Preview: Nautilus PR2

Making Significant Progress

The GNOME Foundation elections wrapped up yesterday, and eleven members of the GNOME community were appointed to sit on the Foundation's Board of Directors. Congratulations to the new appointees.

This week's look at GNOME was supposed to be all about Evolution, the mail client from Helix Code. A new Evolution preview release recently came out with plenty of bugfixes and a better overall sense of stability and polish than the last release. I tried it out for a few days (on a single mbox folder I had created with a "make a copy of everything" procmail recipe), and it seems like it's improved a lot.

About the time I was getting ready to start thinking about writing Evolution up, Eazel finally, a week later than expected, announced the release of Nautilus Preview Release 2. Nautilus is Eazel's contribution to the upcoming GNOME 1.4: a new and improved file manager set to put GNOME's current Midnight Commander into retirement. Nautilus will also represent Eazel's gateway onto the Linux machines of the people they hope will be subscribing to their services, which we'll get into later.

So what's a new release of Nautilus got to do with pushing Evolution back down the editorial calendar a week?

Unfortunately there's a dependency conflict between the two at the moment, at least for Debian users. Nautilus is a little further along the curve in terms of the version of Bonobo, GNOME's new backend libraries, than Evolution. At this point, it's one or the other for the curious, not both. There's work being done to fix this conflict, though, so there's a chance it will soon be fixed and users will be able to get a look at the GNOME 1.4 desktop's two newest features side by side.

Getting Nautilus PR2
It's been no secret that Red Hat 6.2 has been the target platform for Eazel's developers since they first got to work, so it should be no surprise that the folks who held off on upgrading to Red Hat 7 will have the easiest time with this release, and will get the best view of where Eazel's going in terms of download and installation. They can pay a visit to the Eazel Installer page and download an installation program. The system requirements for use of the installer program are a Red Hat 6.2 system on an Intel-based system running at 200 MHz or higher with a recommended 64 MB of RAM.

This isn't to say that users of other distributions are completely out in the cold: it's possible to build the release (which is much easier than it was the last preview), and there have been a few reports of success installing the RPM's on Mandrake systems. In any case, it's best to have Helix Code's GNOME running.

Those of us using Debian, or Debian-based systems have an apt based resource, which can be accessed by adding the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.debian.org/~kitame/gnome/release ./

After adding that, a simple command of apt-get install nautilus will pull in all the dependencies Nautilus has along with the Nautilus package itself. The one additional package you'll need to use Nautilus to its fullest is the Woody package of Mozilla M18, which can be found in the Debian packages archive, plus libnspr4, the Netscape Portable Runtime library.

If you plan to build the release for yourself, it's a good idea to go ahead and load up on the bulk of the GNOME libraries out there: Nautilus has a lot of build dependencies. Once you're armed with a complete GNOME build environment, a visit to the Eazel build page will provide thorough instructions for the process. It's especially important to pay attention to build order for the additional packages Eazel provides on top of the basic GNOME libraries: they're heavily interdependent and have to be built in the right sequence.