First impression...

[Suboner aol com]

    I'm new to linux and gnome, and from what I can tell there are a lot of
people in this same situation (although some may have more experience in
Linux). Let me review my experience a bit, I've originally used DOS (when I
started off on the PC), and mostly used it to play games, learning qbasic and
used XtreeGold for file managment, eventually I started playing around with
windows 3.11 for work group, and was mostly using it for watcom C/C++ to
program DOS4GW programs and sometimes the file manager, eventually I moved to
Windows95 and ever since then I have been what I consider a full out GUI user,
learning the hot keys, using windows explorer, using Visual C++, Paint shop
pro, and I used to use Animation Master but now mostly Lightwave, I still play
games, I'm still interested in game developement. But through out that my
apreciation is changing ever since I started noticing what microsoft is about.

    So far everything has been straight forward all that I have done thus far,
was just installing RedHat Linux 5.2, and downloading and installing Gnome
1.0, all of which was simple and yet shaky, mostly shaky because of unsurety
that I may be doing something wrong like misinterpret install instructions,
etcetera. I've only come across 4 problems, 1) I was unsure what to set my
unknown brand monitor to, and this led to some confusion about why my video
card would not go any higher then 640x480. I corrected this by running
Xconfigurator and experimenting with the monitor settings, I had to set it to
1 resolution higher then the resolution I wanted, if I said the monitor was
capable of 1024x768 it would only go to 800x600, so I set it to a higher
resolution to get it to go to 1024x768x16bpp which is the current resolution
I'm using so I'm happy :). 2) My network card is not supported (or at least
Its hard for me to know if it is an NE2000 compatible or not, its a Lynksys),
the solution seems to be to buy a truely supported/compatible (inexpensive)
card. 3) I could not read floppy discs formated for windows95/nt, I asked
someone on a newsgroup about this and I found the answer to be to just "mount"
it with the command line parameter of "-t vfat". (I needed this because I had
burnt a cd with all the gnome files for 1.0, and I found I forgot 1 necesary
file because it was in another directory but it was big enough to fit on a
floppy so I tranfered it over, using "mount -t vfat /mnt/floppy"). 4) the
instructions for installing gnome said what Xclients should look like, so I
used emacs to edit it and after that the permissions were messed up and x
windows would not start, I solved this by typing "chmod 755 Xclients" to
change the permissions to match another file in the same directory. (For me
this was not a serious issue since I have worked with file permissions before
on telnet, for cgi-bin perl scripts).

That was it, now every thing seems to be working the way I'd like it to (plus
some), except the occassional glitch. I'm satisfied and above all else I like
the direction its going enough to spend some of my spare time on helping it
get there. I do have some suggestions/reports that will hopefully be
helpfull...

The Panel, everything seems to be working fine for me except for some reason
at one time when I started gnome, a dialog poped up asking me if I wanted to
open another Panel or not, I said yes because it seemed to be the safest thing
to do, and I ended up with 2 of them, I then logged out and started it again,
this time there was only 1 panel, but the clock-applet and pager-applet were
gone and no Home/folder/icon on the desktop, when I started MC the home icon
on the desktop reappeared and I just added applets and moved them around to
the orginal position and that solved everything, but the puzzling side was I
don't know why it happened in the first place, it may be that I had logged out
of a previous session to fast.

Gnome Midnight Commander, there seems to be a glitch that when I first open a
Midnight Commander and then if I close it using the titlebars system menu or
by clicking the [x] system button, the desktop goes blank, the icons disappear
and then the icons reappear and MC reopens automaticly, this only happens the
first time, any time after that it works with out doing this. The next glitch
is when I right click on a file or folder and the menu appears, if you change
your mind and click on some empty space or other control (like a scroll bar)
just to have the popup menu disappear, or even if you right click and choose
something like rename and hit cancel, you can't access anthing (can't access
folders on the folder panel, the menu bar, scroll bars, the tool bar,
etcetera) until you select another file or folder by clicking on it. Finally
some suggestions, store windows positioning information on exit, while MC does
store whether you want detailed view of files or icon view, etcetera, it does
not store the position it was last in, it would be more productive for me not
to have to resize it everytime I start it. Since I'm a windows explorer user
there are certain things I like, I like the dragging and dropping features so
far since they are similar to windows, except I would love it if they handle
the right mouse button the same, so that if you right click the popup menu
only appears when you release the right mouse button, this opens the door to
right click and dragging to a folder and having a popup menu appears asking
you if you want to copy, move, create link, or cancel, I work like this in
windows explorer, it is much easier for me to see my options this way, I'm one
of those people who more often then not memorizes the logic behind something
or uses logic to memorize something instead of just memorizing everything (In
this way I was good at math and understood it well but I was slow at
calculating), like what clicking and dragging does with or with out the shift
key, as opposed to just having an option pop up and ask me what I want to do,
this also helps me confirm what I wanted to do (copy or move). The last
suggestions I'm not sure if that goes to the gtk+ or to MC, but it would be
nice to be able to use the click on name to rename trick, in the detailed
view, this does work in the iconic view. Next the icons don't all seem to be
working in the detailed view, while in the icon view everything has icons,
while in the detailed view somethings have icons others have *s and others
don't have anything, the other thing to this it would be nice to have icons
blended in with the file name better more like in windows explorer detailed
view instead of having them in a seperate panes. The next one is the window
splitter, it would be nice if you could click on the entire strip (the section
that splits a window in 2) to move the split left or right, as opposed to
having to select a little square to move the split. The final, is so that if
you click on the [+] or [-] icons/pictures in the folder hierarchy view, that
it does not select the folder, so that the only way to select the folder in
the file hierarchy view is to click on its folder icon or its name, and if it
is already selected that it creates a rename box for the folder name. Please
do not take offense to some of my comparisons to windows, at this point in
time I feel more comfortable using its filemanager windows explorer, but I
feel with a little work my productivity using Midnight Commander would be the
same or even better.

The gnome suggestions, I kind of like having a resize edge above the title
bar, sometimes I find myself with only access to the top of a window and the
fastest way to resize it vertically is to click on the top edge and resize it
that way. The Gnome panel is the most advanced panel (called the task bar in
win95/nt), I've ever used, it even does like windows98 (and nt with ie4
update) with the sliding (the hiding slide the panel to the left or right),
I'd suggest enhancing applications with this same sliding ability, so that
menus and other tools open, like when opening a folder in MC and having the
folder slide open as oposed to just poping open, this is not a productivity
feature but it is an eye candy feature that looks cool (if your into that).
I'm used to the windows standard hotkeys, like Ctrl->C to copy, Ctrl->X to
cut, Ctrl->V to paste, Ctrl->Z undo, Ctrl->O to open a file, Ctrl->S to paste
a file, I notice that gnotepad+ uses this (except for open) I'm happy about
that, I'd like to see this in more programs though, netscape uses Alt instead
of Ctrl :P, a lot of other programs use F3 to open instead, but productivity
goes down if a convention is not choosen and used because it leads to
confusion, or a changable convention is not used, for those who are used to it
being one way and those who are used to it being another way. The other
convention in windows is the Alt->"letter of a menu item", doing this to open
a menu item with an underscore under a letter for example the menu item
"File", commonly has an underscore under the 'F', when someone hits Alt->F,
that drops down the menu items submenu, and you can hit the letter of Open,
Close, Save, etcetera.

Suggestions for the future, I don't know if gnome has anything similar but
having something like the windows registery is a good thing (although because
its made by MS it seems to be a sloppy implementation), it holds global data
for applications, like for example what application to use to open what kind
of files with what command lines (associate netscape with htm,html files,
gnotepad txt, gimp with tga,tif, etcetera), and not only open files but what
program and command line to use to edit, print, and anything else you want to
create, of a particular kind of file so when a program like MC gets a file
right clicked on a popup menu will give them the options to open, edit, print,
or any other commands for a particular file format, its also important to have
a default command so like in MC if someone double clicks on a file it will
either open edit or what ever command there is, for example right clicking on
a zip file in windows explorer gives you the option to uncompress a zip file,
if uncompressing the file is the default then you could just double left click
on it to do that, another example is if you right click on an html file, you
can either open it in netscape or edit it in notepad, you can set open as a
default if you don't edit it that much or if you edit web pages then you could
set that to default, so you can just double left click on it to do the default
thing, but anyway this information is there for all applications not just the
file manager, so if someone clicks on a file from a browsing a web site, the
default program can be used for viewing it. Now the next suggestion is
something that would take time, it is standards, standards are obviosly very
important, MS uses them to control developers, uses DirectX (and shoved OpenGL
into the dark till D3D could compare) to control game developers and IHVs,
uses MFC to control windows developers, was trying to win the browser wars to
have better control over internet standards. Standards are important, it
increase productivity the most, it is the oposite of chaos, so I *feel* its
important that gnome adopt some standards that are more widely used, for
example a lot of people in the PC consumer market play video games, if there
was a standard set of libraries/APIs that allow developers to make games that
use hardware acceleration, then more people will be willing to flock over, the
next thing is 3D acceleration APIs like OpenGL are cross platform it would be
nice if Gnome/gtk+ could allow applications to take advantage of it and allow
the advantage of accerated 3D so high end applications will feel better about
porting over, I believe there is a commercial x server that does this but it
does not seem standard to me and its a commercial x server, any way if the
high end applications get ported that is one less reason to use windows.

Well this thing was so long I probably forgot half the things I wanted to say,
but I guess I'll end it by saying that I think this is turning out great, I'm
happy an alternative to the windows platform is shaping up and looking great.
:)

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