Another USER report

[edgehp together net]

Last night I updated my 980509 Gnome installation to 980528, so here's a
mostly-dumb user's report on it.

This release is much more functional, I may even start using it instead
of TkGoodstuff. There are still a few things missing, and a few things
TkGoodstuff has that are nicer that I use regularly.

First off are some multi-functon applets/buttons. The two I use are the
"Net" button/status and the "Mail" button/status. The Net button lets
me start and stop a PPP session, and gives a visual indication when the
link is up or down. Four intuitive features in one tiny button. The
Mail button tells me when mail is here, and activates my mailer (TkRat)
when I press it.

I've found some sort of 'PPP Dialer' applet, but it's far from intuitive
how to configure the silly thing. Currently it does nothing. I have the
clock/mail applet on the panel, but don't know how to tell it where my
mailbox is. ($HOME/mail/inbox, not /var/spool/mail/$USER) Plus I
wouldn't mind having a second mail indicator to show the staus of my
mail list mailboxes. (All in one, preferably)

The panel is a little 'too responsive' at times. Sometimes when I press
a button over an applet, I'm not sure if the applet is fielding it or if
the panel is. It looks to me is if most of the applets don't even field
the LMB, except the Print device completely suppresses it. The RMB seems
to behave correctly over the applets.

When configuring the panel, it was a bit "fragile", particularly when
deleting a drawer. I took to exiting and restarting before doing that,
and worked more reliably. I've still dropped some core's. Speaking of
drawers, can the icon be changed from the footprint?

I've figured out enough of the convention to "gnomify" knews, or at
least make it so I can put it on the panel as an application.

I like the "icon view" in gmc, in addition to the "detail view". Now we
need the "tree view". I expected to be able to drag a file from gmc and
drop it on an emacs icon on the panel, and see emacs opened with that
file. I got the "non-valid target" icon when I tried. Is this something
I should expect to work at some point. Neither does dropping a file on
an already open emacs window. Should either of these work at some point?
Can you tell I'm also an OS/2 user?

Lastly, I'd like to snap up one of the Gnome-compliant WMs. Back on RH4
I had settled on icewm. When I reinstalled to RH5, I didn't bother, and
am still running AnotherLevel, or whatever they call it. Having two
gizmos overlap on bottom, and TkGoodstuff on the right, and the silly 
little pager in the lower right corner is rather unaesthetic.

I remember seeing a reference to a Gnome-ified fvwm2, and a lot of talk
about icewm. I know G-fvwm is available, though I'll have to dig for the
reference. Is G-icewm available? Are either of these available in an RPM
for Hurricane? I can install a tarball in /usr/local, but prefer to
stick to RPMs for system-type stuff.

Any idea when gtk and gtk++ will converge, so I can run control-panel
again?

Thanks,
Dale Pontius