I'm sure a lot of you have already used GNOME 2.8. Many of the Ubuntu
reviewers and commenters will be in part commenting on GNOME 2.8, rather
than anything specifically Ubuntu. I've just upgraded my Gentoo
workstation at home to use GNOME 2.8, and I thought I'd share the
experience, and make some comments on it.
First of all, I've been running GNOME 2.6 since it came out, but I admit
I didn't delve too deeply into some aspects of it. So if I mention
something here that was in GNOME 2.6, please forgive me!
I'm currently sitting at a Windows XP laptop, using my workstation via
VNC. This was one of the features that prompted me to upgrade to 2.8
before the Gentoo GNOME team declared it stable. GNOME 2.8 has an
integrated VNC client - accessable via the menu at Application ->
Desktop Preferences -> Remote Desktop. The quality of a VNC session
depends entirely upon the implementation of the viewer, and I found
TightVNC to be lacking. RealVNC seems much better. Neither seem
particular better than running an XServer on my laptop and using XDMCP,
however that doesn't let me connect to an existing session. Despite
being a little bit slow, and some key events not registering properly,
this is pretty good. First score to GNOME 2.8.
Also, my laptop has a lower screen resolution than my desktop. Scrolling
round through the VNC window was tedious, so I used the screen resizer
tool (Gnome 2.4 bought this in, I think) which will actually resize your
desktop properly, instead of changing the viewport size. Amazing!
Wonderful! About time!
I'm writing this email in Evolution 2.0.1. I think, at this point, that
I like it more than I liked Evolution previously. Its layout is cleaner;
it just feels nicer. It still behaves really badly if you have large
IMAP mailspools on servers at the other end of a bad link, but that's
the way Evolution handles IMAP (thunderbird / mozilla are a lot less
network-intensive than evolution).
One of the first things everyone mentions about GNOME 2.8 is the
trashcan integrated into your panel. I assume because I upgraded from
GNOME 2.6, leaving my config files intact, this didn't get added for me.
However, I can't seem to work out how to add this trashcan applet to my
panel. Perhaps I don't have it installed, maybe the Gentoo GNOME team
haven't packaged that part of it yet (it was masked for a reason after
all!). Not really a point against GNOME per se.
Nautilus has improved since I last bothered to look at it. Local
filesystem browsing is nice, and the 'Computer' menu gives you options
to mount devices flagged with 'user' in /etc/fstab - typically any cdrom
drives, or in my case, my USB2 harddisk enclosure. Network filesystem
browsing is nice too. I get the feeling this is all GNOME 2.6 stuff here
however :)
Under the 'System Tools' menu there are some good Control Panel-type
applications. The 'Users and Groups' tool lets you mangle your user
databases quite nicely. It only seems to understand local files
(/etc/passwd, /etc/groups etc), I couldn't make it speak to my LDAP
server at all. Also, I think it provides a good balance between being
"User Friendly" and actually allowing experienced users to do what they
want. There is a similar tool for controlling which services are run at
boot, and starting/stopping services. The other tool I looked at
quickly was a network configuration tool, which had options for setting
up wired, wireless, dialup, parallel cable and IR network connections.
You can control network profiles from here as well (so when you boot
your laptop off the LAN, you can tell it to not bother DHCPing for your
wired interface). All of these tools are run through a sudo-like tool,
so prompt for your root password, as expected. Personally, I probably
won't use them - they are for things performed very infrequently, and
I'm happy enough doing them on the command line. However, I think it's a
great step towards "general acceptance". I think I'd feel a lot happier
now about putting my folks in front of a GNOME desktop.
As far as the actual upgrade experience went (gentoo specific), I am
using the "unstable" branch of Gentoo 2004.2 (~x86), and I had to unmask
a whole heap of packages by adding lines to /etc/portage/package.unmask.
(non-gentoo-specific) I had read in several forums that people were
having profile issues when upgrading, and many recommended deleting all
of the various GNOME configuration directories. I didn't do this -
perhaps if I had, I'd have my trashcan on my panel!. It seemed painless
enough however. Evolution bitched a bit about upgrading its profile,
although I'm not sure why it was upgrading a profile that didn't exist.
Daniel
