GNOME Review

[Horacio J. Peña <horape hobbit compendium com ar>]

¡Hola!

I'm back... For who don't know me i was working in GNOME in Jan/Feb and after
it i went into a black hole... :-)

Well, i've installed the new gnome (i hadn't used it in some months)
and -after sending some friends lots of screenshots :-)- wanna to do 
some comments.

The first one is how easy (and quick) was to compile it. The second one
is that a lot of things aren't tried to compile anyways. (i'm sorry for
my english, i should take some lessons...)

Now, getting serious...

mico:
-----
	Afraid of how hard would be to compile it (when panel was
CORBAized they were a lot of comments about it) i tried to get the
rpm's. I couldn't get them working, so i compile mico. It compiled
flawlessly. (48 RAM + 100 SWAP) I tried to run idl and it sigsegv'ed.
The same with micod. A run to ldconfig solved all the problems. (shouldn't
the 'make install' run it?)

eSound:
-------
	It seems to be cool, but it takes so much CPU that makes my
box almost unusable.

gmc:
----
	Great work, Miguel! "mc is my OS, linux my device drivers :-)",
gmc is great, although i prefer the text version (i'm a hard-die keyboard
fan). But, i've some problems with the gmc:

		- In the iconic list the icons have a black box, shouldn't
it be transparent?

		- The placement of icons in the desktop is a bit ugly...

		- SEGVs a lot.

		- To move an icon in the desktop you have to drag it first
over a window that accepts it and after you can drop it newly in the desktop.

		- When resizing the window it flickers a lot. (it's valid
for all the gtk+ programs) (oh, maybe it's a wm issue)

		- In the iconic view the long filenames should be broken in
lines...

help-browser:
-------------
	Congratulations, RH people. I'm using it as my default info
browser...

		- toc:ghelp. It displays 2 links for each program.

		- ghelp:* URL's aren't working.

panel:
------
	Wow! It rocks! I love DnD'ing an image an having the background 
change... (in consistence's sake i would like being able to DnD an image
to the desktop and changing the wallpaper :-)

	I haven't experimented too much with it (i just run it with some
applets, no drawers yet) so i cannot give comments...

Applets:
--------

	bussign: what is it supposed to do? i cannot run it without
being connected to internet. (it SEGV's)

	cpumemusage: it's great! But it would be good to have some help
about what does each bar means. And it (or cpuload) should launch gtop
when clicked. (or something btw)

	fish: Wow! I love it. (the comments about it was what convinced
me of compiling mico/panel) I would like an option to display the fortune
as a big tooltip. (maybe activated with the mid button)

	launcher: it would be great if it would have support for DnD. I
would like to throw an image to ee...

Bloat:
------
	Well, maybe i don't understand very well the gtop output but
the simple fish (or any other you likes to use as an example) applet
taking 2Mb is a bit too much for me... Maybe it's because mico?

Session Management:
-------------------
	I cannot get it to work well with the panel... When i do the
logout it writes a lot of 0-size files to ~/.gnome/panel-Session-<session-id>/
But it isn't saved in the ~/.gnome/session (it only mentions gmc and smproxy)
I've added it by hand, and it restart well, but when i do a logout gsm doesn't
stop...

gnome-games:
------------

	- What has happened to the spanish translations?

	- It depends in gnome-objc. What about a --with-no-objc flag to
configure?

	mahjongg: wow!

	gnomine: why the patch that allowed to go by the squares with the
mouse button down wasn't added?

	samegnome and freecell: the same as ever, i think...

Electric Eyes:
--------------

	Raster, i bless you... ee is great! 

	- I lack the ability of doing screenshots with it... Less seriously, 
it would be very cool (althoug i think it wouldn't be useful at all) to be
able of edit directly (ala bezier) the graph of modificators. (ok, this 
probably isn't possible without a great -and unneeded- change to imlib)

	- The about is very pretty, but it isn't consistent with the
rest of GNOME (maybe ee isn't very consistent with gnome anyways). Please
use gnome-about... (and if you want a pretty about box, modify the gnome-about
code so all the programs get the advances and not only ee)

extace:
-------
	It's wonderful. But eSound is a CPU hog. :-(

ghex and gedit:
---------------
	Wow! I like the MDI thing... But, what does modal mdi mean?

gcalendar:
----------
	I couldn't use it well, it looks pretty bad in 800x600.

gtop:
-----
	It's great! I find me using it very often now. I love the details
and memory use pages...

mini-utils:
-----------
	Well, i like a lot guname, dislike grun*, didn't try gshutdown :-)
and couldn't try gw (libc/glib mixed problems)

background-properties:
----------------------
	It doesn't work here. It just SEGVs.

----------- o ----------- o -------------- o ------------ o ----------

Well, i love the new GNOME. I hope i can give some time now to work on it...

GNOME Hackers, congratulations, your work is GREAT!

						HoraPe