OpenBSD Journal

Developer blog: jasper@: Gnome 2.18

Contributed by deanna on from the portsblogger dept.

Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse (jasper@) writes:

OpenBSD ships with packages for the three major desktop environments, but KDE is the only one that receives regular updates. XFCE gets updates every now and then, but Gnome was forgotten release after release.

Really forgotten? Marc Matteo (marcm@) used to maintain Gnome, but after 2.10 he left Gnome for what it was and nobody else looked after it. Intentionally I think :) The problem with Gnome is, that although there's an x11/gnome directory, parts of Gnome are scattered all over the ports tree. And everything depends on everything so getting started takes some time.

During p2k6 in Budapest, last year, Aleksander Piotrowski (alek@) and Peter Strömberg (wilfried@) started to work on updating this beast. But first gtk+2, glib2 and friends had to be updated. I was busy doing other things around that time and lost track of progress.

But then during Christmas break I had too much spare time and decided that it was time to start to bring Gnome back into shape. Some weeks earlier Alexander Wirt sent a tarball with Gnome 2.16 to ports@. Although it provided me with a "cheat sheet", I didn't use it very much. Only to look at how some things were done. Because although it worked, it was rough and unpolished.

I started with updating some trivial stuff like gnome-mime-data, gnome-doc-utils and such. But to really get going, I needed an updated Gtk+. alek@ provided me with his diffs, so I could continue. But because of school and general lack of time, I didn't work much on OpenBSD untill March.

In the meantime Gnome 2.18 had been released and alek@, Mikolaj Kucharski and I started working on this, instead of 2.16. This time with good progress being made. Diffs were flying all around and in a fairly short time, most of the platform updates were done. I skipped school on friday and spent most of the following weekend working on the desktop part.

But we kinda lost track and we needed some more structure. It was a Systematic Chaos. First we needed to get the gtk+2 update in. In the meantime gnome-diffs were piling up rapidly. Finally somewhere in April the gtk+2 update went in and in the following days quite a decent part of the Gnome platform libraries were committed. Up untill now, updates are being committed. But the end is in sight. There are a some bugs that need to be squashed, but I hope to have committed all the updates Gnome before c2k7.

I can't help but confess I prefer fvwm/cwm over Gnome ;)

I'd like to thank Aleksander Piotrowski (alek@), Martynas Venckus (martynas@), Steven Mestdagh (steven@) Mikolaj Kucharski for testing, fixing, sending and testing diffs to get Gnome updated. Also a decent beer for it's everlasting support.

For all you screenshot junkies...

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Soner Tari (81.215.105.114) on

    I've been waiting for this for a long time. Thanks for your efforts.

    On my laptop I run Ubuntu with Gnome 2.18.x. I usually disable anti-aliasing to use fonts like Tahoma (and, if necessary, enable TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER in freetype, usually for Fedora). I've tried many options (on different window managers and operating systems), but on my LCD screen, I find this to be the best. It looks very nice.

    Am I going to be able to do the same? This was the only thing that prevented me to switch to OpenBSD on my laptop (the only computer I have which is not running OpenBSD).

    Comments

    1. By Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse (jasper) on http://humppa.nl

      > I've been waiting for this for a long time. Thanks for your efforts.
      >
      > On my laptop I run Ubuntu with Gnome 2.18.x. I usually disable anti-aliasing to use fonts like Tahoma (and, if necessary, enable TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER in freetype, usually for Fedora). I've tried many options (on different window managers and operating systems), but on my LCD screen, I find this to be the best. It looks very nice.

      tahoma like this: http://humppa.nl/~jasper/gnome/screenshots/tahoma.png

      Comments

      1. By Soner Tari (81.215.105.114) on

        > tahoma like this: http://humppa.nl/~jasper/gnome/screenshots/tahoma.png

        Excellent, thanks.

        Comments

        1. By Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse (jasper) on http://humppa.nl

          > > tahoma like this: http://humppa.nl/~jasper/gnome/screenshots/tahoma.png
          >
          > Excellent, thanks.
          please note that this font isn't supplied by gnome, i just downloaded it somewhere to demonstrate it to you..

  2. By Anonymous Coward (208.176.170.170) on

    Great work guys. Congrats.

    As a side note, Mark Matteo also was working on a port of Mono, the open (and not so free these days) source implementation of the .NET architecture, for OpenBSD.

    The reason why he left OpenBSD development is sorta stated on his blog here:

    http://www.lectroid.net/2006/03/23/and-thanks-for-all-the-blowfish/

    Comments

    1. By tmclaugh (208.206.3.254) on

      > Great work guys. Congrats.
      >
      > As a side note, Mark Matteo also was working on a port of Mono, the open (and not so free these days) source implementation of the .NET architecture, for OpenBSD.

      I've maintained Mono on FreeBSD for some time. (More so on the packaging side. Most of the porting work has been done by a few different users as issues have cropped up.) I'm not as active with it day to day currently but I still keep up with it. If anyone seriously starts to work on it for OpenBSD they can feel free to contact me and I can share and help however I can. Just add @freebsd.org to my name in the posting header to reach me.

      tom

      Comments

      1. By Brynet (Brynet) on

        > > Great work guys. Congrats.
        > >
        > > As a side note, Mark Matteo also was working on a port of Mono, the open (and not so free these days) source implementation of the .NET architecture, for OpenBSD.
        >
        > I've maintained Mono on FreeBSD for some time. (More so on the packaging side. Most of the porting work has been done by a few different users as issues have cropped up.) I'm not as active with it day to day currently but I still keep up with it. If anyone seriously starts to work on it for OpenBSD they can feel free to contact me and I can share and help however I can. Just add @freebsd.org to my name in the posting header to reach me.
        >
        > tom

        Both .NET and Mono are lame.. lol.. Pathetic really..

        Comments

        1. By Kevin R (198.53.241.18) on

          > > > Great work guys. Congrats.
          > > >
          > > > As a side note, Mark Matteo also was working on a port of Mono, the open (and not so free these days) source implementation of the .NET architecture, for OpenBSD.
          > >
          > > I've maintained Mono on FreeBSD for some time. (More so on the packaging side. Most of the porting work has been done by a few different users as issues have cropped up.) I'm not as active with it day to day currently but I still keep up with it. If anyone seriously starts to work on it for OpenBSD they can feel free to contact me and I can share and help however I can. Just add @freebsd.org to my name in the posting header to reach me.
          > >
          > > tom
          >
          > Both .NET and Mono are lame.. lol.. Pathetic really..

          Nice troll. Honestly, save these kind of comments for slashdot. Some of us actually like .NET (and appreciate Mono). Expanding what OpenBSD can serve and replace is very cool to me. I actually have some internal company servers running windows 2003 server/.NET 2.0 that I'm looking forward to replacing someday.

          C# is actually a fairly nice language (not perfect, but good) and the .NET class libraries are very simple and well laid out (I personally find them much nicer than Java's).

          Also, saying 'lol' is childish and annoying. Thanks.

        2. By Frank DENIS (82.224.188.215) on http://forum.manucure.info

          > Both .NET and Mono are lame.. lol.. Pathetic really..

          Did you actually use .NET before writing this? Or are you just bashing .NET and Mono because Microsoft designed .NET?

          .NET is a very good framework, with a very clean design, and C# itself is way superior to languages like PHP. It has been designed to be cross-platform, the only missing piece of the puzzle was an Unix port, and this is the Mono project.

          I would *love* to see Mono work on OpenBSD.

          Comments

          1. By frantisek holop (165.72.200.11) on 

            > .NET is a very good framework, with a very clean design, and C# itself
> is way superior to languages like PHP. It has been designed to be
> cross-platform, the only missing piece of the puzzle was an Unix port,
> and this is the Mono project.

i don't think that .net is quite in the same league as php...
or that it was intended to.

i personally find it fascinating that unix people all over
the world say mostly good stuff about .net.  i mean, i don't
develop for ms platforms, i don't have an iis server to run
stuff on, i don't have any kind of ms technology in my
infrastructure (and will keep it that way) so even if .net
is best language at the moment, why does it matter?

people keep bitching even about the GPL, but the 40+ pages
microsoft licenses worry no one?  patent claims anyone?
interoperability?  history of ms?

there are other problems which keep me from using ms
technology than solely technical merits (and/or religion :-P)...

    2. By Marc Matteo (206.13.125.181) on

      > Great work guys. Congrats.
      >
      > As a side note, Mark Matteo also was working on a port of Mono

      *Used to*

      I recently pulled Mono from my site, sorry. Mono never sat well with me, even my Linux installs of Mono were dodgy so I wasn't sure how much "better" one could even make it on OpenBSD. After the whole MS/Novell patent fiasco, I'm not all together sorry either.

      Anyway, I'm happy with fvwm and cwm too ;).

      Cheers,
      Marc (the former Gnome guy)

      Comments

      1. By mk (192.38.109.188) on

        > Cheers,
        > Marc (the former Gnome guy)

        Marc, you slacker. Get back to work! :)

  3. By Tony Lambiris (64.106.131.10) tonylambiris [@] gmail -dot- com on

    Back when KDE and GNOME first started being developed, I dabbled a little in both of them. I first started out in console (ah, the days when X would only work with one or two video cards), then moved to WindowMaker, then I believe to Blackbox, then Fluxbox.

    Through all those changes I sort-of kept up-to-date with GNOME, but not so much KDE. While the advancements in GNOME seemed "spiffy", I never felt any compelled reason to use it for a serious desktop environment.

    Fast-forward a few years after using OSX for my main Desktop (first for work, then for personal reasons), and I sold all my Mac hardware and now am "back to basics" with using open-source again.

    My main PC is running Slackware for a few reasons, but the primary one is none of the BSD's currently have support for my audio card. I'm not a huge fan of Linux, but I started with Slackware back in the day, and I think they are one of the few distro's that still do it right (see: KISS).

    When I installed Slackware, I also installed KDE to check it out, and I have to say to me it appears way more functional and configurable than GNOME, feels more responsive and doesn't take up that much memory (I know that last statement is purely relative). I've always been a GNOME guy anytime I was asked which I preferred, but after using KDE for the past few months, it's very slick and suits basically all my needs for a desktop environment.

    Unless GNOME comes out with something that absolutely blows my mind, I'll be using KDE from now on.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (151.188.247.104) on

      I'm with you; I prefer KDE anyway. But Evolution (a GNOME app, unfortunately) is a biggie in my environment, otherwise I have to use MS LookOut.

      Still, this is a good and helpful achievement (updated GNOME on OpenBSD). Thank you for this.

  4. By Mike Swanson (71.197.194.170) on

    Ah, that sounds like some nice progress. I personally dislike GNOME (hey, I use dwm for my window manager :), but I know people that have been dissuaded from using OpenBSD because of an old, unmaintained version of GNOME that it has.

    Comments

    1. By Smith (209.216.206.168) smith@confuciun.com on

      > I personally dislike GNOME (hey, I use dwm for my window manager :)

      I played with all kinds of window managers and was never quite satisfied. Then I found the perfect one for me, dwm. I encourage people to give it a try.

  5. By viking (viking) andy.elvey@paradise.net.nz on

    Good stuff! A very big "thank you!" to these devs! It must have been hard going, given Gnome's size, but at least the pace of change with Gnome seems to have slowed down a lot in the last year or so. That should make it a bit easier on the devs.
    - viking

  6. By z0mbix (88.211.15.70) on http://www.zombix.org

    Many many thanks Jasper and others. This is superb news. I am a big GNOME fan. It will be very nice to run a recent version of GNOME on OpenBSD.

  7. By Anonymous Coward (82.64.43.196) on

    Great work ! As a Gnome user, it was so annoying that I was about to give up on installing OpenBSD. Then I started to think about using KDE because of its recent version. If the latest Gnome is commited, I don't know which one I'm going to use, but this is a true advantage to have the choice.

  8. By Anonymous Coward (203.15.102.65) on

    IceWM FTW!

  9. By Anonymous Coward (83.5.208.157) on

    Call me weird, but I've never been able to get excited by either Gnome or KDE, too much bloat. XFCE is quite nice though, and I've been migrating my Fluxbox desktops to it recently. Anyway, choice is always a good thing.

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