Gnome 2.22 Released

kie writes "The latest version of the Gnome Desktop is being released today. New features in 2.22 include Cheese (an application for webcam photos and videos), window compositing, PolicyKit integration and much more. The full details are in the Release Notes."

That explains it.

Gnome 2.22 Released

I was wondering where it [belfasttelegraph.co.uk] came from.

Evolution actually working?

BTW, does Gnome now allows switching the spelling language of an application during the use of it?

Like switching the spell checker of a chat session during the chat session? Or the assumption is still that everybody only ever uses one language at a time.

Re:Evolution actually working?

Evolution can switch spelling on-the-fly, and even do multiple language spelling.

pidgin however still has the problems you describe, the FAQ/help has the following to say about that
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How do I change the language for the Highlight Misspelled words option?

Pidgin currently only supports spell checking in your locale language. This is because gtkspell 2 does not offer a good way for us to know which dictionaries are available or to switch between them. This functionality has long been promised for gtkspell version 3, which has been delayed somewhat indefinitely. See gtkspell.sf.net.

There is, however a simple plugin called switchspell that can change the spell check language on a per-buddy basis.
----
http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Pidgin [pidgin.im]

Re:

Another responder has posted the same response I was about to offer.

You can use a variety of methods, but often I just open a terminal, type "export LANG=en_US.UTF-8" or whatever locale you want to switch to and then run the program from there by typing th

Re:Evolution actually working?

If only there were a property to allow setting the locale in the shortcut/launcher thing...

You should be able to do this with a tiny script. Not quite as simple as the launcher GUI, but not bad. Simply create in your home directory (or wherever you like):

#!/bin/sh

LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pidgin

And call it "pidgin-en_US". Make it executable and set the launcher to use that script to launch pidgin and you should be good to go.

Better still, if the launcher config lets you give arguments to the program you tell it to execute (I think you can), you can make just one script:

#!/bin/sh

LANG=$1 pidgin

Call it "pidgin-lang" and in the launcher, set it to execute "/home/foo/pidgin-lang en_US.UTF-8" or whatever other language you want.

Re:

Awesome. I didn't know you could do that from such a line. I have always thought in terms of one line, one command or function. The idea that it would move on to execute whatever came behind it would have never occurred to me. I went ahead to create a

Re:

Or you can set up a launcher that executes:

"env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pidgin" ...and skip the ridiculous shell script entirely.

Re:

Better still, can't you just have something like:

/bin/env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pidgin

as the command to launch, and not use a shell script at all?

Re:Evolution actually working?

BTW, does Gnome now allows switching the spelling language of an application during the use of it?

I don't think spellchecking functionality is a desktop-wide feature by itself; I think it will depend on the application how exactly it is implemented. I do know that Gedit, the standard editor, does allow you to set the language on a per-document basis at runtime. No idea on Gaim.

Yeah, but...

does it run Linux? Oh, wait, ummmm, shit! I really suck at karma whoring....

Re:

you both suck at karma whoring... wait ... why am I karma whoring too?

Re:Yeah, but...

The cake was a lie you insensitive clod!

KISS

Fitting with GNOME's "keeping it simple" policy

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Re:

What you mean I cannot have a preview when selecting an image to attach?!)

You can, but it's up to the app to enable this. As a matter of fact, Epiphany 2.22 just gained an image preview in the file chooser.

Gnome 2 for 22

Also known as the Richie Benaud release

Huzzah!

Now to wait for Fedora 9 so I can more easily update :) I tried pointing Smart at the Development repos for the Gnome RC but there isn't a way to say "upgrade all Gnome" - no meta package or anything that I saw - so I didn't feel like doing it package by package.

I've yet to see the point of Cheese as a 'main Gnome' app, though.

Growing to like it

In general, I agree with the camp that hates making GUI's too simple and limited. Yet I'm using Gnome now because it's the default in Ubuntu and because of I work with Mono which uses Gtk, and spending some time with Gnome made me gradually like it.

It could be because I was lucky enough to find the features I want in place so that I wasn't bitten by the "too much minimalism" problem. I don't have much need for sound, printing or the like and 90% of my time are spent in either firefox, monodevelop or a text editor.

Also, the Tomboy note taker rules. I wish something like it was in Windows. This must be a milestone where a user begins to dislike working on Windows and prefers Linux because of an application.

Nice job

I have to admit I like Gnome a lot. But even if I were a KDE user I would have to give Gnome credit for their release schedule and process. They come out with a good set of reasonably stable features every 6 months, reliably enough that Ubuntu (and Fedora?) base their distro releases on the Gnome schedule. They've guaranteed core ABI compatibility through the 2.x series, which has been out for 5+ years by my count. They're conservative in what they add and take away. And every release has a nice set of release notes which tells me exactly what to look for in terms of new features.

Software development ain't easy, especially not in the decentralized volunteer world of free software, but the Gnome guys seem to have it down pretty well. Kudos to them.

Re:Not faster...

GNOME (Or more accurately GTK+, glib, Cairo and X) has got faster steadily since the GNOME 2.12 days. GTK+s UI's are just as snappy for me as Qt equivalents. I noticed significant improvements after several video/X driver updates and updates to Cairo 1.4.x (from 1.2.x).

Re:

One down, now if only we can get the "vi versus emacs" folks to do the same.

Re:Gnome & KDE

Maybe we should shoot for more realistic goals. Like acceptance of Emacs' superiority.

Re:

Maybe we should shoot for more realistic goals. Like acceptance of Emacs' superiority.

Well, Emacs is a nice OS and all, but what it really needs is a good text editor.

Re:

I hear viper-mode's coming along nicely. Haven't checked recently since I don't dual-boot much.

Re:

At least it was feature complete.

Re:Window Compositing?

the traditional way to do a windowed gui was to limit each apps drawing area so that it could only draw within it's own window and force the app to redraw stuff when it's visibility changed. This system has the advantage of being light on ram and being low on CPU when windows aren't moving. However moving windows is a relatively expensive process both because of the need to ask apps to redraw and the need to actually move data arround in the screen buffer (this is why many older systems use a dotted box drawn with XOR to indicate window moving and only move the window when the user has chosen the final location). Also it is virtually impossible to support any kind of partial transparency or rotozooming under this system and even non rectangular windows are a pain.

3D games work in a totally different way. They work with a (large) set of textures and the scene is redrawn every frame building up from the back to the front and rotozooming everything into place. This makes transparency, drop shadows etc fairly easy and of course rotozooming is a fundamental requirement of a 3D game.

A compositing window system (afaict under X this requires support from both X itself and the window manager) draws each window into it's own buffer and then treats that as a texture. Then a frame for the screen is built up in much the same way a 3D game builds up a frame. This enables all sorts of effects from simple stuff like drop shadows and inverted colors to advanced stuff like a window selector that shows a thumbnail of each window or a desktop selector that puts the different desktops on the surface of a cube. Different window managers will obviously choose to use theese capabilities to different extents and in different ways.