Linux NetMag - Diving Into GNOME 2.5 - A Preview of GNOME 2.6

As a part of the Bangla/Bengali GNOME l10n team, I decided to give the GNOME HEAD branch a spin - in order to find out what's new, as well as to get an estimate of how much we would have to translate (I hate that part of the job) to attain supported status. The last time I did this, I also wrote an article about what I saw, but unfortunately, I never learn from my mistakes - so here I go again....
However, before jumping in into this guided tour, please remember that I have been involved with the GNOME community for the past few months as a helper in the GNOME Summaries, and I may not be able totally impartial towards GNOME. Feel free to consider me biased.

The Vital Statistics

Before going into the real stuff, let me give me a brief overview of my system, so that when I mention something as fast or as slow, you would be able to guess how it would crawl in your system.

The Installation

I had gone through (successfully) the GNOME dependency maze before, and to avoid losing my sanity, I decided to use jhbuild (one can also use GARNOME or cvsGNOME - maybe I'll test one of those with GNOME 2.8) .
Using jhbuild is quite easy - just set some variables in ~/.jhbuildrc, and you are ready to roll. Jhbuild grabs the latest source code from CVS (taking care of the dependencies), compiles them, and installs them in whatever $prefix you want them to be in. OK - there was one major problem - but that was at a later stage, and it got fixed really quickly.

First Impressions

Jhbuild took around 6 hours to get a bare bones GNOME system up and running, and surprisingly, there were very few errors, and I had to manually intervene only thrice.

I logged in as root the first time (yaya - I know security risk and other stuff..), to be greeted by a clean and polished looking GNOME desktop (Fig. 1) . (Note that I am running the Freedesktop.org Xserver here - so don't expect a stock GNOME 2.6 install to have panel shadows).

Seeing an icon named "Computer" right on the desktop - my first reaction was to click on it, expecting Nautilus to pop up with my "/" directory or something like that.

Nautilus goes spatial

However, as soon as I clicked on that icon - my reaction was "Yikes!! What have they done to Nautilus ??". Gone was the old and familiar explorer like interface. In it's place was a really minimalistic window, with no toolbar, just a plain menubar. I was quite confused - I even clicked on "Help" -> "About" to verify that the "thing" was indeed Nautilus. After some head scratching I remembered a post at FootNotes, in which the Nautilus developers announced something about going "Spatial". People had been pretty much excited about this - though I personally had no idea about what this stuff was all about. Now I thought I understood.

All my disks had been correctly identified by Nautilus, and was showing up in the "Computer" window (Fig. 2). But that was not very important at that point - all my attention was riveted on the new UI. After some Googling and RTFM sessions, I figured out that Nautilus was following a "Object Oriented" metaphor, instead of the normally used "Navigational" metaphor. The most user visible aspect of the OO metaphor is that there is a always a direct, one-to-one relationship between folders and windows, and the window for each folder remembers where you placed it the last time - i.e, the next time it will pop up in the same position. This new interface is partially inspired by the interface described in http://arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-1.html.

Fig 3. Viewing a deep folder with spatial Nautilus

Fig 4. Viewing the same folder by middle clicking

At first, I was not very comfortable with the new spatial mode (to be honest, I thought it sucked), but after a few days, I grew used to it, and believe it or not - I found it to be quite usable. It much faster than the 2.4x series (installed in the same system), and apparently, this improvement in speed helps a lot. In fact, the speed reminds me of the "Good Ol' Days with GMC" I had back in distant past when men (and women) ran GNOME 1.x . However, the real major test of spatial Nautilus came when I decided to reorganise my home directory (This is one of the most painful jobs that can be carried out with a computer - and children - please do not try this at home). I was simply stunned by the ease of use and the efficiency of the spatial mode - I did a complete reorganisation of my home directory (consisting of 168271 items) in just around half an hour. OK, many of the files were in directories which were moved as a whole, but I would still say that spatial Nautilus made me understand the sheer power of drag and drop ;-). A cool thing that I noticed later was that when I dragged a file into the "CD Creator" window, instead of getting moved, the file just got copied. One of the things that was really irritating me, however, was that my 1024x768 desktop was soon getting cluttered up by too many windows while using spatial Nautilus to view a deep directory (Fig. 3). I soon found a nice way to avoid that - once the directory in question popped up, I just clicked on File -> Close Parent Folder, and my Desktop showed up again. (But a shortcut key to close all the open folders will be even nicer) Also, middle clicking twice on a folder closes the parent window after the child folder is opened. (Fig. 4)
I noticed that this new spatial Nautlus kind of forces me to keep my files and folders organised in sane structure. Also, what made me all the more happy was the fact that the Nautilus developers have not got rid of the older "navigational" interface, it can started by selecting a folder in the spatial window, right clicking, and selecting "Browse Folder". Their comments on this ?? "We want Nautilus to give us the best of both worlds" Cool!! (Actually, if you don't like the spatial metaphor, you can enable the /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser GConf key and go back to the navigational setup.)
The only signs of trouble that I noticed was that the drag and drop failed to work on a very few rare occasions. But hey, I can't expect beta software to be perfect - and at least it is not as bad as this. And of course, there's the irritating bug #101332. But I guess that spatial Nautilus neutralises that bug to a large extent. I had another wish - to jump to a higher (grand-parent/parent) directory directly, and I found this nice button in the lower left corner of the spatial window which let me do just that. (But somehow it doesn't look much like a button - can anyone fix that ? Please?)

Nautilus Gets Template Support and the Preferences dialogue gets better

Another exciting new feature (I personally don't find it much exciting - but most probably my mom would) of Nautilus is the templates support. You just put a file in ~/Templates directory, and Nautilus will have an entry for it in the Templates submenu (Fig. 5). Click on it, and a copy of that file will be created in the directory you are viewing. A very handy feature for new users ! Hopefully distro makers will ship Nautilus with some handy templates.

The Nautilus preferences dialogue now has a handy tab where you can select the columns (modification date, size, mimetype, etc) which are to be displayed in the "List View" mode of Nautilus - and I hear that the List View has improved a lot - though I am not very familiar with that, and so it would be better for everyone concerned if I keep my mouth shut on this.

Metacity and the Window list gets more options

The pop up menu in the Window List applets seems to have two extra options - one for putting the selected window in all workspaces, and another for sending the window to a specified workspace. On clicking on the titlebar of an app window, I noticed a new option - "On Top". Yay!!

ACME disappears

The one and only Microsoft product that I use regularly is my Microsoft Multimedia Keyboard - which has quite a few fancy buttons marked Web/Home, Media. etc on its top. The only set of buttons that I regularly use is the volume control ones. GNOME 2.4 had a nifty application called ACME with which I could easily use those buttons. In GNOME 2.5, ACME has been merged with the Keyboard Shortcuts applet of the GNOME control centre (Fig. 6), and I easily managed to enable my volume control keys from that capplet.

However, I would request the developers to use some kind of human readable keycodes in the shortcuts column of the dialogue. Hex numbers are scary... And I don't know if it's just me, but it seems that the keyboard shortcut dialogue in general could use some UI love.

The wallpaper selector and keyboard tool start to rock

Another major change in the GNOME Control Centre is in the "Background" tool. I simply love this new UI design (Fig. 7) - it is cleaner, and looks much more polished and now it is much easier to manage one's wallpaper collection, especially since Epiphany's "Use Image as Background" has been integrated with this as well.

The keyboard tool has been extended too, and now you can select additional layouts from this tool. This means I can now change my keyboard layout from English to Bengali without remembering that complicated setxkbmap command sequence. This enhancement, along with the proposed (for GNOME 2.8) Language and Culture capplet, should make life a lot easier for us l10n people. Currently the l10n capplet is in the Control Center, but is not compiled by default as it introduces a dependency for IBM ICU.

The GTK File Selector evolves

Fig 8. File Selector in "Open" mode

Fig 9. File Selector in "Save" mode

Fig 10. File Selector in "Save" mode (expanded)

However, one of the most anticipated changes in the GNOME 2.6 release has been the introduction of a new GTK+ file selector. So I fired up EOG, and hit the Open button - and my first reaction was - Wow!. (You can't blame me, I have been using that older thingy with GNOME ever since I booted up a GNU/Linux box for the first time in my life ;-)

The GTK hackers have done some really good work, and have taken a few quite bold steps, and the result is quite stunning.
The new file selector has two main modes - one for selecting/opening files, and another for saving files. (I hear that there is also one for one for selecting new folders (having a tree view of folders) - but I am not very sure.)
Each avatar of the selector has a cool new "pathbar" widget for filesystem navigation, which making moving around in the filesystem really really easy and fast. There is also a bookmarks system, to bring oft visited directories within easy reach. Developers also have the option of adding extra widgets to the selector - the infamous "frobinate/lart" confusion was supposed to be the placeholder for that widget.
The first thing that one notices with the Open/Load dialogue (Fig. 8) is that there is no place for text entry. This would most probably make many users "very angry - very angry indeed!" (remember a little not so green fellow called Marvin ??). I was quite baffled at first, but later figured out that the only time I needed the text entry widget was when I tried to open a hidden file. That was easily solved by using the Ctrl-l shortcut - a text entry dialogue popped up - end of all troubles. The text entry dialogue even has type-ahead support. Nice...
However, the Save dialogue looks really bare bones (Fig. 9). Just a text-entry widget to enter the filename, and a drop down list listing the folders in the bookmarks list. Quite a simplistic approach. But life does not restrict itself within the bookmarks list, so to save a file in some other folder, you need to click on "Browse for other folders", and you will be presented with a familiar looking dialogue box (Fig. 10), complete with a "Create Folder" button at the corner.

My reactions on this file-selector is largely positive. The new UI rocks, and enhancements like bookmarks list, preview support, filtering are just the things which were needed at this stage. I was slightly annoyed at the inability to rename a file through the file-selector, but I never used that feature in a frequent basis, and it is a mild annoyance. Also, I had really hoped that the developers would keep the separate panes for directories and files - the files+folders approach can sometimes make things really cluttered up. Another possible enhancement would be the use of distinct icons for the "Home" and "Desktop" items on the bookmarks pane of the file-selector. They are "special" directories - right? And support for drag and drop from the file list to the bookmark list would be a really cool thing ^(tm) (It is in the TODO list - I believe) . Finally, support for the ".hidden" file used by Nautilus will be really great - otherwise it gets difficult to explain to people where all those new files and folders cropped up from. (bug #129170)

Gedit has UI improvements

The Preferences dialogue of Gedit has been improved (Fig. 11)- and it is now much more cleaner and less cluttered. There's also a very handy new feature which lets you display the right margin as a thin line - I chose column 80 to be my right margin, so that my documents look OK in console based editors. And the spellchecker plugin, instead of colouring the entire misspelled word red, now just underlines it with a squiggly red line.

Also, thanks to and improved gtksourceview, the number of languages/scripts supported for syntax highlighting has improved dramatically - it has now support for Ada, C, C++, C#, diff files, .desktop files, HTML, IDL files, Java, LaTeX, MSIL, Perl, PHP (Yay!!), gettext translations (PO files), Python, SQL, Verilog, and XML. And you can also customise the syntax colours according to your wishes. Cool!!

There is also a new handy close button in the menu - which closes all the open documents. And the new warning dialogue when you are about to close an unsaved document is really "sweet" (Fig. 12).

However, Gedit did seem to act sluggishly when I scrolled down a large document with Pg Dn (around 20 KB) - with syntax highlighting turned on. Some google-ing suggests that this might have something to do with the Render extension being really slow in current Xfree86.

Yelp becomes really faster and better

Thanks to Shaun McCance and the other Yelp hackers, this program has become really really fast - and reports suggest that even the huge Gnumeric manual is handled by this new beast in a few seconds. There have been considerable improvements to the general look and feel too (Fig. 13). There is a good overview of the improvements in this interview of Shaun.
I had complained about Yelp in my last article on GNOME 2.4, and I am really happy to say that I have absolutely no complaints this time. Kudos to the Yelp developers.

Epiphany gets more polish

The Epiphany developers have been really busy all these six months, and a large number of enhancements, tweaks and bugfixes have made into this browser. It seems to even more faster (or it may be the Mozilla 1.7b against which it is being compiled). There have been a large number of changes in the Preferences section. You can now explicitly set a folder for storing all your downloads, and there's also an option which makes the browser automatically open files once they have been downloaded. This should be a handy option for new users, who are often confused about this "download stuff". Also, when a download is progressing, an icon appears in the notification area applet, and if you take your mouse over it, it tells you how much time is left for the download to complete. Click on it, and the download window is brought into focus. The tab list is not shown if there is only one tab open (Fig. 14).
Another interesting feature I noticed is that Epiphany warns you if you are about to close a window and there are un-submitted changes in a form. It also supports undo/redo in form elements. However, for some reason, it does not use the UI that every other GNOME program use in its print dialogue. I hope to see that fixed in the next version.

GNOME gets a net status applet, and the clock becomes integrated with Evolution

GNOME has a netstatus applet now, which lets you know about the status of your network interface. It not only blinks during data transfers, but also, it can show whether the connection is up or not or whether the link is present or not (on a properly configured system). It is similar to the Windows XP network status applet (which spews forth those irritating balloon like message boxes from the taskbar every now and then).
The clock applet is now integrated with Evolution, and it highlights the days which are marked in your Evolution calendar (Fig. 15). This is done through evolution-data-server, and so you will actually see this when your system has Evolution 2.0 or 1.5. Double click on a highlighted day, and evolution pops up, showing the entries in your calendar for that day.

GNOME Games catch the SVG fever

I am not really very familiar with the GNOME Games package. However, a quick look at the Changelog suggests a number of enhancements, especially with respect to the generated hints, the scoring and statistics systems.
Also, quite a few of the games have switched to SVG based graphics, which is a really nice thing, and a move towards the right direction.

File-Roller gets RPM support

There has been a number of nice improvements to the FileRoller (equivalent of Winzip in 'doze). However, the most exciting feature for me is the support for RPM files (Fig. 16). I often need to extract just one file from a particular RPM, and previously, it was quite an irritating process. Now, it just works! This series of File-roller also features support for cut-copy-paste with files in an archive, and it also can rename files/folders inside archives. The menu item for file-roller has been moved to System Tools -> Zip Creator. I somehow don't like the name - it kind of under-estimates File-roller's abilities. However, I guess new users (especially those migrating from Windows) will be more comfortable with the name.

The Character Map gets more organised

Gucharmap, the GNOME Character Map/Picker now has a mode where the characters are organised by Unicode block, instead of the older "by codepoint" organisation. (Fig. 17) This is quite handy, and this should be much less confusing to the users unfamiliar with the intricacies of Unicode . No one needs to use all the characters defined by Unicode, and avoiding throwing a huge truck load of characters to the user really helps. Another nice feature (this is also present in older versions) that I noticed was that on right clicking on a character, it gets magnified.

GPDF comes of age

GPDF, the default PDF file viewer to ship with GNOME made its debut during the 2.4/2.3 series. At that time, many considered it to be quite unpolished, and people were quite shocked to discover that it did not even have a print mechanism. This time, the GPDF hackers have worked really hard, and GPDF is ready to take on any standard PDF viewer in terms of features. It can print, and it has a handy side panel which can be used for navigation (Fig. 18). You can navigate using bookmarks (provided that the file you are viewing has the proper support), or you can navigate using thumbnails of the pages. It has printing support, and the rendering of the pages in most cases is excellent. It has problems handling a very few files (apparently there are a few issues with embedded TrueType fonts), but such cases are rare. This version also has support for fullscreen viewing, and the Changelog suggests support for password protected files as well, but I did not have any such file to test that claim.

..And the Other Applications get tweaked and debugged

GNOME 2.6 will also see the debut of Dasher, an accessibility tool. Here is a cool demo which should give you an idea of what Dasher can do. Among the older applications, EOG (the image viewer) now has an improved image collection view mode, the audio tools use GStreamer, and the System Monitor has better support for systems with Kernel 2.6. There are probably a lot of other changes and major bugfixes which I have missed, and in the process, offended someone. My apologies in advance.

Final thoughts and Conclusion

This release of GNOME has been mostly about polish and more polish. The number of new applications included in this cycle is quite low. Evolution 2,0 and Rhythmbox were initially the two major new applications which were to be included in GNOME 2.6. However, the maintainers of both the projects ultimately backed off, citing stability issues. I think it is OK for a project like GNOME to have a "polish and tweakup" release once in a while.
However, there are still a few nagging annoyances in GNOME which will be hopefully dealt with the next series.

However, in spite of the above shortcomings, I would really like to congratulate the GNOME hackers for a job well done. The last six months have been exceptionally difficult for the GNOME community - with three of some of the most active/enthusiastic members of the team passing away in quick succession. Kudos to the developers and everyone who are involved for creating such a great DE - you all rock, and as a lurking newbie in the GNOME family, I can definitely say that March 22nd, 2004 will be a date on Sprockets when we dance.
And to end it all, let me share with you the brand new default throbber/spinner for GNOME (sorry about the GIF). This thing rocks - many thanks to the GNOME Artmasters for coming up with this.

Copyright © 2004, Sayamindu Dasgupta (sayamindu (at) clai (dot) net).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Linux is a registered Trademark of Linus Torvalds.
GNOME and the Foot logo are trademarks of the GNOME Foundation.
The throbber animation is a part of the GNOME Icon Theme Package.
All trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Diving Into GNOME 2.5 - A Preview of GNOME 2.6

The boring intro...