| First impressions of GNOME 2.14 |
Apr. 18, 2006
For years now, the Linux and open-source desktop has had the benefit of multiple software projects pushing forward to create nicer-looking, more useful environments. One of the most prominent of those projects, GNOME, recently underwent one of its twice-yearly updates, and the result is a compelling set of refinements.
The newest version of GNOME, 2.14, now graces the desktop of Red Hat's Fedora Core 5 and other shipping and soon-to-arrive Linux distributions.
One of the most significant improvements to GNOME is a very good desktop search function. As of late, desktop search has been a big focus of Microsoft Windows and Apple Computer Mac OS X developers.
Beagle a thoroughbred app
eWEEK Labs is happy to see that the Linux desktop can now boast improved search functionality as well -- in the form of Beagle, a desktop application that enabled us in tests to search through all the files in our home directory, as well as through our Novell Evolution and KMail e-mail messages, contacts, notes, RSS feeds and browser search history.
We could launch Beagle searches from a graphical interface, from the command line or from a new GNOME task bar applet called Deskbar, which we could also use to launch Web queries on the search engines we'd configured in the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox.
While we've been impressed overall with Beagle, this application is not a good fit for resource-constrained systems. In our tests with typical desktop workloads -- Firefox with multiple tabs open, an OpenOffice.org document or two, the Evolution e-mail application and Beagle quietly indexing in the background -- Beagle was typically the first or second largest user of RAM. When running GNOME with Beagle and all its bells and whistles, we recommend 1GB of system RAM for best results.
Another search-related improvement that we appreciated in GNOME 2.14 is the addition of a search function to the system's help viewer application, Yelp.
The GNOME Project is touting speed gains in Version 2.14, and we did notice improvement in certain applications, such as GNOME's Log Viewer and Terminal.
In recent tests with Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu's Dapper Drake, however, we have noticed that the open/save file dialogs in GTK (GIMP Tool Kit) applications (all of GNOME is based on the GTK framework) were slow to open. What's more, we've noted slow response times from GNOME's screen-shot task bar applet and from its Create Archive right-click menu option.
Desktop management tools a valuable find
We found promising two new desktop management tools included in GNOME 2.14: Pessulus, a desktop lockdown tool, and Sabayon, a desktop profile editor.
Pessulus doesn't ship with Fedora Core 5, so, during testing of the distro, we had to download the Pessulus source and compile it -- a process that, somewhat to our surprise, went rather smoothly. That's probably because Pessulus is a fairly simple, Python-based front end to the GConf configuration system that underlies GNOME.
Once we got Pessulus up and running, we could disable individual task bar applets, block command-line access and perform a handful of other operations, but the tool needs more work before it's ready for deployment beyond, perhaps, setting up an Internet kiosk-type machine.
Sabayon, interestingly, uses the nested X-Window capability of the X.org Foundation's X.org graphics system, in which you can launch a new session in a window within your current session. In this session within a session, we could set desktop preferences, add task bar items and change font sizes, among other things, and then save that set of configurations as a profile that we could apply to other users.
If your Linux distribution of choice does not yet ship with GNOME 2.14, you may use Garnome -- the download, compile and install script -- to build it yourself, a method we've enjoyed success with in the past.
If you found this eWEEK.com article by Senior Analyst Jason Brooks informative, be sure to check out eWEEK.com's Linux & Open Source Center for the latest open-source news, reviews, and analysis. Brooks can be reached at jason_brooks@ziffdavis.com.
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