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Ars Technica Interviews Robert Love 147

Posted by CowboyNeal from the getting-to-know dept.
functor writes "Ars Technica has interviewed kernel hacker Robert M. Love of MontaVista/Ximian fame. He covers current and future developments in the Linux kernel and on the desktop, particularly concerning the Linux process scheduler and its enhancements for system responsiveness and also his work toward Project Utopia, an effort to make Linux's device management on the (GNOME) desktop transparent and seamless. (Robert Love is the principal hacker who worked on kernel preemption for the Linux 2.6 kernel.)"
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Ars Technica Interviews Robert Love

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  • Gnome is more then creating a desktop (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23, 2004 @05:39AM (#8064287)
    The standard KDE argument:
    >A GNOME spreadsheet you want Miguel? Don't worry. The way things are
    >looking, I can hack one out in a few days. We will borrow from X, Y, and Z
    >projects since they have most of the functionality we need. It will be a
    >matter of fitting them all together."

    I find it always funny that KDE supporters always list re-use of existing libraries as a big minus point of Gnome, as if it is a bad thing to re-use and adopt none-Gnome supporting libraries,

    It is my vision that this is one of the great strengths of Gnome. In Gnome the supporting libraries are almost never Gnome dependent they often use already existing libraries or help to modify them too their needs, without Gnome-ifying them. When they create a new one for use in Gnome they tend too make it as generic as possible, With this sort of philosophy you create functionality that is easily adopted by other projects or was already in use or planned to get used. Things like Cairo (X-server), Fontconfig, ATK, etc. This is exactly why this functionality is popping up everywhere in open-source land. Which makes the KDE supporters scream that Gnome is taking everything over. This isn't true, but Gnome by using the above philosophy, doesn't alienate itself from other Linux/*nix projects in stark contrast too KDE. Gnome is not only about building a great desktop, it is about building modular desktop technology that can be used and reused by more projects then Gnome only, which make Gnome more cooperative too other projects then KDE.

    As example below a quote from Robert Love (from kernel fame) in a interview too Arts-Technica developing for Ximian about his project Utopia:
    [Begin quote]
    Love: Project Utopia's goal is to fully integrate the Linux system, from the kernel on up the stack, through the GNOME desktop, its applications, and finally to the user. Therefore, Project Utopia is very GNOME-specific.

    But Project Utopia is composed of many small components, and each component is intentionally being developed separately and abstractly. Thus, a GNOME desktop (or any desktop) is not required for much of the functionality and another desktop environment could (and should!) provide the missing pieces.

    The system is architect-ed in such a way that the only components actually at the desktop layer are policy mechanisms, such as gnome-volume-manager, and glue layers/libraries, such as any forthcoming notification system.

    Components such as udev and hotplug are obviously entirely agnostic to the rest of the system, as they are (or will be) required pieces of nearly any Linux system. Other components, such as D-BUS and HAL, can likewise fit into any system. I very much hope that both of those projects find wide adoption.

    In response to your example, I think that a server with no desktop environment would still benefit from this work. In fact, it would just use Project Utopia as far up the stack as needed, definitely making use of udev, D-BUS, and HAL.
    [End Quote]

    Now do you think that at KDE they will be glad to get such technology? Oh sure they will take it and probably "adapt" it (like the Borg that is) into there desktop, but for sure the work they will put into it will only benefit KDE and while this is happening they will scream and whine till the end that Gnome is about adopting and Gnome-ifying (giving project Utopia as example off-course, because the technology will get adapted in lots of non-gnome projects), while little somebody else can use is coming from the KDE community (it is all of the KDE or die, look at Red-hat and user-Linux how KDE treads other visions).

    The question is: Do you want a *nux/Linux community desktop which takes from (Fontconfig, Cairo, librsvg, etc) and gives too (Project Utopia, GTK+, Freedesktop.org, Gstreamer, ATK, Pango, etc) other projects (Xfree86, XFCE4, etc) without making everything it touches Gnome or do we want the none-*nix/Linux philosophy of one big API in the form of a win32 clone which alienates everything no

    • Re:Gnome is more then creating a desktop (Score:5, Funny)

      by w00t_sargasso ( 744186 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @06:13AM (#8064405) Homepage
      What the hell are you on about man? KDE does use libraries -- Just not the ones GNOME uses. And here, I see we have yet another mass-manufactured windows hater who says that generic uniformity of interface is a bad thing. Personally, I would rather have all my applications have similar dialogs, etc and be as similar as possible in operation (hence why Windows is actually reasonable sometimes, and why I use KDE) More than that, point out 3 examples of public whining the KDE team has made about GNOME. I haven't seen anything on their website. Meh. People like you make me want to go back to DOS. :D
      • Well, I've never seen the GNOME website badmouth KDE. It all boils down to something like this [userfriendly.org].

    • Re:Gnome is more then creating a desktop (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nitehorse ( 58425 ) <clee@c133.org> on Friday January 23, 2004 @06:41AM (#8064474)
      Just a few comments.

      1) KDE, as a project, is not Borg-like. We like to use other technologies when they work, and we use (and/or invent) better ones if the existing things don't work properly. (See CORBA.)

      2) While it's nice to leverage existing technology and architecture, if you make use of too many existing projects it becomes an absolute nightmare to build everything from scratch. Even installing from binary packages is a huge pain - there are literally dozens of packages, and getting the dependency order correct is just insane. Can you tell me off the top of your head which libraries gdk-pixbuf, gtkglarea, ORBit, and libzvt depend on? I didn't think so.

      3) Using all sorts of different projects means that you have different APIs for every library. One of the really nice features of having KDE based on Qt is that Qt provides a very nice, sane, predictable API for all sorts of different things - the same methods are available whenever they make sense. And since all of kdelibs is distributed as one package, and developed as one large package, the entirety of the API is much more cohesive than the ORBit API plus GTK+ plus libxml plus libsoup plus any other independently-developed libraries that you might need to include to get the functionality you need.

      KDE and GNOME are evolving to serve very different markets and that's ok. I'm a KDE developer and I'm excited about everything in Project Utopia, even the GNOME-specific parts, because it gives me a chance to see what they do that I like and what they do that I dislike in their GUI and I have the opportunity to do things differently without duplicating the entirety of the Project Utopia tree. To use a very common analogy, it's much better for someone to reinvent the hubcap on the wheel than to keep reinventing the entire wheel every time.
      • We like to use other technologies when they work, and we use (and/or invent) better ones if the existing things don't work properly. (See CORBA.)

        You point an interesting example in that it, too, shows little more than differences in development philosophy. Below I'll represent the respective team's decisions as I understand them.

        KDE: "Oh no, CORBA is bad, we don't grok it, the existing free implementations suck, we don't like its exceptions, we don't like inout parameters. Let's sit and hack together our
      • Can you tell me off the top of your head which libraries gdk-pixbuf, gtkglarea, ORBit, and libzvt depend on? I didn't think so.

        I couldn't tell you off the top of my head what libraries the KDE libraries depend on either (and I'm a KDE fan). Besides, that's what ldd is for (please excuse the crappy formatting):

        $ ldd /usr/lib/libORBit-2.so.0
        liblinc.so.1 => /usr/lib/liblinc.so.1 (0x40055000)
        libgthread-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0 (0x4005f000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/i686/libpthrea

        • That's easy to do when the libraries are already installed for you :)

          Now, assuming that you didn't have half of those installed... how would you know what you needed to download in order to build libORBit? It's not easy. (I'm talking about this from a developer perspective - debian makes it as easy as 'apt-get install liborbit2' but if you're building things from source it is complete and total insanity.)
          • m talking about this from a developer perspective - debian makes it as easy as 'apt-get install liborbit2' but if you're building things from source it is complete and total insanity.)

            That's why Red Carpet is such a badass program. If you want to compile a package from source, just download the SRPM, and open it in redcarpet. It will automatically get all the -devel packages required to compile it.

            With Red Carpet, package management in Gnome is a breeze... I don't even think about it. I just pick the

    • Re:Gnome is more then creating a desktop (Score:5, Interesting)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @07:09AM (#8064530)
      I find it always funny that KDE supporters always list re-use of existing libraries as a big minus point of Gnome, as if it is a bad thing to re-use and adopt none-Gnome supporting libraries,
      ---
      It is at once a strength and a weakness. By reusing existing libraries, they gain interoperation and speed up development. However, at the same time, they give up any semblence of a highly architectured, well-integrated platform. KDE has an extremely high level of integration and consistency precisely because the KDE project has an habit of making sure that anything that goes into KDE fits naturally into the desktop. One of GNOME's principle weaknesses is that its usage of external libraries tends to destroy integration within the desktop. In KDE, pretty much everything uses the same text-editing component. You write a text-editor KPart, and it'll work in KMail, KWrite, Kate, KDevelop, etc. In GNOME, pretty much everything uses a different text-editing component. When the Kvim KPart was developed, all of the above mentioned apps automatically got support for editing text with Vim. When Evolution got vim mail-editing support, gedit and anjuta didn't automatically get it. When GNOME's HIG adopted a new Okay/Cancel button order, apps had to change their code to adopt to the new format. In KDE, if the developers wanted to change the button order, they'd change a single line of code in a library!

      Now do you think that at KDE they will be glad to get such technology? Oh sure they will take it and probably "adapt" it (like the Borg that is)
      ---
      That really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Most of Project Utopia is desktop agnostic. Its like the Linux kernel, or glibc. KDE will "adapt it" as much as they "adapt" any other low-level API. They'll write a KDE wrapper for it and be done with it. (Without the KDE wrapper, it'd be C code, and C++ programmers don't want to use C libraries any more than C programmers want to use C++ libraries.) I don't really understand what's so borg-like about using APIs that were meant to be used in the first place?

      into there desktop, but for sure the work they will put into it will only benefit KDE
      ---
      Its hardly KDE's fault. They are building a well-integrated platform. They make extensive use of code-sharing because that is good software design, not because of some political reason. Anybody is free to use KDE's technologies, just as much as one is free to use GNOME's technologies. If people don't want to use C++ code, or depend on Qt, that's really their problem. I mean, the GNOME project seems to have no problems spreading the glib dependency all over the place.

      Project Utopia
      ---
      Most of this project (udev, hotplug, d-bus, HAL, etc) is not under the GNOME umbrella.

      GTK+
      ---
      Qt is there, and has the same number of dependencies as GTK+. And its GPL to boot. What's the problem here?

      Freedesktop.org
      ---------
      Freedesktop.org is *not* a GNOME project. None of the freedesktop.org software projects are related to GNOME. Enchant is the closest, because it comes from AbiWord, which has a GNOME version... Hell, KDE has more representation on freedesktop.org than GNOME does, because D-BUS is directly modeled on DCOP, and is a key component for freedesktop.org.

      Gstreamer
      ---
      Again, not a GNOME project. It uses glib, but then again, so does aRts! What gives people the idea that these things are GNOME projects?

      ATK, Pango
      ---
      These *are* GNOME-related projects, though Pango is more GTK+ related than GNOME-related.

      other projects (Xfree86, XFCE4, etc) without making everything it touches Gnome
      ---
      The GNOME project seems to have a tendency to push the idea that all the software it "adopts" is related to GNOME. Key example: many people now think that OpenOffice is a GNOME app, because it is part of "GNOME Office." Its absolutely ridiculous!

      one big API
      ---
      KDE actually has a highly modular API. Try developing for it sometime. Its very complete and very consistent, but that doesn't mean
      • Opennoffice is not a part of GNOME office.
      • It's Friday, and some moderators have picked up the weekend crackpipe early it seems. I can't believe some are moderating a calm and well argued post like yours "troll", and your parent post which screams about the KDE team of being a Borg like entity "insightful".

      • When GNOME's HIG adopted a new Okay/Cancel button order, apps had to change their code to adopt to the new format.

        You've misunderstood the Gnome HIG [gnome.org]. Don't feel bad, many people do. The HIG covers so much more than simple pixelpushing and the physical layout of a program gui. Case in point: the HIG specifically recommends against [gnome.org] the use of Okay/Cancel-buttons, and suggests the following: "Write button labels as imperative verbs, for example Save, Print."

        Comprehensive UI design decisions such as the

        • I'm not saying that the HIG doesn't do more than simple pixel-pushing and physical layout. I actually think it has a lot of good ideas (ex. the imperative verb bit) that KDE needs to emulate. My point is that a subset of the HIG (the pixel-pushing and physical layout) is handled automatically by the KDE framework, rather than burdening developers with doing it manually.

    • I find it always funny that KDE supporters always list re-use of existing libraries as a big minus point of Gnome

      That's a straw-man argument. KDE supporters don't "always list re-use [...] as a big minus point."

      In Gnome the supporting libraries are almost never Gnome dependent they often use already existing libraries or help to modify them too their needs, without Gnome-ifying them.

      The same is true of KDE.

      Which makes the KDE supporters scream that Gnome is taking everything over.

      I th

  • Kernel Preemption... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23, 2004 @05:40AM (#8064289)
    ...is a bad idea. Who are the users to think their trivial tasks are more important than the kernel's?

  • I was on this mailing list... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23, 2004 @06:05AM (#8064378)
    I was on the linux-kernel mailing list and all I got was spam from Microsoft trying to sell me OS enlargement pills and spam from Intel trying to sell 7 minute SMT support (if it doesn't work in 7 minutes they throw in the extra minute for free.)

  • Must.... Read... Headlines (Score:5, Funny)

    by Psychotext ( 262644 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @06:05AM (#8064380)
    I haven't had enough sleep, because that headline came out as "Slashdot Interviews Robot Love". I thought we were going to have the interesting story of the worlds first robot pornstar.

    Oh well, back to my deranged little world...

  • Strange (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @06:18AM (#8064418)
    As someone that's used Linux as their only desktop on nearly a dozen machines for four years Love said nothing of the slightest interest to me.

    Linux already works fine as a desktop; what most potential switchers need are a few good apps to fill the role of Quickbooks, Exchange, iMovie and a handfull of other programs. They're happy with any schedular as long as their ogg/mp3 player doesn't skip while loading a big spreadsheet.

    As to GNOME and KDE? Well, they're fine if you think all Microsoft's HCI mistakes are outweighed by the need to make it easy for their users to switch to an equally badly designed system. I don't and so I couldn't care less about what the programmers on these projects are wasting their time on this week.

    My wish list for the desktop is: a decent file system which stores meta-data beyond the file name and date stamp, a program which decodes the data in Quickbook files so I can import into Gnucash, and a single, working, font system. None of these are very urgent but they're all more urgent than anything mentioned in the article.

    TWW

    • Re:Strange (Score:5, Insightful)

      by steveha ( 103154 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @06:39AM (#8064472) Homepage
      Linux already works fine as a desktop; what most potential switchers need are a few good apps

      Linux already works fine, as long as you are a Linux guru, or if you never need to change the hardware configuration at all.

      Would you like to read CompactFlash cards? Okay, plug a CompactFlash reader in to a USB port. Let's say your kernel was set up correctly, and lucky you, you don't need to run modprobe or edit modules.conf. But you still need to (for KDE) manually create an icon for the desktop to let you mount the CompactFlash reader, or (for GNOME) edit /etc/fstab so that the reader will show up in the "Disks" submenu when you right-click the desktop. Then you need to mount the CompactFlash chip manually.

      The stuff that RML is working on right now would make it work like this:

      You plug in the CompactFlash reader to a USB port, and it appears on the desktop. If your system is set up for it, GNOME then asks you [ximian.com] "Would you like to import these photographss into your photo album?"

      This is the sort of ease-of-use that Apple brags about. And I think it's really cool.

      steveha

      • Re:Strange (Score:2, Informative)

        by Eivind ( 15695 )
        Get a newbie-friendly distro like Mandrake then. When you insert a Compact-flash card in a Mandrake-system, or plug in a supported digital camera, or a scanner, or a firewire-storage-thingie, what happens is that a icon pops up on your kde desktop.

        That's it. You don't need to do anything to make this work. Though, if you like you can rigth-click on the icon, select properties, and set things like "Auto-open Filemanager on insertion", which would give you a filemanager-window on the device automagically wh

        • It wasn't the best example, I guess. I'm running Debian Unstable, and I haven't really looked very hard into what it would take to get automatic hardware discovery and config.

          There is a great discussion here [linuxgazette.net] and I might try some of the stuff discussed there.

          I think my basic point stands, however. Maybe the specific case of plugging in a CompactFlash reader works automagically now. But what will happen when a user plugs an iPod in to a 1394 port? How about a USB audio module? How about a Palm PDA crad
      • >But you still need to (for KDE) manually create an icon for the desktop to let you mount the CompactFlash reader

        When I plug my Clie PDA into an USB-Port, KDE automagically brings up a new icon for the filesystem on the memorystick. I didn't fiddle with the configuration, it just works.

      • Re:Strange (Score:3, Informative)

        by the_rev_matt ( 239420 )
        I've run linux on the desktop for years now on all manner of hardware, and I tend to swap hardware like madman. Oddly enough, at least since RH 8.0 I haven't had to recompile a kernel EVER or manually edit anything to add USB devices. Hell, since Jan 1st I've upgraded to Fedora, put in a new motherboard/CPU (different chipsets for absolutely everything), added a USB CD burner, new network card, and swapped the ancient CD drive for a shiny new DVD drive. I didn't configure anything for any of it. It all

      • Linux Guru? (Score:3, Funny)

        by Felinoid ( 16872 )
        > as long as you are a Linux guru

        Don't sabotog your argument with such language.
        I can show you a whole bunch of people who use Linux as a desktop and aren't computer experts. The bulk of the Slashdot userbase.

        I'm not a Linux guru but I certanlly use it for my desktop. Cmdr ("Do I LOOK like I could make a Linux Destro?") Taco is yet annother example.

        It dosen't take a computer expert to pull up a shell SU into root start up the Linux config tools and recompile the Linux kernel.

        Nither dose it take a Lin
        • It dosen't take a computer expert to pull up a shell SU into root start up the Linux config tools and recompile the Linux kernel.

          Most computer users would disagree with you.

          When I used the phrase "Linux guru", I meant to include the people who know how to build their own kernels. This already leaves behind the vast majority of computer users.

          steveha
      • Desktop icons suck anyway. Fluxbox rules :)

        Gnome then asks you...

        Wow, does it come with a cute cartoon paperclip too?
      • > Okay, plug a CompactFlash reader in to a USB port.
        > Let's say your kernel was set up correctly, and lucky
        > you, you don't need to run modprobe or edit
        > modules.conf. But you still need to (for KDE) manually
        > create an icon for the desktop to let you mount the
        > CompactFlash reader, or (for GNOME)

        You might be correct for other desktops ....
        But you are completely wrong for KDE -- at least if you use SUSE Linux. Whenever I plug any USB device into my Laptop or PC a new icon pops up on my KD
        • That's not the same thing. Currently, distros that provide automounting of removable media do it by continuously polling the device to see if there's something there. That's an enormous hack, and rather inefficient. What Love is doing allows the kernel to pass a signal to a userland process whenever a device is inserted, without the process having to keep polling the kernel.

      • You plug in the CompactFlash reader to a USB port, and it appears on the desktop. If your system is set up for it, GNOME then asks you "Would you like to import these photographss into your photo album?"

        Not just this. Imagine what it'll do for home theater PCs that people build to handle everything from playing DVDs, playing CDs, MP3 CDs, act as a digital video recorder a la TiVO, and so on. You insert the medium, GNOME gets notified of the media attachment, mounts the volume for you, starts the appropria

    • the subject speaks for itself

  • How much of this is ready for use? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by steveha ( 103154 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @06:26AM (#8064440) Homepage
    Project Utopia is going to glue a whole bunch of stuff together. Meanwhile, some of the pieces look interesting.

    Is udev ready for use by typical Linux users (as opposed to kernel hackers)? How about sysfs -- that is just part of 2.6 and is completely ready, right? How about D-BUS?

    Meanwhile, on a flamefest^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion about KDE and GNOME, I saw a claim made that "hardly any GNOME applications use Bonobo". Is that true? If it is true, is it changing? (Wasn't a Network Object Model one of the fundamental things about gNOMe?)

    I browsed RML's blog, and some [ximian.com] of the screenshots [ximian.com] look really cool [ximian.com]. I'm really looking forward to this stuff.

    steveha
    • D-BUS is meant as a replacement for Bonobo.

      Although some Gnome applications, use Bonobo, I think their USE is fairly limited. Only in Nautilus (previews of files etc.) is is actually used. Oh, and some people use VIM in Evolution, why is beyond me (what's wrong with mutt?).

      Clearly if KDE and Gnome use the same mechanism for embedding (D-BUS?) things would be better.

      D-Bus is not kernel functionality, but userland. Further I suspect sysfs is usable and udev not.

      • Re:How much of this is ready for use? (Score:5, Informative)

        by nitehorse ( 58425 ) <clee@c133.org> on Friday January 23, 2004 @07:07AM (#8064522)
        Oh, wow.

        I'm not even a GNOME hacker and I can tell you you're pretty far off.

        D-BUS isn't meant to replace Bonobo at all. D-BUS is a message bus architecture meant for passing messages between applications and the system - e.g. for the kernel to tell the desktop "Hey, I mounted a USB flash drive at /mnt/usb!" or "The user inserted an Audio CD". Bonobo is a cross-application component embedding system so that you can have the AbiWord viewer embedded into Evolution for inline-viewing of an attached word-processing document.

        (FWIW, D-BUS is modelled heavily on DCOP, which we've had in KDE since KDE 2.0. D-BUS has both a system-bus mode and a session-bus mode, however, which DCOP does not, as DCOP is a session-bus system only. The current talk indicates that we'll be moving wholesale to D-BUS for KDE4.)
        • We'll see what future brings, but you are actually right, it is not meant as a replacement per se. But

          http://www.advogato.org/person/murrayc/diary.htm l? start=96

          • Re:How much of this is ready for use? (Score:1, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            You see, I have been a Unix junkie for nine years. From time to time, I come out of the closet and talk about it. I've used Unix at work, ranging from Alphas to Indys to Suns over those years. Ever since a terrific mentor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Charlie Hammons, introduced me to the spirit of Unix, I have been a student of that science which, in fact, is equal parts art. At home, I've been running Linux and the Apache Web server on a PC for over two years.
            Linux, like many complex technologies,
        • Well.

          At the moment all IPC in GNOME generally goes through bonobo. For simple IPC that's fairly wasteful. D-BUS is a lighter solution for these cases.

          OTOH, I think the only thing you need to do cross-component embedding is a way of telling the program which X plug to use. And that's _all_ that goes through bonobo. It could be done very simply through D-BUS too.

    • Re:How much of this is ready for use? (Score:5, Informative)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @07:33AM (#8064585)
      It is true that hardly any GNOME applications use Bonobo. Its use is limited to Nautilus, AbiWord, and Gnumeric as far as I can tell. The Network Object Model was supposed to be a fundemental part of GNOME, but they really dropped the ball with it.

      You see, Bonobo is based on CORBA. And CORBA, as I can tell you from working on a fairly large project using it, is a total piece of crap. Its a design-by-committe API that has no semblence of order, and requires a thousand page manual to describe a fundementally simple concept. Oh sure, CORBA is great in theory. Its platform independent, network transparent, feature-packed, well-supported by the industry, and with a good ORB (OmniORB or ORBit) can be quite fast. Its also an absolute bitch to program, and the API (especially the C++ one) is more horrid than even MFC!

      When the component models of GNOME and KDE were being designed, I remember the debate between using CORBA and making something new. The GNOME people went with CORBA and stuck to it. The KDE people tried a CORBA-based system (OpenParts) realized how badly it sucked, and ultimately rolled their own (KParts). The GNOME people ridiculed them for going that route (reinventing the wheel, they said). Well, it is now 2004, and KParts is a phenomenal success on KDE, thanks to its simplicity and power. Meanwhile, Bonobo is pretty much marginal on the GNOME platform, even according to original creator.
      • (not to mention Evolution) So just the major GNOME apps then?
        • The use of Bonobo in all of these apps is pretty limited. Abiword will embed Gnumeric sheets. Nautilus will embed a few viewer types. I can't really see where Bonobo is used in Evolution, but I'll take your word for it. In KDE, KParts is used almost everywhere, and the apps that use it use it much more extensively than the apps that use Bonobo. For example, GNOME has two different HTML viewers. One is Gecko (Epiphany) and the other is GTKHTML (based on KHTML and used in Nautilus and Yelp). Heck, none of the
      • God bless your disdain for CORBA. I hate that thing with all my heart.

        Is KParts good enough to be used generally - apart from KDE? Like what CORBA is designed for?
        • Is KParts good enough to be used generally - apart from KDE? Like what CORBA is designed for?

          KParts isn't really anything like CORBA, it's far less ambitious for starters and is essentially little more than a glorified wrapper around a C++ class loader.

          In particular, KParts must be written in KDE/Qt C++, ie they are tied at a fundamental level to KDE and Qt. You can write them in other languages if you can somehow export your languages classes via a C API (for instance Python) because you can write a c

          • KParts doesn't just provide in-place editing of documents, but generic, pluggable, reusable components. KMail, for example, uses components for HTML display and mail editing. KatePart is used as a text-editing component throughout the system. Ease of use goes up when code reuse goes up, and the different components in the system behave the same way, because they are the same component. For advanced users, it also enables easy customization and replacement of components like KatePart with (say) KVimPart.

            Kon
        • KParts is rather specialized for its use within KDE. If you want an alternative to CORBA, I'd strongly consider ZeroC's ICE. [zeroc.com] It was designed by a group of people to be both more powerful than, and much simpler than CORBA. Especially, read their comparison between CORBA and ICE, and how ICE addresses the weaknesses of CORBA.
      • Actually, Bonobo is an optional dependency for both AbiWord and Gnumeric.

        Dom Lachowicz, Gnome Office Maintainer
    • Bonobo's used in eog (an image viewer) as well.

  • Misread Headline (Score:3, Funny)

    by IntelliTubbie ( 29947 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @07:00AM (#8064507)
    For a minute, I was honestly wondering why on earth Ars would interview Rob Lowe.

    Cheers,
    IT
    • You're confused? I misread it as Donald Love and I wondered why the ceepy conglomco/radio-magnet from GTA3 was commenting on anything....

      "Hello. You are listening to a Donald Love media station.
      Enjoy." ;)

      =tkk

  • Microsoft Bob (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23, 2004 @07:39AM (#8064599)
    not to complain, but I remember one of the first beta lists I ever was on was for the product called "Microsoft Project Utopia" which apparently was the internal code name of the development project later to be released as "Microsoft Bob".

    Just thought you'd find this interesting ehhe
  • For those who are interested (and happen to be in Brussels on October 21), Robert Love is one of the speakers at FOSDEM 2004 [fosdem.org].
    He will talk about "The Linux kernel and the desktop".
  • I saw "Ars Technica Reviews Robot Love", seriously.
  • Oh... wait... Rob LoVe!.... ok... never mind..
  • Did anyone else read it "Ars Technica Interviews Robot Lore" and get excited? Now that would kick Data into having emotions, instant jealousy.

    Damn my slashdot-dyslexia.
  • HAL, D-BUS, and udev seem really neat, but they also seem like they are core improvements that belong at a lower level than GNOME (being a graphical desktop environment)... i.e. maybe not quite in the kernel, but right above it... does anyone know if they are being developed generically so that they may easily be used at the console (non-X) level, independent of which graphical environment is being used?

    It worries me that so many fundamental systems are implemented in each graphical environment independent
    • Sorry... looks like I'm guilty of not reading the entire article before commenting... Robert's answer:

      Components such as udev and hotplug are obviously entirely agnostic to the rest of the system, as they are (or will be) required pieces of nearly any Linux system. Other components, such as D-BUS and HAL, can likewise fit into any system. I very much hope that both of those projects find wide adoption.

      In response to your example, I think that a server with no desktop environment would still benefit from th

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