTER.
Herein lies a key problem with desktop FOSS. In their own, insular little world, FOSS devs can afford to throw shameless sums of money in hardware at badly written code to compensate for its inefficiency. Not everyone is in the same position. Frankly, to posit the notion that poor people can somehow better afford Linux, when it takes more expensive hardware to run than Windows does, is spurious, fallacious illogic to say the least.
I agree with you in part, to be able to easier “invade” the computing industry of a third world country, you DO need to run on old computers *fast*.
However, to write optimized code requires _more_ time than it usually does, because of debugging and profiling, plus it requires high quality tools. I don’t think that your *average* OSS hacker is going to care about crazy optimizations, most don’t even know how to use a profiler.
Regarding the 300/600 US$, I don’t think that a computer that costs here $300 is going to cost over there $600. Not necessarily at least.
Article title: Rest of World to Force US Into Linux
Most relevent quote: if the whole world is using Linux in the future, US will have to ‘switch’ eventually too
Reading the linked article had me doing a double take, because I don’t think the title above represents the article, or even that quote. The title implies a hostile and unified confrontation. It also implies a lack of choice.
I’m assuming miguel’s quote above is referring to the economic and competitive impact of using less expensive but capable software vs. those organizations having to pay for that service. I doubt he’s referring to Linux’s interoperability (or implied lack of) with other operating systems, namely windows.
Myself, I use Linux every day, and it’s been my desktop of choice for at least three years – I keep Windows *only* to play some games on. I do my best to convince friends and associates of the advantages of this OS. I do see Linux succeeding in the market place, and I appreciate that as much as the next geek, but only because of the choice it represents.
Thanks for the space to rant, Paul
Computers can be purchased for 300 USD, which is in fact
a lot of money there, but more house holds can afford this.
In regions where this is not possible, governments have
started the adoption of community sites where people can
use computers for free, the equivalent of going to the
post office to send mail. Brazil has the telecentros in
Sao Paolo and Rio Grande do Sul.
Spain has Andalucia and Extremadura, and the trend is
catching up.
Pics: http://www.telecentros.sp.gov.br/destaques/capaannh.jpg
http://www.telecentros.sp.gov.br/destaques/ceuperamar2.jpg
http://www.telecentros.sp.gov.br/index.php?t=147
Or go and browse them all:
http://www.telecentros.sp.gov.br/index.php?t=147
Miguel.
> I don’t think the title above represents the article, or even that quote
Try to fit that quote in 410 pixels with FONT SIZE=3 and then come back to me and tell me how to do it. I even had to ask my husband to suggest for me a title that both fits in the table cell and represents the situation (and is quite catchy too
, because I had hard time finding one.
I think that people in most third world countries buy most of their more expensive goodies paying a little bit each month. For example, 600 USD could be paid in 24 months, but there would still be the interests which would make it even more expensive.
And if you feel pity of them, imagine the new Longhorn that will require something like 4 to 6 GHz and 1 to 2 GBs of ram (of course the real requirements can’t be known so before-hand).
And the use of pirated software isn’t something one should be proud of. So the real pain for them is to fork the money to pay for software.
You can you your computer as soon as you have the hardware, so that’s the only expense that most are willing to pay for.
(Disclose: I live in Brazil)
xp slugish on pentium 3 800 MHZ while latest kde/gnome fly on this box , it is said thing but thr real problem is lack of desktop dostro not redhat/fedora (Realy sucks) mandrake (QA is nowhere) the closest one is suse . on the other hand let’s look at it and as we see gnome/kde become faster and less memory consumption any major version and compare to next windows version well nothing need to say about it.
If more households can afford 500-600 USD for a computer (which is more like what it would be – see my comment above), then why couldn’t they afford Windows? Chances are, they’re getting a copy of Windows with their new system anyway. Your logic doesn’t follow.
Furthermore, if the government can, likewise, afford to pay for public access systems, are you saying they can’t afford Windows either? Your rationale doesn’t make sense. You can make the philosophical arguement that FOSS is better than proprietary, but that wasn’t the original point you were making in the article. Originally, you said that Linux is cheaper than Windows. However, I’ve just shown your arguement to be logically fallacious.
OSS will take over. It’s impossible to prevent it.. sadly..
So you think the idea that a 300 USD system wouldn’t cost more like 600 USD in a third world country (hereafter know as ‘TWD’)? Well, let’s see what Compare India @ http://www.compareindia.com/searchresult.asp?frm=1 , a sort of Indian Reseller Ratings for all manner of electronic goods, has to say about it:
According to them, prices range from 23,000 Indian Rupees (or about 512 USD) for a Celeron 1200 w/128 MB RAM, to 150,599 Indian Rupees (or about 3,350 USD) for a P4 2400 w/256 MB RAM.*
Remember, India is a relatively affluent TWD. Imagine what prices must be like in many African countries, assuming people can actually find a vendor there.
*Currency conversions derived from The Universal Cuurency Converter @ http://www.xe.com/ucc/
“Try to fit that quote in 410 pixels with FONT SIZE=3 and then come back to me and tell me how to do it. I even had to ask my husband to suggest for me a title that both fits in the table cell and represents the situation (and is quite catchy too
, because I had hard time finding one.”
Hmmm…International Pressure eventually brings the US into the Linux fold.
Linux sweeps the nation. World to blame.
Tux takedown. US knuckles under foreign pressure.
US thirsty for imported OS.
“Now that ximian is not a little tiny company fighting for survival anymore, why do they not open source connector? ”
So they have a business model that works, this allows them to survive, and as a reward for this that should tank their business model. Things like not opensourcing things like this could be what keeps them alive.
Far as third world countries and not affording a computer. Something to keap in mind is a computer is not a needed thing. The personal computers is a product of the first world where there is money to be burned, and then later more and more uses came about. In a country like the US a computer is somewhat needed today, but still plenty of people do fine without. In a country where they can not afford a computer I doubt their is much of a need for them. If next to no one there has a computer much of the reasons we have them is straight out the window since communication is out, no one you need to communicate with. Also is their even a way to get online? I really don’t see to many people living in a tiny rusted steal shack suddenly needing a computer. If they are in a position to know about computers and have a need for them, they are probably in a situation where they can afford a computer.
You need food, water, clothes, shelter, healthcare in life, computers arn’t a requirement. If it’s something you can’t afford, and it’s not a requirement for life, you don’t need it. Not to say it wouldn’t be nice, and might not improve your life. I’m sure someone here will come back with something like. “what if third world child wants to grow up and be a programmer, or a engineer” well lets be realistic at the odds of this, and if a need for a computer is the biggest hurdle in this. Even in a first world country you can become just about anything without a computer.
“Frankly, to posit the notion that poor people can somehow better afford Linux, when it takes more expensive hardware to run than Windows does, is spurious, fallacious illogic to say the least.”
Not sure how someone can say this when XP takes up at least 3x more memory on the hard drive than most distros and most certainly does not come with lightweight window managers like Afterstep and Fluxbox for the truly resource impaired. I’m temporarily using a Celeron 433mhz, 128mb RAM, 4.3GB pc which is probably more typical a machine held from over the late nineties, and while it’s going to be sluggish with whatever you put on here, you ain’t gonna fit XP on this box.
“You need food, water, clothes, shelter, healthcare in life, computers arn’t a requirement.”
Information however is. The world is now a global presence, and a lot of third and second are skipping the industrial age and going for the information age. What is healthcare if you’re using outdated information? What is food if you don’t know the best ways to grow it? What is water if you don’t know the best ways to find, and clean it (a lot of water sources are dirty). What is shelter if you don’t learn the best ways to get, and keep it? Computers are mearly a means to an end, and in this case it’s a better future if not for the parents, then for their decendents.
1) Hard drive space is not memory in the way you imply.
1) Afterstep and Fluxbox are not desktop mamangers, they are mere window managers and, thus, cannot be compared to Windows Explorer. There are similar “window manager”-type Explrer replacements available in Windows, too: geOShell comes to mind. You know what? They’re faster even than Explorer! The point is, the only legitamate GUIs in Linux (in terms of equivalent functionality) that can be compared to Windows Explorer are much more resource-intensive and, therefore, slower than, Explorer. One cannot reasonably or logically hold-up a simple window manager as an alternative to Linux desktop managers when doing a comparison against Windows.
> The US government will simply mandate that all
> communications with it must be in MS Word format
Rayner, although I usually agree with you, I believe this hypothesis is unrealistic. It would mean actively favouring a monopoly, which the government cannot do so explicitely. If it did, it would be like declaring war to the rest of the world 🙂
Know you think that, the time Longhorn is finally released, that Linux will have similar system requirements? In fact, if the current reality holds, Linux will require *more* than Longhorn (since Linux, in its current form, has much higher system requirements than Windows 2000 or XP).
fact windows xp required pentium 2 350 and above but it’s know near to be usable in pentium 2 350 while kde 3.2 work there without a glitch (usable and not slugish!!!) and for the future we see linux here and know while longhorn still far away with alot of hardware requirements.
I am sorry, I just can’t believe this. I have tested many different distros on much faster PCs than your PII@350 and I can tell you, they don’t feel faster than XP on the same or other slower PC when doing things (or loading).
Know you think that, the time Longhorn is finally released, that Linux will have similar system requirements? In fact, if the current reality holds, Linux will require *more* than Longhorn (since Linux, in its current form, has much higher system requirements than Windows 2000 or XP).
No it doesn’t necessarily. I check my resource usage al the time and Linux uses less mostly, but not by much. Besides, there is stuff you can always turn off, or you can get a lighter desktop, something you cannot really do with windows.
You should also mind the themes you are using, the really good ones can minimise resource usage too.
I live in the third world, and I think hardware costs are ok really. I actually have a fairly top end machine for anywhere in the world and it doesn’t really cost that much. I know Durons and the like run Linux farily decently, (I had one) and these are really cheap. Plus if we are planning for the future, they are going to get even cheaper too. windows prices are now really out there. I could build a computer and have software costing about as much as hardware. If I can improve on the hardware instead, I can get an even better experience too and save on software costs.
linux desktop is slow.
yeah, the linux desktop is pretty slow so I switched back to windows and stopped using beOS because there isnt a good version out yet. i still don’t understand how the rest of the world will *force* the us to linux. there are many other open source alternatives to linux… i also think the biggest linux companies are US-based. It also seems the reason linux is so big is because of the USA.
I also don’t see the point of copying off of commercial software then bashing it.. i can’t wait until open source organizations actually create something that is different and useful 😉 (although they have, im talking about something with huge impact like java or .net) not just php and python and what not.. although zend is the company behind php for the most part
False. That’s spin-doctoring. That’s fine, pretend that black is white and vice-versa, but you aren’t doing Linux a wit of good in the long run.
I am writing this comment in Windows XP SP1 on a PII 550 w/128 MB RAM. I can run a browser, MS Word, play a high-resolution DivX movie or listen to music, have an instant messenger and Usenet client all running at once and comfortably. There is no way I could do that in a rescent release of Linux, if for no other reason than the fact that the OS itself won’t even run nicely on this machine.
The above statements are cold, hard facts, and exist independently of assertion to the contrary. I know, because I’ve tried running Linux on this machine many, many times. People know the truth, and no amount of lying about the reality can change their knowledge.
“1) Hard drive space is not memory in the way you imply.”
What do you mean? I thought the point was making the best of a shortage of resources. It’s easier to change out a RAM chip than switch hard drives, so I would think the hard drive should be the most important factor. If you’re saying that KDE and GNOME are resource hogs, that might well be. But if you’re saying that XP is the best way to make use of limited resources, I beg to differ. The whole point, from my view, is that OSS offers you more options on how to best make use of those limited resources. As with this machine that I described, I would have a choice of getting a new copy of Windows 98 or using OSS (FreeBSD in my case).
“Afterstep and Fluxbox are not desktop mamangers, they are mere window managers and, thus, cannot be compared to Windows Explorer.”
Why not? While it’s true they are not as popular as something like GNOME, but people who take the time to get used to them and find them very useful. And let’s face it, the Windows desktop has alot of extra features that the average user doesn’t even need.
People can argue which is better, the Open Source operating systems or Windows all day long. Points could be made on boths sides, but I think flexibility has to go to OSS.
i didn’t say faster i did say not slugish run well when few programs open ,while xp work well on that computer after clean install when u add few needed program im client antivirues browser (other then the crap preloaded ie) and a office suite the system become very slugish to the point that is not usable that it’s not the case on unix desktop but as i said before linux lack of desktop oriented distro , and it will be right to say that fedora 1 is very slugish on this computer but even slax (live cd) run well there ,and by that i mean i don’t care if program taken 5 or 10 seconds to start the important thing is that after loaded program will work well and here we benefit from much better scheduler and memory menagment of linux (and same goes for freebsd).
what about shared source? can sell you software but your allowed to modify it all you want?
that’s the biggest crap i have ever heard while i admire your exprience i think i can say i have alot of experience in that term so u made a miracle and winxp work well with 128M of memory hell no with p4 2.4 it doesn’t work well with that amount of memory.
Enough of this “linux is too slow/linux is too fast”, we all discussed it, end of story please. Please get back on topic please.
Shall I post a screenshot somewhere? 🙂 Of course, that could be easily faked. Maybe a video of my desktop would suffice, showing the systems properties dialogue, along with the browser (a tabbed browser no less, My IE), movie, MS Word, Miranda instant messenger and Grab It! Usenet client all running in tandem, and everything still multitasking smoothly (except, maybe, when Grab It is decoding large binaries from Usenet, then the system skips a bit due to the hard drive bottleneck (it’s a laptop). OTOH, linux would become positively unresponsive).
Sometimes in Linux, the mouse locks-up cold momentarily due to system load. That NEVER happens in Windows.
xVariable, please stop it. Any more comments on this by anyone else will be moderated down.
why they aren’t open connector ?
that is a very good question i’ll do hope that novel will gpl it as they made with yast .
to the other think i don’t think think that that linux desktop boost will come 3 world country , linux desktop is making advance every day but it will take few years before we will see share of more than 10% (about 3-5).
Congratulations! That’s certainly one of the best articles I’ve read on this website. Only one way to tell you weren’t English native (em-dash followed by comma, not something done in English) as well as one or two minor problems. But in general the style was very nice and I certainly enjoyed reading it.
Keep up the good work!
>That’s certainly one of the best articles I’ve read on this website
Check our archives, we do have some gems in there (and some bad ones too
, like our interview with freebsd or freedesktop.org, really nice articles.
>Only one way to tell you weren’t English native
This has nothing to do with me, the article got proof readed, but I had to wait 2 days for that. This is why most of the time I decide to post my articles without being proof read because most articles are current news and have to go live “now”. Not always I have the luxury of waiting, so do expect poor grammar in the future.
I do not think they can opensource connector anyway, or it doesn’t make sense. You still need a license to connect to the Exchange server, so it is quite pointless. They also want the revenue for every connector license sold. BI oculd be wrong though.
Rayner, you may be right about american people and gouvernement, I don’t know, you are american, not me
But there is one thing that I am pretty sure of: the US won’t domine the world economy forever. China, India, are really strong countries, which can lead the world economy in 20 years, maybe. These countries have strong comitment to linux, for several reasons.
I am living In france, but I am doing an internship in Japan right now. Linux is pretty big, here, too. When the US won’t be the biggest country theay are today, they will have to follow different rules…
First point: If you think Gnome or KDE are slow, you can use TWM or something. Replacing the Exporer shell on Windows doesn’t gain to nearly as much speed. And whether or not WinXP does better on slow hardware or not is not exactly a closed question.
Second point: Which do you think is more likely to solve the problems of people who **can’t spend much money**? OSS or commercial software? Duh… MS doesn’t care about them because they could only pay $20 for Windows. A company like Libranet could use OSS to produce a distro just for poor hardware, selling it for $20 because they are standing on the shoulders of man-eons of OSS work. MS doesn’t have that option.
I really don’t see why the US would adopt linux just because the rest of the world is using it. I am an American, and it is readily seen that Americans will take whatever products companies shove down their throats. Americans are also stubbornly patriotic. They are reluctant to adopt foreign standards. Take for example, that Americans never adopted the Metric System, despite it being far superior, and the rest of the world using it.
Miguel is very aware of the patent situation in US today and the dangers this [will] mean for Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS). He acknowledges that most patents today should be invalid, as they were filed over trivial technical solutions, but the US patent office seems to be doing a poor job seperating the valid ones from the trivial ones. This situation creates many lawsuits every year in US and according to Miguel, this will only get worse with time.
India and China two of the most populous and tech savvy nations and the targets of the massive ongoing outsoucing efforts, have patent offices as well.
China: http://www.sipo.gov.cn/sipo_English/default.htm“ rel=”nofollow”>http://www.sipo.gov.cn/sipo_English/default.htmhttp://pk2id.delhi.nic.in/
What is to prevent US companies doing business in those countries from registering their entire patent portfolios with the local governments? Or The US to form cross patenting deals with these countries, under pressure from US business lobbies?
The patent issue isn’t trivial and making plans of world domination by assuming Patents are a US only phenomenon is dangerous. The very same businesses, that use the patent office here are opening R&D centres in these two countries, and could use the patent offices there for similar purposes. I am sure other countries have patent offices as well, but China and India seem more likely to be sources of the most number of developers.
One thing I failed to mention. India and China are the worlds fastest growing economies and are likely to pass many developed countries in the EU in a few years.
Also the massive proliferation of pirated software in these countries is going to dampen the rapid adoption of linux there as envisaged by some. You can get any commercial closed source software in India gratis and fully cracked. With a fast growing economy and more people being able to afford computers, windows installations are bound to grow, as it is available free of charge from local computer assemblers.
“The rest of the world doing things differently doesn’t bother
anyone in the US.”
It’ll bother them.
“….especially third-world countries that need the aid money.”
The US is not the only country “giving” aid money to third world countries. Or better, having economic interrests (e.g. oil) in third world countries. (see Iraq)
The world economy is changing, my friend. The US will have to adapt as well.
”
India: http://pk2id.delhi.nic.in/ ”
the wto is really pushing trips and stuff in here but india doesnt yet have software patents so nobody can build their portfolio here for cheap
There is a famous patent tale about Aviation in the US.
The Wright brothers made the first working airplaine and patented it. They wanted to be the only Aviation firm in the US. That slowed down significantly innovation because they spent time and money sueing other US firms instead of focusing on innovation.
Meanwhile European countries developed an indigenous industry, learning from Wright “proof of concept” and a very competitive environment. The Wright brothers made a airplane without actually inventing the concept ( see prior works of Otto Lilienthal, Clément Ader, … )
The US gov. anihilated these patent issues in the wake of WW1 to allow the US airplane industry to catch up with Europe.
Many comparisons can be made with the software industry now : Patents that may slow down innovation in the US and ignored elsewhere. Firms patenting ideas that have already been explored in research papers. People more interested in selling licences than in making software affordable for everyone, …
One of my machines is Dell Inspiron 3800 Celeron 600 256MB ram and is running dropline Gnome + Slack and in terms of performance is same as XP on the same machine(dual boot).
patents will most probably be the cancer of the tech industry in the near furure in US
This part isn’t exactly news, but I couldn’t have said it better myself…
We have p3 500MHz 128MB RAM machines at my university that used to run NT4 but now run XP, and I can tell you those things are slooooooooow. Oh I can’t believe how slow they are. Unfortunately the administrator has disabled the display properties dialog, so the theme engine can’t be turned off (which I know from experience will boost performance considerably).
I’ve got a recent version of Linux running on a PR233 with 32MB of RAM. Granted it’s using ICEWM… but it smokes win98 on the same machine. If ICEWM supported the notification area protocol and more drag’n’drop stuff, then it’d totally rock on old machines.
KDE seems to be getting faster with each release. Memory usage is still huge. Branding all OSS software as slow because of the big DE’s is wrong IMO. The Linux _kernel_ is *very* fast and optimised — the people coding that really care about performance. However a lot of apps seem to be very sloppy (I’m running dcgui now which is riddled with memory leaks, granted it’s very much pre-release though).
Using the GNU profiler (gprof) and Valgrind can help a lot.
I’m running XP on a Celeron 466 with 128Mb RAM, mainly used as a firewall/router and MP3 player. The desktop feels responsive and the speed is fine for web browsing and playing music.
Mandrake 10 wouldn’t install on it properly so I haven’t been able to test the speed running Linux, but to me KDE feels quite sluggish on a 1.3Ghz Athlon with 512Mb.
I am sorry for breaking reality upon you, but if you believe that eventually US software patent law will give way under international pressure, think again.
In the EU, the push is currently strong towards unlimited patentability of data structures, protocols, algorithms, and ideas. This after the EU parliament decided against such a patentability, and with a very good chance of getting passed within the next week.
This is lobbied by a) the US software industry, and b) some European big players who think that EU software patents will allow them to play with the US biggies on level ground.
The world is en route to less freedom, not more.
Don’t under estimate Microsoft. They are WAY ahead of Mono and with their next release of SQL Server and .NET they will continue their path to blowing away Java and Linux. Microsoft lowered their prices on their operating systems and has made the value proposition so hi now that Linux is still left way in the dust. Again, I own Aspire and when we estimate develpoment costs for clients we can’t get close to beating what we can charge for windows over a Linux solution. Becuase of the whole business world transitioning to .NET, Linux is getting crushed as I write this. The more applications written for a platform the more popular it will be. Microsoft is still 5 – 7 years ahead of any of these other Linux projects. I would like to see Linux and some competition but unfortnatly, most Linux people do not want to hear the truth from those of us who pay big money to develop software. They want to be biased and argue most of the time over how they hate Microsoft, vs. from a business standpoint how to beat competitors tactically and strategically. So here is to Microsoft. They do!
If Sun was smart, now would be about the perfect time to GPL Java. Just give it up Sun. It’s not hard for a devoted Java developer to learn C#, and I’m about to if Mono keeps gaining traction in the free software world. I thought I would never learn a Microsoft technology, but now I’m not so sure. Don’t be stupid Sun, Java is an amazing language (especially with the upcoming 1.5), so please don’t let it die because some idiotic know it all executives think that GPL’ing it will cause a “fork”. Stop with the lame excuses Sun. Gosling, do something to make this happen!
You must be joking. All the solutions we build and implement today for are clients are platform neutral, and our clients demand them that way.
They don’t want anything to tie them to a specific platfrom. They might use Windows today, Linux Tommorow, *BSD the next day and MacOSX next month. Some use a mix of all.
They way is to use tools which are vendor neutral. We Utilize Java, PHP, Firebird,MySQL (sonn PostgreSQL as well – 7.5 will have a native win version), XUL, Apache httpd, Tomcat etc, both for server and client side.
Forcing people to use Linux is just as bad as Microsoft forcing people to use Windows.
This is true. But – and this is a big but – Linux generally uses open file formats and standards. If an application is avaliable, or a file readable on Linux, it will most likely also be avaliable and/or readable on Windows.
I think it would be more accurate for the article to state that “The rest of the world will force the USA to use open standards”. If true, this can only be a good thing. Look what open email standards did for communication.
I will have to agree with you, in part. I still run XP on my dual Celeron 533 Mhz with just 256 MBs of RAM, without a single problem. Installing Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE or even Slackware on this machine, their desktop come to a crawl, I can’t use Linux or FreeBSD on that dual Celeron machine.
Pufff! I run Debian on AMD K6-2 300 MHz, 4MB SVirge Video Card, 256MB RAM and it rocks while running Apache, PostgreSQL, SNMP daemon and Alamin SMS Gateway at the same time. Since when is Windows more responsive???? I miss something or what? KDE and Fluxbox are veeery responsive. And yes, I live in poor country and working in GSM company (company with prety good cash balance
), and let me tell you one thing. We already f**ked up several WinXP machines (with licensed copies of Windows) and installed Knoppix + Debian repositories (PostgreSQL is not included in Knoppix). Why? Because when it comes to automating things (ftp this from HP-UX or Solaris, make some gawk and perl things to it, put it in DB, generate a report in html (I love Perl + GD::Chart), clean some stuff and similar), you became to realize that Windows is not an apropriate solution!
Is it clear?
>> I liked the article but, It seems that it implies that Spain is a third-world-country!! We are not!
The article doesn’t imply that Spain is a third world country at all (unless Eugenia changed it):
“… starting with the third world… More developed countries also use Linux: Miguel mentioned the 200,000 Debian machines in Spain running Gnome…”
Distros like Deli run fine on i586 (Pentium class) boxen:
http://delilinux.berlios.de/
If for instance a school has two (or more) such machines they may consider an X11 client-server setup between the two:
http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/oldpc/x-on2.html
And/or have a look at openMosix clustering:
http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/
Way i figure: such a project might be CS students configuring and maintaining for grades…
(End user applications could be made avaiable on the system(s), for any faculty to use.)
> The overall responsiveness of the desktop experience is not > optimal even on my AthlonXP 1600+ with 512 MB RAM.
Have you tried a newer 2.6 kernel ? Many improvements have been made.
the wto is really pushing trips and stuff in here but india doesnt yet have software patents so nobody can build their portfolio here for cheap
IBM, Microsoft and Intel are not in any crash crunch. Also nothing on the Patent website clearly says you cannot patent a software procedure.
Even if you can’t patent software today, how long do you think it will take a few wealthy organizations to get something like that passed in India. I am Indian so I know how things work.
More Linux developers writing software for Mono = more developers writing software for Windows.
At the same time I’m sure MS is not going to arrange things so that more Windows developers writing software for .Net = more developers writing software for Linux.
And don’t forget, Windows comes preinstalled on many x86 hardware. There is no need to install Linux to run some cool Mono app as long as Mono is compatible with .Net.
So if things keep as it is the likely net result is the amount of Windows software will grow even faster than the amount of Linux software.
If mono is not compatible with .Net then uh why don’t the developers waste their time with Java or something else.
Makes you wonder who Miguel is working for.
“if the whole world is using Linux in the future, US will have to ‘switch’ eventually too, regardless of patent problems. And when that happens, there’s no stopping”.
Countries don’t switch to Linux. Individuals, companies, and government institutions switch to linux or something else. And to suggest “the whole world” is going to go lock-step with linux is absolutely ridiculous. People use software as a tool, not because of some rabid ideology. If linux or BSD or whatever suits their needs then they will use that.
I’m surprised Miguel made these comments, considering that most of the interviews I’ve read of him usually have him being pretty realistic about linux.
In any case, something like 10% of the home desktop market is still around 8 to 10 years off for linux. And that might be pushing it.
As far as linux in the third world, another poster was spot on when he said that Gnome is just as bad or IMO a worse resource hog than XP. Gtk+ redraw is still a mess. If I was in the third world I would most likely be using a pirated version of Windows 98. Not some bloated crap like Gnome which I’m unable to use on modest hardware.
Get real Miguel.
“If people in the third world cannot afford Windows, how in heavens name can they afford the rich hardware to run, say, GNOME? Desktop Linux is inordinately resource hungry, which is odd as it has a fraction of the functionality (on the desktop) that OS X or Windows does. I really wish the F/OSS community would get their heads out of the clouds and be logically consistent in their efforts.”
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Bravo! Especially the part about getting their heads outta their butts. As a third-world Debian user, my “GNOME” is XFCE4. We ain’t got time to play games literally, much less afford P4 processors, VIA is fine, anything beyond 1.0 Gh is
luxury for the most part, except for heavy compiling which only a minority of the total users engage in. Keep it lean and mean.
And even with you running XFCE4 I bet you’re still not impressed with the redraw issues that affect gtk+ if you’re on something less than a 1Ghz machine.
Too bad that there isn’t something like XFCE that runs on top of qt. The one problem with that is, unlike gtk+, there aren’t many apps that are just qt apps. Most have big KDE dependencies.
Eugenia: BP6 for life.
one of mine died. it was going to be my DragonFly BSD car computer.
there’s nothing i wanted more than having that machine running again. half tempted to throw $60 at a setup on ebay, but i know i could get a modern 1.5Ghz+ system at that price. the other bp6 i owned is still humming along as my parents computer. love those babies: my 466 celerons were 600 stable.
I guarantee you that common people aren’t as worried about “redraw issues” as you are. That’s like attacking something that’s not even there. The real problem isn’t the slowness of the system, but the applications and easy of use that aren’t there.
And do you really think that if one uses pirated software, they will choose something really boring and old like Windows 98 ? 😉 It’s most likely they will have the latest versions of the softwares (Windows XP, Office XP, Windows 2003 Server, etc.).
Can anyone confirm what the article says, that Evolution is coming to Windows?
It appears to be news…. very interesting news, actually.
First of all I’m not worried about the redraw issue because I have a p4 3.0 with a gig of ram. And to suggest that other people aren’t worried about it is ridiculous. It’s there alright, and it’s a constant issue that comes up on #gnome on irc. Windows XP/2000 requires a lot of ram and some up to date hardware that some guy in Africa most likely isn’t go to have. That’s why I said they would be using something like win98 on a p-166 with 64 meg of ram…a system that you would have to be a masochist to run modern Gnome or KDE on.
enlightening article Eugenia, best i’ve seen on OSN for a while
> More Linux developers writing software for Mono = more developers writing software for Windows.
And how is that different from now? Many people say they can run unix apps under cygwin, and how has that changed something?
> as long as Mono is compatible with .Net.
You just have to get the right libraries. That means dependancy hell for windows with no package manager in sight.
am writing this comment in Windows XP SP1 on a PII 550 w/128 MB RAM. I can run a browser, MS Word, play a high-resolution DivX movie or listen to music, have an instant messenger and Usenet client all running at once and comfortably. There is no way I could do that in a rescent release of Linux, if for no other reason than the fact that the OS itself won’t even run nicely on this machine.
The above statements are cold, hard facts, and exist independently of assertion to the contrary. I know, because I’ve tried running Linux on this machine many, many times. People know the truth, and no amount of lying about the reality can change their knowledge.
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On my PII/266 w/128 MB RAM, I did a Debian/Sid lean installation (no Tasksel/Deselect), just added what i wanted with apt-get. Right now, I got open: Mozilla-mail, Opera, Jabber, OOo, XChat, and got some photos open in xzgv, no movies, no dvd, my total memory consumption according to memstat and and the mem-meter at XFCE4, is 59 mb of memory.
Ok, what really struck me about the article was Eugenia’s picture. No offence intended, but I thought she looked very pretty and sexy
What is going to pay your bills ? its not free software. I myself believe in MAKING money instead of giving my software away for free. You see my code talks to me, and it says “i do not want to be free”
I agree too.
“In any case, something like 10% of the home desktop market is still around 8 to 10 years off for linux. And that might be pushing it.”
As I may not be objective enough to answer this one I pass. Let’s just say it is a wrong statement.
“And even with you running XFCE4 I bet you’re still not impressed with the redraw issues that affect gtk+ if you’re on something less than a 1Ghz machine.”
This one shows that you don’t know what you are talking about. You got 3 ghz cpu with 1 gb ram,dont say that you got a Ferrari laptop also like that other punk who has been seen around this site.
“Get real Miguel.”
Get real Lumberg!