TimburyDotOrg » GNOME

What Will Happen to GNOME Now?

Susan Linton — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 18:55:45 +0000

Those who remember a time before Ubuntu will undoubtedly also remember that GNOME, although probably the second most popular desktop manager, didn't hold too much share of the Linux desktop market. KDE was king, and GNOME was a distant second. Then Ubuntu appeared and not only climbed its way to the top of the distribution game, but brought GNOME with it. more>>

When is a Gnome Not a Gnome? In Ubuntu 11.04!

Shawn Powers — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:00:00 +0000

At the Ubuntu Devloper Summit on Monday, it was announced that Ubuntu 11.04 will ship with Unity as its default shell. It will still focus on Gnome applications, and depend heavily on the Gnome libraries -- but the default interface will be Unity. For those unfamiliar with Unity, it's the default shell for the Netbook Edition of Ubuntu.

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More on Canonical’s Contributions

Susan Linton — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 18:28:20 +0000

Apparently still troubled over the backlash sparked by Dave Neary's report of top (and bottom) GNOME contributors given at July's GUADEC convention, Mark Shuttleworth, posted his "Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption." As I reporte more>>

Spotlight on Linux: Parsix 3.6 (RC)

Susan Linton — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Parsix GNU/Linux is a great little distro hailing from the exotic lands of Persia. It features a lovely customized GNOME desktop and lots of handy applications. It reminds folks of Ubuntu in many ways and is often described as a nice alternative to Ubuntu. more>>

Change the back end, not the UI

Daengbo — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 17:03:00 +0000

Image via CrunchBase

I watched four hours of the Google Atmosphere event yesterday. Sure, a lot of it was Google preening and PR, but there were a lot of surprises. The iPhone and Blackberry were mentioned much more often than android phones. Several different OSes were used for demos, along with different browsers. MS, Zoho, Amazon, and several other Google competitors were mentioned as viable alternatives, which definitely breaks the Marketing 101 rule: "If you're the market leader, never mention your competition." (UFS, why can't you act mature?)

That's not really what this blog post is about, though. I want to mention a couple of gems that were buried deep in lectures and demos. Salesforce.com's new social layer (Chatter) is a blatant rip-off of Facebook. They admit it. They even revel in the fact. Why? Everyone in the new generation knows Facebook, and everyone understands it. Training costs to start using Chatter are almost zero. Turn it on, people immediately get it, and they immediately start using it. It doesn't matter that the interface for FB sucks or that a new kind of interface would be more efficient.

That brings me to the second, related point: don't change the interface. Add functionality on the back end, but leave the interface alone. The automobile analogy was almost required. Repeat: leave the interface alone. I fear the day GNOME 3 comes out, no matter how clever and "intuitive" it is. I much prefer the work around Elementary Nautilus and integration of Zeitgeist and Tracker. In fact, my old notes for GNOME 3 were pretty much total integration of tagging into the desktop and every application, while leaving the tags to appear as directories in the file manager.

Just something to think about. Cue comments about button placement in 3, 2, 1 ....

What Applications Should be in the Standard Installation?

Daengbo — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:56:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

You may have heard that GIMP and F-Spot aren't safe for inclusion in 10.04. 700MB isn't much space to work with Why not question all the applications in Ubuntu, then? What should be in the default installation? I'll look category by category, but I'll talk a little about why the current defaults are chosen first.

Ubuntu is first and foremost a GNOME distribution. It takes GNOME applications unless there's a definitive reason not to. For example, Firefox was originally used instead of the GNOME default Epiphany browser because Epiphany was in a terrible state at the time, and FF is still preferred because it's a very poplar browser and serves as a familiar signpost to switchers. But mostly, you've got Totem, Nautlius, Evolution, and all the gang. Ubuntu thus looks much like any other GNOME distribution.

But it doesn't have to be that way. The questions about The GIMP are great -- they represent a critical look at what should be included. How many people do advanced photo editing? Few, probably. I would guess that the same can be said for PIMminess. Has the average user even even opened Evolution? Most home users handle all their personal business through web services like Yahoo! or Google.

First of all, UBuntu needs to decide whether it wants to be a home or professional operating system. Pro users want different things out of the box. Trying to please both sets of users with one CD is an exercise in frustration. Take a look at the table below to see what groups I think want various features (and keep in mind that it's easy to install these bits if you are an exception).

Application Class	Current Choice	Home User	Professional User
Accessories	Printing, Calculator, etc.	Yes	Yes
Games	GNOME Games	Yes, and more	No
Photo Manager	F-Spot	Yes	No
Bitmap Editor	The GIMP	No	No
Vector Editor	OO.o Draw	No	Yes
Image Scanner	XSANE	On insertion of a scanner	On insertion of a scanner
IM Client	Empathy	Yes	Probably no
Personal Information Manager	Evolution	Not likely	Yes
Web Browser	Firefox	Yes	Yes
Remote Desktop	VNC Client and RDP Client	No	Yes
Bittorrent Client	Transmission	Yes	No (a hundred times, "No!")
File Synchronization and Back-up	Ubuntu One	Yes	Yes, but not this one
Presentation Software	OO.o Impress	No	Yes
Spreadsheet Software	OO.o Calc	Maybe	Yes
Word Processor	OO.o Write	Yes	Yes
Disc Burner	Brasero	Yes	Maybe
Video and Audio Player	Totem	Yes	Yes
Music Manager	Rhythmbox	Yes	No

Using very rough calculations (via apt-cache show's size), the home user profile above would shave 75-80MB. That's more than enough to add more themes, a video introduction on first run, a video editor, cool games, or other things deemed useful for the home user. The corporate user will only get 60MB or so, but you could then make a case for removing Tomboy so that Mono could be ripped out, saving even more space. What would go in instead? Certainly the would be tools for connecting to directory services. Tracker should be installed and Nautilus should have Tracker functionality re-enabled.

Ubuntu devs are constantly fighting amongst themselves about which applications deserve to be on that tiny, 700MB disk. Serving two different customer bases with one CD just makes that problem worse.

Banshee 1.2 – 1.x Series Getting to Maturity

Craciun Dan — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:32:00 +0000

The new Banshee 1.2 includes several new features over the last stable release, like the equaliser or the music recommendations panel. The full list of new or improved features is here. For those who didn't hear about Banshee yet, it's a pretty powerful audio player for GNOME which received more and more attention lately, featuring things like a media library, support for Last.fm, podcasts, cover fetching, plugins and many more.

Banshee 1.2.0 playing

I was enchanted to try the so-called 'Amarok Migration' feature, which, according to the official website, lets you import ratings, play counts and podcasts from Amarok. Well, I have Amarok 1.4.9.1 using SQLite but Banshee crashed when I tried to import those using the Media -> Import Media dialogue, already having a media library in Banshee. I tried deleting the file ~/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db and this time the import feature worked flawlessly, and Banshee didn't crash anymore.

Importing the Amarok media library

The equaliser works very well, except that there are no default presets. I think several default presets like 'Rock', or 'Full Bass' would be nice instead of letting the user setting those.

The new equaliser

I was still disappointed to see that the cover fetching plugin doesn't look inside the song's directory for local files like cover.jpg or front.png, but the retrieval of covers from the Internet works pretty well. All of the covers for albums which don't have additions like [2004 Remaster] or [Limited Edition] were correctly fetched.

Plugins

Banshee looks more improved with every version and it's definitely a very promising player. Compared to 1.0.0, this new release it's much more stable (no more crashes when clicking on the Last.fm tab for example), but I think it still needs some work at cover fetching, and the Last.fm integration won't show all the images for recently played tracks. Last.fm changed the layout recently so I'm not sure whether this is Banshee's fault at all.

Last.fm integration - Banshee features song submission too

Although the 1.0 release was also accompanied by a new, professionally designed website, work at the Wiki seems to be still in progress.

Although I'm not a GNOME or GTK fan, I can warmly recommend Banshee to any audiophile using this desktop environment. It's almost full-featured, and stable enough now, the 1.x series showing real signs of maturity now.

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