GNOME 2.15.4 has been released. “This is our fourth development release on our road towards GNOME 2.16.0, which will be released in September 2006. GNOME 2.15.4 has some rough edges but you should definitely try it to see how well it works.” Easiest way to get it is via GARNOME.
Where can i read what’s new in 2.15.4??? or what will be 2.16 compared to 2.14??
This is a good place to start:
http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap
I find the section FromThreePointZero to be the most interesting. These are concepts that were supposed to be in GNOME3 but were found to not break the GNOME2 API/ABI. Some of these things will end up in 2.16 and others may end up in >=2.18.
Looks like 2.16 will be the polish release. Nice to see, I love the amount of refinement Gnome sees these days (well, since 2.14 anyway…), instead of just throwing in new features. The places/bookmarks leveling is a small and boring change (changelog-wise), but it’s the kind of thing that just needs to be done to make Gnome better. I’m glad something is being done about it
Go Gnome devs! You rock!
I’m surprised that they don’t just simply replace the Elightenment Sound Daemon with the NAS one, which is already mature and used by KDE already.
Why, it does a good job, unlike Arts.
Can anyone not go through a gnome thread and not say anything about KDE?
Even many of the GNOME developers have said that esd needs to be replaced. I think the only question at this point is when, and what will replace it.
The problems of esd are numerous. arts had its fair share of problems too. Both of them are pitiful.
Really, a sound server shouldn’t be needed at all for most desktop machines. Sound drivers should support mutiple opens or the Linux sound drivers should do software mixing for the drivers that can’t support it. It’s hilarious that in 2006, there are still sound driver in Linux that don’t support multiple applications using the same sound device.
That’s something I’ve always hated about sound on Linux (coming from a FreeBSD background where this is handled transparently by the kernel). Why doesn’t the Linux kernel do software mixing of virtual sound devices (/dev/dsp0.0 through /dev/dsp0.whatever)? Why the need for a multitude of external sound servers that may or may not play nice together?
It does. It’s called ALSA. ESD is just a front end for GNOME and its applications to interact with, “transparently.”
It does. It’s called ALSA. ESD is just a front end for GNOME and its applications to interact with, “transparently.”
Wrong. ALSA does not do software mixing by default. You have to manually configure it to do that, unless your distro sets it up. And as I said a while ago already, I can not see any reason why they can’t just dynamically apply dmix plugin when the driver doesn’t support multiple opens. That would be useful from the end-user point of view, though it may not be that interesting for the devs.
“Wrong. ALSA does not do software mixing by default. You have to manually configure it to do that, unless your distro sets it up.
Wrong. To quote from the ALSA wiki: “NOTE: For ALSA 1.0.9rc2 and higher you don’t need to setup dmix. Dmix is enabled as default for soundcards which don’t support hw mixing.”
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugin
The current stable release is 1.0.11
Edited 2006-07-15 05:37
The problem is with any modern PC you do not
get a sound card. They should be considered passe unless
you are a sound professional.
Integrated sound on the i915 chipset for example
is STILL buggy. Kmix or whatever lets SOME apps
mix well but not all.
You cannot listen to your favorote music while
at the same time listen to sounds from many
java apps(and others too i suspect) that are not
“ALSA AWARE”
An example is jin( a chess client that connects to
chess servers for online chess..www.freechess.org
for example login)
If you start the chess app first your music player
will be blocked..if you start xmms first the sounds
from the java program will be blocked.
PATHETIC!
There IS a solution using the (nagware non-free
except for trial) oss drivers at http://www.opensound.com
but this is hardly an integrated solution.
This is why I’ve mostly switched to the FreeBSD
“distro” PC-BSD. no probs at all(except no 64 bit version yet)
Integrated sound on the i915 chipset for example
is STILL buggy. Kmix or whatever lets SOME apps
mix well but not all.
Is it really buggy or was it the apps, how do you know ?
I still wonder why people that don’t understand what they’re talking about feel compelled to tell others where problems are and what needs fixing.
The apps that don’t mix well are the culprits here, not kmix or whatever.
They made assumptions that ALSA could not break, or it would break the apps.
You cannot listen to your favorote music while
at the same time listen to sounds from many
java apps(and others too i suspect) that are not
“ALSA AWARE”
But AFAIK the SUN Java implementation is NOT ALSA aware at all.
So tough luck having any java app ALSA aware on Linux.
SUN Java is one of the last pathetic (like you say) thing on Linux that does not support ALSA (yes, I know they say they support OSS only for portability reasons with other unixes, how is that an excuse for not adding ALSA support ?).
“Fortunately”, ALSA devs have perhaps found a way to support mixing in their OSS plugin.
There IS a solution using the (nagware non-free
except for trial) oss drivers at http://www.opensound.com
but this is hardly an integrated solution
I’d rather avoid using sound in Java apps … But you have to do what is best for you.
If OSS hadn’t been so slow to implement their Virtual Mixing …
This is why I’ve mostly switched to the FreeBSD
“distro” PC-BSD. no probs at all(except no 64 bit version yet)
I don’t understand, as it’s no more integrated than in Linux.
What I find amazing, is that some bad apps made you change OS, with no clear benefit, as the OSS solution was available on Linux too …
>Is it really buggy or was it the apps, how do you >know ?
>I still wonder why people that don’t understand what >they’re talking about feel compelled to tell others >where problems are and what needs fixing.
I don’t understand this..it’s buggy because it can’t
do all that it is supposed to do – mix sound from
arbitrary sources. The apps are not buggy – they are cross platform and work on XP and freebsd.In the case of PC-BSD(FreeBSD) I can run EXACTLY the same apps, xmms, mplayer and jin(a chess client) and get perfect sound mixing.
Are you saying they are all buggy?
>I don’t understand, as it’s no more integrated than >in Linux.
>What I find amazing, is that some bad apps made you >change OS, with no clear benefit, as the OSS solution >was available on Linux too
There is nothing “bad” about any apps I use..only
the linux way of getting sound to work. As for OSS,
and I speak as an archlinux user (as my backup OS now)
believe me you don’t want to use the old OSS
on a chipset like i915. It is not recommended as
it would break sound in other apps. But maybe it would work with the apps i use. Who knows?
The freebsd sound system is integrated with the kernel
and you need configure NOTHING at run time.
Maybe it is OSS – I don’t know – but if so it is integrated in a better way.
. There is no need to download drivers, muck with your kernel(whatch out for custom buids) and type alsamixer alsasave to save your settings.OK maybe Ubuntu or Linspire have this tedius task licked.
That is what I mean by integration(i wont even get into how easily pcbsd configured X correctly the first time)
ALSA supports software mixing out of the box and has done so for a few months now. I use Gentoo, I didn’t have to configure ALSA to get software mixing working. I’m guessing you have an exotic or unsupported sound card or component.
Edited 2006-07-15 10:34
Jesus Christ! who said anything about Arts! NAS is developed by a completely different group of guys, and it just so happens that you can choose to use NAS instead of Arts.
SlackerJack, do us all a favour and sublease a clue.
I thought that may provide a reaction, since people always make gnome comparisons I’m doing a KDE one.
2.16 will be yet another bite out of KDE’s nothing realy new app selection, I guess kde 4 will put right what people claim is already right in KDE now.
Edited 2006-07-15 13:48
ESD is being replaced eventually. See http://pulseaudio.org/ and http://gstreamer.org/ .
As far as I know, audio stuff is being ported to Gstreamer which can output to Pulse Audio, JACK, Arts, ESD, NAS, ALSA or whatever.
Pulse Audio will be the default audio server eventually I believe, being that one is required for having sound work through remote X connections and it has features similar to the new stuff in Vista (app specific mixers).
An improvement that I noticed in epiphany is the addition of a web developer extension. This is welcomed. I recently switched to epiphany (from firefox) and the web developer extension is one of the things I have been missing. I realized that most of the other extensions I had installed were not used that often because I don’t find myself lost without them, although I do miss the Wizz Bookmarks extension that hasn’t even worked in Firefox since the 1.07 release. The only other need for me is increased tab control. I have a few third party tab extensions installed in epiphany but there is still a lot of missing functionality when compared to tab mix plus.
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/desktop/2.15/2.15.4/NEWS has the release notes for desktop.
Thanks a lot!!! that was what i was looking for!!!
what about the slab? will it be in 2.16 or saved for later? i read that it was imported into gnome cvs, but now what?
I find esd to be great! AFAIK though alsa should be able to handle everything so I dont know why we have it. But I consider esd to be top notch, above arts and all of its problems. Especially when you throw in JACK along with arts.
Maybe it is my stock gnome with stock gnome apps but sound is fantastic on my realtek/via piece-o-crap onboard sound chip!
Gnome is seriously rocking! Keep up the great work gnome dudes! I will admit I cheated and played with KDE for a while right after 2 came out but I soon came back, lived with it, and now I am truly enjoying it and I honestly like the simplicity as well as the easy configurability for the “big” stuff and I can still dig down deep if I really want to sweat the small stuff.
Hope gnome stays on focus, keeps the in-fighting to a minimum and advances quickly – cause I am loving it!
Nautilus lags many big times to Konqueror as a file system browser; I wish really if they improve it to be more feature rich like or semi-like konqueror which I use frequently to open many tabs and in each tab to open many panes and then save the whole session as a new profile from the settings menu, this feature is incredible feature I lack in windows and in any other browsers for linux(that use only gnome)/solaris ( that use a clone of gnome).
Other things in gnome are better in many ways (in may opinion) than the gigantic frequently crashing KDE.
I agree that Nautilus is lacking. I have only used it a little bit, but the approach OS X takes seems to be interesting.
RIGHT!
I think nautilus is great. Maybe a bit simple but simple is all I need in a file manager….I think!
Of course I also liked GMC back in the day too…
One thing that really pisses me of with Nautilus, and I filed this as a feature request already: When you have an external drive mounted, you have to go to the “Computers” place in order to be able to unmount it (I don’t use the desktop icons). But Nautilus has this eat “places” sidebar which shows mounted devices, why not put a small eject button next to removable devices, just like Mac OS X Finder does it?
One thing that really pisses me of with Nautilus, and I filed this as a feature request already: When you have an external drive mounted, you have to go to the “Computers” place in order to be able to unmount it (I don’t use the desktop icons)
Seems pretty contradictory to me : on one hand you “have to” go to Computers, and on the other hand, you don’t want to use the desktop icons. Which is it ?
But Nautilus has this eat “places” sidebar which shows mounted devices, why not put a small eject button next to removable devices, just like Mac OS X Finder does it?
This is not in Spatial mode, as I don’t have a sidebar in spatial mode.
The process is obviously tailored for spatial mode in Gnome, and spatial mode is less buggy too (non-spatial IS being improved, I see tons of bugfixes for it in nautilus and even in GTK).
If I understand what you mean, I don’t think a god widget for this was implemented in GTK 2.8. I recall seeing sth about it in GTK 2.10. You should check that, perhaps it will be in 2.16. If not, you should file a request in bugzilla.
“Other things in gnome are better in many ways (in may opinion) than the gigantic frequently crashing KDE.”
I have been using KDE 3.4.x/KDE 3.5.x for some time now and can honestly say it hasn’t once crashed for me. Maybe it is the distro you are using or a hardware problem, because KDE does not frequently crash. If it did I wouldn’t use it as my main desktop!
If a Gnome developer is reading this: Please, pretty please, can ANYTHING be done about Gnome’s performance?
On this aging Athlon XP 2000/768MB machine (which I don’t plan to upgrade for some time), Gnome is crawling, while KDE and Windows perform just fine. It’s a pity, but I plan to switch to KDE one of these days, just because it’s a lot faster.
(Let’s not start one of those “what is faster, really, philosophicaly speaking” arguments)
Using Gnome exclusively since 2.4
Let’s not start one of those “what is faster, really, philosophicaly speaking” arguments
Yeah. Let’s instead start on of those “Take my word it’s faster without me giving any arguments” discussions.
Yeah. Let’s instead start on of those “Take my word it’s faster without me giving any arguments” discussions.
Well, the rest of us will wander off and not take your word for it because Gnome does have some performance issues and deficiencies in a lot of areas. It’s acknowledged privately by those working with Gnome, but never admitted. It’s usually repackaged as something else, like ‘World Domination as an Optimization Hack’ rather than admission of any problems:
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/docs/gnome-deployments-2006/in…
Thanks. So many arguments. Oh and if you find any irony in my comments you may keep.
Thanks. So many arguments.
Thanks. So many benchmarks and so much proof that Gnome is just as fast and responsive as KDE or Windows, and the problems that everyone has reported from bugs, to mailing list postings to articles is a myth. Where was your quoted article by the way?
If anyone had actually read that page (apparently there are real comments in there ;-)) in the comment that was helpfully modded down (denial if ever I saw it), then you’d see these:
“Memory occupation, because on one server, we run 50 gnome users. With 4GB of memory, sometimes it is short.”
“Evolution IMAP performance is horrible, I had to replace it with thunderbird.
“Users’ mention that startup time is slow. Many of the people who switch their desktop do it for reasons of speed (i.e. XFCE is faster). […] WebDav with graphical file browsing is slow.”
“And finally improve the performance. Most of pcs are pentium celeron 500mhz with 256 of ram.”
“Printing is routinely broken, specifically gnome-cups-icon, it leaks, and takes up too much CPU, so I remove the package. Users can still print, they just get no notification or any kind of management of their jobs.”
and problems with configuration options:
“The gnome printing system (cups-frontend) is really nice to look at but far from useful. we cannot manage to print “number-up=2” from the interfaces. We only manage by setting these options in the commandline.”
And these are people deploying the thing who’ve probably decided they wanted to use Gnome before they started. I must say I’ve tried it with up to twenty users (I always like to try everything), and I can’t say any of these comments are wrong in any way. Issues are spread over so many areas, and they increase in an exponential way the longer the deployment is in use.
Oh and if you find any irony in my comments you may keep.
Sounds witty doesn’t it? It doesn’t make sense ;-). Oh, and there’s not a trace of irony anywhere ;-).
Edited 2006-07-16 09:22
So many benchmarks and so much proof that Gnome is just as fast and responsive as KDE or Windows, and the problems that everyone has reported from bugs, to mailing list postings to articles is a myth. Where was your quoted article by the way?
What BS is that ? Do you understand we’re talking about gnome 2.15.4 here ?
Where did you find all these ? You can go back to the start of gnome 2 in bugzilla.
But what use is it ? What use are all your bugs report, mailing lists postings and articles when they refer to problems that no longer exist in 2.14 or even 2.15.4 ? None !!
What is your purpose here ?
If anyone had actually read that page (apparently there are real comments in there ;-)) in the comment that was helpfully modded down (denial if ever I saw it), then you’d see these:
Did you read it ?
If you followed Mena Quintero work on performance, you’d have everything to understand that these are big deployments they’re talking about, and these are not deployments of 2.14 release, but older ones, which means no big performance or other improvements in most cases.
“Memory occupation, because on one server, we run 50 gnome users. With 4GB of memory, sometimes it is short.”
80 MB memory by user, not bad. Means 2.14 is better.
“Evolution IMAP performance is horrible, I had to replace it with thunderbird.
Work has been done on this since at least 2.10, don’t know actual state as I don’t have problems with IMAP (I do not have 1000s of users). You effectively missed the rest of the comment that says that 2.14 is MUCH better resource wise, and the fact that this is about a 2500 users installation.
“Users’ mention that startup time is slow. Many of the people who switch their desktop do it for reasons of speed (i.e. XFCE is faster). […] WebDav with graphical file browsing is slow.”
No longer true since 2.14, Gnome now is faster than current stable XFCE.
“And finally improve the performance. Most of pcs are pentium celeron 500mhz with 256 of ram.”
Done too. Not finished, but in good shape. Some work done by RH for the $100 PC.
“Printing is routinely broken, specifically gnome-cups-icon, it leaks, and takes up too much CPU, so I remove the package. Users can still print, they just get no notification or any kind of management of their jobs.”
Very old release.
“The gnome printing system (cups-frontend) is really nice to look at but far from useful. we cannot manage to print “number-up=2” from the interfaces. We only manage by setting these options in the commandline.”
Still broken with some printers in the GUI. GTK 2.10 and Gnome 2.16, whom dev version we are talking about here, are meant to fix that. libgnomecups is more than 1 year old and seems unmaintained. CUPS has gone up one minor version since, which is a big leap.
I must say I’ve tried it with up to twenty users (I always like to try everything), and I can’t say any of these comments are wrong in any way. Issues are spread over so many areas, and they increase in an exponential way the longer the deployment is in use.
How can you say that, when the issues reported that could increase are for deployments of 100 times more users than you have ? If the issues were exponential, you couldn’t see any problem with 20 users, compared to what they see with 2500, or even 800.
Oh and if you find any irony in my comments you may keep.
I find lots of BS in your comment, all related to old releases of Gnome.
Mena Quintero dod this review to know where to improve Gnome for big installments.
You take it and use it only for disparaging Gnome, as you’re not even a target of this survey.
Nothing positive about what has improved since then, or if this dev release is on track compared to this survey.
Looks like trolling to me.
You may be a Gnome user, and may have problems, but the solution in OSS has never been to run from problem, but to face them and do sth positive; And no, disparaging is not doing sth positive.
Let’s not start one of those “what is faster, really, philosophicaly speaking” arguments
Yeah. Let’s instead start on of those “Take my word it’s faster without me giving any arguments” discussions.
I really thought it was obvious, not worth pointing out, has been brought up again and again.
In my case, the problem is screen (re)drawing. I can see windows painting themselves, slowly, while on KDE and Windows they simply pop up. Since GTK apps are also slow on Windows (but QT aren’t), this has to be a problem with GTK (rather than X, for example).
Also, as it has been already pointed out, in the recent survey “performance” was reported as problem #2 in frequency. So, I am not the first one to notice.
I am not trying to troll here, but I won’t pretend I am a “happy, happy, happy” Gnome user.
So you see windows painting themselves slowly in GTK apps ?
Could you please give us the names of some of these apps ?
That’s when you will cite the classic ones : OOo and Firefox, which of course, are not GTK apps, specially when you talk about their redraw method (except for the broken pango in Firefox).
And citing a survey is like trolling, especially as we are talking gnome 2.15.4 here, and I doubt your survey takes into account the 2.14 release which was out on march IIRC, knowing that 2.14 focused on performance.
Of course, it is *always* good if the performance is improved in newer gnome releases, but I find it odd that Gnome is “crawling” on your hardware. I’m using Gnome 2.14 on a Pentium4 1.7Ghz with 768MB ram and it’s running just fine. I also run it on an iBook G4 1.33Ghz with 512MB and it runs just fine on that too. I suspect there is something seriously wrong with your gnome install if it’s crawling while KDE and Windows perform just fine.
Ok guys.
This is cheap, but try something like
time cat /var/log/longtextfile
in gnome-terminal and konsole. This may give you some idea of what I’m talking about.
This is about GTK vs QT, not Gnome vs KDE per se.
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/en/rnusers.html
I have to admit, that was a quick one!
(Still sticking to my view, though)
I wouldnt think gnome would be crawling on that! I run gnome-core on my 366mhz 288mb ram laptop and it is a bit slow especially if I am doing more than one or two things but thats about it.
KDE is nice. Both DEs have dramatically improved in the past couple years but I think GNOME has really rocked since they decided to simplify and really detail stuff. I find KDE to be too cluttered. Too many tabes, too many buttons, too many line frames around everything including kickers, too many seperators on toolbars. What is up with that?I like the control panel, but it is just too much especially if it has advanced options turns on and everything is showing.
AFA sound goes – Gnome/esound works great for me. I can listen to a mp3/ogg while watching a movie in totem-xine and I can hear both fine along with my crazy system sounds too.
[quote] 2.16 will be yet another bite out of KDE’s nothing realy new app selection, [/quote]
i really really dont understand this. ?!?? kde’s nothing really new app selection ? gnome biting out ?
i am just happy for everyone
I think KDE is just the same ol same ol with a new shiny face usually. But that may be its strength is that it is familar and doesnt introduce drastic changes or changed behavior. Whereas with gnome you often have to figure out how to get that damn spatial to do what you want.
Good to see that Gnome 2.15.4 is out!
But it’s strange that the anouncement is not in Gnome’s desktop news site
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/
In a somewhat related note, does anybody knows the status of the gnome mail archives? They are frozen from july 7, so I can’t read the interesting d-d-l (desktop-devel-list). Sigh.
Mod me up
Mod me down