GNOME Development Release 2.7.1 is Out

49 Comments

1. 2004-06-04 6:29 am

   Anonymous

   “* Fix issue with the clock no resizing properly when making the panel bigger (Mark)”

   Speaking of resizing problems. Is anyone else having the same problem with the volume control applet too?

   Screenie:

   http://img21.photobucket.com/albums/v64/super_science_monkey/gnome_…
2. 2004-06-04 7:18 am

   Anonymous

   The volume applet not resizing correctly is a known problem. Most major distributions have used a patch to fix it for quite a while (Fedora, for instance). Since you’re using Dropline, though, I would recommend just resizing that panel to 24px, that will take the applet down to a correct size. Hope that helps.
3. 2004-06-04 7:19 am

   Anonymous

   is also out:

   ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.1/gimp-2.1.0.tar.bz2
4. 2004-06-04 7:20 am

   Anonymous

   😀

   2.1.0

   of cource.
5. 2004-06-04 7:23 am

   Anonymous

   Ah ok, I’ll stick with 24px then. Thanks.
6. 2004-06-04 7:31 am

   Anonymous

   of course

   of course.
7. 2004-06-04 7:33 am

   Anonymous

   I’ve just switched from Gnome to… *cough* the other one. I’ve been with Gnome since 2.2, but the constant lack of features and customisation options constantly irks me.

   Fair enough if you like a desktop with pretty much default everything that you can’t really change (e.g. try setting a default terminal using command line options like `aterm -bg black -fg white` – it doesn’t work), or have to change by going through GConf (Nautilus spatial), which I totally disagree with (working with Windows a lot, I really dislike registry style option settings.)

   I still use Gnome at work, because I don’t require anything more, but right now I’m being very impressed by *cough* that other DEs releases.
8. 2004-06-04 7:41 am

   Anonymous

   I know there was the whole “testicles” blow up, but come on, these were always a lot of fun! A return perhaps?
9. 2004-06-04 7:54 am

   Anonymous

   Well Mr “-“,

   nice to hear that you are happy KDE user now. But let me clarify a few things:

   >> […] that you can’t really change (e.g. try setting

   >> a default terminal using command line options like

   >> `aterm -bg black -fg white` – it doesn’t work)

   What do you think the prefered applications dialog is meant for? Perhaps I haven’t found out its REAL use yet because I always thought it was meant to help the user set his prefered terminal, email and browser applications…

   >> or have to change by going through GConf (Nautilus

   >> spatial), which I totally disagree with (working with

   >> Windows a lot, I really dislike registry style option

   >> settings.)

   If you don’t like gconf you don’t have to edit it manually. But… DON’T COMPARE A POWERFUL TOOL LIKE THIS TO A MESS LIKE WINDOWS REGISTRY!!!

   It’s true that the gconf editor looks a bit like regedit

   but that’s about all…

   >> Nautilus spatial

   …is very cool. yes, there should be an option to turn it off in the prefs for those 5 ppl in the world who don’t like it

   Btw: “working with Windows a lot” is perhaps not the best argument when you try to convince ppl that their desktop sucks…
10. 2004-06-04 8:15 am

    Anonymous

    Should have been released 19th May (http://www.gnome.org/start/2.7/). Any reason given for the delay?
11. 2004-06-04 8:32 am

    Anonymous

    If you:

    – Dislike spatial Nautilus…

    – …and don’t want to spend 15 seconds to disable it in gconf-editor…

    Then this app is for you! http://members.chello.nl/~h.lai/gnome-extra-setup/index.html

    GNOME Extra Settings is a new, innovative, easy-to-use application for disabling spatial Nautilus in just one simple click! No compilation or installation is required: just unpack the archive, open the program, and you’re reasy to go! So download now!

    (yes the marketing speech is intentional)
12. 2004-06-04 8:36 am

    Anonymous

    >>> Nautilus spatial

    >…is very cool. yes, there should be an option to turn it

    > off in the prefs for those 5 ppl in the world who don’t

    > like it

    You meant to say “… those 5 billion ppl in the world …” right?
13. 2004-06-04 8:44 am

    Anonymous

    >>>> `aterm -bg black -fg white` – it doesn’t work)

    >> What do you think the prefered applications dialog is meant for? Perhaps I haven’t found out its REAL use yet because I always thought it was meant to help the user set his prefered terminal, email and browser applications…

    I think he meant passing the whole custom command to preferred applications with the settings for aterm (bg and fg settings)….

    But that could easily be fixed by either writing a script or using ~/.Xdefaults (I think that’s the file name)… Problem solved, no reason to complain

    Can’t wait to see what they do with 2.7, although I use KDE, I’m up for taking 2.7 out for a drive this weekend, see if she grows on me some more… I’m also curious about the delay anyone know anything? I quickly browsed gnome-devel-list but didn’t see anything. All the messages of any use would probably be on a private release list anyway…
14. 2004-06-04 9:36 am

    Anonymous

    everyone else wrote:

    >>>> `aterm -bg black -fg white` – it doesn’t work)

    >> What do you think the prefered applications dialog is meant for? Perhaps I haven’t found out its REAL use yet because I always thought it was meant to help the user set his prefered terminal, email and browser applications…

    I think he meant passing the whole custom command to preferred applications with the settings for aterm (bg and fg settings)….

    my reply:

    Are you kidding me? This is the worst criticism ever, in that it’s not even valid.

    Applications -> Desktop Preferences -> Advanced -> Preferred Applications -> Custom Terminal -> command (aterm), exec flag (-bg black -fg white).

    Ugh, enjoy KDE. I’m sure you’ll be better off there if you couldn’t even figure that out.
15. 2004-06-04 9:36 am

    Anonymous

    The reason for the delayed release is in the release notes. Basically it’s late because they wanted something interesting in the development branches first. There is no point in releasing a development snapshot if it is identical to the latest stable point-release.

    This is actually the second 2.7.1 release but the first one was buried in silence for the above reason.

    2.7.2 seems to be on track, the call for new tarballs has gone out and it should be released according to schedule.
16. 2004-06-04 9:45 am

    Anonymous

    I know this is an early development release but is there going to be anything worthwhile in Gnome 2.8. All I see here a hundreds of bug-fixes,translations and a disable spatial option for nautilus.

    The change from gnome 2.4 to 2.6 introducted spatial nautilus and the file chooser but what will 2.8 brings us. I read somewhere that they want to use cairo instead of gnome-canvas (There is no work towards this in gnome 2.7.1). I also doubt this will happen in 2.8. They also mentioned tighter integration with Evolution, e.g.

    I have a feeling this will be mainly a bug-fix release with a few dialog boxes moved around.

    Don’t get me wrong I like gnome, everything is consistent and it all works, and it is a good professional desktop. However it still seems to lack any features that really differentiate it from Windows or Mac OS X.
17. 2004-06-04 9:50 am

    Anonymous

    ‘Don’t get me wrong I like gnome, everything is consistent and it all works, and it is a good professional desktop. However it still seems to lack any features that really differentiate it from Windows or Mac OS X.

    ”

    ximian industrial theme as default

    totem media player

    svg and cairo integration

    accessibility improvements

    integration of evolution

    seperation of gre in ephiphany and so on is planned
18. 2004-06-04 10:06 am

    Anonymous

    Gpdf will also be based on xpdf 3.0

    Evolution integration will bring gaim-evolution integration

    Mayne a new Mime System : http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/mime/

    I have seen on some mailing-list that we will have a new ‘Connect to server’ dialog.

    And so on! Feature freeze is only for the 21st of July man.
19. 2004-06-04 10:29 am

    Anonymous

    The reason you can’t see anything compelling in this list is because we’re at the very, very, very beginning of the release process. It’s only a few weeks since 2.6.0 came out, and we’ve had 2.6.1 as well. 🙂 We make releases all the way through our release process, so our software is testable all the time – you’re seeing the very first release after 2.6 though! 🙂

    That said, we’ve already taken a bunch of proposals for new modules, included in this 2.7.1 release, including:

    * Evolution groupware suite

    * Evoluton Data Server which allows us to integrate your Evolution data with the rest of the desktop

    * Evolution Exchange connector which provides Exchange 2000 and 2003 connectivity

    * GNOME System Tools which provides simple system configuration frontends for desktop and laptop users

    * GNOME Nettool, a network information utility (much like the one in OS X)
20. 2004-06-04 10:53 am

    Anonymous

    Thanks again Jeff for starting Garnome, I’m compiling 2.7.1 currently, can’t wait to load it up later
21. 2004-06-04 11:05 am

    Anonymous

    wath i woukd like to se in 2.8 is a wlan utility

    where you could connect to different wlans and maby a location selector like in osx. im home then i get eth0 with dhcp

    switch location to work i get wlan with statix and so on.

    that would be exclent
22. 2004-06-04 11:29 am

    Anonymous

    Damn, that new mime system looks sweet =). Anyone have any word on whether that will be included?

    Also, does anyone have any idea to turn on content sniffing for all files (and yes, I know it will be slower)? I read the posts on gnome-list, and I liked the old behaviour better, even if you did have to wait a bit (and yes, I saw the statistics – so the word ‘bit’ isn’t really accurate.)

    Thanks,

    Victor
23. 2004-06-04 12:01 pm

    Anonymous

    >> What do you think the prefered applications dialog is

    >> meant for? Perhaps I haven’t found out its REAL use yet

    >> because I always thought it was meant to help the user

    >> set his prefered terminal, email and browser

    >> applications…

    That’s what he was trying to do, right? Set the default terminal

    >> If you don’t like gconf you don’t have to edit it

    >> manually. But… DON’T COMPARE A POWERFUL TOOL LIKE THIS

    >> TO A MESS LIKE WINDOWS REGISTRY!!!

    >> It’s true that the gconf editor looks a bit like regedit

    >> but that’s about all…

    There’s a difference between implementation and what the user sees. An implementation could synthesize gold, feed bananas to monkeys and calculate Pi to the 7000th digit, but if it ‘looks’ anything like windows registry to the user, they’ll think it is. There’s a huge gap between end-user and developers, and things like this happen often: user reports bug A, developer answers the usual “that isn’t a bug, it’s a feature <insert technical goo here>”. The user won’t be happy, as he’s still experiencing what he considers to be a bug.

    >>…is very cool. yes, there should be an option to turn it

    >> off in the prefs for those 5 ppl in the world who don’t

    >> like it

    There actually quite a few people that don’t like it.

    >> Btw: “working with Windows a lot” is perhaps not the best

    >> argument when you try to convince ppl that their desktop

    >> sucks…

    It’s not really that relevant, is it? And, he wasn’t saying GNOME sucks 😉
24. 2004-06-04 12:39 pm

    Anonymous

    or have to change by going through GConf (Nautilus spatial),

    Ummm… I’m not sure if this is a fedora specific thing, but you could just pass a ‘-browse’ switch to nautilus when starting it, to force it into browse mode.

    Just a thought.

    Also, there maybe a very good reason for not providing it as an option. I develop a CAD tool for a phone company. We’ve got some really cool features that automate a lot of things (hence, saving the company $$$). But people are lazy, and won’t change volunatirly. They know the old way of doing things, and that’s they way the want to keep it ( no matter how much it costs the company in lost efficency). If we provided the easy option, then a majority of the users would switch back to the old way immediatly. Then, not only would the company would be losing money because of lost user efficency, but they’d be losing money because my development time was wasted.

    But somewhere, there is a happy medium between the infinite configurability of KDE and the our-way-or-the-highway configurability (or lack there of) of Gnome.
25. 2004-06-04 12:45 pm

    Anonymous

    they should focus more on applications, add rhythmbox, totem and something like k3b!
26. 2004-06-04 12:56 pm

    Anonymous

    …hmmm… Nautilus is looking more like BeOS Tracker everyday. What I’d like to see in Naut. is the ability to drill down through my hard drive[s] through the context menus. I’d also like a better tool for maintaining and modifying context menus.

    Another nicety might be an “open terminal here” option.

    Mike
27. 2004-06-04 1:02 pm

    Anonymous

    > and we’ve had 2.6.1 as well. 🙂

    How about making http://www.gnome.org telling about it? 🙂 It only talks about “2.6” and “2.6.0”.
28. 2004-06-04 1:08 pm

    Anonymous

    Cut and Pasted from another OSNews article:

    “Disagreements on how to implement proper multi-user were also present: mostly between kernel engineers,

    Dominic and Pavel Cisler, the creator of the BeOS desktop/filemanager, Tracker. Pavel came from General

    Magic and later worked at Easel developing Gnome’s Nautilus while today he works for Apple on Finder. Half

    of the engineers were citing kernel/fs changes and other half filemanager ones. Multi-user functionality was

    finally implemented but was never shipped because it was breaking a lot of apps that were created with single

    -user in mind (BeOS already had about 1500 applications at that point) and that was a business risk Be didn’t

    wanna take.”
29. 2004-06-04 1:16 pm

    Anonymous

    If what I’ve heard is correct, most of nautilus has been re-written since Easel originally implemented it.
30. 2004-06-04 1:20 pm

    Anonymous

    Oh, I am sure it has! Just sort of ironic based on my previous post. But seriously, I like Nautilus and I hope they continue to add “sensible” features and don’t overload it with junk.
31. 2004-06-04 1:31 pm

    Anonymous

    * Added read/extract support for ISO files. (bug #142316)

    Just what I need, Thank you so much.
32. 2004-06-04 1:33 pm

    Anonymous

    BTW, when will I be able to see the new cd/dvd burning tool?
33. 2004-06-04 2:17 pm

    Anonymous

    http://www.coaster-burn.org/

    Looks pretty nice – glad they’re focused on the big GNOME picture.

    -Erwos
34. 2004-06-04 2:19 pm

    Anonymous

    There was a time when I *loved* GNOME over “the other well known one” but since it’s latest release, KDE just seems to make GNOME look like a tortise when opening applications/performance, etc. As anyone else noticed this or is it maybe my setup? I always thought GNOME was lighter and faster, but even apps like Firebird load up much faster in KDE than they do GNOME. Another big turn-off recently has been some of the comments on the planetgnome.org blog site that seems to show the GNOME developers tend to discount what the community is asking for in favor of what they think is more important. Case in point is a well known GNOME hacker who was seething because people where complaining about metacity and it’s poor performance in relation to Kwin. Ya know, if a lot of people as pissed because it’s slow and appears sluggish, you might want to take them *somewhat* seriously at some point.

    But anyway, back to my original question: How’s the performance of GNOME for others?
35. 2004-06-04 2:29 pm

    Anonymous

    I use KDE for one lone reason: I can hover over the virtual desktop pager and switch desktops by turning the mouse scroll wheel. I just put the pager on the lower right corner, so I can switch by just throwing the mouse pointer downwards and right and turning the wheel. Laugh if you must, but this little detail is quite important to me.

    If GNOME had that, it’d be GNOME all the way, as I like the clean, sparse feel of Nautilus over the often baroque Konqueror. That comment actually applies to the whole DE as well.
36. 2004-06-04 2:50 pm

    Anonymous

    Yes, I tried to use metacity for my WM with using xfce4. I couldn’t believe when I wanted to find an option to turn off the animated windows minimizing effect that there was a bug report that spanned 2 years worth of posts and the developer basically wouldn’t budge. His arguement was that minimizing was a visual cue that the window was minimized. Fair enough, but even if an effect provides some visual information it’s still pretty much eye candy, and all effects should have an option to turn them off.

    He argued that he wanted info on what was wrong with the current effect and would be willing to fix that. The issue of the time also came up and he said it only takes .3 seconds max for the minimize effect. Regardless of how long it takes, there is a perceived amount of time vs the actual time something takes. And to many users it was perceived to be making the system seem more sluggish. In the end he gave an option to turn off all window effects, including draw contents of windows when moving/resizing, an option that I wanted to keep. sigh…

    And btw, the reason I was checking out metacity in XFCE4 is because xfce wm allows resizing on maximized windows. I swear I thought this was a bug when I first checked out the beta last year. And again, even though the developers are great in the XFCE camp, they wouldn’t budge on this one. Just add an option to disable resizing of max windows would not be considered bloat imho. Has anyone ever seen a wm that can resize max windows?! I’ve accidently grabbed the resizer instead of the slidder so many times.

    Basically if there is a bug report spanning 2 years of posts, enough users want that option and should be given serious consideration before disregarding.

    And ya this is open source patch it yourself. Problems with that is: first you need the knowledge to know what to change. 2nd if you obtain this knowledge you have to keep applying this patch to new versions. 3rd if you use some pkg management, you have to get around dependencies in the pkg manager trying to force the install of the wm so you can install just that pkg alone with the patch.

    I’m rambling now, but developer’s should try and really listen to their users and consider their requests instead of using arguments on why they won’t change something when it’s not bloat or missing visual cues or whathave you as the reasoning, when I suspect the real underlying reasoning is that it almost seems these developers take offence that a user does not want to use it their way and potentially having wasted their own time in say coding a minimize effect.
37. 2004-06-04 3:00 pm

    Anonymous

    I have zero performance issues running Gnome. It all works nice and fast on my 750 MHz Duron.

    No, not everything happens instantly. I don’t care, I don’t see it as a problem. The things I expect to happen instantly, such as opening menus, clicking buttons, entering text etc., do happen instantly. Other things such as starting applications do take time. It would be strange if they didn’t.

    As for developers not listening to users: I disagree. If you have a sound enough reason (and reasoning) they listen. And it is hardly surprising they choose to work on the things they consider important themselves as opposed to what _you_ think is important (or any other user for that matter). Convince them that your feature request is important. If you can’t do that, you will need to do it yourself or pay someone to do it.
38. 2004-06-04 3:13 pm

    Anonymous

    “Has anyone ever seen a wm that can resize max windows?!”

    One of the things that annoys me about Windows is not being able to resize maximized windows. Macs always had that capability, so I like the fact that Metacity does this, as well as KDE. Whether some one likes this or not I guess depends on where one is coming from. Having used mostly Macs before Linux, I found this behavior natural and expected. I guess it would be different for someone who came from Windows.
39. 2004-06-04 4:55 pm

    Anonymous

    “There’s a difference between implementation and what the user sees. An implementation could synthesize gold, feed bananas to monkeys and calculate Pi to the 7000th digit, but if it ‘looks’ anything like windows registry to the user, they’ll think it is. There’s a huge gap between end-user and developers, and things like this happen often: user reports bug A, developer answers the usual “that isn’t a bug, it’s a feature <insert technical goo here>”. The user won’t be happy, as he’s still experiencing what he considers to be a bug. ”

    So in other words people are superficial when it comes to evaluating the world. If the world doesn’t conform, then the world is broken. Glad to know we’re maturing as a species.
40. 2004-06-04 5:16 pm

    Anonymous

    I’m leaning more toward gnome than KDE, because it has a cleaner simple interface. KDE is too crowded. Probably, the most important reason is FREE GTK lib. instead of paying to get license for QT lib.

    I have a few suggestions for gnome developers; they should try to copy features from OS X instead of windows. KDE is more and more looking like windows; which is a bad thing to do.

    Another cool feature worth considering is mouse gestures as used in opera browser. It helps managing windows with fewer mouse moves. This feature should be supported by default on all apps (maybe built into GTK) examples. draw letter L while right-cliking the mouse causes the window to minimize; draw U for undo, C for copy….etc

    -Bedros
41. 2004-06-04 5:37 pm

    Anonymous

    2004-06-01 Dave Camp <[email protected]>

    * src/nautilus-file-management-properties.c:

    (nautilus_file_management_properties_dialog_setup):

    * src/nautilus-file-management-properties.glade: Add an

    “always open in browser windows” option to the

    prefs dialog. Please stop yelling at me.
42. 2004-06-04 5:42 pm

    Anonymous

    FREE GTK lib. instead of paying to get license for QT lib.

    Just in case you’re not just trolling, the versions of Qt used by KDE are GPL. They don’t have a license problem.
43. 2004-06-04 5:57 pm

    Anonymous

    “They don’t have a license problem.”

    Which proves you don’t understand what the license problem is.
44. 2004-06-04 6:54 pm

    Anonymous

    The problem is that they are too free for some people.
45. 2004-06-04 7:25 pm

    Anonymous

    Gnome depends on a lot of other things. I would be nice if someone offered a source distribution of Gnome with all its dependencies included. This would allow people to compile and installed Gnome with a single command; perhaps installing into /usr/Gnome by default.
46. 2004-06-04 7:44 pm

    Anonymous

    Gnome depends on a lot of other things. I would be nice if someone offered a source distribution of Gnome with all its dependencies included. This would allow people to compile and installed Gnome with a single command; perhaps installing into /usr/Gnome by default.

    This is more or less what Garnome does. It actually gets the dependencies for you from the internet, so you only type a few commands.
47. 2004-06-04 8:12 pm

    Anonymous

    PERFORMANCE
48. 2004-06-04 10:44 pm

    Anonymous

    Gnome depends on a lot of other things. I would be nice if someone offered a source distribution of Gnome with all its dependencies included. This would allow people to compile and installed Gnome with a single command; perhaps installing into /usr/Gnome by default.

    Someone does, it’s called Gentoo. I hate to be the first to bring up gentoo in this thread, but I installed the 2.6 desktop with the venerable old:

    $ emerge gnome

    I’ve used Corel, RedHat, SuSE, and FreeBSD and I seem to come back to gentoo for its ease in package management.
49. 2004-06-05 11:15 pm

    Anonymous

    You had to make me scroll through all those petty bugfixes and hurt my eyes by making the layout too wide….