Re: [PLUG] RH 6.2 unstable?

[Jeff Abrahamson <jeff@purple.com>]

This is a slightly pedantic, but hopefully informative, bit of
information on the state of GNOME/window manager/file manager
things. Please bear with me.


On Wed, Dec 13, 2000 at 09:20:19AM +0500, Mike Leone wrote:
> > also sprach Rupert Heesom (on Wed, 13 Dec 2000 08:45:23AM +0500):
> > > I've been told in the past that RH 6.2 is an unstable version of RH
> > > linux.   Well, I'm using 6.2, and I now tend to agree.    In the past
> > > few days, I've had my PC slowing down to a freeze or the Gnome pager die
> > > on me!!
> > 
> > i would swear by my left pinky that it's gnome that's freezing, not
> > linux. gnome sucks pretty bad in my opinion, if you plan on using a
> > file manager, you might just as well use windows. in general, i find
> 
> Not in my opinion. Altho you're right - the file manager sucks. Badly.

I need to correct a significant misunderstanding here. GNOME is not a
file manager, it is a desktop environment. Confusingly, that doesn't
obligate it to provide the standard compenents of a desktop: it merely
provides the enabling middleware. So GNOME (and KDE, too) is really
about middleware (ORBit is a small, light-weight CORBA ORB; bonobo is
an embedding technology; etc.).

Then there are lots of GNOME-enabled (or GNOME-aware or whatever)
applications.

So, for example, Evolution, the upcoming groupware thing that's
designed to make Outlook users feel at home, is actually several
different applications (a mailer, a calendar, a PIM, etc.). But it
looks to the user like one application because GNOME allows these
individual programs to display themselves embedded in a container that
makes it all look integrated, and to share information so that it
really is integrated. But because they are separate programs, all you
have to do is write or adapt a new component and plug it in if you
want to replace, say, the mail client part. Try that with Outlook.

[Divert Outlook flames to /dev/null. Evolution tries not to duplicate
the horrid parts of Outlook. And there's a real need for this in
certain corporate environments, so it's a big stumbling block for
linux right now in those environments.]

Incidentally, it's common knowledge among gnomers that gmc, the GNOME
file manager, sucks rocks. It's there because it exists, not much
more. There's a replacement in the works, called Nautilus, that's
looking pretty slick. You can get a preview release at
<http://www.eazel.com/>.

Note that Nautilus is not completely stable yet, and it's feature
incomplete. But it's kind of usable and won't trash your files
(besides maybe adding a file called "core" from time to time ;-).


> > that crashes of my system are due to X stuff and the more fancy your
> > window/desktop manager gets, the easier it crashes. gnome crashed a
> > whole lot on me, that's why i am now with windowmaker and vtwm.
> 
> Gnome never crashes on me.

I want to second that GNOME itself is quite stable. I have seen X
crash on rare occasion, and I've seen GNOME apps occasionally die. But
I've never seen the core GNOME stuff crash on me. YMMV.

However, know this: essentially all distributions ship an out of date
version of GNOME. Before dismissing it, you should try a current
version.

To get a current version of GNOME, go to <http://www.helixcode.com/>
and click on the "I want Helix GNOME" button. After a bit of
information, it basically tells you to su to root and type

	     lynx -source http://go-gnome.com/ | sh

This is one of the cleverest simple things I've seen in years. Anyway,
it will guide you through downloading GNOME in a nice, easy, GUI
way. And at the end, you'll have an update program so you can update
GNOME as you like. (It leaves you in control: it never does nasty
things to you or starts to download without your permission.)

Helixcode is a company that works on GNOME development. GNOME is still
free, just as linux is still free even thought RHAD and Suse sponsor
development.


Finally, while I'm in pedantic mode, a brief lexicon:

	-X is a display server that manages a bitmapped display

	-xterm, xclock, gmc, and the like are X clients. They talk to
	 an X server to request that things be drawn on a bitmapped
	 display. The things they request to be drawn are typically
	 inside windows, and so you can think of X clients as being
	 responsible for the *contents* of windows.

	-windowmaker, twm, vtwm, sawfish, E (enlightenment),
	 afterstep, and so forth are window managers. They allow you
	 to manipulate windows: moving, resizing, changing stacking
	 order. They don't affect the contents of the windows.

	-GNOME and KDE (and CDE, yuck) are desktop environments. They
	 handle interapplication communication and provide certain
	 common services. In the Microsoft world, OLE is the critical
	 technology behind desktop integration. Both KDE and GNOME are
	 reported to be better and cleaner than OLE.

Thus, you may choose to use or not to use GNOME, KDE, or CDE, but that
is unrelated to your choice of window manager.

You can check out life without a window manager. It's kinda cool,
albeit not somewhere you want to stay for long. Just send a kill
signal to your window manager and you'll see the WM-drawn stuff go
away: window borders and titles and so forth.

To get it back, just invoke the window manager on the command line
(and in the background if you have a life).

Make sure you have an xterm up before you kill your WM, as it will be
difficult to run any new programs (whether xterm or your WM) without a
WM.

-- 
 Jeff

 Jeff Abrahamson  <http://www.purple.com/jeff/>