GNOME 1.2.2.1 impressions/bugs

["Brent A. Nelson" <brent astro ufl edu>]

I recently upgraded our GNOME environment from October GNOME (last year)
to GNOME 1.2.2.1.  It seemed quite nice, but as I upgraded more and more
people, I noticed certain issues...

1) The most immediate complaint was the colormap.  The new GNOME somehow
manages to allocate the whole 8-bit color map, even with nothing but gmc,
the panel, and a terminal on the screen! On the bright-side, I did get a
number of converts to 24 bit color. ;-)  Does anyone have any insight into
this issue? Unfortunately, 8-bit color is the "norm" in the sciences due
to some reluctant old applications (although it is improving, some
things still refuse to work on anything but 8-bit pseudocolor).

2) Once I upgraded people who use xfmail-- big trouble.  XFMail
(especially when bringing up a window to compose a message) has a very
high probability of killing off the tasklist applet.  I now have people
constantly restarting tasklist throughout the day. Most distressing! :-(

3) The deskguide applet crashes occassionally.

4) So far, gdm 2.0beta4 (as distributed by Helix) seems to be better
behaved than RedHat's 2.0beta2 RPMs have been, although not perfect.  With
the old RPMs, given about 45 machines, gdm often would not restart
properly when someone logged out, and I'd frequently have to restart gdm.
With the newer gdm, I've still had to do this once, so it's still not
reliable but it at least seems better.

5) I had sawfish die on one person, but in general, it does seem to be
behaving much better than enlightenment did.  Shook my faith a little, but
sawfish has been otherwise very well behaved (version 0.31.1).

Overall, it looks like we'll at least survive this upgrade (most people
seem quite happy with it, and it's much prettier), but does anyone at
least have any idea how to fix the XFMail/tasklist issue? That one's
really pretty nasty! I've sent off a message to the XFMail list, but I
thought you guys should know, too, as tasklist really shouldn't die no
matter what the apps on screen are doing.

Many thanks for listening!

Brent Nelson
Sys. Manager
Dept. of Astronomy
University of Florida