GNOME

The GNOME project began as an effort to create an entirely free desktop environment for free systems. GNOME is part of the GNU project. The GNU project was launched in 1984 to develop a complete UNIX-like operating system that is free software: the GNU system. (GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU’s Not Unix; it is pronounced guh-NEW.) Variants of the GNU operating system, which uses the Linux kernel, are now widely used. Though these systems are often referred to as Linux, they are more accurately called GNU/Linux systems.

From the start, the main objective of GNOME has been to provide a user-friendly suite of applications and an easy-to-use desktop. As with most GNU programs, GNOME has been designed to run on all modern strains of UNIX-like operating systems.

GNOME is a large collection of software created over the last few years. It ranges in scope from small utilities to large, powerful systems, and from low-level development libraries to end-user applications. As you begin to use GNOME, you’ll quickly see the array of utilities and programs already available, including screen snapshot tools, multimedia tools, performance monitoring tools, and yes, games.

The GNOME project consists of the following major components:

The GNOME desktop An easy-to-use, Windows-based environment for users
The GNOME development platform A rich collection of tools, libraries, and components to develop powerful applications on UNIX
The GNOME Office A set of office productivity applications such as a calendar, address book, and time tracking

As of this writing, GNOME 1.4 is included with the Solaris 9 software distribution CD-ROMs in the Bonus pack. It features an intuitive desktop interface that enables users to easily locate and access files and applications, manage workspaces, and run a broad range of software. If you don’t have the CD-ROM, you can download GNOME 2.0 for the Solaris 9 environment for free from the following URL:

http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/gnome/

Sun has announced that it is adopting GNOME 2.0 as a standard component of the Solaris platform sometime in late 2002.

After installing GNOME, you can select it by clicking the Options button in the login window, as shown in Figure 25.12.

Figure 25.12. Selecting the GNOME desktop from the login window.


The GNOME desktop is displayed in Figure 25.13.

Figure 25.13. The GNOME desktop.


GNOME 1.4, which is included in the CD Bonus pack, includes several new client software applications and technologies, including the following:

  • Nautilus This file manager provides a new user interface that makes it much easier to organize and find local or remote files, as well as novel ways to view file contents. Nautilus has built-in web browsing capabilities and support. Compared to CDE, Nautilus offers several innovative features:

    • Zooming in every view, from 25 to 400 percent.

    • Icons can be arbitrary sizes and are individually resizable.

    • Icons are based on document content, including embedded text for text files.

    • Emblems, which are small images expressing file attributes (including user-assigned attributes).

    • Sound previewing by hovering over a file icon.

    • Extensible, componentized viewers.

    • Extensible, componentized directory views.

    • File annotation.

    • Attribute-based searching.

  • GNOME-VFS A virtual file system that provides an abstraction to common file system operations like reading, writing, and copying files, listing files, and so on

  • Bonobo A CORBA-based technology that facilitates the creation of reusable software components and enables the rapid creation of custom applications.

  • Gconf A configuration management system that simplifies the handling of system and user preferences, particularly in networked environments.

For more detailed information, see the GNOME community web site at www.gnome.org.

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