KDE 1.1 vs GNOME 1.0 and flames, flames, flames
Navindra Umanee
probably biased, but what the heck you guys will set me straight.
Note: I have been using KDE 1.1 for a long while now and I have not
been using GNOME extensively.
* Installing GNOME is really complicated compared to KDE.
* KDE 1.1 is extremely stable but GNOME 1.0 seems rather unstable to
me. For example, double clicking on on a leaf in gnomecc will
segfault gnomecc (then things get weird, gnomecc comes alive again
and a extra window that should have been swallowed pops up). gpanel and
gmc and other applications have crashed on me several times (eg,
when changing themes). KDE 1.1 did not crash for me in all the time
I have been using it (except when I was playing with kdelibs but
that's irrelevant).
* GNOME falls flat down on its face in terms of documentation, at
least as far as I can see. I guess my documentation could be
missing somehow or maybe in the wrong place because most of the time
I get no response when I press "Help". gnome-help-browser says "This
document accompanies the alpha release of GNOME , shipped May 1998".
Not good.
GNOME About dialogs have useful information and humor in them. :)
KDE wins in terms of help and helpfulness as far as I can see.
KDE's help browser is nicer.
* GNOME configuration is sometimes confusing. I mean I just don't
understand it. What the heck is MDI? Clicking on help does nothing
for me so some things are just unclear. What does GNOME Edit
Properties do for me? I guess I haven't used GNOME enough to find
out.
I think GNOME suffers from the lack of an integrated window manager.
Frankly, I don't think Enlightenment cuts it but I could be missing
a .deb because I couldn't figure out how to configure Enlightenment
from GNOME.
KDE wins on the ease of configuration and integration issue.
* gpanel kicks kpanel ass, I like it very much. gpanel can be moved
simply by dragging with the middle mouse button. Those applets are
very nifty (I especially like the minicd player). All this corba
stuff is very impressive but it sure fills up my syslog with a lot
of garbage. gpanel also seems more powerful in general (edge
panels, corner panels). gpanel has useless menu entries.
Big minus for kpanel: I had to modify kpanel *source* so that it is
not always on top.
* GNOME menus can be torn off, very useful. GNOME has a rather neat
style called "Metal". I quite like it. I think it's the most
polished and professional look included with GNOME. The feel is
still the same though, and gpanel menus pop up too quickly for my taste
and so you can't scroll throuh menuitems comfortably. Dragging
toolbars or menubars in GNOME are just too slow. I can move my
mouse faster than the bars can follow.
KDE as always is polished and professional.
* GNOME uses more colours. This is very nice for a person with a
16bpp display like me. GNOME folder icons are oriented in a weird
way, just kidding -- I'm just used to the KDE orientation :).
* GNOME calls it's panel "panel" instead of "gpanel". GNOME makes an
/etc/sound, /etc/CORBA directory, has files named /etc/paper.config
and I'm sure more. This seems rather arrogant to me and encroaches
on namespace but I guess I'm just being a stupid bastard here.
* gmc is more bloated than kfm. gmc root icons don't work properly in
KWM. gnome-terminal is just broken. Konsole while alpha stands
up in general though it has its problems.
* yadda, yadda, yadda.
Comments, corrections, flames?
-N.
--
"These download files are in Microsoft Word 6.0 format. After unzipping,
these files can be viewed in any text editor, including all versions of
Microsoft Word, WordPad, and Microsoft Word Viewer." [Microsoft website]
< http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~navindra/editors/ >
O. Niepolt
My god, thanks for these comments, you're absolutely right in every
aspect. -- I just would like to add a very few things, as I don't have
much time right now:
Gnome is not only much more difficult to install and to handle than KDE
1.1, but IMHO it would also be beaten by KDE 1.0. I have compiled from
source KDE 1.0, then KDE 1.1, now Gnome 1.0.1. It's been a Big Pain,
it's not ready. In comparison compiling KDE 1.0 was as easy as typing
"updatedb" or something like that. I'm deeply, deeply sorry for the
Gnome team. I beleive I can understand them a bit, but to me this
so-called release is a complete failure. Gnome does look stunning, but
it's NOT ready for "release". It's beta at best. Help is lacking
everywhere. The groundworks of Gnome look promising, but there are lots
of caveats to to the whole system. The biggest problem to me seems the
windowmanager issue, this has to be fixed very soon. There's got to be a
specification for what is a "Gnome compliant" WM! My goodness, I'm back
to editing all those ASCII files again. In that respect, it's like
running fvwm2 on KDE, I've tried recent icewm, wmaker, and (of course)
enlightenment, all of them are making problems. Enlightenment's problem
is that personally I don't like it :-), and the two others don't
interoperate very well with Gnome. As a consequence, session managment
is very flaky etc, I get an icewm panel plus a gnome panel, or wmaker
icons scattered needlessly all over the Gnome desktop. Of course I could
fix all that, only not from the GUI as it is supposed to be.
I have downloaded all the stuff and paid lots of Deutschmarks to my
phone company for that, and then hacked Makefiles and found out about
dependencies and things and made every effort to do it right, because in
some stupid way I too beleived that Gnome would be better than KDE. But
all this only to find out that gmc is relaunched each time I assign a
new icon to a desktop item, or that it crashes when I assign a tiff icon
instead of png although tiff support is compiled in the libraries, or
that I can't change the so-called "editor environment" in any sensible
way, it will always default to Xemacs etc etc, lots of other stuff. I'm
sure many people will like Gnome, I'm sure it will get better, but so
far it's NOT the ease-to-use GUI that they proclaim it is. I'm saying
this without irony, really, thanks Gnome team for the great effort that
must surely have gone into all of this. But please don't lower standards
even further, think twice next time, already KDE declared things 1.0
when they where still beta by Linux standards.
Sorry for this outbreak of violence, I just had to vent off.
>From Berlin, Germany
-- Olaf Niepolt
David M. Cook
>* Installing GNOME is really complicated compared to KDE.
KDE was not so easy at about the same point in its development. I remember
a lot of struggling with the C++ compiler (maybe more FSF's fault, but
still...) and similar struggles with the RPMs.
>* KDE 1.1 is extremely stable but GNOME 1.0 seems rather unstable to
I'd say GNOME is at the state where some KDE betas were at. Not suprising
as it got a much later start. The version number inflation is a bit
annoying but understandable (the KDE team was guilty of some version number
inflation as well, IMO). KDE 1.1 should probably be KDE 1.0 and GNOME 1.0
should probably be something like GNOME 0.60 or 0.70. But it's all
numerology, anyway.
>* GNOME configuration is sometimes confusing. I mean I just don't
> understand it. What the heck is MDI? Clicking on help does nothing
> for me so some things are just unclear. What does GNOME Edit
> Properties do for me? I guess I haven't used GNOME enough to find
> out.
MDI = multiple document interface. It doesn't seem to be as useful an MDI
yet as the one on that other OS. It does not really seem to address the
window clutter issue in a manner that is non-modal.
Yeah, GNOME docs suck. I don't know why the respective authors of each API
can't take a few minutes to document their interface. It's maddening to see
"No Description" again and again in the docs for weeks on end. The idea
that one can figure out what is going on from the header files is asinine.
> I think GNOME suffers from the lack of an integrated window manager.
> Frankly, I don't think Enlightenment cuts it but I could be missing
> a .deb because I couldn't figure out how to configure Enlightenment
> from GNOME.
Well, enlightenment is the de facto window manager for GNOME unfortunately.
I can't figure out how to do simple things in it, either. And the cursor is
always an X in any context. Stupid. The developers should have been more
proactive in this area.
I prefer using Window Maker, which seems to work fine with gnome as far as I
can tell. Hopefully a wider range of compatible window managers will become
available. I'd like to see an easy to configure gnome compatible fvwm2. I
haven't heard much about development in that area.
> and I'm sure more. This seems rather arrogant to me and encroaches
> on namespace but I guess I'm just being a stupid bastard here.
No, they should change this.
>* gmc is more bloated than kfm. gmc root icons don't work properly in
> KWM. gnome-terminal is just broken.
How so? I like it more than the KDE xterm. As I've said before, slang apps
work better (background colors drawn correctly) in gnome-term.
My own complaint about GNOME is that some of the apps don't size themselves
relative to the screen size, i.e. they start too big on my laptop.
Dave Cook
Tim
<navi...@cs.mcgill.ca> wrote:
>I didn't write this for the newsgroups so it's quite crude and
>probably biased, but what the heck you guys will set me straight.
>
>Note: I have been using KDE 1.1 for a long while now and I have not
>been using GNOME extensively.
>
>* Installing GNOME is really complicated compared to KDE.
>
>* KDE 1.1 is extremely stable but GNOME 1.0 seems rather unstable to
> me. For example, double clicking on on a leaf in gnomecc will
> segfault gnomecc (then things get weird, gnomecc comes alive again
> and a extra window that should have been swallowed pops up). gpanel and
> gmc and other applications have crashed on me several times (eg,
> when changing themes). KDE 1.1 did not crash for me in all the time
> I have been using it (except when I was playing with kdelibs but
> that's irrelevant).
Quite true. KDE (even v1.0) is a piece of cake to install. Trying to
install any of the GNOMEs (except for the one shipped with RedHat
v5.2) was an exercize in futility and frustration. The newer RPMs
wouldn't install/upgrade because of dependencies and trying to force
the issue would result in a highly unstable situation. GNOME v1.0 is
at a worse state than even the KDE betas were!
If they want the masses to use GNOME, they really need to get the
installation, and even more importantly the upgrading of versions, to
a level where you don't have to uninstall some libraries, install some
core components while upgrading other components. There needs to be
an easy install script, or at least make it so upgrading doesn't break
existing GNOME aps.
GNOME really should still be a beta product. It ain't ready for
primetime. I hope it does make it because GNOME has potential.
Simon Kinahan
> Quite true. KDE (even v1.0) is a piece of cake to install. Trying to
> install any of the GNOMEs (except for the one shipped with RedHat
> v5.2) was an exercize in futility and frustration. The newer RPMs
> wouldn't install/upgrade because of dependencies and trying to force
> the issue would result in a highly unstable situation. G
As far as I can tell this a product of the 'helpful' features of GTK+ and
the fact that RedHat ship some (proto) Gnome apps with their distribution.
To install a new GTK+ it tries to install the compatibility libraries. If
you have the old library installed, it tries to overwrite it, and RPM
complains. If you use -U it refuses to do ahead because of the GTK+ comtrol
panel apps. I have not found a nice solution, but I think this is the onlt
legitimate use for --nodeps.
Simon
Navindra Umanee
>> and I'm sure more. This seems rather arrogant to me and encroaches
>> on namespace but I guess I'm just being a stupid bastard here.
>
> No, they should change this.
The more I think of this, the more it incenses me for some reason.
They really should have used a /etc/gnome for all their config files.
>>* gmc is more bloated than kfm. gmc root icons don't work properly in
>> KWM. gnome-terminal is just broken.
>
> How so? I like it more than the KDE xterm. As I've said before, slang apps
> work better (background colors drawn correctly) in gnome-term.
Well, C-u and backspace don't update the line for me, so that's one of
the more annoying problems. I also can't figure out how to copy more
than one screenful of text, since the right mouse button brings up a
menu and gnome-terminal doesn't scroll, that too is an annoying
problem for me. Clicking in the window does not get rid of the X
selection properly. Mutt does not work properly in gnome-terminal.
Navindra Umanee
> I have downloaded all the stuff and paid lots of Deutschmarks to my
> phone company for that, and then hacked Makefiles and found out about
> dependencies and things and made every effort to do it right, because in
> some stupid way I too beleived that Gnome would be better than KDE. But
And this, to put it bluntly, is a tribute to the GNOME marketing team.
rob
David M. Cook wrote in message ...
<snip>
>inflation as well, IMO). KDE 1.1 should probably be KDE 1.0 and GNOME 1.0
>should probably be something like GNOME 0.60 or 0.70. But it's all
>numerology, anyway.
Well, maybe. I held off on trying GNOME until 1.0 because I hoped I
wouldn't have
too much trouble compiling and running it. In the end I spent all Sunday
afternoon
and evening on a project that I never got to work. I finally got the gnome
core to
compile but I don't even know what it produced or how to use it. I could
probably
figure it out but I still haven't got quite a few of the other pieces to
compile so I think
there's a good chance that GNOME wouldn't do anything for me if I got it to
run. I'm
not upset about it because after all it is free software without warranty,
but I'm
disappointed at the time that I (so far) wasted. I would have better off to
wait until
GNOME is further along - more documented, easier to install, etc.
rob.
jedi
>O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
>> I have downloaded all the stuff and paid lots of Deutschmarks to my
>> phone company for that, and then hacked Makefiles and found out about
>> dependencies and things and made every effort to do it right, because in
>> some stupid way I too beleived that Gnome would be better than KDE. But
>
>And this, to put it bluntly, is a tribute to the GNOME marketing team.
Me, I just got the binary packages and installed them in
the proscribed fashion, ditto for KDE except for qtlib.
--
Herding Humans ~ Herding Cats
Neither will do a thing unless they really want to, or |||
is coerced to the point where it will scratch your eyes out / | \
as soon as your grip slips.
In search of sane PPP docs? Try http://penguin.lvcm.com
Paul D. Smith
>> And this, to put it bluntly, is a tribute to the GNOME marketing team.
j> Me, I just got the binary packages and installed them in
j> the proscribed fashion, ditto for KDE except for qtlib.
^^^^^^^^^^
Hmm. Freudian slip? :)
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul D. Smith <psm...@baynetworks.com> Network Management Development
"Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These are my opinions---Nortel Networks takes no responsibility for them.
Craig Kelley
> * GNOME falls flat down on its face in terms of documentation, at
> least as far as I can see. I guess my documentation could be
> missing somehow or maybe in the wrong place because most of the time
> I get no response when I press "Help". gnome-help-browser says "This
> document accompanies the alpha release of GNOME , shipped May 1998".
> Not good.
You need to install the documentation from the noarch/ section.
> Comments, corrections, flames?
All I can say is: GNOME 1.0 should not have been released as such.
I like GNOME, but 1.0 is still BETA code, if not alpha.
--
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
Craig Kelley -- kell...@isu.edu
http://www.isu.edu/~kellcrai finger i...@inconnu.isu.edu for PGP block
Navindra Umanee
> On Tue, 09 Mar 1999 16:15:34 GMT, Navindra Umanee <navi...@cs.mcgill.ca> wrote:
>>O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
>>> I have downloaded all the stuff and paid lots of Deutschmarks to my
>>> phone company for that, and then hacked Makefiles and found out about
>>> dependencies and things and made every effort to do it right, because in
>>> some stupid way I too beleived that Gnome would be better than KDE. But
>>
More in reference to the last line of his comment than anything else.
> Me, I just got the binary packages and installed them in
> the proscribed fashion, ditto for KDE except for qtlib.
I don't fault anyone for installation problems, really, as both Debian
and Red Hat will probably eventually solve these issues. I installed
from binaries which was hard enough but I hear that compiling from
source is rather significantly harder. Why isn't it a ./configure &&
make && make install like KDE and most other GNU projects? (or is it?)
Navindra Umanee
> Navindra Umanee <navi...@cs.mcgill.ca> writes:
>
>> * GNOME falls flat down on its face in terms of documentation, at
>> least as far as I can see. I guess my documentation could be
>> missing somehow or maybe in the wrong place because most of the time
>> I get no response when I press "Help". gnome-help-browser says "This
>> document accompanies the alpha release of GNOME , shipped May 1998".
>> Not good.
>
> You need to install the documentation from the noarch/ section.
Yeah, you told me this before and I did not ignore it. I guess the
.deb maintainer could have missed something or my GNOME installation
is broken. I have HTML files in /usr/doc/gnome-core that seem to be
mostly mc documentation (don't know how to access it from gmc as the
help menu only has About as menuitem). My
/usr/doc/gnome-control-center has no HTML files and nor do most other
directories... Somewhere there is a gnome-intro that speaks about the
May 1998 alpha release.
> All I can say is: GNOME 1.0 should not have been released as such.
>
> I like GNOME, but 1.0 is still BETA code, if not alpha.
No doubt they'll release a kick ass 1.1.
Chris Costello
>I don't fault anyone for installation problems, really, as both Debian
>and Red Hat will probably eventually solve these issues. I installed
>from binaries which was hard enough but I hear that compiling from
>source is rather significantly harder. Why isn't it a ./configure &&
>make && make install like KDE and most other GNU projects? (or is it?)
It seems to me that it was not written to be portable from
Linux, so ugly, horrible hacks had to be written using lots of M4
and various shell scripts to stick a slight image of portability.
I had to rewrite most of the Makefiles to get it to work on
FreeBSD a couple months ago. (I don't really like it, and I
don't know how far it's progressed since then.)
>
>-N.
>--
>"These download files are in Microsoft Word 6.0 format. After unzipping,
>these files can be viewed in any text editor, including all versions of
>Microsoft Word, WordPad, and Microsoft Word Viewer." [Microsoft website]
> < http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~navindra/editors/ >
--
Powered by FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT. "The Power to Serve!"
Programming just with goto's is like swatting flies with a sledgehammer.
jedi
>jedi <je...@dementia.mishnet> wrote:
>> On Tue, 09 Mar 1999 16:15:34 GMT, Navindra Umanee <navi...@cs.mcgill.ca> wrote:
>>>O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
>>>> I have downloaded all the stuff and paid lots of Deutschmarks to my
>>>> phone company for that, and then hacked Makefiles and found out about
>>>> dependencies and things and made every effort to do it right, because in
>>>> some stupid way I too beleived that Gnome would be better than KDE. But
>>>
>>>And this, to put it bluntly, is a tribute to the GNOME marketing team.
>
>More in reference to the last line of his comment than anything else.
>
>> Me, I just got the binary packages and installed them in
>> the proscribed fashion, ditto for KDE except for qtlib.
>
>and Red Hat will probably eventually solve these issues. I installed
>from binaries which was hard enough but I hear that compiling from
>source is rather significantly harder. Why isn't it a ./configure &&
>make && make install like KDE and most other GNU projects? (or is it?)
Bullocks. I don't get binary packages of things like GNOME,
KDE or GnuStep because they are 'nice' to compile by yourself.
Any of the three are a mess to deal with in source form.
jedi
>%% je...@dementia.mishnet (jedi) writes:
>
> >> And this, to put it bluntly, is a tribute to the GNOME marketing team.
>
> j> the proscribed fashion, ditto for KDE except for qtlib.
> ^^^^^^^^^^
>Hmm. Freudian slip? :)
Bad spelling and no proofreading & carelessness in general.
This is just Usenet after all... :-p
Paul D. Smith
>> I think GNOME suffers from the lack of an integrated window manager.
>> Frankly, I don't think Enlightenment cuts it but I could be missing
>> a .deb because I couldn't figure out how to configure Enlightenment
>> from GNOME.
dmc> Well, enlightenment is the de facto window manager for GNOME
dmc> unfortunately. I can't figure out how to do simple things in it,
dmc> either. And the cursor is always an X in any context. Stupid.
dmc> The developers should have been more proactive in this area.
dmc> I prefer using Window Maker, which seems to work fine with gnome
dmc> as far as I can tell. Hopefully a wider range of compatible
dmc> window managers will become available. I'd like to see an easy
dmc> to configure gnome compatible fvwm2. I haven't heard much about
dmc> development in that area.
In fact, someone associated with the GNOME team has a version of fvwm
2.2 which has been modified to be GNOME-aware--whatever that may mean :)
I'm not sure of the status of these patches right now--we're trying to
keep in touch with him on it.
We on the fvwm-workers list are anxious to incorporate some support for
GNOME (and KDE!), and we're just waiting for someone with the requisite
knowledge to provide patches. The docs for GNOME-aware WM's are pretty
lacking, so we can't really do it ourselves.
One idea that seems to have received a lot of interest by the
fvwm-workers is trying to get a relatively quick release of fvwm 2.4 out
with support for GNOME at least, and KDE if someone wants to help with
that.
O. Niepolt
>
> O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
> > I have downloaded all the stuff and paid lots of Deutschmarks to my
> > phone company for that, and then hacked Makefiles and found out about
> > dependencies and things and made every effort to do it right, because in
> > some stupid way I too beleived that Gnome would be better than KDE. But
>
>
Do you mean to say that it is my own fault, allowing myself to be fooled
into buying this thing, or do you mean the Gnome Marketing "Department"
is to blame. OK. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
There was a time when a was a pure Windows user, and some people out
there had decided they had to convince others that they should use Linux
instead, and I was one of their "victims". I have never regretted being
such a victim. I have never regretted learning the basics of LaTeX, or
of shell scripting. I have never regretted going from SuSE to Debian. I
have not regretted learning how to compile a kernel, for instance. All
this I did because someone in the Linux community had told me that it
makes sense and that it could be useful. So that kind of "marketing" did
work quite well for both sides. But Gnome people are cheating us. To do
them justice, one could add this sentence from old commie Bertholt
Brecht: "I really don't like people who do bad things just because of
their good intentions." (Ich kann Leute nicht leiden, die mit gutem
Willen schlechtes tun.).
If they declare it alpha beta gamma pre 99.88-pre-pre-pre and say it's
version 0.6.7.3.44.21-99-22:11 whatever, and they say, hey you have been
warned if you're a regular user don't use it and wait a bit, then I have
only myself to blame. But that isn't the case, just read the press
release. It's disgusting if you confront it with Gnome realities. I'm
not prepared to report a single bug to them, unless they friendly ask me
to do so. Which of course they won't do :-) They have changed the name
of the game, so I don't have to comply either. Which is the saddest
part ot the whole story: not that Gnome is still broken, but that
GNU/Gnome
people seem to have broken a very important principle of the free
software community, which is about a certain degree of sincerity towards
the user.
That's my second monologue in 24 hrs, but I promise it won't happen
again. Back to lurking mode, or feel free to flame me.
-- Olaf
mlw
>
> Navindra Umanee <navi...@cs.mcgill.ca> writes:
>
> > * GNOME falls flat down on its face in terms of documentation, at
> > least as far as I can see. I guess my documentation could be
> > missing somehow or maybe in the wrong place because most of the time
> > I get no response when I press "Help". gnome-help-browser says "This
> > document accompanies the alpha release of GNOME , shipped May 1998".
> > Not good.
>
> You need to install the documentation from the noarch/ section.
>
>
> All I can say is: GNOME 1.0 should not have been released as such.
>
> I like GNOME, but 1.0 is still BETA code, if not alpha.
I sympathize with the GNOME project, and I wish it were better. For me,
however, I don't think that GNOME or KDE are the answer. KDE is too
proprietary with Qt, and IMHO GNOME is poorly designed. I like the idea
of CORBA for linking apps and UI. Who knows, maybe Harmony and KDE with
some GNOME extensions would be the answer.
--
Mohawk Software
Windows 95, Windows NT, UNIX, Linux. Applications, drivers, support.
Visit the Mohawk Software website: www.mohawksoft.com
Roberto Alsina
dave...@home.com (David M. Cook) wrote:
> On Tue, 09 Mar 1999 04:10:43 GMT, Navindra Umanee <navi...@cs.mcgill.ca>
wrote:
>
> >* Installing GNOME is really complicated compared to KDE.
>
> a lot of struggling with the C++ compiler (maybe more FSF's fault, but
> still...) and similar struggles with the RPMs.
>
>
> as it got a much later start.
KDE was started in Oct 16 1996. Gnome was, if I remember correctly, around
May 1997?
KDE 1.0 was released on July 12 1998, so the same moment in time is about
1.0.
I may be wrong since the original GNOME announcement sadly doesn't have a date
in it, can anyone check?
> >* gmc is more bloated than kfm. gmc root icons don't work properly in
> > KWM. gnome-terminal is just broken.
>
> How so? I like it more than the KDE xterm. As I've said before, slang apps
> work better (background colors drawn correctly) in gnome-term.
Did you try them in konsole? I had success using it with slrn, which IIRC was
one of the apps you had troubles with.
Best regards,
--
Roberto Alsina (KDE developer, MFCH)
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Matt Willis
First off, I like Gnome, and some (not most) of the themes are quite
beautiful. As for KDE, the Qt folks still have bad Karma.
The Gnome Desktop and config are easy. But Gnome's not ready for prime
time, though, and I wish they didn't give a 1.0 number. It seems like
they did this out of pressure to announce something at the conference
last week. There's going to be a lot of Newbies trying Red Hat's linux
and giving up saying "Stable? I don't know what they are talking about!
It kept crashing to DOS." <Shudder>
A bad first impression is not what we need to convince these people of
the superiority of the OS method. For these newbies, KDE seems the way
to go. After all, for a RH package, Gnome doesn't even install properly
on a stock RH5.2 machine! (wow)
Despite what some people might think, competing desktops is a good
thing, and by version 1.1 or 1.2, gnome should be more respectable, and
we can focus on stylistic issues. I think wm-neutral apps are better
than wm-specific apps, and the existence of two major desktops should
prevent an avalanche of gratuitously incompatible programs, where the
latest and greatest is only available as "Kthis" or "Gthat".
- Matt
Matthias Warkus
..and Navindra Umanee <navi...@cs.mcgill.ca> wrote:
> O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
> > I have downloaded all the stuff and paid lots of Deutschmarks to my
> > phone company for that, and then hacked Makefiles and found out about
> > dependencies and things and made every effort to do it right, because in
> > some stupid way I too beleived that Gnome would be better than KDE. But
>
> And this, to put it bluntly, is a tribute to the GNOME marketing team.
Aw, stop it. "Gnome marketing", what a joke. KDE does marketing (just
look at their Web site). Gnome still looks very much less
Corporate-America-ish to me.
mawa
--
"Well, let's just say, don't try to defend your argument with your
body, and you won't feel like it's an ad hominem attack."
-- Andrew "drieux" Hampe <ha...@nas.nasa.gov>
Matthias Warkus
> probably biased, but what the heck you guys will set me straight.
>
> Note: I have been using KDE 1.1 for a long while now and I have not
> been using GNOME extensively.
It shows.
> * Installing GNOME is really complicated compared to KDE.
Yep, this is because it's packaged in a finer-grained way.
> * KDE 1.1 is extremely stable but GNOME 1.0 seems rather unstable to
> me.
Hm, right. So far, I hadn't Gnome 1.0 crash horribly, but yes, it could
be more stable.
[schnibble]
> * GNOME falls flat down on its face in terms of documentation, at
> least as far as I can see. I guess my documentation could be
> missing somehow or maybe in the wrong place because most of the time
> I get no response when I press "Help". gnome-help-browser says "This
> document accompanies the alpha release of GNOME , shipped May 1998".
> Not good.
Let me guess: you didn't get the noarch RPMs with the Users' Guide and
stuff.
[schnibble]
> * GNOME configuration is sometimes confusing. I mean I just don't
> understand it. What the heck is MDI?
Multi-Document Interface.
[schnibble]
> I think GNOME suffers from the lack of an integrated window manager.
This is a design decision, and I think it's a very good one; so far,
at least four WMs support Gnome in varying degrees (IceWM, Window
Maker, E, FLWM).
> Frankly, I don't think Enlightenment cuts it but I could be missing
> a .deb because I couldn't figure out how to configure Enlightenment
> from GNOME.
enlightenment-conf is a separate package.
> * gpanel kicks kpanel ass, I like it very much. gpanel can be moved
> simply by dragging with the middle mouse button. Those applets are
> very nifty (I especially like the minicd player). All this corba
> stuff is very impressive but it sure fills up my syslog with a lot
> of garbage. gpanel also seems more powerful in general (edge
> panels, corner panels). gpanel has useless menu entries.
Let me guess: you haven't installed anything in the categories you
call useless.
[schnibble]
> * GNOME menus can be torn off, very useful. GNOME has a rather neat
> style called "Metal".
This is not a GNOME "style", but a GTK+ theme.
> I quite like it. I think it's the most
> polished and professional look included with GNOME. The feel is
> still the same though, and gpanel menus pop up too quickly for my taste
> and so you can't scroll throuh menuitems comfortably. Dragging
> toolbars or menubars in GNOME are just too slow. I can move my
> mouse faster than the bars can follow.
Hm. I can't seem to reproduce that.
> * GNOME uses more colours. This is very nice for a person with a
> 16bpp display like me.
Actually, it even works great on an 8bpp display since it dithers
everything with Imlib.
> GNOME folder icons are oriented in a weird
> way, just kidding -- I'm just used to the KDE orientation :).
>
> * GNOME calls it's panel "panel" instead of "gpanel". GNOME makes an
> /etc/sound, /etc/CORBA directory, has files named /etc/paper.config
> and I'm sure more.
You've got a messed-up install. This should be in $GNOME_PREFIX/etc
and not in /etc.
[gmc]
I like gmc a lot - to me it looks altogether more useful than kfm.
It's still heavily under development, though.
mawa
--
And I'm not a stultifying geek. I'm a computer dweeb. Sheesh.
-- Michelle Lee, mi...@ontek.com
Craig Kelley
> > And this, to put it bluntly, is a tribute to the GNOME marketing team.
>
> Aw, stop it. "Gnome marketing", what a joke. KDE does marketing (just
> look at their Web site). Gnome still looks very much less
> Corporate-America-ish to me.
^^^^^^^
Ugh. Not that again. Please leave your nationality flames in
alt.nuke.europe.
O. Niepolt
>
> It was the Tue, 09 Mar 1999 16:15:34 GMT...
> > > I have downloaded all the stuff and paid lots of Deutschmarks to my
> > > phone company for that, and then hacked Makefiles and found out about
> > > dependencies and things and made every effort to do it right, because in
> > > some stupid way I too beleived that Gnome would be better than KDE. But
> >
>
> Aw, stop it. "Gnome marketing", what a joke. KDE does marketing (just
> look at their Web site). Gnome still looks very much less
> Corporate-America-ish to me.
>
KDE does marketing much more than Gnome, that's true. But overall KDE
people have kept their promises. Sure, they have done fake version
numbering as well. KDE 1.0 for instance was beta by Linux standards. But
basically it worked. Gnome 1.0.1 in turn is rather early beta by Linux
standards, it's not ready for the average experienced user. I wouldn't
have expected such a thing from the GNU corner, though. They must have
been very anxious not to loose against what they think is their deadly
enemy, the so-called Kommon Denominator Emulation. How stupid, already
KDE and Gnome can coexist much better than nedit, netscape, tkdesk, and
fvwm2 could in the past. Just try it, how about using kfm as a web
browser under gnome. If only there was anything usable on Gnome apart
from the panel. If KDE rushed out version 1.0 much too early, well that
was only to be expected, but of course Gnome people are soooo much
cooler, they will make a public release even earlier than KDE could have
even dared to dream of it.
"Release early, release often". One should add: "And make _public_
releases at the latest possible stage in development, if you don't want
to loose users and reputation in advance."
>>Corporate-America-ish
Oh please relax. How does netscape look these days? Is Red Hat not
corparate America, too? What about Motif? It's pretty much corporate and
didn't receive half of the flames of QT. Isn't there an fvwm95? Isn't
there a Mac-like windowmanager? Isn't there a Redmond95 theme in Gnome?
Wasn't NeXt a corporation? There is the nextaw widget set, there are
Windowmaker and Afterstep. There is a Step theme for gtk which looks
very nicely if used in conjunction with Gnome, BTW. One of the "gnome
compliant" window managers is icewm, which not only has a Win95 theme
but also a Win 3.1 theme, apart from imitating OS/2. Finally, don't
forget Dosemu and Wine, the last time I had Wine on my disk it looked
like KDE 3.7 if I remember well :-) Also, I wonder what the look and
feel of loadlin is when it boots Linux from autoexec.bat. Oh please.
-- Olaf
Navindra Umanee
> Navindra Umanee wrote:
>>
>> O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
>> > I have downloaded all the stuff and paid lots of Deutschmarks to my
>> > phone company for that, and then hacked Makefiles and found out about
>> > dependencies and things and made every effort to do it right, because in
>> > some stupid way I too beleived that Gnome would be better than KDE. But
>>
>> And this, to put it bluntly, is a tribute to the GNOME marketing team.
>>
>
>
> Do you mean to say that it is my own fault, allowing myself to be fooled
> into buying this thing, or do you mean the Gnome Marketing "Department"
> is to blame. OK. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
Well, why did you expect GNOME to be so much better than KDE? You're
not alone in this belief and people have been pooh-pooh'ing KDE in
favour of GNOME for a long time now (not that I'm saying you did
this. The GNOME folks have been able to create mindshare much more
effectively and much earlier on in the project than the KDE folks.
vin...@my-dejanews.com
Navindra Umanee <navi...@cs.mcgill.ca> wrote:
> I don't fault anyone for installation problems, really, as both Debian
> and Red Hat will probably eventually solve these issues. I installed
> from binaries which was hard enough but I hear that compiling from
> source is rather significantly harder. Why isn't it a ./configure &&
> make && make install like KDE and most other GNU projects? (or is it?)
I am pretty sure that does work, though you need the latest autoconf (or you
will get some error about "@SHELL@"). That is how I compiled from cvs, which I
stopped doing about a month ago, as the rpm's were good enough for me.
Vincent
vin...@my-dejanews.com
pretty much targeted control-center and gmc, mostly gmc. I think most of the
gnome stuff is fine.
Anyway, for icewm, you must compile icewm with gnome support (config
--with-gnome), and you can get rid of the taskbar by changing a line in the
~/.icewm/preferences file (you want "ShowTaskBar=0"). I can only speak for
IceWm, I haven't bothered checkout out others besides Enlightenment. What
don't you like about enlightenment by the way?
In article <36E4AB21...@berlin.snafu.de>,
"O. Niepolt" <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
> Re your comparison KDE vs. Gnome:
>
> My god, thanks for these comments, you're absolutely right in every
> aspect. -- I just would like to add a very few things, as I don't have
> much time right now:
>
> Gnome is not only much more difficult to install and to handle than KDE
> 1.1, but IMHO it would also be beaten by KDE 1.0. I have compiled from
> source KDE 1.0, then KDE 1.1, now Gnome 1.0.1. It's been a Big Pain,
> it's not ready. In comparison compiling KDE 1.0 was as easy as typing
> "updatedb" or something like that. I'm deeply, deeply sorry for the
> Gnome team. I beleive I can understand them a bit, but to me this
> so-called release is a complete failure. Gnome does look stunning, but
> it's NOT ready for "release". It's beta at best. Help is lacking
> everywhere. The groundworks of Gnome look promising, but there are lots
> of caveats to to the whole system. The biggest problem to me seems the
> windowmanager issue, this has to be fixed very soon. There's got to be a
> specification for what is a "Gnome compliant" WM! My goodness, I'm back
> to editing all those ASCII files again. In that respect, it's like
> running fvwm2 on KDE, I've tried recent icewm, wmaker, and (of course)
> enlightenment, all of them are making problems. Enlightenment's problem
> is that personally I don't like it :-), and the two others don't
> interoperate very well with Gnome. As a consequence, session managment
> is very flaky etc, I get an icewm panel plus a gnome panel, or wmaker
> icons scattered needlessly all over the Gnome desktop. Of course I could
> fix all that, only not from the GUI as it is supposed to be.
>
> I have downloaded all the stuff and paid lots of Deutschmarks to my
> phone company for that, and then hacked Makefiles and found out about
> dependencies and things and made every effort to do it right, because in
> some stupid way I too beleived that Gnome would be better than KDE. But
> all this only to find out that gmc is relaunched each time I assign a
> new icon to a desktop item, or that it crashes when I assign a tiff icon
> instead of png although tiff support is compiled in the libraries, or
> that I can't change the so-called "editor environment" in any sensible
> way, it will always default to Xemacs etc etc, lots of other stuff. I'm
> sure many people will like Gnome, I'm sure it will get better, but so
> far it's NOT the ease-to-use GUI that they proclaim it is. I'm saying
> this without irony, really, thanks Gnome team for the great effort that
> must surely have gone into all of this. But please don't lower standards
> even further, think twice next time, already KDE declared things 1.0
> when they where still beta by Linux standards.
>
> Sorry for this outbreak of violence, I just had to vent off.
>
> >From Berlin, Germany
>
> -- Olaf Niepolt
Navindra Umanee
>> * Installing GNOME is really complicated compared to KDE.
>
> Yep, this is because it's packaged in a finer-grained way.
Well, my first attempt was dpkg -i *.deb. Finer-grained or not, it
failed.
> Let me guess: you didn't get the noarch RPMs with the Users' Guide and
> stuff.
I guess.
> This is a design decision, and I think it's a very good one; so far,
> at least four WMs support Gnome in varying degrees (IceWM, Window
> Maker, E, FLWM).
Well, this is not much different from KDE. I'd say at least four WMs
support KDE too, with the exception that one of them is integrated
exceptionally well with KDE.
> Let me guess: you haven't installed anything in the categories you
> call useless.
Exactly, so why does gpanel have these useless menus if I haven't
installed anything in that category? I already downloaded 11M of
GNOME stuff and I don't really need to download more.
>> * GNOME uses more colours. This is very nice for a person with a
>> 16bpp display like me.
>
> Actually, it even works great on an 8bpp display since it dithers
> everything with Imlib.
Nice.
>> GNOME folder icons are oriented in a weird
>> way, just kidding -- I'm just used to the KDE orientation :).
>>
>> * GNOME calls it's panel "panel" instead of "gpanel". GNOME makes an
>> /etc/sound, /etc/CORBA directory, has files named /etc/paper.config
>> and I'm sure more.
>
> You've got a messed-up install. This should be in $GNOME_PREFIX/etc
> and not in /etc.
So what in $GNOME_PREFIX set to in the GNOME rpms?
Jim Ross
Navindra Umanee wrote in message ...
>O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
>> Navindra Umanee wrote:
>>>
>>> O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
>>> > phone company for that, and then hacked Makefiles and found out about
>>> > dependencies and things and made every effort to do it right, because
in
>>> > some stupid way I too beleived that Gnome would be better than KDE.
But
>>>
>>>
>>> -N.
>>
>>
>> Do you mean to say that it is my own fault, allowing myself to be fooled
>> into buying this thing, or do you mean the Gnome Marketing "Department"
>> is to blame. OK. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
>
>Well, why did you expect GNOME to be so much better than KDE? You're
>not alone in this belief and people have been pooh-pooh'ing KDE in
>favour of GNOME for a long time now (not that I'm saying you did
>this. The GNOME folks have been able to create mindshare much more
>effectively and much earlier on in the project than the KDE folks.
>
>--
>"These download files are in Microsoft Word 6.0 format. After unzipping,
>these files can be viewed in any text editor, including all versions of
>Microsoft Word, WordPad, and Microsoft Word Viewer." [Microsoft website]
> < http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~navindra/editors/ >
...and the letdown seems to be all the greater. Gnome is not ready for
primetime. Also it doesn't seem to be as portable. Give me KDE anytime.
Jim
D. J. Birchall
my old '486 laptop. I didn't try to use gdm or have the panel start up
automatically, though (xdm is fine with me, and I launch GNOME stuff from
my Blackbox menu).
-Dan
--
Daniel Birchall, VP - Technology, Digital Facilities Management.
do.not....@digitalfm.com is no longer a real address for me,
since a bunch of illiterates spammed it! :) My username is djb.
http://www.scream.org/maisha/ is the Unofficial Maisha Fan Site.
Matthias Warkus
..and O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
[schnibble]
> But Gnome people are cheating us.
Aw, sheesh. What would be their incentive to "cheat"? Even if they made
a zillion people download Gnome 1.0 by "cheating", they wouldn't earn
a single buck more for it.
[schnibble]
> I'm
> not prepared to report a single bug to them, unless they friendly ask me
> to do so.
Ah, now your real character shows. Just because it's 1.0 and you feel
cheated you won't report any bugs?
Goddammit, Gnome is not made by a fscking company, and you get it for
free! And there you are, so damn *pompous*, complaining as if it were
shareware or normal cashware!
[schnibble]
> That's my second monologue in 24 hrs, but I promise it won't happen
> again. Back to lurking mode, or feel free to flame me.
I truly hope you are going to shut up. Soon.
mawa
--
MicroSoft product, BTW. Real dirty programming.
-- Henrik Clausen
O. Niepolt
>
> O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
> > Navindra Umanee wrote:
> >>
> >> O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
> >> > I have downloaded all the stuff and paid lots of Deutschmarks to my
> >> > phone company for that, and then hacked Makefiles and found out about
> >> > dependencies and things and made every effort to do it right, because in
> >> > some stupid way I too beleived that Gnome would be better than KDE. But
> >>
> >> And this, to put it bluntly, is a tribute to the GNOME marketing team.
> >>
> >> -N.
> >
> >
> > Do you mean to say that it is my own fault, allowing myself to be fooled
> > into buying this thing, or do you mean the Gnome Marketing "Department"
> > is to blame. OK. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
>
> Well, why did you expect GNOME to be so much better than KDE? You're
> not alone in this belief and people have been pooh-pooh'ing KDE in
> favour of GNOME for a long time now (not that I'm saying you did
> this. The GNOME folks have been able to create mindshare much more
> effectively and much earlier on in the project than the KDE folks.
>
> -N.
I did not expect Gnome to be much better than KDE, but just equal in
overall terms, maybe better here and there and worse in this or that
respect. What I did _not_ expect was that the Gnu corner of the free
software world would be much _worse_ than the KDE team. That was a
surprise, and it's a very, very bad sign IMO. They are worse in terms of
quality, and much worse as far as their release policy is concerned.
Gnome in its current state is just an annoyance, KDE 1.0 was a more or
less usable proof of concept with a few annoying details built in, apart
from some childishly-looking icons ;-)
No, I have never participated in KDE bashing, and I didn't consider
myself one of those self-proclaimed Gnome defenders. I had been using
KDE for some time and after the Gnome release just wanted to test
something new. But I have never seen such a huge discrepancy between the
announcements and the real product in my Linux times.
-- Olaf
Tim McNerney
>
> Big minus for kpanel: I had to modify kpanel *source* so that it is
> not always on top.
I still don't understand why they did this without making it
configurable. It can cause plenty of problems for me and doesn't work
correctly when you have the app panel on top and have it hide itself. I
will eventually rebuild from source so that I can fix this "feature".
That and change the raise window entry to do circle
(raise/lower-if-on-top).
--Tim
David M. Cook
> Me, I just got the binary packages and installed them in
> the proscribed fashion, ditto for KDE except for qtlib.
rpm with --nodeps worked OK for me.
Dave Cook
David M. Cook
wrote:
>KDE was started in Oct 16 1996. Gnome was, if I remember correctly, around
>May 1997?
I don't remember the exact dates. GNOME has involved work on both improving
the underlying toolkit and creating the desktop code. KDE started with a
commercial quality application framework.
>> How so? I like it more than the KDE xterm. As I've said before, slang apps
>> work better (background colors drawn correctly) in gnome-term.
>Did you try them in konsole? I had success using it with slrn, which IIRC was
>one of the apps you had troubles with.
I was not aware there was another terminal emulator in kde. I just tried
jed with konsole and it seems to work fine. I'll try slrn after this
session.
Dave Cook
Roberto Alsina
> >> a .deb because I couldn't figure out how to configure Enlightenment
> >> from GNOME.
>
> dmc> unfortunately. I can't figure out how to do simple things in it,
> dmc> either. And the cursor is always an X in any context. Stupid.
> dmc> The developers should have been more proactive in this area.
>
> dmc> I prefer using Window Maker, which seems to work fine with gnome
> dmc> as far as I can tell. Hopefully a wider range of compatible
> dmc> window managers will become available. I'd like to see an easy
> dmc> to configure gnome compatible fvwm2. I haven't heard much about
> dmc> development in that area.
>
> In fact, someone associated with the GNOME team has a version of fvwm
> 2.2 which has been modified to be GNOME-aware--whatever that may mean :)
> I'm not sure of the status of these patches right now--we're trying to
> keep in touch with him on it.
>
> We on the fvwm-workers list are anxious to incorporate some support for
> GNOME (and KDE!), and we're just waiting for someone with the requisite
> knowledge to provide patches. The docs for GNOME-aware WM's are pretty
> lacking, so we can't really do it ourselves.
>
> One idea that seems to have received a lot of interest by the
> fvwm-workers is trying to get a relatively quick release of fvwm 2.4 out
> with support for GNOME at least, and KDE if someone wants to help with
> that.
Hi!
I did the initial KDE code for blackbox, and I have a rather big problem
trying to do it for fvwm... I don't understand the code :-P
If someone with a working knowledge of the fvwm internals wants to hack it for
KDE awareness, perhaps I can help him from the other side!
It's really quite simple once you get the idea, and it can be done gradually.
--
Roberto Alsina (KDE developer, MFCH)
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
Simon Kinahan
> Well, why did you expect GNOME to be so much better than KDE? You're
> not alone in this belief and people have been pooh-pooh'ing KDE in
> favour of GNOME for a long time now (not that I'm saying you did
> this. The GNOME folks have been able to create mindshare much more
> effectively and much earlier on in the project than the KDE folks.
As far as I can tell, the KDE guys barely tried. I managed to come across
Gnome first, and didn't see much of KDE untill their beta1. I do object
slightly to the whole KDE approach to things - they seem to have rewritten
a lot of stuff from scrach just in order to have a K-version of everything,
and taken some rather arbitrary design decisions. Having done that they
then seem to have expected their desktop to become a standard.
Gnome does show signs of being slightly better thought out and having more
potential, though I agree with the consensus that there is really not much
in it - IMNSHO they both have an extremely long way to go. Gnome is also
far too buggy to be called 1.0, but then so was KDE 1.0 to be frank. Gnome
documentation is abysmal, and their GUI guidelines are next to
non-existant. KDEs user docs are pretty poor too, but at least the APIs are
docuemnted.
I used KDE 1.0 for a long time, and tried to install 1.1 but if died
horribly in some way so I went back to Afterstep for a while (that shows
how little value these things really give me I guess). I'm now using
Gnome+E, and its pretty good. Quite a few bugs though, and a few hickups (E
seems to stop xlsclients from working as I would expect, and I have some
scripts that rather relied on that).
Simon
Simon Kinahan
> So what in $GNOME_PREFIX set to in the GNOME rpms?
For RH5.x, it should be set to /usr, which is where they reckon
non-essential RPM-managed packages should go. They're not really into /opt
as far as I can tell. I guess it doesn't matter much, and if you compile it
yourself you can do as you please.
Simon
Roberto Alsina
Matthias' explanation is that it's difficult to control all the interactions
kpanel can have (minipanel, contracted panel, full panel, autohidden panel,
plus taskbar, plus stay on top, plus not-stays-on-top), so he was trying to
make it simpler.
Dale Pontius
vin...@my-dejanews.com writes:
>
> Anyway, for icewm, you must compile icewm with gnome support (config
> --with-gnome), and you can get rid of the taskbar by changing a line in the
> ~/.icewm/preferences file (you want "ShowTaskBar=0"). I can only speak for
> IceWm, I haven't bothered checkout out others besides Enlightenment. What
> don't you like about enlightenment by the way?
>
as-is?
Dale Pontius
(NOT speaking for IBM)
Navindra Umanee
Huh? The GNOME rpms put GNOME config files in /usr/etc/? Dude that
really sucks. I'd have to see it for myself to believe it.
Paul D. Smith
ra> I did the initial KDE code for blackbox, and I have a rather big
ra> problem trying to do it for fvwm... I don't understand the code
ra> :-P
ra> If someone with a working knowledge of the fvwm internals wants to
ra> hack it for KDE awareness, perhaps I can help him from the other
ra> side!
You should contact the fvwm-workers list <fvwm-w...@fvwm.org>, who
are the official maintainers now, and discuss what kinds of things are
needed.
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul D. Smith <psm...@baynetworks.com> Network Management Development
"Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These are my opinions---Nortel Networks takes no responsibility for them.
Navindra Umanee
clobbers /etc/ namespace and gpanel is named /usr/bin/panel instead of
something like /usr/bin/X11/gpanel or maybe /usr/bin/GNOME/panel.
-N.
mawa claimed:
> You've got a messed-up install. This should be in $GNOME_PREFIX/etc
> and not in /etc.
Simon Kinahan <sim...@cadence.com> wrote:
> For RH5.x, it should be set to /usr, which is where they reckon
> non-essential RPM-managed packages should go. They're not really into /opt
> as far as I can tell. I guess it doesn't matter much, and if you compile it
> yourself you can do as you please.
>
> Simon
Navindra Umanee
> As far as I can tell, the KDE guys barely tried. I managed to come across
> Gnome first, and didn't see much of KDE untill their beta1. I do object
Something to learn from, I guess.
> slightly to the whole KDE approach to things - they seem to have rewritten
> a lot of stuff from scrach just in order to have a K-version of everything,
Oh please. I like having k-equivalents for those athena applications.
Besides, I have GNOME utilities in front of me and they include:
gcalc, GNOME Diskfree, gnome-terminal, 2 versions of tetris... do I
really need to list more?
> and taken some rather arbitrary design decisions. Having done that they
> then seem to have expected their desktop to become a standard.
Some decisions are always arbitrary. Which ones do you have in mind?
C++? Qt?
-N.
Roberto Alsina
> > not alone in this belief and people have been pooh-pooh'ing KDE in
> > favour of GNOME for a long time now (not that I'm saying you did
> > this. The GNOME folks have been able to create mindshare much more
> > effectively and much earlier on in the project than the KDE folks.
>
> Gnome first, and didn't see much of KDE untill their beta1.
Well, beta1 was the first beta release. Announcing and doing publicity before
that stage I would consider unethical, and is one of the problems I had with
GNOME. Then again, people say complaining about GNOME's blatant preannouncing
was not right, so obviously opinions vary.
> I do object slightly to the whole KDE approach to things - they seem to have
> rewritten a lot of stuff from scrach just in order to have a K-version of
> everything,
If someone cared enough to write it's at least to him it was worth having.
It's not centralized planning, so it's not like some secret cabal is pushing
people to implement, say, kdvi. It's just that one guy wanted to do it.
So, in that respect, the decision justifies itself.
> and taken some rather arbitrary design decisions. Having done that they
> then seem to have expected their desktop to become a standard.
Can you give any examples?
Tim McNerney
>
> In article <36E5BDA5...@netcom.com>,
> Tim McNerney <mum...@netcom.com> wrote:
> > Navindra Umanee wrote:
> > >
> > > Big minus for kpanel: I had to modify kpanel *source* so that it is
> > > not always on top.
> >
> > I still don't understand why they did this without making it
> > configurable. It can cause plenty of problems for me and doesn't work
> > correctly when you have the app panel on top and have it hide itself. I
> > will eventually rebuild from source so that I can fix this "feature".
> > That and change the raise window entry to do circle
> > (raise/lower-if-on-top).
>
> Matthias' explanation is that it's difficult to control all the interactions
> kpanel can have (minipanel, contracted panel, full panel, autohidden panel,
> plus taskbar, plus stay on top, plus not-stays-on-top), so he was trying to
> make it simpler.
It can cause some nasty behavior, though. It has gotten into a battle
with some apps I use where they get into a loop of refreshing, resizing
and lowering. Not a great explanation, but I haven't spent the time to
more accurately define it.
Further, I really don't like losing the real estate to the panel and
hidden just doesn't sit well with me.
I was really glad about how much more configurable 1.1 was so was rather
shocked that they changed something without giving us the option to
retain the old behavior. I really don't want to have to hack the code
everytime in order to keep the window manager working in a manner I
like.
--Tim
Roberto Alsina
That is when the hidden cost of open source kicks in and you need to tak to
Matthias and Pietro about how you could give them a neat patch that will make
all these interactions go well ;-)
O. Niepolt
>
> It was the Tue, 09 Mar 1999 20:28:26 +0100...
> ..and O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
> [schnibble]
> > But Gnome people are cheating us.
>
> Aw, sheesh. What would be their incentive to "cheat"? Even if they made
> a zillion people download Gnome 1.0 by "cheating", they wouldn't earn
> a single buck more for it.
Cheating means behaving dishonestly to get something, not just ripping
off someone's money. So maybe they wanted to impress users. Just my
theory. And wasn't there a guy who wrote in "The Cathedral and the
Bazaar" that hackers are kind of competing for peer recognition?
Oh well, I forgot I'm not a hacker, just one of those humble average
users. As such, I'm deeply convinced that drag'n'drop and icons and
animated panels and even menus and all this stuff are only for hackers,
personally I prefer configuring everything by hand and have always
succeeded so far, I'm at the brink of doing even without a window
manager. Poor hackers.
> [schnibble]
> > I'm
> > not prepared to report a single bug to them, unless they friendly ask me
> > to do so.
>
> Ah, now your real character shows. Just because it's 1.0 and you feel
> cheated you won't report any bugs?
I wouldn't mind if they called it Gnome Warp or Gnome 2000. My only
complaint was that they make a public release accompanied by a big
announcement (just like one of those corporations which you seem to hate
so much), telling us things which are ridiculously far from reality.
> Goddammit, Gnome is not made by a fscking company, and you get it for
> free! And there you are, so damn *pompous*, complaining as if it were
> shareware or normal cashware!
I know very well how to behave in the free software world, and have seen
lots of free programs which were like Gnome licence-wise. I have been
running Linux for 2 and a half years now, on an almost daily basis. It's
absolutely the first time that I complain. It's they who are not playing
by the rules, so why should I. See above.
>> *pompous*
Maybe I'm just not using the words "dammit" and "f*cking" as often as
you do. I admit there is still ample room for improvement in my
vocabulary. Still, I am very much missing these words in the Gnome press
release. Or maybe they are just a little bit "pompous"? ->
http://www.gnome.org/news/pr-gnome-1.0.shtml
BTW, mc is a marvellous program if run on the console, and rock solid.
Really.
-- Olaf
Bart Vanhauwaert
: I sympathize with the GNOME project, and I wish it were better. For me,
: however, I don't think that GNOME or KDE are the answer. KDE is too
: proprietary with Qt, and IMHO GNOME is poorly designed. I like the idea
: of CORBA for linking apps and UI. Who knows, maybe Harmony and KDE with
: some GNOME extensions would be the answer.
Wow, what a warp in time. You are one year behind the current state
of affairs I guess.
cu bart
--
__
| Linux also needs a Grock or a Krock , Like in Yosemite.
Richard Finney
It didn't work the first two times I ran startx but mysteriously
things started working. WTF?? Anyway, I've never used KDE, and
I don't have flipping idea about KDE and GNOME design and which
one is better or has more potential or which should be declared
the GNU king.
I like GNOME; though I suspect that somehow it's misconfigured.
I feel the current power and future potential of what appears to be a
truly Microsoft crushing product. The "themes" are really cute; I even
detect a sense of humor in their implementations. The one buzzword that
made me go with GNOME over KDE is "CORBA". Both might have it but
the jist I got scouring around is that GNOME supported it.
Corba sounds cool and one of the big tools in the war for
WORLD DOMINATION.
I'm really looking forward a good O'Reilly book on GNOME so
I can read it on a plane trip and not have to stab around and
figure out what's the right way to do things and configure the
interface and program an application.
GNOME needs improvement in a few ways (and these are just my
silly first impressions) ....
1) Prefer two button mouse solutions cuz that's what I got
and it looks like the three button mouse is the native GNOME
way. Most clowns tear down a store-bought or mail order
PC which usually has a two-button mouse.
2) Put some more damn options on the "simultaneous left button/mouse
button" in the "field of play" for lusers like me who haven't strayed far
from Motif or Win95 GUI in ages. (don't worry; I'm always telneted into
a Unix box doing real work).
3) Provide a suggestions box on adding favorite programs; whatever
they may be (I think there's something called "gnumeric" which
I'm missing and the little footprint box whatever in all the
screen shots which I don't got). Perhaps they could style on the
annoying AOL instant messanger which pops up periodically with
netscape; which I could tolerate if they had a "don't bother
again ever" but to disable it.
4) As I mentioned before; get the O'Reilly in-depth how to do
everything with GNOME book out soon; and not one of those
lame O'Reilly's like their "Practical C++ Programming"
Keep up the good comments in this thread; I'm learning a lot!
Thanks,
richard finney
P.S. I will install KDE and bang on it also. The Linux desktop's starting
to look good; Alpha Borg Bill's probably starting to get a little spooked
now.
David M. Cook
>3) Provide a suggestions box on adding favorite programs; whatever
The gdev site has a wishlist board:
http://gdev.hom.net/devcentral/
Dave Cook
Simon Kinahan
> >
> > non-essential RPM-managed packages should go. They're not really into /opt
> > as far as I can tell. I guess it doesn't matter much, and if you compile it
> > yourself you can do as you please.
>
> really sucks. I'd have to see it for myself to believe it.
They should. Go read the FS standard. Thats what it says. Config files for
packages installed by the package manager should go in /usr/etc. Maybe
/usr/etc/gnome would be better, but I consider it of minimal importance. If
you like /opt, use it, but its not standard (yet).
Simon
Simon Kinahan
>
> Well, I picked apart an official GNOME rpm and just as I suspected, it
> clobbers /etc/ namespace and gpanel is named /usr/bin/panel instead of
> something like /usr/bin/X11/gpanel or maybe /usr/bin/GNOME/panel.
/usr/bin/GNOME/panel would be off the normal system path, and therefore
deeply irritating, and I've never been very fond of apps other than the X11
distribution sticking themselves in /usr/X11/bin.
What the hell is wrong with doing what any other properly packaged app
would do and putting binaries in /usr/bin ?
Simon Kinahan
> > a lot of stuff from scrach just in order to have a K-version of everything,
>
> Besides, I have GNOME utilities in front of me and they include:
> gcalc, GNOME Diskfree, gnome-terminal, 2 versions of tetris... do I
> really need to list more?
It wasn't so much those, as things like the image viewer in 1.0, which is
not very good. Gnome has an advantage in having ee, which was written by
someone who wanted to write a good image viewer, rather than by someone who
wanted to write a Gnome app.
I think this is a bit of an issue for both systems - that people do very
mediocre rewrites of applications just in order to have a K or G on the
beginning of the name. This is a waste of programming talent in some ways,
and an annoyance in others. What I'd ideally like to see is more KDE/Gnome
cross-standardisation (on CORBA interfaces and WM hints, and so forth) and
then more effort by best-in-class application writers to make their
software compliant. The politics involved in trying to bring this about is
rather beyond me I fear.
> > and taken some rather arbitrary design decisions. Having done that they
> > then seem to have expected their desktop to become a standard.
>
> Some decisions are always arbitrary. Which ones do you have in mind?
> C++? Qt?
Both, and all that wierd kioslave stuff. Its not that I think its wrong
(necesarily), it just seems odd for a group that was trying to create a new
standard to go so far out on a limb.
Simon
Navindra Umanee
> It wasn't so much those, as things like the image viewer in 1.0, which is
> not very good. Gnome has an advantage in having ee, which was written by
> someone who wanted to write a good image viewer, rather than by someone who
> wanted to write a Gnome app.
I think you're just being unfair. There are some times when the k-
image viewer is actually better than xv.
Have you seen aktion? Now there's a kickass frontend to xanim I
wouldn't want to do without.
>> Some decisions are always arbitrary. Which ones do you have in mind?
>> C++? Qt?
>
> Both, and all that wierd kioslave stuff. Its not that I think its wrong
I don't think C++ and Qt were arbitrary decisions at all but I admit I
don't know what you're talking about re: kioslave stuff though.
Navindra Umanee
>> Huh? The GNOME rpms put GNOME config files in /usr/etc/? Dude that
>> really sucks. I'd have to see it for myself to believe it.
>
> They should. Go read the FS standard. Thats what it says. Config files for
> packages installed by the package manager should go in /usr/etc. Maybe
> /usr/etc/gnome would be better, but I consider it of minimal importance. If
Where, where, where?
The /usr/ hierarchy is described here:
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-4.html
If you do a search on etc, you'll find nothing.
The whole hierarchy is described here:
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html
If you do a search on usr/etc, you'll find nothing as well.
I still don't believe you but if this is true, than man this is lame.
> you like /opt, use it, but its not standard (yet).
If I use a package manager, I'd probably expect my config files to go
under /etc/, generally not under /opt and certainly not under
/usr/etc/. According to what you're saying, /usr/etc/ supercedes
/etc/?
Simon Kinahan
> > They should. Go read the FS standard. Thats what it says. Config files for
> > packages installed by the package manager should go in /usr/etc. Maybe
> > /usr/etc/gnome would be better, but I consider it of minimal importance. If
>
> Where, where, where?
>
> The /usr/ hierarchy is described here:
>
> http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-4.html
>
> If you do a search on etc, you'll find nothing.
>
> The whole hierarchy is described here:
>
> http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html
>
> If you do a search on usr/etc, you'll find nothing as well.
You're right. It doesn't say that - but it does say that config files go in
/etc. It also mentions /opt, which it didn't last time I looked.
Its just a RedHat thing then I guess - they do tend to place all the files
for a given package either in subdirs of / or subdirs of /usr.
> > you like /opt, use it, but its not standard (yet).
>
> If I use a package manager, I'd probably expect my config files to go
> under /etc/, generally not under /opt and certainly not under
> /usr/etc/. According to what you're saying, /usr/etc/ supercedes
> /etc/?
Hang on, were you not moaning about your Gnome install using /etc a minute
ago ?
Simon
Navindra Umanee
> You're right. It doesn't say that - but it does say that config files go in
> /etc. It also mentions /opt, which it didn't last time I looked.
Config files have been in /etc for as long as I can remember. :)
> Its just a RedHat thing then I guess - they do tend to place all the files
> for a given package either in subdirs of / or subdirs of /usr.
Oh man, Red Hat does sound like it sucks really bad. Debian with all
its political bullshit at least strives to do things consistently.
> Hang on, were you not moaning about your Gnome install using /etc a minute
> ago ?
No! I was whinging about the arrogant namespace clobbering issue.
/etc/gnome/ would have been fine and dandy with me.
As an irrelevant side note, I didn't use the KDE debs because I wanted
to install my KDE under a $KDEDIR (mostly for applications not
available in .deb for). Under this arrangement, KDE keeps config
files under $KDEDIR/share/config/ which is just fine with me. I think
GNOME can do that too with the $GNOMEPREFIX thing mawa mentioned.
Tim McNerney
>
>
> I think this is a bit of an issue for both systems - that people do very
> mediocre rewrites of applications just in order to have a K or G on the
> beginning of the name. This is a waste of programming talent in some ways,
> and an annoyance in others. What I'd ideally like to see is more KDE/Gnome
> cross-standardisation (on CORBA interfaces and WM hints, and so forth) and
> then more effort by best-in-class application writers to make their
> software compliant. The politics involved in trying to bring this about is
> rather beyond me I fear.
Agreed. Is there an example of even one program which has a compile-time
option to work with either Qt or GTK+? A well written modular
application should not be too hard to build with either GUI toolkit. I
don't know the additional implications of using the KDE and Gnome
libraries. But work in this area is clearly a win for both environments.
--Tim
mlw
resurrect Harmony.
--
Mohawk Software
Windows 95, Windows NT, UNIX, Linux. Applications, drivers, support.
Visit the Mohawk Software website: www.mohawksoft.com
jedi
A Unix dev system that could target multiple widgetsets at
compile time would be a really useful thing. People might
actually spend money on it. This sort of thing (spiffy dev
tools) is where I think Troll should have spend it's
commercial effort on instead of trying to own what would
possibly become a core Linux API.
Then they sell what everyone is already buying instead of
what everyone else expects to use for free (widget apis).
--
Herding Humans ~ Herding Cats
Neither will do a thing unless they really want to, or |||
is coerced to the point where it will scratch your eyes out / | \
as soon as your grip slips.
In search of sane PPP docs? Try http://penguin.lvcm.com
vin...@my-dejanews.com
> > Anyway, for icewm, you must compile icewm with gnome support (config
> > --with-gnome), and you can get rid of the taskbar by changing a line in the
> > ~/.icewm/preferences file (you want "ShowTaskBar=0"). I can only speak for
> > IceWm, I haven't bothered checkout out others besides Enlightenment. What
> > don't you like about enlightenment by the way?
> >
> Are you saying that the icewm RPM doesn't have full GNOME support
> as-is?
Yes, that is it. I can however give you an icewm RPM that supports gnome. It
even includes a fix .Icewm still reads from "/usr/share/apps", not
"/usr/share/gnome/apps" as it should with the recent gnome. It shouldn't make
a difference if you just use the gnome menu bar. I sometimes use CTRL+ESC,
which can give me a icewm menu that reads from gnome's menu, which is cool.
Simon Kinahan
> Agreed. Is there an example of even one program which has a compile-time
> option to work with either Qt or GTK+? A well written modular
> application should not be too hard to build with either GUI toolkit. I
> don't know the additional implications of using the KDE and Gnome
> libraries. But work in this area is clearly a win for both environments.
I agree. I think the work the Mozilla guys have done on XPFE (the cross
platform front end, that uses XML descriptions of the user interface to
construct an equivalent, but platform complaint, UI in all systems) is very
interesting, and I was particularly pleases when they changed to Gtk+.
Maybe this work has potential to solve the Qt/Gtk+ problem.
Simon
Anthony Ord
wrote:
or /usr/local/bin
Regards
Anthony
--
-----------------------------------------
| And when our worlds |
| They fall apart |
| When the walls come tumbling in |
| Though we may deserve it |
| It will be worth it - Depeche Mode |
-----------------------------------------
Tim Hanson
>It was the Tue, 09 Mar 1999 20:28:26 +0100...
>..and O. Niepolt <nie...@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:
>[schnibble]
>> But Gnome people are cheating us.
>
>Aw, sheesh. What would be their incentive to "cheat"? Even if they made
>a zillion people download Gnome 1.0 by "cheating", they wouldn't earn
>a single buck more for it.
>
>[schnibble]
>> I'm
>> not prepared to report a single bug to them, unless they friendly ask me
>> to do so.
>
>Ah, now your real character shows. Just because it's 1.0 and you feel
>cheated you won't report any bugs?
>
>Goddammit, Gnome is not made by a fscking company, and you get it for
>free! And there you are, so damn *pompous*, complaining as if it were
>shareware or normal cashware!
Well... Not _quite_ true. Red Hat is heavily into it.
>
>[schnibble]
>> That's my second monologue in 24 hrs, but I promise it won't happen
>> again. Back to lurking mode, or feel free to flame me.
>
>I truly hope you are going to shut up. Soon.
>
>mawa
Christopher B. Browne
>On Thu, 11 Mar 1999 13:45:58 +0000, Simon Kinahan <sim...@cadence.com>
>wrote:
>
>>Navindra Umanee wrote:
>>>
>>> Well, I picked apart an official GNOME rpm and just as I suspected, it
>>> clobbers /etc/ namespace and gpanel is named /usr/bin/panel instead of
>>> something like /usr/bin/X11/gpanel or maybe /usr/bin/GNOME/panel.
>>
>>/usr/bin/GNOME/panel would be off the normal system path, and therefore
>>deeply irritating, and I've never been very fond of apps other than the X11
>>distribution sticking themselves in /usr/X11/bin.
>>
>>What the hell is wrong with doing what any other properly packaged app
>>would do and putting binaries in /usr/bin ?
>
>or /usr/local/bin
/usr/local/bin is the *WRONG* place for a package manager to put
thing.
According to FHS,
"The /usr/local hierarchy is for use by the system administrator when
installing software locally. It needs to be safe from being
overwritten when the system software is updated."
This is open to some interpretation; there might be some "local"
packages that might be installed there, and perhaps managed by a
package manager.
It is *not* reasonable to consider GNOME components such; if one is to
install them in other than /usr/bin, then the preferable location
would be /usr/X11R6/bin...
--
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
cbbr...@hex.net - "What have you contributed to free software today?..."
Tim Smith
>Simon Kinahan wrote:
>> I think this is a bit of an issue for both systems - that people do very
>> mediocre rewrites of applications just in order to have a K or G on the
>> beginning of the name. This is a waste of programming talent in some ways,
>> and an annoyance in others. What I'd ideally like to see is more KDE/Gnome
>> cross-standardisation (on CORBA interfaces and WM hints, and so forth) and
>> then more effort by best-in-class application writers to make their
>> software compliant. The politics involved in trying to bring this about is
>> rather beyond me I fear.
>
>option to work with either Qt or GTK+? A well written modular
>application should not be too hard to build with either GUI toolkit. I
>don't know the additional implications of using the KDE and Gnome
>libraries. But work in this area is clearly a win for both environments.
This is where an application framework would come in handy. Basically,
something like MFC on Windows, or perhaps something at a higher level,
like Power++.
--Tim Smith
jedi
Actually, since GNOME is a mess of packages that pretty
much constitutes it's own little universe, an entry in
/opt would be rather more appropriate.
This is one of the few things I actually really like about KDE.
When I get annoyed by it, I can blow it away really easily.
--
"I was not elected to watch my people suffer and die |||
while you discuss this a invasion in committe." / | \
Bart Vanhauwaert
:> of affairs I guess.
: No, I hear a rattling that people are unhappy with Qt and want to
: resurrect Harmony.
I just hear someone taking his wishes for reality. But if they provide a
full featured replacement : power to them. Untill then : good luck folks.
Navindra Umanee
> Actually, since GNOME is a mess of packages that pretty
> much constitutes it's own little universe, an entry in
> /opt would be rather more appropriate.
I absolutely agree with the sentiment. /usr/kde/ and /usr/gnome/
might be suitable for package managers (or /opt/ but I'm never quite
sure about that).
jedi
>jedi <je...@dementia.mishnet> wrote:
>> Actually, since GNOME is a mess of packages that pretty
>> much constitutes it's own little universe, an entry in
>> /opt would be rather more appropriate.
>
>I absolutely agree with the sentiment. /usr/kde/ and /usr/gnome/
>might be suitable for package managers (or /opt/ but I'm never quite
>sure about that).
Even a unified /usr/gnome would be an improvement. It is
a major subsystem theoretically even distinct from unix
itself. It shouldn't be mangled with the rest of the file-
system.
Craig Kelley
> Actually, since GNOME is a mess of packages that pretty
> much constitutes it's own little universe, an entry in
> /opt would be rather more appropriate.
No. Only if you install it by hand should you be able to do this.
The packages correctly install everything in the normal /usr tree. I
imagine that GTK is destined for many more things than simply GNOME.
The problem with /opt is that it is particular to certain types of
UNIX (Sun) and makes hell out of paths. Could you imagine every
application having /opt/<program>/bin (lib, etc, var, doc). Your
$PATH would become HUGE, startup time would go down and it would be
hell on manpages.
> This is one of the few things I actually really like about KDE.
>
> When I get annoyed by it, I can blow it away really easily.
I wrote this to help uninstall whole RPM packages:
#!/usr/bin/perl
#find RPM names in stdin
$| = 1;
die "You must provide the RPM options!" unless ($ARGV[0]);
while ($line = <STDIN>) {
($package, $junk) = split (/-\d/, $line, 2);
$list .= "$package ";
print "rpm @ARGV $list\n";
print `rpm @ARGV $list`;
Just go to the directory where the .rpm files are and do something
like this:
ls | rpm_find --nodeps -e
And the program will take names like package-name-1.0.3.i386.rpm and
convert them into package-name. So to uninstall GNOME, I can just do
this:
cd /usr/local/work/Gnome
ls | rpm_find --force --nodeps -e
--
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
Craig Kelley -- kell...@isu.edu
http://www.isu.edu/~kellcrai finger i...@inconnu.isu.edu for PGP block
Craig Kelley
> I wrote this to help uninstall whole RPM packages:
A closing brace was left out (damn that gnome-terminal!):
#!/usr/bin/perl
#find RPM names in stdin
$| = 1;
die "You must provide the RPM options!" unless ($ARGV[0]);
while ($line = <STDIN>) {
($package, $junk) = split (/-\d/, $line, 2);
$list .= "$package ";
}
print "rpm @ARGV $list\n";
print `rpm @ARGV $list`;
> And the program will take names like package-name-1.0.3.i386.rpm and
> convert them into package-name. So to uninstall GNOME, I can just do
> this:
>
> cd /usr/local/work/Gnome
> ls | rpm_find --force --nodeps -e
This also works well with RPM itself:
rpm -qa | grep -i xfree86 | rpm_find --force --nodeps -e
Richard
% Even a unified /usr/gnome would be an improvement. It is
% a major subsystem theoretically even distinct from unix
% itself. It shouldn't be mangled with the rest of the file-
% system.
I really dislike having miscellaneous packages installed at the same
level as the libs, man, .. - as the important stuff. While it might not
meet the filesystem standard I've seen quoted, my personal preference
is /usr/local/packages/. I have no idea how most Linux home users maintain
a semblence of order in their Linux installations, but if I upgrade my Linux
distribution, I can just mount /usr/local and have all the software available
there. This is with a complete upgrade from scratch.
--
Richard Tew (above spudent -> student, lame spam avoidance thingy)
Simon Kinahan
> I really dislike having miscellaneous packages installed at the same
> level as the libs, man, .. - as the important stuff. While it might not
> meet the filesystem standard I've seen quoted, my personal preference
> is /usr/local/packages/.
I do this on my Slackware-based (heavily customised/beaten up) system,
which is fine, but, as you say, not at all standard. If you want to do this
the appropriate place these days is /opt.
> I have no idea how most Linux home users maintain
> a semblence of order in their Linux installations,
In terms of things that are packaged, the answer is 'using the package
manager'. There is no need to maintain a package based directory structure
when the package database does it for you, and a bunch of other stuff too.
Simon
dfg...@orion3.sgi.net
What's so special about /opt?? Somebody is always trying to change
something. In my case, I have /opt linked to /usr/local so I can keep
all this stuff in the same place. One year's good idea, is another
year's reject.
Don
--
Registered Linux User - [It's not just for hackers anymore!]
Care about your family's health? Check out
http://www.notmilk.com
Greg Fruth
On Thu, 11 Mar 1999 13:45:58 +0000, Simon Kinahan <sim...@cadence.com>
wrote:
>
> /usr/bin/GNOME/panel would be off the normal system path, and therefore
> distribution sticking themselves in /usr/X11/bin.
>
> What the hell is wrong with doing what any other properly packaged app
> would do and putting binaries in /usr/bin ?
Try replicating that on the other 100 machines on your network. Unless
you're running a diskless cluster, you'll need to install each package to
host0:/usr/bin, host1:/usr/bin, ... host100:/usr/bin. Not a very pleasant
prospect. (Please correct me if RPM and the like have support for multi-host
installs.)
You could just install onto host0:/usr/bin and export it to the others, but
what if your cluster is not homogenous? i.e. host0 is an Linux/Alpha
server while the rest are Linux/Intel workstations?
Not to be flippant, but this is a problem that standalone-oriented *nix
distributions are not handling very well. (The commercial *nixes are not
much better, if at all, IMHO). Not everybody runs a single isolated Linux box
in their house; some people may have hundreds networked together on a LAN.
The /usr/local convention, while ill-defined, lets you install your
goodies on one centralized host and export it via NFS. Of course, you pay a
performance penalty for going through NFS, but it vastly simplifies the
management of a large cluster. (OK, so it doesn't totally address the case
of a heterogenous cluster.)
The /opt/PACKAGENAME convention introduced in SVR4 (and implemented in
Solaris 2.x, HP-UX 10.x, and so on) has turned out to be an unworkable mess
in my opinion, due to its effect on PATH and MANPATH. And I don't want to
make symlinks from /usr/bin/foo to /opt/Foo-1.2.2a/bin/foo for all values of
foo.
Packages should be relocatable; they shouldn't care where they live. argv[0],
environment variables (automatically set, of course), or config files should
be used to determine paths. When packages need to access files from other
packages... well, all bets are off, too bad.
In the end, the method that provides the most flexibility is the time-
honored tradition of installing from customized source code. However, this
is NOT good for Joe E. User, who just wants to get his machine running that
new terminal emulator which has a multiplayer 3D Tetris game as its background
pixmap (and in its window manager decorations, too).
Hmmm, now I'm just rambling, so I'll stop now.
--
Gregory Fruth (gregor...@aero.org)
The Aerospace Corporation
Los Angeles, CA
Craig Kelley
> > /usr/bin/GNOME/panel would be off the normal system path, and therefore
> > irritating, and I've never been very fond of apps other than the X11
> > distribution sticking themselves in /usr/X11/bin.
> >
> > What the hell is wrong with doing what any other properly packaged app
> > would do and putting binaries in /usr/bin ?
>
> Try replicating that on the other 100 machines on your network. Unless
> you're running a diskless cluster, you'll need to install each package to
> host0:/usr/bin, host1:/usr/bin, ... host100:/usr/bin. Not a very pleasant
> prospect. (Please correct me if RPM and the like have support for multi-host
> installs.)
>
> You could just install onto host0:/usr/bin and export it to the others, but
> what if your cluster is not homogenous? i.e. host0 is an Linux/Alpha
> server while the rest are Linux/Intel workstations?
>
> Not to be flippant, but this is a problem that standalone-oriented
> *nix distributions are not handling very well. (The commercial
> *nixes are not much better, if at all, IMHO). Not everybody runs a
> single isolated Linux box
[snippage]
You don't understand UNIX philosophy. Each tool does one thing, and
does it well. If you want to remote-install on many machines, any
language and rsh/ssh will do that for you with about a page of code.
Just put all your RPM files in a public FTP directory and then run
remote-shell RPM upgrades using the ftp:// nomenclature.
I do it all the time.
The LAST thing we need is Yet Another Daemon with Yet More Bugs
running on our servers. Especially when such a daemon is going to be
updating the sytem (yech!).
Perry Pip
>jet...@mustang.aero.org (Greg Fruth) writes:
>
>> > What the hell is wrong with doing what any other properly packaged app
>> > would do and putting binaries in /usr/bin ?
>>
>> Try replicating that on the other 100 machines on your network. Unless
>> you're running a diskless cluster, you'll need to install each package to
>> host0:/usr/bin, host1:/usr/bin, ... host100:/usr/bin. Not a very pleasant
>> prospect. (Please correct me if RPM and the like have support for multi-host
>> installs.)
>>
>> You could just install onto host0:/usr/bin and export it to the others, but
>> what if your cluster is not homogenous? i.e. host0 is an Linux/Alpha
>> server while the rest are Linux/Intel workstations?
>>
>> Not to be flippant, but this is a problem that standalone-oriented
>> *nix distributions are not handling very well. (The commercial
>> *nixes are not much better, if at all, IMHO). Not everybody runs a
>> single isolated Linux box
>
> [snippage]
>
>You don't understand UNIX philosophy. Each tool does one thing, and
>does it well. If you want to remote-install on many machines, any
>language and rsh/ssh will do that for you with about a page of code.
>Just put all your RPM files in a public FTP directory and then run
>remote-shell RPM upgrades using the ftp:// nomenclature.
>
No, I don't think you understand the nature of his problem. He is talking
about a network where /usr/bin exists on a nfs server and many machines
are using it. Furthere more, the newtwork is not homogenous. Rsh or ftp
wnn't enable you to do that if RPM itself is not aware to put some files
on all machines and some just on the server.
Perry
Craig Kelley
> >You don't understand UNIX philosophy. Each tool does one thing, and
> >does it well. If you want to remote-install on many machines, any
> >language and rsh/ssh will do that for you with about a page of code.
> >Just put all your RPM files in a public FTP directory and then run
> >remote-shell RPM upgrades using the ftp:// nomenclature.
> >
>
> No, I don't think you understand the nature of his problem. He is talking
> about a network where /usr/bin exists on a nfs server and many machines
> are using it. Furthere more, the newtwork is not homogenous. Rsh or ftp
> wnn't enable you to do that if RPM itself is not aware to put some files
> on all machines and some just on the server.
Ouch. That *is* a problem.
Here's my script to do remote-machine updates:
http://inconnu.isu.edu/~ink/update_machines
It handles different setups on different machines (and it would be
easy to modifiy for different architectures if you needed to). If the
/usr tree is mounted read-only (well, it probably is..) then I wonder
if you can still coerce RPM to install the rest of the package.
Roope Anttinen
> > No, I don't think you understand the nature of his problem. He is talking
> > about a network where /usr/bin exists on a nfs server and many machines
> > are using it. Furthere more, the newtwork is not homogenous. Rsh or ftp
> > wnn't enable you to do that if RPM itself is not aware to put some files
> > on all machines and some just on the server.
> Ouch. That *is* a problem.
> Here's my script to do remote-machine updates:
> http://inconnu.isu.edu/~ink/update_machines
> It handles different setups on different machines (and it would be
> easy to modifiy for different architectures if you needed to). If the
> /usr tree is mounted read-only (well, it probably is..) then I wonder
> if you can still coerce RPM to install the rest of the package.
BUT that remote updating doesn't solve the thing with diskless Workstations.
I've setup few RH-5.x based systems where on the (tiny) local disk are only
stuff that is needed to boot the thing up and everything else is mounted
from NFS servers. KDE is very nice in this kind of situation as everything
is under one directory tree (/opt/kde here).
Roope
--
MicroSoft? is that some kind of a toilet paper?
PS: Look for address here, not from headers. And remove NOSPAM's
___________________________________________________________________________
antt...@mNyOyS.PhAeMlia.fi / Roope.A...@nNtOcS.PnAoMkia.com
+358 9 812 7567 / +358 500 445 565 / +358 49 445 565
http://myy.helia.fi/~anttiner/index.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Helsinki Business Polytechnic - Institute of information technology
Jeff Dickey
>On Tue, 16 Mar 1999 17:12:36 +0000, Simon Kinahan <sim...@cadence.com>
wrote:
[ SNIPPUS MAXIMUS ]
>
>What's so special about /opt?? Somebody is always trying to change
>something. In my case, I have /opt linked to /usr/local so I can keep
>all this stuff in the same place. One year's good idea, is another
>year's reject.
>
>Don
well, all MY systems have /usr mounted readonly, with little tiny r/w
partitions for /usr/local and /opt....makes it MUCH harder to fark things
up inadvertently or otherwise...
293724443a
Personally, I'm sick of the whole thing, maybe a lot of you like these new fancy shmancy window managers, but have you ever watched a top display with these hogs running? All you really need is lwm running an rclock, a top, slrn, wily, and jcc. That's pretty much got it all covered, and tons of memory left for applications instead of all of it getting sucked up by both bloated window managers referenced above!
On Thu, 01 Apr 1999 02:45:51 GMT, Jeff Dickey <jeff_...@hotmail.com> wrote:
}/dfg...@sgi.net wrote in <slrn7f0b25...@orion3.sgi.net>:
}/
}/>On Tue, 16 Mar 1999 17:12:36 +0000, Simon Kinahan <sim...@cadence.com>
}/wrote:
}/[ SNIPPUS MAXIMUS ]
}/>
}/>What's so special about /opt?? Somebody is always trying to change
}/>something. In my case, I have /opt linked to /usr/local so I can keep
}/>all this stuff in the same place. One year's good idea, is another
}/>year's reject.
}/>
}/>Don
}/
}/well, all MY systems have /usr mounted readonly, with little tiny r/w
}/partitions for /usr/local and /opt....makes it MUCH harder to fark things
}/up inadvertently or otherwise...
}/
--
A Los Angeles judge ruled that "a citizen may snore with immunity in
his own home, even though he may be in possession of unusual and
exceptional ability in that particular field."
Shimpei Yamashita
>dfg...@sgi.net wrote in <slrn7f0b25...@orion3.sgi.net>:>wrote:
>[ SNIPPUS MAXIMUS ]
>>
>>What's so special about /opt?? Somebody is always trying to change
On some commercial Unices, /opt is where many of the "optional"
packages get installed. Solaris development tools get installed in
/opt/SUNWspro, for example. Packages like KDE and WordPerfect are
probably trying to follow this convention by installing themselves in
/opt/kde, /opt/wp, etc. This way, /usr/local remains clear of
"packaged" software, so that you can install and de-install whatever
you want there without upsetting the packaging mechanisms.
On systems like Linux, where /opt is not used by most of the vendors,
it makes sense to /opt a symlink to /usr/local, or vice versa. I do it
partly out of my Solaris habit, and partly to save
keystrokes--#!/opt/bin/perl is faster to type than
#!/usr/local/bin/perl.
--
Shimpei Yamashita <http://www.submm.caltech.edu/%7Eshimpei/>