GNOME 1.2: A Giant GUI Leap
Introducing GNOME 1.2

Michael Hall
Tuesday, May 30, 2000 10:29:21 PM
Disclosure: The writer has contributed documentation to the GNOME
Documentation Project.
The week GNOME was released as version 0.13, my home connection to the
Internet went down. Undeterred, I quietly bought a box of floppies and availed
myself of the ISDN connection at the office. GNOME was too interesting to pass
up. Over the course of two days (the second day was for recopying all the
corrupt disks) I carried the new GNOME distribution home and unzipped it with
my Windows partition and then booted into Linux to copy the files over.
At the time, GNOME wasn't much. It was definitely nicer to look at than it
was functional, but it held a lot of promise.
Last year, when GNOME went into release as version 1.0, I was similarly
excited, but at least endowed with a 56K dialup. GNOME had clearly come a long
way. The project was making good on the attempt to provide a desktop
environment without the nagging license issues KDE faced (rightly or wrongly).
On the other hand, there was an underlying sense of solidity that was still
missing. Faced with providing guests on my system with an environment, I
avoided GNOME.
Now, though, with last week's release of version 1.2, GNOME has attained a
level of reliability and overall "completeness" that elevates it to
the level of "ready for prime time." This release is smooth, stable,
polished, and, because it represents one of the last major GNOME releases of the 1.x
series, a tempting preview of where GNOME is headed.
For purposes of this review, we took a look at Helix Code's binary release
of GNOME 1.2. Most users new to GNOME and running one of Helix Code's supported
Linux distributions will probably have the easiest time getting and installing
Helix Code's GNOME distribution. We used both the Red Hat release and the
version Helix Code has released for Debian users, which, though still considered
"beta" in terms of Debian support, offers the same level of polish
and stability as the Red Hat release.
Getting GNOME 1.2
After GNOME had reached the 1.0 release distribution, some of the enthusiasm for it as
an end-user environment was undermined by the sheer complexity of the download
and installation process. Even those taking the "easy way out" with a
package manager like RPM were faced with an overwhelming number of packages to
download and install. Inevitably, comparisons were made to KDE, which had
thoughtfully provided an "all-in-one" package that would at least
guarantee a functioning core environment.
Helix Code has solved the download and installation process in a different
(and better) manner by providing an installer program that allows for selection
of packages through a GUI. The installer, while allowing users some flexibility
in terms of selecting optional packages, still guarantees installation of all
required components. In the face of over 100 total binary packages, this is a
welcome relief.
As a side note, those who use Debian or Debian-based distributions with
apt-get can add a line to their /etc/apt/sources.list pointing to
the Helix Code archives, making installation as easy as apt-get install
task-helix-gnome. Helix Code is tracking the unstable (Woody) release of
Debian, but we've had no problems using the environment with the frozen
(Potato) release.
Getting the installer is also a simple process. Users need only log in as
the root user and enter the command:
lynx -source http://spidermonkey.helixcode.com/go-gnome | sh
This starts a download of, and ultimately executes, the installer.
One thing worth noting for users who have gotten away with a relatively
small root partition: for better or worse, Helix Code downloads its files into
/tmp. Users selecting "everything" during the
installation will be faced with a potential space crunch owing to the massive
quantity of software being downloaded. We solved the problem by creating a
symbolic link to a Helix Code installation directory located in a roomier
partition.
The installer provides a good level of feedback, including a thoughtful
running tally of the projected download time for users running the installation
over a 56K dialup, and progress meters as each
package is downloaded. Those curious about what's going onto their system will
be happy, those who aren't will be able to get away with walking away from the
process: it's reliable.
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