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GNOME GUI

GNOME Gets its Own Software Repository 85

PostThis writes "After the attack to the Gnome servers a few months back the Gnome Project was left without a third party software repository (which wasn't that usable anyway). The gap was filled in very recently by GnomeFiles.org. The site was built using BeBits as a model (BeOS users still swear by it) and they are looking into filling up their Gnome/GTK+ software database quickly; they are offering prizes to Gnome developers who will submit an app during the first week of the site's launch."
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GNOME Gets its Own Software Repository

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 20, 2004 @11:06AM (#9478101)
    Both BeOS users swear by it...
  • Nice (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mfh ( 56 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @11:08AM (#9478105) Homepage Journal
    Gnomefiles.org looks nice and intuitive. I like the RSS feed [gnomefiles.org], the layout and the simple interface of the site. I've wanted to go in this direction for some time and I think I might just have to try gnome out now. Any suggestions for someone getting started with Gnome?
    • Re:Nice (Score:4, Informative)

      by It'sYerMam ( 762418 ) <thefishface@gmaGINSBERGil.com minus poet> on Sunday June 20, 2004 @11:15AM (#9478129) Homepage
      An RSS feed - very neat. I already check the FootNotes feed, now I have more GNOME goodies in my RSS Panel :-)
      As for trying out gnome, the easiest way is to grab Fedora [redhat.com] which has GNOME 2.6 on the CDs.
      It's possible, but slow, to trawl through the sources at ftp.gnome.org, downloading all the necessary files. However, if you can find binary packages for your distro of choice then I'd go for them.
      • or an even easier way emerge -a gnome gentoo ofcourse required
      • It's possible, but slow, to trawl through the sources at ftp.gnome.org

        My preferred method of getting the latest GNOME stuff is garnome [gnome.org].

        You still have to wait a day or two while it is compiling, but at least you don't have to download everything youself. And you get all the goodies of compiling from source, like switching on optimizations and stuff.

        This way I can have the latest GNOME desktop even on my Debian Woody machine.
    • If you're using Slackware, you shouldn't have to ask this question, but... :P

      Dropline GNOME [dropline.net] All you'll ever need for Slackware GNOME

      • I run Slackware, and yes I've dl'ed Dropline Gnome, but that has to be the slowest torrent I've seen in a long time. And it's torrent-only download.

    • Absolutely. The interface is very nice. I have only one little crib with it: the categorization system. It doesn't cover all categories. When I submitted my app, gretools [gnomefiles.org], I couldn't find a proper category to put it into. Ideally it would be under "Education" but there's no such category. So I put it under Games/miscellaneous, where no one who's looking for a vocabulary app will find it :-(

      Sourceforge has a nice categorization scheme [sourceforge.net], I wish they'd copied that instead of inventing their own. I suggested

      • Oops, ignore my rant above, I checked the site again and there *is* an education category which seems to have been added after I submitted my app. Pretty cool.
  • gnome-look (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gandalfar ( 599790 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @11:09AM (#9478109)
    And don't forget gnome-look [gnome-look.org] for eye candy
  • This set's looking rather sparse, at the moment. Still, it's good that they've got back their space, hopefully not to be hacked again.
    I wonder whether I can submit all the miscellaneous lint I've acquired for the developers ;-)

    It's a real pity when things like that get hacked - It's GNOME people who're the real hackers, after all. In addition, this is a free software group - it's not like they're a software giant *cough* who crushes small businesses *cough* and uses illegal business practises *cough* (Oh, sod this - MICROSOFT) We need more white-hats, to go and whoop Teh Script Kidde H4x0r'S arses...

  • List of prizes: (Score:4, Informative)

    by rd4tech ( 711615 ) * on Sunday June 20, 2004 @11:12AM (#9478122)
    Four $25 Amazon.com gift certificates
    - Ten OSNews subscriptions (allowing you to read a faster-loading OSNews without ads), a $20 value each.
    - One copy of "Advanced UNIX Programming, Second Edition" by Mark Rochkind.
    - Four blocks of $50 in free advertising to promote your application.


    Nice!
    • "Ten OSNews subscriptions (allowing you to read a faster-loading OSNews without ads), a $20 value each."

      It's called AdBlock in Firefox...
      Oops, did I give it away? =D
      • It is, but sometimes it's just nice to see an ad, I'm serious. For example, you need something and you didn't knew about it until you saw the ad (herbal medicine excluded). Or you'll just have a faint smile seeing ads where windows beats linux in speed on the server side by nn times and think: "This is /., do they really thing people would go with it?"
        But then people will click to see what the claim is, so i counts as a hit doesn't it?
        Ads are somewhat good if they are unobtrusive and, of course, if you c
    • Four $25 Amazon.com gift certificates

      - Gnome is part of the GNU project.
      - The FSF asks us to boycott Amazon.com because of the one click patent.

      Practice what you preach Gnome.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      Ten OSNews subscriptions (allowing you to read a faster-loading OSNews without ads), a $20 value each.

      People actually pay $20 to read the bad writing of uninformed middle school students?
  • by agent dero ( 680753 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @11:13AM (#9478125) Homepage
    Yeah, I submitted mine today...it's called......um....gImmeaprize

    Did I win?
  • "Own"? (Score:3, Informative)

    by twener ( 603089 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @11:16AM (#9478130)
    "Own" is good when this is in fact a commercial third party site.
  • by dotslashconfig ( 784719 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @11:17AM (#9478133)
    While some people really like GNOME's design, I have significant issues with the software available to it and the desktop environment itself. GNOME has a hard time separating out libraries that it's not using for a given applications. The environment tends to take a shotgun approach at loading up EVERYTHING and then just dismissing libraries it's not using. The memory footprint, however, ends up being much larger than KDE (I didn't think this was possible until I ran GNOME).

    I just hope that with this new incentive to bring in GTK+ apps that people start more closely examining the underlying software support for the GNOME project. I think GNOME is still light-years behind KDE, not so much in interface, but in foundation and logic.

    I'd like to see more developers optimize GTK apps to only load needed libraries. I think this is one of the reasons linux has come under fire recently for being "unusable" on older systems - it loads up too much junk with the standard desktop environments. I don't mean for this to be a flame towards the GNOME project, but it's just an unfortunate trend I'm noticing.

    GTK apps need to be refined, such that they don't start following the Microsoft paradigm of, "since we have it, let's bring everything in and add it to the toolbar... woot woot".

    Any thoughts on this?
    • That's what XFCE [xfce.org] is supposed be for.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      The main problem with gnome, IMHO, is that it tries to be as OO as KDE but using C. This leads to the horrible mess that is gnome and its library dependencies. Sorry Miguel, but the current object model, as implemented in Gnome 2.6, blows dead goats.

      Let's look at an app that doesn't even claim to be fully gnome-ified...

      mandraka: {396} ldd `which gaim`
      libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x40020000)
      libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0 (0x402ed000)

      • by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @11:57AM (#9478238)
        Well, if you're going to be as scientific as that here's the ldd list for kmail:

        libkmailprivate.so.0 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkmailprivate.so.0 (0x40017000)
        libkhtml.so.4 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkhtml.so.4 (0x403b7000)
        libjpeg.so.62 => /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62 (0x406aa000)
        libkjs.so.1 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkjs.so.1 (0x406c8000)
        libpcreposix.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpcreposix.so.0 (0x40729000)
        libpcre.so.0 => /lib/libpcre.so.0 (0x4072c000)
        libkdeprint.so.4 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkdeprint.so.4 (0x4073d000)
        libkparts.so.2 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkparts.so.2 (0x407fa000)
        libkutils.so.1 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkutils.so.1 (0x4083d000)
        libkwalletclient.so.1 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkwalletclient.so.1 (0x40891000)
        libkdenetwork.so.2 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkdenetwork.so.2 (0x408a0000)
        libkspell.so.4 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkspell.so.4 (0x40970000)
        libkdepim.so.1 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkdepim.so.1 (0x40973000)
        libmimelib.so.1 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libmimelib.so.1 (0x409c9000)
        libktnef.so.1 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libktnef.so.1 (0x409fd000)
        libksieve.so.0 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libksieve.so.0 (0x40a13000)
        libkcal.so.2 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkcal.so.2 (0x40a21000)
        libkabc.so.1 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkabc.so.1 (0x40af7000)
        libvcard.so.0 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libvcard.so.0 (0x40b98000)
        libkresources.so.1 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkresources.so.1 (0x40bba000)
        libkio.so.4 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkio.so.4 (0x40bdf000)
        libkdeui.so.4 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkdeui.so.4 (0x40ee0000)
        libkdesu.so.4 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkdesu.so.4 (0x41159000)
        libkdecore.so.4 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkdecore.so.4 (0x41173000)
        libDCOP.so.4 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libDCOP.so.4 (0x41353000)
        libresolv.so.2 => /lib/libresolv.so.2 (0x41383000)
        libart_lgpl_2.so.2 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libart_lgpl_2.so.2 (0x41395000)
        libkdefx.so.4 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libkdefx.so.4 (0x413a9000)
        libqt-mt.so.3 => /opt/kde3.2.1/lib/libqt-mt.so.3 (0x413d2000)
        libGL.so.1 => /usr/lib/nvidia/tls/libGL.so.1 (0x41a0f000)
        libXmu.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXmu.so.6 (0x41a6d000)
        libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXrandr.so.2 (0x41a83000)
        libXcursor.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXcursor.so.1 (0x41a87000)
        libXft.so.2 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXft.so.2 (0x41a90000)
        libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0x41aa2000)
        libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x41af2000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x41b1a000)
        libpng12.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0 (0x41b1d000)
        libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x41b40000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x41b4e000)
        libSM.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x41c2c000)
        libICE.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x41c34000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x41c4c000)
        libXrender.so.1 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x41c5c000)
        libutil.so.1 => /lib/libutil.so.1 (0x41c64000)
        libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x41c67000)
        libfam.so.0 => /usr/lib/libfam.so.0 (0x41c78000)
        libstdc++.so.5 => /usr/lib/libstdc+
        • So? Here's the ldd for mutt:

          libncurses.so.5 => /lib/libncurses.so.5 (0x40018000)
          libsasl.so.7 => /usr/lib/libsasl.so.7 (0x40056000)
          libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x40062000)
          libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40065000)
          libdb2.so.2 => /lib/libdb2.so.2 (0x40182000)
          libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0x401c3000)
          libpam.so.0 => /lib/libpam.so.0 (0x401f0000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
      • Well gosh, on my Fedora system there doesn't seem to be a big difference in the library problem between Gnome and KDE. Konqueror shows 32 library dependencies on my system. Next time try a valid argument.

        ldd `which konqueror`
        konqueror.so => /usr/lib/konqueror.so (0x003b0000)
        libkonq.so.4 => /usr/lib/libkonq.so.4 (0x005df000)
        libkparts.so.2 => /usr/lib/libkparts.so.2 (0x0035e000)
        libkio.so.4 => /usr/lib/libkio.so.4 (0x00657000)
        libkdeui.so.4 => /usr/lib/libkdeui.so.4 (0x00bdb000)
        libkdesu.so.4 =
        • Compare apples and apples, please. Comparing Konq to GAIM is not right.

          ldd `which nautilus`
          libnautilus.so.2 => /usr/lib/libnautilus.so.2 (0x4003b000)
          libnautilus-adapter.so.2 => /usr/lib/libnautilus-adapter.so.2 (0x4004d000)
          libnautilus-private.so.2 => /usr/lib/libnautilus-private.so.2 (0x40051000)
          libeel-2.so.2 => /usr/lib/libeel-2.so.2 (0x40105000)
          libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x40198000)
          libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x401a0000)
      • The number of libraries linked tells you two things about the memory consumption, load time, and general bloatedness of a given app: Jack and Shit. Some of those libraries are tiny and do next to nothing (libXrandr, 16KB on machine) and others are huge because they contain an entire GUI toolkit (libgtk-x11, 2.8MB) or X protocol (libX11 980KB). Besides, on Linux, and just about every other modern OS, shared libraries are (surprise!) shared. That means that even if you have 12 apps running that depend on
    • by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @11:47AM (#9478213) Homepage Journal
      Hi,

      The GNOME devs are actively working on this issue.

      See for example

      http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/ 2004-May/msg00028.html [gnome.org]

      http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2004 -April/msg00065.html [gnome.org]

      You should start seeing the improvements in 2.8.

  • ...if it is you, who invented it...
  • by Xpilot ( 117961 ) on Sunday June 20, 2004 @11:32AM (#9478178) Homepage
    ...it would get its icon on Slashdot updated.

  • I've been a long time user of BeBits [bebits.com] and am real happy to see a similiar site for Gnome. It is a bit spooky to see a site that looks almost exactly like a site you've been using for awhile. It would be like a Bizzaro Slashdot where everything looks familiar, but then you notice that the articles use correct spelling and the Webmaster's name is Samurai Steve.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 20, 2004 @11:44AM (#9478206)
    User X hears about Gnomefiles and see cool new verison .x of some app. He's currently running Fedora Core 2, Mandrake, or Suse(ie a top 3 distro) or something else that comes with Gome 2.6. Of course this new app requires GTK and glib .x which of course are newer than what he has on his system. User tries to get it working but either can't or ends up hosing his Gnome install. Now I'm sure this is when user of distro X pipes in a say "but my distro can do it!". Good for you. That doesn't change the fact that getting both the latest and oldest versions of Gnome apps running on the same system isn't a royal PITA for many users. Don't even get me stated on the latest apps which require Gstreamer.

    Say what you want about Windows but if your running XP you can download and install pretty much any app from last 8 years and get it to work. There are of course exceptions to this rule but for the most part its possible with little to no effort. For most people Gnomefile.org is just going to be a painful reminder of what cool apps are out there but you can't run because you can't figure out how to install them without hosing your system. For the new generation of Linux Desktop users this continues to be a huge problem.
    • You're right - if you work off of random tarballs off of the net, you will end up with a hosed install. Stick with the major distribution automation tools - apt, yum etc. Packages in the repositories are typically kept "sane".
    • Gnome has remained ABI stable since 2.0 (two years ago). So basically any app less than 2 years old will run on a linux/gnome system. This is not nearly as good as XP, but it is still respectable. Gnome 2.8 will be released in september, and guess what it is ABI compatible with? Yes! 2.0, just like the version before was. And of cause one can install gnome 2.x libraries in parralel to gnome 1.x libraries, meaning that to upgrade one doesn't have to do anything like "hosing gnome"

      Basically I think you are o

  • by NoData ( 9132 )
    Gnome get home!
    Gnome no roam!
    Last gnome home overthrown,
    get owned!

    Users groan:
    Gnome overblown!
    Biggest bloat known,
    look like windows clone!
    Gnome throw bone
    Prize for code loan!
    "Hone tome
    that is gnome;
    No more piss and moan."

  • Rushed Entries (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JonoPlop ( 626887 )

    From the story:
    they are offering prizes to Gnome developers who will submit an app during the first week of the site's launch.

    1. People rush to make the date
    2. The site is filled with hurried, poorly-made software after the first week
    3. The crappy software gives the site a bad reputation
    4. Developers of "good" software shun the site's collection
    5. Users find that there is no good software in the repository, only poorly-made software (the programs submitted for the prize were made only for that purpose, and are no
  • ....why not, really? It's more than half way there already. When I think OS, I think the pile of applications I use. The gnome desktop and assembled apps are a GUI computing experience, that appears to me to be the design goal, they don't need much more to make a full fledged gnome OS, only real probs I could forsee would be which package manager they wanted to use, and they could put it to a vote probably.

    Just a thought and I know in advance a lot of folks will say "you can do this with distroX, why shoul
    • "Distros by and large are just choice of kernel, arch, how they package, pile 0 libraries, and what apps ya got."

      Exactly... and GNOME does not want to limit itself to any particular kernel, arch, package system, etc. To many people and organizations, those fundamentals matter a great deal more than which desktop runs on top of it.
      • and what you say is correct, I'll grant that-take your word for it. What I am thinking is also correct though, by trying to be all things to all people all the time they dilute resources, have to work around a lot of inconsistencies, etc. There's nothing stopping any large desktop project like gnome from deciding on being an *integrated* project rather than a *scattered* project that tries to be the kitchen sink for eveything out there.

        It's just an idea, no biggee. Here is my thinking in an anology form. I
  • I am a happy gnome user, but one area in which I think the gnome project needs a lot of work is with the webpage. Even though they recently (a year ago?) updated gnome.org with a new look, it is already falling into unmaintenance.

    Furthermore, gnome.org is far from the central site regarding things about gnome, which I think is a big mistake. In fact, even though I'm a heavy user of gnome stuff and keep up to date with gnome news, I hardly ever visit. Many important websites about gnome like footnotes or
    • GNOME is a much more distributed project than KDE is.

      I think that the approach to documentation, software design, policy and politics all reflect this.

Whoever dies with the most toys wins.

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