GNOME vs KDE - Income and Expenses

Being avid users of GNOME and/or KDE, have you ever wondered how much revenue these well known open source projects generate ? If popular perception is taken into account, GNOME should generate far more revenue, in-turn more profits, than KDE. But reality is somewhat different.

The following are some nuggets of information gleaned from the quarterly reports that give a birds eye view of the income and expenses of GNOME and KDE respectively.

GNOME Do - An intelligent launcher tool for GNOME

GNOME Do is an intelligent launcher tool which makes all your default menus and panels in GNOME redundant. Since last time I had written about GNOME Do, it has gotten only better. Just a glance through the numerous plugins available for GNOME Do will be enough for any sceptic to fall in love with it.

Linus Torvalds ditches KDE 4 for GNOME

Linus Torvalds says he has ditched KDE for good and is now sleeping with its arch rival GNOME. Oh well, rhetoric apart, he says the move over to GNOME happened because in KDE 4, he found it quite bothersome that he couldn't get his Right mouse button to access the right menu he wanted. In short, he ran into usability issues while using KDE 4.0.

In an interview given to Rodney Gedda of "Computer World" - Australia, he had this to say, and I quote :

I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I switched to GNOME. I hate the fact that my right button doesn't do what I want it to do. But the whole "break everything" model is painful for users and they can choose to use something else.

I realise the reason for the 4.0 release, but I think they did it badly. They did so may changes it was a half-baked release. It may turn out to be the right decision in the end and I will re-try KDE, but I suspect I'm not the only person they lost.

I am sure the GNOME camp must be rejoicing in having won over a high profile Linux user to their side. This when a few years back, Linus Torvalds had gone on record severely criticizing GNOME for over simplifying the user interface.

Linus Torvalds was in Australia to attend the annual linux.conf.au organised by Linux Australia. While he was rather critical of KDE 4 in its current form, he did say it was a good thing for Nokia to release Qt as LGPL. Among other things, he also gives his views on Microsoft Windows 7 advising Microsoft to release sooner and decouple the operating system from the applications. A really interesting interview.

Tip : Quickly open special locations in Nautilus

It is really amazing that in many ways than one, it is the open source software developers who are in the forefront of innovation the most. If you ask me, one reason may be because they listen to the end users more than any proprietary software developers. Secondly, the open source programmers are not tied down by the bureaucratic hurdles that weigh down on their closed source counterparts. But in my opinion, the most pertinent reason is that creating open source software is purely a labour of love - a love of coding and creating something of real value to themselves and to others.

Take Nautilus file manager for instance, it has a plethora of hooks built in which allow a user to navigate to different locations by just typing in a name. For example, to get network locations, you type in network:/// in the location bar of nautilus.

There are a number of such shortcuts which allow an end user to navigate to different locations with ease. Shankar has compiled a set of nautilus shortcuts which throw light on the in-built versatility of Nautilus.

GNOME Do - a universal launcher for the GNOME Desktop

When ever I have logged in to Windows, there is one program which I use on a regular basis and which I cannot do without. The program is called Launchy. The unique feature of this program is that it helps me to navigate the file system, open applications, visit websites and a lot more by just typing a couple of keys. Launchy runs in the background as a service and is activated when a key combination is pressed. On my machine it is [Alt] + [Space].

Fig: Launchy in action in Windows

In KDE, we have a similar program called Katapult. But if you are a GNOME user then you should check out a recent project which tries to equal or even surpass all the features found in Launchy. The name of the project is "Gnome Do". Simply put, Gnome Do is a launcher ... of applications, web pages, Firefox bookmarks, system config panels, your documents residing on your hard disk and so on. But you can also extend the functionality of Gnome Do using an add-in framework.

Fig: Gnome Do interface

Gnome Do is the brain child of David Siegel who started this project to be submitted to his university as a part of his curriculum. It has been entirely coded using C# and uses Mono. David Siegel claims he was motivated to work on Gnome Do seeing a similar project called Quick Silver on Mac OSX.

I installed "Gnome Do" using the method explained in the official website and the installation was successful. If you are using Ubuntu, then you can download and install the binary instead of compiling the program from source.

Once installed and running, Gnome Do acts as a background process waiting for the specific key press combination from the user. The default key combination is [Win Key] + [Space].

When you press the key combination, Gnome Do will make itself visible and you can start typing. It takes only the first couple of key strokes from the user to zero in on the correct application you wish to launch. For example, if I want to open Gedit text editor, instead of navigating the Gnome menu, I activate Gnome Do and type the first three characters namely 't', 'e'. 'x' and by then Gnome Do has zeroed in on the gedit text editor and all I have to do is press enter to open the text editor.

Fig: Type 't','e','r' and Gnome Do highlights terminal.

When you press the hot key combination and bring Gnome Do to the foreground, you will find two boxes side by side. You can navigate between either of the boxes using the [Tab] key. And while one of the boxes have the focus, if you press the [Down arrow] key, it will open a drop down list which will list alternate actions that can be taken such as opening a terminal in the current location and so on.

Features of Gnome Do

• All applications in your Gnome menu are indexed.
• Supports an add-in framework so it is easy to write and extend the functionality of Gnome Do to suit your needs via pieces of code called add-ins. You can find a couple of add-ins at do.davebsd.com/addins. You have to place the add-ins in ~/.do/addins and restart Gnome Do.
• It keeps track of your Firefox bookmarks so you can start typing the first few letters of a bookmark and Gnome Do will open the webpage for you.
• Type an English word and it will open Gnome dictionary to give you the meaning of the word.
• You can open any file or folder in your home directory by typing the first few letters of their name and pressing enter. For example, to open my home folder, I press the hotkey combination and type 'r', 'a', 'v' and Gnome Do will open my home folder.
  

GNOME 2.20 released - some new features

GNOME is a popular, multi-platform desktop environment which focuses on ease of use, stability, and first class internationalization and accessibility support. GNOME rolls out a new version of its ever popular Desktop every six months. And in keeping with its commitment, it has yet again made available the newest release which is GNOME ver 2.20.

This begs the question as to what is new in GNOME 2.20. There are a number of new features. But most of them are subtle in nature and are not conspicuous to the end user. Here is a concise list of the new features in GNOME 2.20.

Evolution enhancements

• Gives an attachment reminder to the user if he tries to send a mail without any attachments but certain words in his mail indicate that he has attached a file to the mail.
• Backup all the mails and profiles in the Evolution client with the click of a button.
• A new mail notification icon and many other tiny miscellaneous enhancements.
  

Epiphany Web browser enhancements - More intuitive inline completion in the address bar

Image viewer enhancements

• Eye of Gnome (EOG) has a menu which allows you to open an image using another software program such as Gimp, Fspot, a web browser or G-thumb while viewing the image using eog. And if the image is modified, the modifications are updated in the eog in real time.
• The new image properties dialog provides easy access to basic information and metadata for your images, and now includes XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) data that your camera or software might store in your image files, along with the existing EXIF data. This might include location, copyright information, license, and tags.
  

Evince PDF viewer

Supports interactive PDF forms. That is forms which allow you to enter data and then which can be send to print. Evince's page rendering features are also noticeably faster.

Great media player enhancement

Totem is the default media player in GNOME. In the new release, totem will search for and install all the required media codecs - even the non-free ones if it finds that the media file requires additional codecs. This is a very cool feature and will do away with all the manual installations required to make Linux more multimedia friendly.

Fig: Totem now offers to install the proprietary codecs

Notes synchronization

Tomboy now supports saving and retrieving notes stored in a remote location via its WebDav framework or SSH. This means that it is now possible to synchronize all your notes say between your home and office machines.

Search integrated in the File chooser dialog

This redesigned dialog now allows you to search for files using Desktop search systems such as Beagle or tracker. This makes it much more easier to open your files.

Nautilus enhancements

• A pie graph incorporated into the Nautilus file properties window makes it much more intuitive.
• File manager can now read EXIF data from digital cameras and will automatically orient and display the thumbnails of images.
  

A new control panel

GNOME 2.20 sports a new appearance control panel which allows you to change various properties such as themes, background images, fonts and such from a single interface. Till now each of these options had their own individual dialogs but not anymore.

Other enhancements
Improved GNOME keyring system providing you with a few new conveniences. I have not used the GNOME keyring yet so can't comment on it.

GNOME help browser called Yelp now sports a much more pleasing style and layout.

Apart from all this there are a number of other minor enhancements all round.

In the system administration side, GNOME offers an improved Lock down and user profile editor as well as incorporating better auditing support and roll based access control in Gnome display manager (GDM).

Having said that, the number one feature which excites me as an end user is the totem's built-in feature of pulling in and installing all the required codecs to play any media file. I guess with this, one can finally say goodbye to poor out of the box support for video and audio files in Linux.

You can read the official news at the GNOME website and also try out a live-cd of Foresight Linux sporting GNOME 2.20.

Lesser known Drag and Drop tips in Gnome

Recently, while I was reading an article in the Firefox web browser, I happened to accidentally click on a link and drag it outside the browser. And the result was rather interesting. Gnome obediently created a shortcut to the webpage pointed by the link on the desktop. Seeing this and having piqued my curiosity, I decided to try a few other things and to put it lightly, I was surprised and pleased with the results. These are my findings...

Create a shortcut of a webpage or a link in a website on the Gnome desktop

Click on the web link in the web browser and drag it on to the desktop. Gnome will automatically create the shortcut (link) to the remote location pointed to by the link you just dragged.

Note: It also works if you select the link in the Firefox address bar and drag it to the desktop.

Save a block of text from a webpage to a file

Select the text in the webpage and drag it on to the desktop. Gnome will auto-magically create a text file and save the selected text into it. You will also be prompted to rename the file to a name of your choice.

Fig: Showing the drag'n drop possibilities in Gnome

Copy an image from a remote location.

While the image is displayed in the web browser, just click on the image and drag it to the desktop. Gnome will copy the image from the remote location. Take care to drag the image rather than the link pointed to by the image.

Note: These tips are also possible from any application. Not necessarily from the web browser. In fact, I was able to copy a block of text to another file from Gedit. I was able to do this even from evince - the PDF viewer.

These features only prove that Gnome has a very advanced drag and drop functionality built in it.

Tag your files and folders with an emblem in Gnome

I like all things which are simple. And I like Gnome desktop very much because of the obsession of its developers in making this popular desktop as simple and intuitive to use as possible. Yes I know, Linus Torvalds has in the past gone on record stating his preference for KDE over Gnome for just this very reason. Nevertheless, my disgust towards complexity goes back to the times I used to work in Windows when I had to put up with the hard to understand jargon and syntax of things I had to do to maintain it. So when I switched to Linux, Gnome desktop breathed a bout of fresh air in its simplistic but functional design.

Fig: Shows the folders and files tagged with unique icons

In Gnome, it is possible to tag files and folders with small icons called emblems. Tagging files with visual cues like these will help a person to find the particular file much easily. Here is how it is done:

1. First choose the file you want to tag with an emblem.
2. Now right click on it and select Properties from the popup menu.
3. The Properties menu will have multiple tabs. From them, select the tab named 'Emblems'. Here you can choose from a collection of icons. Gnome allows one to choose multiple emblems. Once the emblem is choosen, press 'Close' button. And you are done.
   

I have been using this property to keep track of files which contain important data. For example, I have a folder containing contact information of people I interact with. I have tagged this file with the icon showing 'two people' which gives me a cue as to what is in this file.

Running Scripts from within Nautilus file manager

Recently, when I was in the process of installing and using JavE - an ASCII art editor, each time I wanted to run the editor, I had to open up a terminal, navigate to the directory containing the JavE binary and then execute the command :

$ java -jar jave.jar

After some time, this whole job of opening the terminal and typing the command became quite tedious. And I started wondering if it was possible to start the editor by just double clicking on the jar file. But double clicking on it opened the jar file in the Gnome archive manager which was not what I wanted. I even tried associating the command 'java -jar' with all jar files in Nautilus. But to no avail.

That was when I remembered that Nautilus has a special feature which allows one to pass file names to scripts from the file manager. Gnome has a special folder by name nautilus-scripts/ which resides inside the hidden directory '.gnome2/' in ones home folder. The full path for the nautilus-scripts/ in my home directory being '/home/ravi/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/'. And any executable script that one drops in this directory will be accessible from the Gnome right click menu.

So I created a bash script by name 'Run_Java' and saved it in the folder '/home/ravi/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/'. And voila! I was able to access and run the script by right-clicking anywhere on the Gnome desktop or file manager and selecting the script (See picture).

Fig: Shows how the script is executed from Nautilus

The contents of the script I wrote contains only two lines as shown below:

#File Name: Run_Java
#!/bin/sh

java -jar $1

In the above listing, the $1 contains the value of the first parameter - which in this case was the name of the JavE jar file. You can access the nautilus-scripts/ directory in Nautilus file manager by navigating to File Menu -> Scripts -> Open scripts folder.

Fig: The message one sees when nautilus-scripts folder is opened in the file manager

This is a very useful feature and opens up a lot of avenues as most GUI tools in GNU/Linux accept command line parameters. For instance, one can open a Jpeg image in Gimp from the command line by passing the name of the image file as a parameter to Gimp. So by writing a bash script and saving it in this magic folder, one can select a group of image files in Nautilus and right-click and select the relevant script to open all the selected files in Gimp.

But not every one is proficient in writing scripts you say ? No problem, there is a site by name g-scripts maintained by Shane.M who has taken it upon himself to collect and make available nautilus scripts suitable for diverse purposes. The afore mentioned site contains a large collection of scripts, some of which were written by Shane himselves and others collected from different sources on the net.