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Ximian GNOME 1.4: The Monkey Has Landed: The Ximian Desktop Experience

By: Michael Hall
Thursday, May 3, 2001 08:45:07 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/3301/1/

What You Get With Ximian GNOME

Editor's Note: This is the second in a two part look at Ximian GNOME 1.4. The first part detailed how to get Ximian GNOME and install it, plus how the setup wizard, GNOME Doorman, works

When GNOME 1.4 was released, we made the decision to wait on Ximian's release of their own distribution because we believe most desktop productivity users will likely experience GNOME through Ximian.

We mention this because we want to make it clear in advance that not everything in our review is reflective of Ximian's work: some of the enhancements and improvements over GNOME 1.2 are part of the core GNOME 1.4 distribution prior to Ximian's own additions. We'll try to note the difference, but it's our belief that Ximian is essentially GNOME to people who aren't interested in building a project of that size on their own, and we anticipate end users who simply prefer GNOME and have the bandwidth won't want to wait on the next round of distributions (Mandrake 8.0 excepted) to ship GNOME 1.4 on CD's. For purposes of space and simplicity, we'll refer to the environment and its elements as "GNOME."

Where last we left off, we'd stepped through the process of getting and installing the software and using the GNOME Doorman, a wizard-like interface for configuring the basic look of the desktop and selecting whether to use Nautilus, Eazel's new file manager, or GNOME Midnight Commander.

For purposes of the second half of our look at Ximian GNOME 1.4, we used a brand new install of Red Hat 7.1 and started from a clean slate with a user account that had all existing local GNOME configuration files removed so as to best get a handle on how the environment presents itself without any old settings. We also chose to use the default option with the GNOME doorman, allowing Ximian to set up our basic desktop and panel configuration.

What You Get

Ximian ships GNOME with an up-to-date collection of packages. Some of the highlights include:

AbiWord 0.7.13
GIMP 1.2.1
Mozilla 0.81 (built on April 25)
gPhoto 0.4.3
dia (a diagram editor) 0.86
gnumeric 0.64
xmms (a CD/Ogg Vorbis/MP3 player) 1.2.4
grip (a CD ripper) 2.95
Sawfish (the window manager) 0.38

In addition, the version of Nautilus arriving with the distribution is version 1.0.2, which arrived without Medusa, which is used to index hard drives to speed file finding operations under Nautilus. Medusa posed performance and security problems that were identified just before the core release of GNOME 1.4 and it's back on the design boards until these issues can be resolved. One improvement its exclusion represents is the lack of a lengthy access of the hard drive when GNOME is started for the first time as it sets out making an initial file index: something a lot of users described as disconcerting.

Ximian has also added a pair of applications unique to the company's release: MonkeyTalk and Red Carpet 1.0, both of which we'll look at further on in this review. Briefly, MonkeyTalk is a help application that connects users with a live chat session in a stripped-down version of the IRC program xchat; and Red Carpet is a package management tool designed to ease software installation and removal.

First Looks at the Desktop

We won't spend a lot of time with Nautilus, having reviewed it shortly after its release. The version in included, 1.0.2, felt more responsive than where we left it, and a few bugs that crashed components now and then seem to have been resolved. The built-in HTML-rendered access to man and info pages seemed to be a little speedier as well. Though we still ended up turning off a lot of the eye-candy features (such as anti-aliased text and image thumbnailing), we were left feeling much better about its inclusion after a little use. We do, however, think it was a good move on Ximian's part to include access to GNOME Midnight Commander (gmc) for those who are comfortable with it or want something demonstrably faster and more capable in some areas (such as virtual filesystem browsing).

We also noticed some change in performance depending on the distribution we ran it on (our Debian install seemed a little more sluggish) and kernel (with the 2.4 kernel it seemed slower, too.)

Enhanced File Interface

A major change to the way Ximian has GNOME set up is in the file saving interface. Though GTK+'s default setup is usable, it's reflective of the designers' familiarity with the filesystem structure and it doesn't allow for users who will tend to think of their computer differently. To that end, Ximian has added some touches to the file saving dialog (and the user directories) that includes direct links to the user's home directory, a "Documents" folder (located in the home directory) and the Desktop itself. Some will say it's a "Microsoftian" arrangement, but we think it's probably a good example of salvaging something useful from Redmond. Moreover, it doesn't bury the folders under several levels: they're all sitting in the user's home directory. Saving files becomes a proposition much less fraught with peril for end users (who will often accept a default save location they later forget, if they ever realized it was different from where they expected at all), and support personnel who have to go looking for said lost files.

The Default Desktop

Ximian's default setup presents a very small (24 pixel) panel at the bottom that contains the desk guide and tasklist applets. The tasklist applet has been improved in GNOME 1.4 in a very useful way. Where it used to reflect every open window on a desktop, it now "stacks" the tasks for applications with more than a single window . For instance, where the GIMP might have once occupied six or seven task buttons for all the windows it opens, it now occupies one. Clicking on the GIMP task brings up a list of the individual windows for selection. The cutoff for how many open windows it takes to begin stacking is user configurable.

Another small panel at the top includes the menus Programs, System, and Help, plus icons for Mozilla and gnome-terminal. At the far right of the menu bar, there's a clock that presents a menu that allows access to the GNOME calendar program, and a task icon that replaces GNOME 1.2's set of web links with a list of running programs on all desktops when clicked.

Under GNOME 1.4 as initially released, that icon also provided feedback during program launch as a way to show that clicking on an icon had a reaction even if the application was slow to launch. That functionality was provided by a program called xalf, which appears to have been removed by Ximian for their release. There were bugs in xalf that caused it to keep some applications from launching, and also provided bad feedback (continuing to show that accessing an application was ongoing even after the app had been launched), which make its removal welcome.

GNOME also launches a help window at login that provides a helpful 'tip of the day' users can disable. The one issue we found with Ximian's default desktop layout was a disconnect between what users get in terms of GUI elements and what the startup tip says: Ximian has removed GNOME's G/foot menu from the panel, but the helpful tips refer to it as the first place to go to get at applications.

The menus that do exist, however, replace The Foot, but we did discover some issues with them.

The Programs Menu

The 'Programs' menu provides a categorized list of applications that appears to be largely limited to the software Ximian included in the install. Most of the software is in subfolders with the exception of AbiWord, gnumeric, and Mozilla.

There have been complaints in the past few years about how GNOME manages the menu system, with users specifically concerned with how many nested menus there are to wade through. Ximian has taken a preliminary step to correcting this by presenting a Programs menu that covers only the applications they consider most essential, which means users aren't confronted by a vast array of applications. Ximian has also improved on a lot of the icons presented, making them more descriptive than some of their counterparts in the core GNOME distribution.

We did, however, have some problems with the menu configuration.

By default, Ximian excludes any preexisting menus. On our Red Hat 7.1 install, for instance, with very few exceptions (Emacs, specifically) there was no indication of how to get at programs besides those provided by Ximian. This isn't necessarily a problem with Ximian's choice in this area: careful reading of the prompts from Doorman will cause a user who's spent a lot of time tweaking menus carefully to consider more conservative choices at the first Ximian startup.

On the other hand, thanks to some problems in either Red Hat's menuing system or Ximian's interaction with it, even configuring the menu to show a "distribution" submenu netted us only one app: xmms. We had no access to any of the other software we knew to be on the system, including some essentials like Netscape Communicator. By adding yet another menu option, "GNOME Programs," we reclaimed the bulk of the icons. Confusingly enough, though, this created another issue:

Right-clicking on the panel will bring up a menu of available options and applications. With both 'GNOME Programs' and 'Ximian Programs' enabled, a right click reveals two submenus with identical icons but different sets of software. More strangely, each piece of software may have different icons for each menu it appears in, which means many of the improvements Ximian made in the icons presented is lost depending on which menu users access.

Another operation, adding an icon to a "favorites" menu, is supposed to be accomplished by right-clicking on a given menu item and selecting "Add this to favorites menu," but that didn't work correctly and failed to place the icon.

These will seem like petty things to people who have been around Linux desktops for a while, but part of the stated goals of GNOME (and Ximian and Eazel) is providing a consistent, usable end-user experience. While seemingly trivial, things like identical menu icons with different collections of software underneath and vanishing everday applications are problematic for people who crave consistency while they learn their way around a desktop, and they undermine claims to polish and attention to detail. On the other hand, Ximian should be congratulated for the first steps toward simplification. Experienced users are still offered some choice and flexibility, while new users can feel a little less assailed by all the options available to them.

The System Menu

The System Menu provides access to the GNOME Control Center application, where the bulk of GNOME configuration is handled, Red Carpet, a find tool Ximian added that provides a nice front-end to Linux file location apps, a 'Run...' icon for launching applications, a screen lock icon and a logout icon.

The GNOME Control Center is largely unchanged from GNOME 1.2, providing access to just about every configurable option in the GNOME environment, including the Sawfish and GNOME-Pilot configuration tools.

Red Carpet is shown as the Red Carpet icon with the caption "Get Software..." and clicking on it invokes a root password prompt and then Red Carpet itself.

The 'Find' tool should prove very nice for newbies and experienced users alike. It performs very basic searches (acting, we understand, as a 'slocate' front end) and can also perform much more complex searches as a 'find' front end, allowing not only basic globbing characters but regular expressions (if the user chooses) and compound search terms.

The screen lock icon invokes xscreensaver with a login prompt, and the logout icon allows users to either log out, restart the system, or shut the system down. It doesn't prompt for a root password to perform the latter two operations.

The Help Menu: Adventures With MonkeyTalk

The Help Menu provides access to the Ximian FAQ, the more general GNOME User's Manual, Bug Buddy, and MonkeyTalk.

The Ximian FAQ offers a rundown of basic questions (including explanations of some vexations users face from time to time in the form of startling messages), while the GNOME User's Manual provides a thorough guide to the entire environment. BugBuddy is a tool for filing bug reports against various GNOME components.

MonkeyTalk, however, is the real innovation of the Help menu.

By clicking on the MonkeyTalk icon, users invoke a small, stripped-down version of xchat designed to provide live support. The initial help area is general, but additional chat rooms are available for Red Carpet, Evolution, and gnumeric.

MonkeyTalk presents a very basic environment. Initially it doesn't even list other users in a given room, though a userlist can be toggled. It includes provisions for one-on-one chat and file transfer (both by right-clicking on a user's name).

We stopped in on MonkeyTalk a few times (and under a few names) while preparing this review to get a sense for how well it was handled. What appear to be moderators or aides of some sort are designated by a Ximian logo next to their name (which we assume means they've got ops status). Discussions were fairly freewheeling, but confined to Linux computing of some sort or another, and the operators didn't tend to get involved much as there were plenty of helpful users loitering about.

We created an alter-ego at one point, setting out to behave in as obtuse a manner as possible over a missing Netscape icon, which drew no reaction from the operators but did net us some great help from another user in the room who patiently walked us through a variety of remedies until one worked.

Monkey Talk doesn't stop at the Help menu on the primary desktop, though. Ximian has extended it into the Help menus of many of the programs it's shipped in this release. Consequently, users can open the help menu of an app and either follow any options for written documentation, or choose to click on a yellow 'Help Chat' icon and be taken to MonkeyTalk.

The whole idea is fairly clever, and it's also, based on our observations, a good way to tap a lot of the natural helpfulness you can still find among Linux users. Though IRC isn't the most difficult mode of communication to grasp, by stripping out a lot of unneeded choices to fulfill their mission of connecting confused users with helpful people in as direct a manner as possible, Ximian's done a good thing. You can't get much easier than "click an icon and type a question when the window comes up." The fact that the operators are happy to let a little unrestrained and constructive babble take place actually provides people the opportunity to learn something besides what they arrived for should they decide to stick around.

Smoothing Down the Red Carpet

The other big Ximian addition to this release is Red Carpet, a package management/software installation/software removal tool. Red Carpet provides a graphical front end to package management and dependency resolution that comes close (in terms of basic end user operations) to bringing the rest of the Linux world to parity with Debian's apt-get.

Red Carpet is organized by channels, allowing users to "subscribe" to broad software themes. At the moment, Red Hat 7.1 users can subscribe to a Red Hat 7.1 channel (which provides a mirror for the distribution and any updates), an Evolution channel (which allows users to follow the nightly builds of the Outlook-like mailer/PIM), and a Ximian GNOME channel.

Upon launch, users are presented with a summary of the channels they're subscribed to including any information on available updates. At the summary window, users can choose to simply click on an "Update Now!" button to download and install the latest updates, or they can check in on each channel and select packages individually.

In addition to managing updates, Red Carpet also allows users to add and remove software easily, and includes a simple search utility to locate a given package by name.

Whether updating, removing, or installing, Red Carpet also tracks dependency information on each involved package and sees to it that users are either kept from taking out applications with packages that are dependent on them or are apprised of applications that need to be pulled in as part of a dependency relationship for installation.

Red Carpet also offers encrypted verification of a package's source, the ability to install local packages the user may have downloaded outside Red Carpet, and the ability to pull packages across channels, meaning that it's aware if the Ximian channel happens to have a newer version than the package a user might have requested from the Red Hat channel.

Finally, in the features column, Red Carpet offers "prettified" package names to clarify the purpose of a given package, and a useful informational summary that can be opened as needed on each package.

Unfortunately, we also encountered some bugs in Red Carpet that, while they didn't adversely affect our system, were a little disturbing. For instance, using the program's package database verification tool, we learned that we had 6 installations of the GNOME-games package, probably because we'd tried (and failed) to install it several (six) times using Red Carpet, only to meet with it turning back up as an available update the next time we checked. There were also problems with some failures in the download/install/verify sequence that went unexplained: Red Carpet would simply return an error informing us that the file wasn't available. At one point, Red Carpet also reported that there was just something wrong with our package database and shut down without any indication as to what to do next.

Finally, there were issues with a problem we reported in the first part of this review during the download phase, wherein the installer would return an "500 Internal Error" message repeatedly on a package we were trying to install.

None of these problems seemed to affect our system adversely, but we'll throw a couple of caveats in: we were using a brand new install on which we expect to do no production work, and doubt will remain in operation in its current state, so we have no way to judge whether the small glitches could become more problematic over time. Of the entire Ximian distribution, this is probably the one element we'd encourage people to approach with some caution. Experienced users might enjoy it, but newer users may want to make sure they have a guru on hand in case something goes wrong with the underlying package database and steps need to be taken to recover.

Wrapping Up

It may seem like we didn't cover a lot of "stuff" in this review, and that's true. GNOME 1.4 itself was primarily an incremental upgrade designed to introduce new libraries into the project, with the notable exception of Nautilus, which we reviewed shortly after its release. As a result, users familiar with the GNOME we've had for nearly a year now as version 1.2 won't see any startling changes in their day-to-day experience outside Nautilus' inclusion. This isn't to downplay the infrastructural improvements that made Nautilus and, when it's released, Evolution possible.

On the other hand, Ximian has added some good features in its GNOME distribution: MonkeyTalk seems like a tool that will do a lot of newer end users a lot of good (provided Ximian keeps a lid on the sort of rambunctiousness that can turn up in online fora of whatever sort), and Red Carpet will, once the bugs are worked out, be an excellent tool for managing productivity-oriented workstations. We also think the addition of "Documents," "Desktop," and "Home" links in the file saving dialog is a very nice touch that makes GNOME on home and corporate desktops more appealing, as small a deal as it may seem.

As we reported in the first half of the review covering installation and basic configuration, the Ximian installer is very simple and easy-to-use, and the GNOME Doorman is great for both setting up a pleasant desktop look and familiarizing users with some of the ideas that are still entrenched in Linux desktop computing (such as the dichotomy between window manager and toolkit in terms of configuring their look and feel).

If we had to make a generalized complaint, though, it would be that there are some small nits we'd like to see ironed out, especially where issues of consistency are concerned. While we don't think the average Linux user is going to be particularly troubled by a lot of these smaller issues, we also acknowledge that, however incrementally, the "average Linux user" is creeping more and more toward the vast middle ground of computer users each day: the onus any desktop project has on it, especially one hoping to profit from migration to Linux desktops, is to provide a compelling set of reasons to make the migration at all. It's clear from Ximian GNOME, though, that the company is building the expertise it needs to provide definitive motivation to make that move, even if small bumps remain.