Preview: Nautilus PR2

By: Michael Hall
Friday, November 10, 2000 08:50:44 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/previews/2620/1/

Making Significant Progress

First things first:

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.

Running Nautilus

Nautilus comes with a script for proper execution called run-nautilus.sh. This is the recommended command to use to get the program running, since it sets some needed variables.

On launching Eazel for the first time, you can set your experience level (beginner, intermediate, advanced), which will determine how many configuration options you can tweak. Beginners aren't allowed to change much, advanced users can set all sorts of performance tweaks. Each experience level also remembers its own settings.

Once an experience level is set, users can opt to sign up for Eazel's services. This is new to this release, and it provides a small taste of what Eazel's aiming for with Nautilus. The signup is simple, and is conducted through the embedded Mozilla component.

The services available at this point are pretty basic: there's a 25 MB 'net storage account that integrates with the Nautilus desktop and behaves like a local folder, and there's a software installation component that currently provides a small catalog of software, including the gecko-based Galeon browser, Gabber, the GNOME Jabber client, and Maelstrom, a game. The current software catalog is limited to Red Hat 6.x, but Eazel plans to expand that to other distributions as they come closer to a final product.

The point here is simply to provide a look at the direction Eazel is taking the GNOME desktop with Nautilus. The software catalog service will, for instance, simplify the installation of binary packages by ensuring dependencies are also downloaded with any new software the user selects. This functionality isn't new to Debian users, but it's dressed up in a nicer interface than dselect.

Beyond Services: What's Improved This Time Around
The last time we looked at Nautilus, it was interesting, but it wasn't anything to use on an extended basis. There were some stability issues that came and went from session to session causing it to die quickly some days, and run for hours on others. This time around, it's a lot less cranky, and a lot smoother.

One capability that existed last release as a command line switch only, and one highly unrecommended by many who tried it, is the ability to run Nautilus on the root window of the GNOME desktop. No big surprises here: it provides a trash can, a "home" icon, and the default icon GNOME presents for hard drives, which points at the root directory of the system. It's a comment on how stable Nautilus has become that we turned on its management of our desktop and forgot about it for most of the day. There's a sense of a small performance hit, but nothing like the sluggishness we experienced with PR1.

Nautilus now also offers more than simple thumbnails of graphics files. Each text file's icon, for instance, contains the first few words of the first line of text found in the file, showing more content if the display is zoomed in. It's also possible to stretch icons to larger sizes, revealing more of their content. Nautilus remembers the size of each icon on an individual basis, too.

A nice usability touch comes with moving icons around. By default, Nautilus uses the standard sorted approach for icon placement. On attempting to move an icon out of Nautilus' sorting scheme, it asks if you prefer to switch to manually arranged icons for that folder.

The embedded Mozilla component performs fairly well in this release, even though there are a few bugs here and there: it can't download files from hyperlinks yet, it doesn't allow access to sites requiring authentication, and it doesn't appear to handle name anchors. On the whole, though, it's very fast and provides seamless switching between file browsing and web surfing with almost no pause. In addition, the embedded Mozilla component provides rendering of HTML-ized info and man pages, which can be invoked with a simple address like man:ls or info:gcc. The complete GNOME users manual is also readily available, as is a manual for Nautilus itself. Chalk yet another one up for the rapidly growing family of Mozilla beneficiaries, no matter what you think of the browser.

There are also some welcome tweaks to performance within the file browser itself. There's a lot going on in the background in Nautilus, and components can and do crash from time to time, leaving the bulk of the software running. There are still elements of Nautilus that are particularly poorly behaved in this release, especially in the sidebar. The nice thing, though, is that when components crash, Nautilus tells you about it and recommends you turn the component off, making it possibly the most courteous pre-release software ever. It is also easier to shut Nautilus down without crashing it.

Final Impressions

Nautilus is shaping up to be a great file manager, and just what GNOME needs to shake the usability problems GMC poses for the current GNOME desktop. It looks clean, provides enough options to make it a comfortable and customizable fit for most users, and promises to provide much the same "all-in-one" functionality as KDE2's Konqueror.

It's still slow, however, and there are bugs that make it die from time to time. It's a good idea to remember that it ships with a script called nautilus-clean.sh, which kills stray processes it may leave behind after a crash, or just a poor shutdown. Running it for too long will take a toll on system performance at this point, but not anything untoward for software under heavy development. It's even fairly usable if you don't mind a few bugs here and there.

The real meat of this release wasn't Nautilus, as much as it has improved. It was the look Red Hat users in particular got at the services Eazel plans to offer, which have always been the reason behind the company's efforts on the Linux platform. It will be interesting to see what else comes along as it fleshes out its services model.

Next Week:
Next Friday I'll take that deferred look at Evolution, and toss in a quick look at a few other GNOME mail clients that have made some recent progress.