The Fink project already features KDE 3.1.1, but Tony Arnold is working on bringing Gnome 2.4 (2.3.x for now) under X11 for Mac OS X, via Fink. Screenshot. So far, older Gnome 1.4 is available via Fink.
Gnome 2.4 for Mac OS X Underway
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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43 Comments
Anonymous
Check the buttons on the Fonts panel on your first shot: Notice the mauve color around them that isn’t transparent as it should: amateurish.
Sorry Eugenia, it’s not so easy to see it on my LCD monitor, but I get what you mean. But it wasn’t always like that though. When I first emerged Liquid the buttons looked fine and the button bg was transparent, as you said, like it should be. But I tinkered with some settings and now they’re opaque and I don’t know how to make then transparent again. I did see some docs on it, but again, it didn’t bother me enough to persue it.
2003-05-30 8:21 pm
Anonymous
There is no need to compile KDE from scratch – there is a pre-built binary package available through Fink. Using Fink Commander makes the process particularly easy.
2003-05-30 8:40 pm
Anonymous
especially kdevelop.. imho, the nicest C++ IDE available.. I do prefer Objective-C to C++ these days, so I usually use native Cocoa apps these days..
looking forward to gnome2 support in fink however.. it still looks ugly side to side with Aqua, but it’s come a long way since it’s 1.4 days.. I *shruddered* at gnome 1.4, but I curiously I used gnome 1.2 all the time (go gmc!)
imho, the gnome developers should really work on the polish of things.. the general lack of polish of gnome 2.2 is a lot worse than in OSX, WindowsXP, or even KDE, which itself is quite unpolished.
2003-05-30 8:44 pm
Anonymous
Eugenia, fink mostly uses binaries for everything, including KDE, so why would you compile KDE?
I’ve never seen running gnome 2.2 apps bring up the gnome-panel.. I’ve seen nautilus take over the desktop however. But I’ve tried Nautilus in gnome 1.4 and it doesn’t do this, at least in OSX (my Gentoo installation doesn’t have 1.4)– is this desktop behavior a new feature in gnome2.x?
2003-05-30 10:19 pm
Anonymous
Nautilus uses the E root window protocol to figure out if a desktop manager is already running. KDesktop had a bug (fixed in cvs) that didn’t set this correctly, so Nautilus would eat it.
Or that’s what i heard anyway.
Personally I think GNOME looks great, but the default GTK 2 theme is ugly, and BlueCurve widgets are boring. I use Mist, which is also boring but does look a lot cleaner and more professional imho.
Aqua is nice. A bit flashy. There are some pretty good themes for GTK2 out there though.
2003-05-31 12:30 am
Anonymous
I personally like GTK1. I use the XenoQT2k themes, and it looks really nice. The biggest problem in it for me is lack of 2-byte font support. Also, the unthemed GTK2 has to be the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen (now I use the Spheres and Crystals theme; beautiful). GTK2 is a lot worse for slower machines (having more than 2 GTK2 apps open is hell on this 433 celery).
2003-06-01 7:10 am
Anonymous
I hope the kind of “fight” between KDE ‘n GNOME wont spread to the Mac’s. What about inter-operability between the GNOME apps and native ones?
For me, the perfect solution would be to use native OSX libraries in open-source projects on Mac, so you won’t be in that situation where this awsome GNOME app and that great KDE app make you have 3 different WM systems using different kind of process communication, etc…
But as WM systems now deal with more than just GUI, that seems pretty hard to achieve.
So for me, porting KDE/GNOME apps that way to OSX: “not good”
I use Fink and X11 on my Mac OS Xes, but I haven’t install KDE yet on it, as it takes too long to compile. I just use apps like Abiword and xterm.
However, from what I see in the screenshot, the Gnome-panel is loaded. Is there _any_ way that you can load gnome apps without the need of loading this obscure panel in the middle of the screen? I mean, if Gnome was the only desktop environment running there, I would need its panel, but running it under OSX, I just want to use the native Dock and have all the X apps listed on the context menu of the X11 icon (I know that it is not easy to list the X apps as individual apps on the Dock, so they should at least list themeselves under the X11 icon somehow).
But no matter what, having gnome-panel and/or nautilus loaded, is not an option when you are using another DE as the host and gnome as the guest.
“Is there _any_ way that you can load gnome apps without the need of loading this obscure panel in the middle of the screen?”
1. Open terminal.
2. Type: gedit (or whatever)
3. Press ENTER.
4. Done.
It is not so simple though. The reason why I asked this question was because I have seen some Gnome apps loading the gnome-panel when they were loaded under KDE. This is not something I would want to happen on Mac OS X though…
Apart from the usual tips and workarounds, do a clean break via:
1. Replace gnome-panel with a bogus stub executable.
2. Remove ‘offending’ code from apps and recompile.
Or you could just ‘Deal’ 🙂 (Set to autohide, transparent background, no applets, etc.)
Make sure you deactivate applets… XMMS and gaim, notably load the panel so their applets can be loaded along.
This screenshot demonstrates what a nice dropshadow can do to make GNOME look even better than it already does!
Now if only Linux would get this within 10 years or so… Maybe I’m just being too optimistic though
I have a question guys!!!
How do you do to install kde and koffice on macosx with fink? Does koffice need kde to run, or can it run without it?
Thanks!!
GNOME looks so much better than the cotton candy Apple UI. I’d prefer KDE, but GNOME is inspiration enough for the moment.
the panel is just there to show it works
theres no need to have it running. and yes drop shadows are nice, but i dont like ugly hacks and thus wait for the forked xfree by keith cause it will rock. no need to waste a day with ugly hacks like kde does.
Fun hack I guess. Not sure why you’d want to do this though, unless you love GNOME but require app that only runs on MacOS. You might as well just run a free platform instead.
I suppose it’s useful for people who want to run GNOME apps on the Mac.
The fonts look beautiful in that screenshot, but in the following screenshot they don’t.
http://www.gnome.org/~jody/bars.png
Does Fink use Apples rendering? Why such a big differences? What are the fonts in the Fink screenshot?
Now someone needs to write a drop-in replacement for Apple’s Quartz (or whatever the thing the apps talk to so they can display graphics/text on the screen is called), and compile it for x86, and we can have Darwin_x86, with Gnome and nice looking fonts. Yeah, I know Linux’s fonts look a lot nicer today that they did a couple of years ago, but they’re still a bit behind Apple. I think anti-aliased fonts in KDE are easier to read than those in Windows XP though. It’s one of those things where everyone will have their own preference. Is anyone porting Gaim to OSX? It’s the only GUI open-source apllication I use on Windows, and it would be nice to have it for OSX too.
Ehm those fonts on Jody’s screenshot look horrible but that must be because of his setup. Fonts on my system look a lot better. In fact, I think that the fonts I’m looking at right now look less blurry than those on the OS X screenshot. But judge for yourself:
http://server204.serverflex.de/Screenshots/Screenshot.png
Sorry for the size and sorry for the GtkRadiant menu font in the background, obviously that one should be ignored as it’s still Gtk1.
Grumble: I was thinking exactly the same when I saw this screenshot.
Can’t wait for real transparency in X.
Is there a move to make GTK+ more Aqua like as to allow the applications to “fit into” MacOS X nicer? Personally, I would love to see Pan on MacOS X. Maybe in the future, when I have time, I’ll port it to Cocoa 😉
GTK does not use native widgets, never will. The closest you’d get is semi-aqua theming, but Apple have traditionally not been happy about that.
Why not run applications using the OSX/Aqua port of GTK instead of going through an X11 layer? Your apps will be faster and look better (they have it looking like real aqua now).
http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/
Just seems silly to run X11 when OSX has native GTK support.
Jamie.
Eggazery 😉 that is what I was looking for. I thought there was a better way to run GTK+ applications on Mac without the need of X. This isn’t a negative comment, I just don’t see why I should have the over head of yet another graphical server just so I can run a basic GTK application.
can run gtk on windows natively too
Can I also run Epiphany on Windows
Spark,
What fonts are you using?
http://server204.serverflex.de/Screenshots/Screenshot.png
Ehm those fonts on Jody’s screenshot look horrible but that must be because of his setup. Fonts on my system look a lot better. In fact, I think that the fonts I’m looking at right now look less blurry than those on the OS X screenshot. But judge for yourself:
http://server204.serverflex.de/Screenshots/Screenshot.png
Is that a RedHat Network Service Icon in the top right (red excalmation point)… Are you sure this screen shot is from a Mac box
>> Are you sure this screen shot is from a Mac box
Reading English can be quite difficult for some people..
What I don’t get is why anyone would want ugly looking gnome in professionally done OSX?
The screenshot shows the huge GUI quality difference between two systems (DEs).
That just goes to show that Gnome has a looong way to go before being called “professionally done”.
Yeah, I know Linux’s fonts look a lot nicer today that they did a couple of years ago, but they’re still a bit behind Apple.
This statement jumped out at me cause I was using OSX on my iMac one last time before I wiped the HD and started a Gentoo install. What I like about Linux is I can set font settings and anti-aliasing properties that work pretty much all throughout, in every app. True, occasionally I’ll get a properties dialog or something that doesn’t have font AA, but it’s always something that I don’t use often and would not care.
OSX on the other hand, it seems there are still a lot of apps written in Carbon, and for one reason or another fonts in Carbon apps aren’t always anti-aliased, even if I set the font size well above the options in Sys Prefs “Do not anti-alias fonts below # pt.” Take for example the ICQ client for OSX, no font AA, and I’ve tried a handful of IRC clients, most are written in Carbon thus have ugly fonts. So in spite of all the eye candy put into OSX, I still get a headache and my eyes burn after looking at it too long.
As Rich said…
This is my RedHat system with a browser in the background showing the MacOS X screenshot and the supposedly “superior” fonts.
I have opened a terminal (the one with Linux) and the theme preferences (the active window) in front of it so you can compare the fonts. To me, the fonts on my RedHat system look clearly more sharp and crisp.
It’s possible that Jody set the AA properties to make fonts more crisp, there is another option which I forgot the name of since I don’t use Gnome day-to-day, but I noticed that once I set it to “none” it made the fonts blurry, not washed out blurry but softer around the edges kind of blurry.
wow…so much anger and heat here. You wouldn’t want to use gtk for OS X as it looks like they only have support for the ugly outdated gtk 1.x series. Who would want to use a gtk 1 app anymore (with the exception of xmms and maybe one or two others who haven’t ported to gtk 2 yet)? Gnome looks good, but that’s a matter of opinion. So if you like all the aqua crap, fine…but your opinion doesn’t entitle you to be all high and mighty. Geez…..some people…..
Almost overlooked this…
The fonts are the free Vera fonts which were recently released (only got a small side notice at OSNews
).
http://www.gnome.org/fonts/
They are excellent and great replacements for the less-free Microsoft fonts (I couldn’t tell the difference). Because they are free, they will definately be included in future Linux distributions, unlike the MS fonts. This was a great step for free software, which weirdly enough didn’t make much noise.
Why do you make silly statements like that. You are probably just trolling, but one thing nice about Gnome is that it looks really good.
Well… I do truly believe that Gnome does look ugly and usability is not quite there yet.
GNOME is without a doubt the best full DE available on the *nix platform, i always used GNOME 1.x and GNOME2 is proving to be even better, you lucky OSX people
Well…
to the Apple platform. I mean fully integrated. IMO the Aqua is nicer than Bluecurve.
Have you tried Mosfet’s High Performance Liquid widget set yet?
http://www.ly-tech.com/img/snapshot3.jpg
http://www.ly-tech.com/img/snapshot5.jpg
Lquid: yuk.
I like the fonts it is using on the menus, and that’s it. I even prefer Bluecurve to Liquid, even Bluecurve is much more “nothing to see there, move along”.
Check the buttons on the Fonts panel on your first shot: Notice the mauve color around them that isn’t transparent as it should: amateurish.
Have you tried Mosfet’s High Performance Liquid widget set yet?
http://www.ly-tech.com/img/snapshot3.jpg