The 2005 GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC) is underway in Stuttgart, and there are live and archived streams of the events available. It’s almost like being there! In more GUADEC news, Nat Friedman notes some interesting finds on his blog: SymphonyOS and Thunar.
OH Noes! The one presentation i really want to see is Keith Packard. And its not in the archives!
without realizing what was wrong with it is the most important comment in the whole entry.
I sent him an email about it.
I would have seen that it was wrong in about five seconds.
I’ve been working with a co-worker in my office about sending out bulk emails (to students, not spam!) using Groupwise. What a nightmare interface that thing has! NOTHING is obvious. I can’t even right-click half the time!
One reason the IT industry is in trouble is that nobody in it can see that a one-word-based menu interface is not at all task-oriented, it is FEATURE-oriented. Just doesn’t work, folks.
Any recommended software for playing the archive (http://stream.fluendo.com/archive/6uadec/) under Windows XP ?
try VLC to do it
Can anyone confirm that all of the following are intended for 2.12? If so, it will be a superb release!
1. Cairo-based GTK;
2. Beagle incorporated into the system;
3. Fruits of the memory optimization projects;
4. The long-awaited menu editor;
5. Improved Yelp (held over from 2.10);
6. System/disk tools;
7. Cron front-end (held over from 2.10).
Is there anything else of major significance that I have missed?
beagle entering gnome 2.12 would mean incorporating the whole mono thing, the c# port of lucene and quite a bit of other stuff, I really don’t think it is meaningful and doable.
Thanks for that. Are the other features likely to make it into 2.12?
4. The long-awaited menu editor;
I have been using GNOME since the 0.9-something versions, and I can’t recall ever needing a menu editor. If I want quick access to something, or need to group things differently I just create launchers or drawers.
In MSWindows there’s a definite need to be able to edit the Start menu, because apps tend to put so much crap there, but in GNOME I just don’t see it… I’m not trying to troll or anything, but could someone please explain to me this urgent need for a GNOME menu editor.
Jeff Waugh addressed this issue in his talk on Project Topaz. There he discussed what it means to ‘be in’ GNOME and to *be* GNOME. What he stated there is abundantly obvious and I totally agree. His point is that GNOME is exclusive by default. Someone in GNOME must say ‘yes’ to someones project for it to be part of GNOME yet the vast mojority of applications which end users hold to be GNOME have never been ‘in’ GNOME.
Evolution is the example he pointed to- and it is almost painful- Evolution is more GNOME than half of what is officially ‘in’ GNOME it is probably one of the most used GNOME applications in existance and is part of what defines what it means to be a GNOME application.
One is correct if one states that Beagle will never ‘be in’ GNOME-but Beagle is GNOME and will only continue to become more so. NLD/SuSE will definitely be including Beagle, Ubuntu is also very likely to include it, I suspect by 2.12 Beagle will be in stable in Portage(ie. Gentoo). Of Course Redhat/Fedora won’t include Beagle in their distribution. But in my book if lot’s of major distros are including Beagle in their releases then Beagle *will* be GNOME.
The reality some distributions will have issues with this or that software-yet if enough users desire an application other contributors to the distribution will set up repositories for it-effectively circumventing the decisions which the distributors make. I suspect that f-spot and Muine will actually be the applications which lead to Beagle becoming GNOME- both of these applications are also dependent upon mono and both are first-rate programs for which their is a discernable demand.
Beagle is somewhat more demanding in that it requires an inotify-enabled kernel and that it requires extended attributes on the fs. Inotify is not yet in the mainstream kernel but will likely make it in for 2.6.13. The issue of EA’s is an issue of the distributors-they need to make EA’s turned on by default-this is already the case with fedora and likely other distros will follow suite over time.
I certainly hope a way can be found for mono to get it’s gtk# in snyc with the main GTK-right now they lag one generation behind the current GTK. If this happens c# will almost definitely be included in the ‘Official’ GNOME bindings release. And as much as the mono folks would like to see mono ‘in’ GNOME I suspect that the price of this distinction is simply far greater than any purported value associated with it.
I encourage people to watch Jeff Waugh’s presentation -if you have had any questions about what GNOME is you will have a much clearer view after seeing his presentation-and if you ask the question about Beagle/mono being part of GNOME you will find that the question itself seems rather absurd after having seen his presentation.
Note I am not stating that what Jeff Waugh says, as if by decrit, *is* the definition of GNOME- but what Jeff does is draw on the common values and vision of GNOME developers- the actual real common values and vision (IMHO), and from this vantage point it is obvious that mono is already GNOME. It should also be noted that Jeff is not a big proponent of mono-in fact he has reiterated time and again his problems with mono. But Jeff is now beginning to see the bigger picture something which most GNOME users have seen all along but which has been a kind of blind-spot for many of the dev’s.
I think the task is to overcome the relative isolationsim which GNOME has forced upon itself- GNOME2 was and is a major project and it is only natural that the identity of GNOME would become the most important issue in GNOME-a lot of work was needed to form new conscensus and to forge new values and new visions.
But this phase, the birthing-pains if you will, has for the most part been concluded. At this point it is high time for GNOME to start embracing those projects external to ‘Official GNOME’ and to focus on what collection of software rightfully exposes GNOME as a product-ie. If you use GNOME this is what your desktop looks like and this is how it works and there are these applications associated with it.
I am a GNOME user but ‘Official GNOME’ applications account for less than 1/3 of the applications I use- yet these ‘other’ applications are HIG-compliant, make use of GNOME features(gnome-vfs/ gnomeprint), are written in GTK and share the broader GNOME vision in terms of usability-and it is these aspects which really define what GNOME is-above and beyond what any dev says.
Being ‘in’ GNOME is only really an issue if there is disagreement about the values and vision associated with GNOME. But from what I see now there is relatively little contention about common values and vision. This was certainly not the case for the majority of the last 2 years, during this time there was tremendous contention and those parties not ‘in’ GNOME were exposed to a rather crass form of exclusionism. Now this process seems to have come full circle and hopefully we will now see GNOME opening up and embracing the legacy of what it is.
The videos appear to have been cut from the overall stream automatically by time (as opposed to content). The “Mark Shuttlenote keynote address”, for example, is six minutes footage of an empty room, followed by 14 minutes of geeks trying to get Solaris to work with the overhead projector. Mark himself doesn’t appear.
I am sure Fedora will follow if the other distributions all have support for Mono. They simply cannot afford not to.
I’ve tried to play the videos with MPlayer, but only the left audio channel was hearable during the playback. I tried some arguments to force mono playback with no success. Anyone knows how to play them correctly?
Thanks!