Linux Desktop Environments
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2009 Linux desktop environments Submitted By
Prasham Trivedi (6044) As a partial fulfillment of the course of B.E.I.T.
SHANTILAL SHAH ENGINEERING COLLEGE
CERTIFICATE This is to certify that below mentioned student Mr. Prasham H Trivedi(Roll No. 6040) of semester 8th , course B.E.I.T. , have successfully and satisfactorily completed his Seminar report on “Linux Desktop Environment” in subject Seminar report and produced this report of year 2009 and submitted to S.S.E.C., BHAVNAGAR.
DATE OF SUBMISSION: ---------------------------------------------
STAFF IN CHARGE:
HEAD OF DEPARTMENT:
PRINCIPAL:
Table of Contents Desktop Environments Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………… ………3 GNOME
13
KDE………………………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………52 The Battle: Gnome vs. KDE……. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….…89 XFCE: The Underdog………………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………….90 Conclusion And Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………….93
1. Desktop environment introduction In graphical computing, a desktop environment (DE) commonly refers to a style of graphical user interface (GUI) that is based on the desktop metaphor which can be seen on most modern personal computers today. Desktop environments are the most popular alternative to the older command-line interface (CLI) which today is generally limited in use to computer professionals. A desktop environment typically consists of icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. Software which provides a desktop environment might also provide drag and drop functionality and other features which make the desktop metaphor more complete. On the whole, a desktop environment is to be an intuitive way for the user to interact with the computer using concepts which are similar to those used when interacting with the physical world, such as buttons and windows. -Source WIKIPEDIA The term desktop environment did not originally refer to software, and was adopted as a way to describe a particular style of user interface
provided by that software. Desktop environment therefore is first and foremost describing the style of a user interface, in that it is like a desktop. However a program, or set of programs which simulate a desktop environment may sometimes themselves be referred to as a desktop environment, with a desktop environment being considered either a window manager, or a suite of programs which includes a window manager. There is some disagreement on precisely what constitutes a desktop environment, and how one distinguishes one from a window manager. While historically, and even logically, this may seem incorrect as a suite of applications are obviously not required to provide desktop metaphor, suites such as the The K Desktop Environment have popularized this usage, and may provide a more complete desktop environment consisting of a number of supporting programs, configuration tools, and in the case of KDE a large number of other applications such as office and productivity software, and games. A more correct term for application suites like KDE might be something more along the lines of a desktop manager. However, for the moment, the term desktop environment in relation to computer science refers both to a type of user interface, and to a lesser extent a particular class of window manager.
X Window System
Figure 1 X Window System graphical user interface and applications common to the MIT X Consortium's distribution running under thetwm window manager: X Terminal, Xbiff, xload and a graphical manual pagebrowser.
The X Window System (commonly X or X11) is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a graphical user interface(GUI) for networked computers. It implements the X display protocol and provides windowing on raster graphics (bitmap) computer displays and manages keyboard and pointing device control functions. In its standard distribution, it is a complete, albeit simple, display and human interface solution, but also delivers a standard toolkit and protocol stack for building graphical user interfaces on most Unix-like operating systems andOpenVMS, and has been ported to many other contemporary general purpose operating systems. All modern GUIs, such as GNOME, KDE, andXfce, developed for Linux and other UNIX-like systems use the X Window System as a foundation. X provides the basic framework, or primitives, for building such GUI environments: drawing and moving windows on the screen and interacting with a mouse and/or keyboard. X does not mandate the user interface — individual client programs handle this. As such, the visual styling of X-based environments varies greatly; different programs may present radically different interfaces. X is built as an additional application layer on top of the operating system kernel. Unlike previous display protocols, X was specifically designed to be used over network connections rather than on an integral or attached display device. X features network transparency: the machine where an application program (the client application) runs can differ from the user's local machine (the display server). X originated at MIT in 1984. The current protocol version, X11, appeared in September 1987. The X.Org Foundation leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X.org Server, available as free software under the MIT Licenseand similar permissive licenses.
Design
In this example, the X server takes input from a keyboard and mouse and displays to a screen. A web browser and a terminal emulator run on the user's workstation, and a system updater runs on a remote server but is controlled from the user's machine. Note that the remote application runs just as it would locally. X uses a client-server model: an X server communicates with various client programs. The server accepts requests for graphical output (windows) and sends back user input (from keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen). The server may function as: •
an application displaying to a window of another display system
•
a system program controlling the video output of a PC
•
a dedicated piece of hardware.
This client-server terminology — the user's terminal as the "server", the remote or local applications as the "clients" — often confuses new X users, because the terms appear reversed. But X takes the perspective of the program, rather than that of the end-user or of the hardware: the local X display provides display services to programs, so it acts as a server; any remote program uses these services, thus it acts as a client.
The communication protocol between server and client operates network-transparently: the client and server may run on the same machine or on different ones, possibly with different architectures and operating systems, but they run the same in either case. A client and server can even communicate securely over the Internet by tunneling the connection over an encrypted network session. An X client itself may contain an X server having display of multiple clients. This is known as "X nesting". Open-source clients such as Xnestand Xephyr support such X nesting. To use a client program on a remote machine, the user does the following: •
On the local machine, open a terminal window
•
use telnet or ssh to connect to the remote machine
•
request local display/input service ( export DISPLAY=[user's machine]:0 )
The remote X client will then make a connection to the user's local X server, providing display and input to the user. Alternatively, the local machine may run a small program that connects to the remote machine and starts the client application. Practical examples of remote clients include: •
administering a remote machine graphically
•
running a computationally intensive simulation on a remote Unix machine and displaying the results on a local Windows desktop machine
•
running graphical software on several machines at once, controlled by a single display, keyboard and mouse.
X is primarily a protocol and graphics primitives definition and it deliberately contains no specification for application user interface design, such as button, menu, or window title bar styles. Instead, application software – such as window managers, GUI widget toolkits and desktop environments, or application-specific graphical user interfaces - define and provide such details. As a result, there is no typical X interface and several desktop environments have been popular among users. A window manager controls the placement and appearance of application windows. This may have an interface akin to that of Microsoft Windows or of the Macintosh (examples include Metacity in GNOME, KWin in KDE or Xfwm in Xfce) or have radically different controls (such as a tiling window manager, like wmii or Ratpoison). The window manager may be bare-bones (e.g. twm, the basic window manager supplied with X, or evilwm, an extremely light window manager) or offer functionality verging on that of a full desktop environment (e.g. Enlightenment).
Many users use X with a full desktop environment, which includes a window manager, various applications and a consistent interface. GNOME,KDE and Xfce are the most popular desktop environments. The Unix standard environment is the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). Thefreedesktop.org initiative addresses interoperability between desktops and the components needed for a competitive X desktop. As X is responsible for keyboard and mouse interaction with graphical desktops, certain keyboard shortcuts have become associated with X. Control-Alt-Backspace typically terminates the currently running X session, while Control-Alt in conjunction with a function key switches to the associated virtual console. Note, however, that this is an implementation detail left to an individual X server and is by no means universal; for example, X server implementations for Windows and Macintosh typically do not provide these shortcuts.
Implementations The X.Org reference implementation serves as the canonical implementation of X. Due to liberal licensing, a number of variations, both free andproprietary, have appeared. Commercial UNIX vendors have tended to take the reference implementation and adapt it for their hardware, usually customising it heavily and adding proprietary extensions.
Figure 2 Cygwin/X running rootless on Microsoft Windows XP. The screen shows X applications (xeyes, xclock, xterm) sharing the screen with native Windows applications (Date and Time, Calculator).
Up to 2004, XFree86 provided the most common X variant on free Unix-like systems. XFree86 started as a port of X for 386-compatible PCs and, by the end of the 1990s, had become the greatest source of technical innovation in X and the de facto standard of X development. Since 2004, however, theX.Org reference implementation, a fork of XFree86, has become predominant.
While it is common to associate X with Unix, X servers also exist natively within other graphical environments. HewlettPackard's OpenVMS operating system includes a version of X with CDE, known as DECwindows, as its standard desktop environment. Apple's Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther) andMac OS X v10.4 (Tiger) includes X11.app, based on XFree86 4.3 and X11R6.6, with better Mac OS Xintegration, on Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard) Apple included X.org (X11R7.2 Codebase) instead of XFree86 (X11R6.8). Third-party servers under Mac OS 7, 8 and 9 included White Pine Software'seXodus and Apple's MacX. Microsoft Windows does not come with support for X, but many thirdparty implementations exist, both free software such as Cygwin/X, Xming and WeirdX; and proprietary products such asXmanager, MKS X/Server, Exceed and X-Win32. They normally serve to control remote X clients. When another windowing system (such as those of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS) hosts X, the X system generally runs "rootless", meaning the host windowing environment looks after the root window (the background and associated menus) and manages the geometry of the hosted X windows — although some servers (Xmanager, and Exceed, for example) can also create the root window for the remote clients to display to as a separate window in the host system.
X terminal In computing, an X terminal is a display/input terminal for X Window System client applications. X terminals enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1990s when they offered a lower total cost of ownership alternative to a full Unix workstation. An X terminal runs an X server. (In X, the usage of "client" and "server" is from the viewpoint of the programs: the X server supplies a screen, keyboard, mouse and touchscreen to client applications.) This connects to an X display manager (introduced in X11R3) running on a central machine, using XDMCP (X Display Manager Control Protocol, introduced in X11R4). Thin clients have somewhat supplanted X terminals in that they are 'fattened' with added flash memory which contains software that duplicates much of the various Microsoft operating systems, thus acquiring the ability to "speak" a range of remote desktop protocols. Due to the existence of free software implementations of multiple protocols X terminals which do not have this extra flash memory have been commercially obsoleted by more general-purpose thin clients and by low cost PCs running an X server.
Limitations and criticisms of X Limitations and criticisms of X The UNIX-HATERS Handbook (1994) devoted an entire chapter to the problems of X. Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System (1990) by Gajewska, Manasse and McCormack detailed problems in the protocol with recommendations for improvement. User interface issues The lack of design guidelines in X has resulted in several vastly different interfaces, and in applications that have not always worked well together. The ICCCM, a specification for client interoperability, has a reputation as being difficult to implement correctly. Further standards efforts such as Motif and CDE did not alleviate problems. This has frustrated users and programmers. Graphics programmers now generally address consistency of application look and feel and communication by coding to a specific desktop environment or to a specific widget toolkit, which also avoids having to deal directly with the ICCCM. The X protocol provides no facilities for handling audio, leaving it to the operating system or its audio subsystems like OSS or ALSA to provide support for audio hardware and sound playback. Most programmers simply use local, OS-specific sound APIs. The first generation of client-server sound systems included rplay and Network Audio System. More recent efforts have produced EsounD (GNOME), aRts (KDE), andPulseAudio to name a few. In 2001, the X.org foundation announced the development of the Media Application Server (MAS) to remedy this problem. However, none of these are generally used as a solution to the problem. Another effort, X11 AUDIO, was announced by Helge Bahmann in September 2007 as an extension to the X server. Network
Figure 3 Example of tunnelling an X11 application over SSH.
An X client cannot generally be detached from one server and reattached to another, as with Virtual Network Computing (VNC), though certain specific applications and toolkits are able to provide this facility. Workarounds (VNC :0 viewers) also exist to make the current Xserver screen available via VNC. Network traffic between an X server and remote X clients is not encrypted by default. An attacker with a packet sniffer can intercept it, making it possible to view anything displayed to or sent from the user's screen. The most common way to encrypt X traffic is to establish a Secure Shell(SSH) tunnel for communication. Client-server separation X's design requires the clients and server to operate separately, and device independence and the separation of client and server incur overhead. Most of the overhead comes from network round-trip delay time between client and server (latency rather than from the protocol itself): the best solutions to performance issues depend on efficient application design. A common criticism of X is that its network features result in excessive complexity and decreased performance if only used locally. That used to be the case, but modern X implementations are able to use unix domain sockets and shared memory (the MIT-SHM extension) to work around the network overhead[citation needed]. The programmer must still explicitly activate and use those extensions in order to improve performance and must also provide fallback paths in order to stay compatible with older implementations.
Competitors to X For graphics, Unix-like systems use X almost universally. However, some people have attempted writing alternatives to and replacements for X. Historical alternatives include Sun's NeWS, which failed in the market, and NeXT's Display PostScript, which was discarded in favor of Apple's entirely new Quartz in Mac OS X. Mike Paquette, one of the authors of Quartz, explained why Apple did not move from Display PostScript to X, and chose instead to develop its own window server, by saying that once Apple added support for all the features it wanted to include in to X11, it would not bear much resemblance to X11 nor be compatible with other servers anyway. Other attempts to address criticisms of X by replacing it completely include Berlin/Fresco and the Y Window System. These alternatives have seen negligible take-up, however, and commentators widely doubt the viability of any replacement that does not preserve backward compatibility with X. Other competitors attempt to avoid the overhead of X by working directly with the hardware. Such projects include DirectFB and the very smallFBUI. The Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI), which aims to provide a reliable kernel-level interface to the framebuffer, may make these efforts redundant. However, in Linux embedded systems requiring real-time capabilities (e.g. using RTAI), the use of hardware acceleration via DRI is discouraged; X may be unsuitable for such applications. Other ways to achieve network transparency for graphical services include: •
the SVG Terminal, a protocol to update Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) content in a browser in near-real-time
•
Virtual Network Computing (VNC), a very low-level system which sends compressed bitmaps across the network; the Unix implementation includes an X server
•
Citrix XenApp, an X-like product for Microsoft Windows
•
Tarantella, which provides a Java client for use in web browsers
•
RAWT, IBM's Java-only Remote AWT, which implements a Java "server" and simple hooks for any remote Java client
Desktop Environments The most common desktop environment on personal computers is the one provided by Microsoft Windows; another common environment is the one provided by Apple Mac OS X. Other mainstream desktop environments for Unix-like operating systems using the X Window System include KDE, GNOME, Xfce and CDE. A number of other desktop environments also exist, including (but not limited to): Aston, EDE, GEM, IRIX Interactive Desktop, Sun's Java Desktop System, Jesktop, Mezzo, Project Looking Glass, ROX Desktop, UDE, Xito, XFast. X window managers that are meant to be usable stand-alone — without another desktop environment — also include elements reminiscent of those found in typical desktop environments, most prominently Enlightenment. Other examples include Window Maker and AfterStep, which both feature the Nextstep GUI look and feel. The Amiga approach to desktop environment was noteworthy; the original Workbench desktop environment in AmigaOS evolved through time to originate an entire family of descendants and alternative desktop solutions. Some of those descendants are the AmigaOS 4.0 Workbench based on the ReAction_GUI object oriented GUI engine, the Ambient desktop of MorphOS based on the MUI (Magical User Interface) objectoriented GUI engine, the ScalOS third-party desktop environment for Amiga, the Zune graphical environment of the AROS open source OS, and the Feelinthird party programming environment which has its internal GUI engine built on the XML markup language. Third party Directory Opus software which was originally just a navigational file manager program then evolved to became to a complete Amiga desktop replacement called DirOpus "Magellan". There is the Workplace Shell that runs on IBM OS/2 or eComStation. The BumpTop project is an experimental desktop environment. Its main objective is to replace the 2D paradigm with a "real world" 3D implementation, where documents can be freely manipulated across a virtual table.
.GNOME Environment The name “GNOME” was proposed as an acronym of GNU Network Object Model Environment. GNOME is... Free GNOME is Free Software and part of the GNU project, dedicated to giving users and developers the ultimate level of control over their desktops, their software, and their data. Find out more about the GNU project and Free Software at gnu.org. Usable GNOME understands that usability is about creating software that is easy for everyone to use, not about piling on features. GNOME's community of professional and volunteer usability experts have created Free Software's first and only Human Interface Guidelines, and all core GNOME software is adopting these principles. Find out more about GNOME and usability at the GNOME Usability Project. Accessible Free Software is about enabling software freedom for everyone, including users and developers with disabilities. GNOME's Accessibility framework is the result of several years of effort, and makes GNOME the most accessible desktop for any Unix platform. Find out more at theGNOME Accessibility Project. International GNOME is used, developed and documented in dozens of languages, and we strive to ensure that every piece of GNOME software can be translated into all languages. Find out more at the GNOME Translation Project. Developer-friendly Developers are not tied to a single language with GNOME. You can use C, C++, Python, Perl, Java, even C#, to produce high-quality applications that integrate smoothly into the rest of your Unix or GNU/Linux (commonly referred to as Linux) desktop.
Organized GNOME strives to be an organized community, with a foundation of several hundred members, usability, accessibility, and QA teams, and an elected board. GNOME releases are defined by the GNOME Release Team and are scheduled to occur every six months. Supported Beyond the worldwide GNOME Community, GNOME is supported by the leading companies in GNU/Linux and Unix, including HP, IBM, Mandriva, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun. Find out more at foundation.gnome.org. A community Perhaps more than anything else, GNOME is a worldwide community of volunteers who hack, translate, design, QA, and generally have fun together. Find out more at GNOME Developer's site. -Source http://www.gnome.org/
History GNOME In 1996, the KDE project was started. KDE was free software from the start, but members of the GNU project were concerned with KDE's dependence on the then non-free Qt widget toolkit. In August 1997, two projects were started in response to this issue: the Harmony toolkit (a free replacement for the Qt libraries) and GNOME (a different desktop not using Qt, but built entirely on top of free software). The initial project leaders for GNOME were Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena. In place of the Qt toolkit, GTK+ was chosen as the base of the GNOME desktop. GTK+ uses the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), a free software license that allows GPL-incompatible software (including proprietary software) to link to it. The GNOME desktop itself is licensed under the LGPL for its libraries, and the GPL for applications that are part of the GNOME project. Having the toolkit and libraries under the LGPL allows applications written for GNOME to use a much wider set of licenses (including proprietary software licenses). In 1998, Qt became open source. While Qt is dual-licensed under both the QPL and the GPL, the freedom to link proprietary software with GTK+ at no charge makes it differ from Qt. However proponents of the free software philosophy deem the LGPL a disadvantage for free softwaredevelopers. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it. With Qt licensed under the GPL, the Harmony
Project stopped its efforts at the end of 2000, as KDE did not depend on nonfree software anymore. In contrast, as of 2009, the development of GNOME did not stop. Look and feel
Figure 4 The GNOME Desktop
GNOME is designed around the traditional computing desktop metaphor. Its handling of windows, applications and files is similar to that of contemporary desktop operating systems. In its default configuration, the desktop has a launcher menu for quick access to installed programs and file locations; open windows may be accessed by a taskbar along the bottom of the screen and the top-right corner features a notification area for programs to display notices while running in the background. However these features can be moved to almost anywhere the user desires, replaced with other functions or removed altogether. GNOME uses Metacity as its default window manager. Users can change the appearance of their desktop through the use of themes, which are sets consisting of an icon set, window manager border and GTK+ theme engine and parameters. Popular GTK+ themes include Bluecurve andClearlooks (the current default theme). GNOME puts emphasis on being easy for everyone to use. The HIG helps guide developers in producing applications which look and behave similarly, in order to provide a cohesive GNOME interface.
Usability Since GNOME v2.0, a key focus of the project has been usability. As a part of this, the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) were created, which is an extensive guide for creating quality, consistent and usable GUI
programs, covering everything from GUI design to recommended pixel-based layout of widgets. During the v2.0 rewrite, many settings were deemed to be of little or no value to the majority of users and were removed. For instance, the preferences section of the Panel were reduced from a dialog of six tabs to one with two tabs. Havoc Pennington summarized the usability work in his 2002 essay "Free Software UI", emphasizing the idea that all preferences have a cost, and it's better to "unbreak the software" than to add a UI preference to do that: A traditional free software application is configurable so that it has the union of all features anyone's ever seen in any equivalent application on any other historical platform. Or even configurable to be the union of all applications that anyone's ever seen on any historical platform (Emacs *cough*). Does this hurt anything? Yes it does. It turns out that preferences have a cost. Of course, some preferences also have important benefits - and can be crucial interface features. But each one has a price, and you have to carefully consider its value. Many users and developers don't understand this, and end up with a lot of cost and little value for their preferences dollar. Some people believe that GNOME should be more functional. One of these is Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, who commented in a usability-related discussion on the GNOME usability mailing list: This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do. Please, just tell people to use KDE. —Linus Torvalds
GNOME Applications -Basic Tools 1 File Manager: Nautilus
Figure 5 Screenshot of Nautilus 2.22.1 in Spatial mode
Nautilus is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. The name is a play on words, evoking the shell of a nautilus to represent anoperating system shell. Nautilus replaced Midnight Commander in GNOME 1.4 and was the default from version 2.0 onwards. Nautilus was the flagship product of the now-defunct Eazel Inc. Released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, Nautilus is free software. History Version 1.0 was released on March 13, 2001, and incorporated into GNOME 1.4. Version 2.0 was a port to GTK+ 2.0. Version 2.2 saw a lot of changes to make it more compliant with User Interface Guidelines. Version 2.4 switched the desktop folder to ~/Desktop (the ~ represents the user's "Home" folder) to be compliant with freedesktop.orgstandards. In the version included with GNOME 2.6, Nautilus switched to a spatial interface. The "classic" interface is still available by a filing cabinetshaped icon, by an option in the "Edit -> Preferences -> Behavior" menu in Nautilus, in a folder's context menu, and by using the "--browser" switch when started by a command via a launcher or shell. Several Linux distributions have made "browser" mode the default.
GNOME 2.14 introduced a version of Nautilus with improved searching, integrated optional Beagle support and the ability to save searches asvirtual folders. With the release of GNOME 2.22, Nautilus has been ported to the newly introduced GVFS, the replacement virtual file system for the agingGnomeVFS. The latest stable release of Nautilus (2.24.0) adds some new features (tabbed browsing, better tab completion etc.). Features Nautilus supports browsing local filesystems as well as filesystems available through the GVFS system, including FTP sites, Windows SMBshares, ObexFTP protocol often implemented on cellphones, Files transferred over shell protocol, HTTP and WebDAV servers and SFTPservers. Bookmarks, window backgrounds, emblems, notes, and add-on scripts are all implemented, and the user has the choice between icon, list, or compact list views. In browser mode, Nautilus keeps a history of visited folders, similar to many web browsers, permitting easy access to previously visited folders. Nautilus can display previews of files in their icons, be they text files, images, sound or video files via thumbnailers such as Totem. Audio files are previewed (played back over GStreamer) when the pointer is hovering over them. For its own interface, Nautilus includes original vectorized icons designed by Susan Kare. With the use of the GIO library, Nautilus tracks modification of local files in real time, eliminating the need to refresh the display manually. GIO internally supports Gamin and FAM, Linux's inotify, and Solaris' File Events Notification system.
E-mail client: Evaluation
Figure 6 Screen shot of evaluation
Evolution or Novell Evolution (formerly Ximian Evolution, prior to Novell's 2003 acquisition of Ximian) is the official personal information manager and workgroup information management tool for GNOME. It combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions. It has been an official part of GNOME since version 2.8 in September 2004. Evolution development is sponsored primarily by Novell. Its user interface and functionality are similar to Microsoft Outlook. Features include: iCalendar support, full-text indexing of all incoming mail, powerful email filters writable in Scheme, and a "Search Folders" feature (i.e., saved searches that look like normal mail folders). Evolution can be connected to a Microsoft Exchange Server using its web interface and an Evolution add-on formerly called Ximian Connector. Using gnome-pilot, it may be synchronized with Palm Pilot devices, and OpenSync enables it to be synchronized with mobile phones and otherPDAs. Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Evolution is Free software. Evolution 2 Evolution 2, which has been available since September 2004, delivers these features: integrated connectivity to Novell GroupWise integrated connectivity to Microsoft Exchange Server integrated support for GPG email encryption improved offline support for IMAP accounts numerous calendar improvements support for S/MIME, enhanced contact management Pidgin instant messaging integration improved desktop integration. improved compliance with GNOME's Human interface guidelines
integrated SpamAssassin functionality (with user-defined spam score and whitelist rules in ~/.spamassassin/) a connector for Scalix is available
Distribution Evolution 2.22 was released on 2008-03-11, together with GNOME 2.22 (March 2008). GNOME is the default desktop environment for several Linux distributions, most notably Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. Foresight Linux showcases the latest releases of GNOME. Novell distributes Evolution with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and the openSUSE community project. Evolution 2.22 is also available as source code. Some pre-built install packages are available for other operating systems, but only for older versions.
X Window Manager : Metacity
Figure 7 metacity enabled desktop
Metacity is a compositing window manager used by default in the GNOME desktop environment. The development of Metacity was started by Havoc Pennington and it is released under the GNU General Public License. Before the introduction of Metacity in GNOME 2.2, GNOME used Enlightenment and then Sawfish as its window manager. Although Metacity is part of the GNOME project and designed to integrate into the GNOME desktop, it does not require GNOME to run, and GNOME can be used with different window managers provided that they support the part of the ICCCM specification that GNOME requires. Metacity uses the GTK+ graphical widget toolkit to create its user interface components, which makes it themeable and makes it blend in with other GTK+ applications. Philosophy Metacity's focus is on simplicity and usability rather than novelties or gimmicks. Its author has characterized it as a "Boring window manager for the adult in you. Many window managers are like Marshmallow Froot Loops; Metacity is likeCheerios.".
What is Metacity’s role in GNOME Shell? GNOME Shell uses a fork of Metacity called Mutter (i.e. Metacity with Clutter). Whether this will become the main Metacity in future, or whether the two will be developed in parallel, or whether it’ll be merged back upstream and have some way of controlling which control path is taken, is not yet decided.
Widget Toolkit: GTK+ GTK+, or The GIMP Toolkit, is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is one of the most popular toolkits for theX Window System, along with Qt. GTK+ was initially created for the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), a raster graphics editor, in 1997 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, members of eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) at UC Berkeley. Licensed under the LGPL, GTK+ is free software and is part of the GNU Project. Design GTK+ is written in the C programming language, and its design uses the GObject object system. The GNOME platform provides language bindingsfor: C++ (gtkmm) Perl (Gtk2-perl) Ruby (ruby-gtk2) Python (PyGTK) Java (java-gnome) (not available for Microsoft Windows) C# (Gtk#) PHP (PHP-GTK) Others have written bindings for many other programming languages (including Ada, D, Haskell, Lua, Ocaml, Pascal, Pike, Javascript, Tcl ,Euphoria and all .NET programming languages). GTK-server provides a stream-based IPC interface to GTK+ allowing it to be used from any language with I/O capabilities, including shell scripts. Bindings for many languages can be generated automatically via GObject-introspection. Languages purpose-written for GObject and therefore GTK+ include Vala and GOB. Like Qt, but unlike several other widget toolkits, GTK+ is not based on Xt. This allows flexibility and allows GTK+ to be used on platforms where the X Window System is unavailable. However, without this dependency, GTK+ lacks access to the X resources database, the traditional way for customizing X11 applications. GTK+ initially contained some utility routines that did not strictly relate to graphics, for instance providing such data structures as linked lists
andbinary trees. Such general utilities, along with the object system called GObject, have now migrated into a separate library, GLib, which programmers can use to develop code that does not require a graphical interface. Platforms GTK+ was originally targeted at the X Window System, and this remains its primary target platform. Other targeted platforms are Microsoft Windows (Windows 2000 and upwards, near complete support), DirectFB, and Quartz (Mac OS X v10.4 and upwards, still under development). Look and feel The end-user can configure the look of the toolkit, down to offering a number of different display engines. Engines exist which try to emulate the look of other popular toolkits or platforms such as Windows 95, Motif, Qt and NEXTSTEP. History GTK+ 2 has succeeded GTK+ 1. Its new features include improved text rendering using Pango, a new theme engine, improved accessibility using the Accessibility Toolkit, complete transition to Unicode using UTF-8 strings and a more flexible API. However, GTK+ 2 lacks compatibility with GTK+ 1, and programmers must port applications to it. Starting with version 2.8, GTK+ 2 depends on the Cairo library for rendering with vector graphics in GTK+ 2. Releases Release Latest minor Initial release date Major enhancements series version 1.0.x ? ? 1.0.? 1.2.x 27 February 1999 ? 1.2.10 GObject, Unicode UTF-8 2.0.x 11 March 2002 2.0.9 support 2.2.x 22 December 2002 ? 2.2.4 2.4.x 16 March 2004 ? 2.4.14 2.6.x 16 December 2004 ? 2.6.10 2.8.x 13 August 2005 Cairo integration 2.8.20 2.10.x 3 July 2006 ? 2.10.14 14 2.12.x GtkBuilder 2.12.12 September 2007 4 Jpeg2000 load 2.14.x 2.14.7 September 2008 support Future developments Project Ridley is an attempt to consolidate several libraries that are currently external to GTK+, including: libgnome, libgnomeui,
libgnomeprint22, libgnomeprintui22, libglade, libgnomecanvas, libegg, libeel and gtkglext. Developers are also considering new directions for the library, including breaking ABI, removing deprecated API components, and adding an integrated scene graph system, similar to the Clutter graphics library, effectively integrating GTK+ with OpenGL. GTK hello world GTK hello world in Linux #include #include /* * Terminate the main loop. */ static void on_destroy (GtkWidget * widget, gpointer data) { gtk_main_quit (); } int main (int argc, char *argv[]) { GtkWidget *window; GtkWidget *label; gtk_init (&argc, &argv); /* create the main, top level, window */ window = gtk_window_new (GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL); /* give the window a 20px wide border */ gtk_container_set_border_width (GTK_CONTAINER (window), 20); /* give it the title */ gtk_window_set_title (GTK_WINDOW (window), PACKAGE " " VERSION); /* open it a bit wider so that both the label and title show up */ gtk_window_set_default_size (GTK_WINDOW (window), 200, 50); /* load the icon for the window; here we just load one, default icon */ gtk_window_set_default_icon_from_file (PIXMAPS_DIR "/hello-icon.gif", NULL);
/* Connect the destroy event of the window with our on_destroy function * When the window is about to be destroyed we get a notificaiton and * stop the main GTK loop */ g_signal_connect (G_OBJECT (window), "destroy", G_CALLBACK (on_destroy), NULL); /* Create the "Hello, World" label */ label = gtk_label_new ("Hello, World"); /* and insert it into the main window */ gtk_container_add (GTK_CONTAINER (window), label); /* make sure that everything, window and label, are visible */ gtk_widget_show_all (window); /* start the main loop */ gtk_main (); return 0; } Uses
Figure 8 Screenshot of GIMP 2.0. GTK+ is responsible for managing the interface components of the program, including the menus, buttons, input fields, etc.
Environments that use GTK+ GNOME is based on GTK+, meaning that GNOME programs use GTK+ Xfce is based on GTK+, though its applications typically do not depend on as many libraries (this is the difference between something being branded as a “GNOME program” or as a “GTK+ program”). LXDE is based on GTK+, stands for "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment" ROX Desktop a lightweight desktop, with features from the GUI of RISC OS
GNOME Applications- Basic Tools 2 Terminal Emulator: Gnome Terminal GNOME terminal, also identified as gnome-terminal, is a terminal emulator written by Havoc Pennington and others. It is part of the free software GNOME desktop environment software suite. This allows users of GNOME to execute commands using a real UNIX shell whilst still remaining on their graphical desktop. Along with this comes the benefits of being able to move the window, resize it and shift it to another desktop, just like any other window in GNOME. GNOME Terminal is similar to the xterm terminal emulator, and has a nearly identical feature set. Some of the more important features of the two include their support for coloured text (the output of a command such as ls -color=auto shows the use of this feature well), and support for mouse events within the window. Mouse events are commonly used within ncurses based applications for using menus or buttons that normally would have been selected using the keyboard. The application aptitude makes use of this feature. GNOME Terminal emulates many, but not all, of the escape sequences supported by xterm, and provides a useful subset of the VT102 DEC terminal. Newer versions support compositing and real transparency, as well as multiple tabs. It also supports URL detection (i.e., making links visible in the terminal clickable, and thus simpler to open in a web browser, ftp- or mail client than via copy-pasting). Much of GNOME Terminal's functionality is provided by the VTE widget.
Text Editor : G Edit
gedit is a free software, UTF-8 compatible text editor for the GNOME desktop environment. It is mainly designed for editing program code, and structured text, such as markup languages. It is designed to have a clean, simple graphical user interface according to the philosophy of the GNOME project, and it is the default text editor for GNOME.
Features
gedit includes syntax highlighting for various program code and text markup formats. gedit also has GUI tabs for editing multiple files. Tabs can be moved between various windows by the user. It can edit remote files using GVFS (GnomeVFS is now deprecated) libraries. It supports a full undo and redo system as well as search and replace. Other typical code oriented features include line numbering, bracket matching, text wrapping, current line highlighting, automatic indentation and automatic file backup. Some advanced features of gedit include multilanguage spellchecking and a flexible pluginsystem allowing to dynamically add new features, for example snippets and integration with external applications including terminal. A number of plugins are included in gedit itself, with more plugins in the gedit-plugins package and online. gedit has an optional side pane displaying the list of open files and (in a different tab of the side pane) a file browser. It also has an optional bottom pane with a Python console and (using gedit-plugins) terminal. gedit automatically detects when an open file is modified on disk by another application and offers to reload that file. Using a plugin (in gedit-plugins
package), gedit can save and load sessions, which are lists of currently open tabs.[citation needed] gedit supports printing, including print preview and printing to PostScript and PDF files. Printing options include text font, and page size, orientation, margins, optional printing of page headers and line numbers, as well as syntax highlighting.[citation needed] Architecture Designed for the X Window System, gedit uses the GTK+ 2.0 and GNOME 2.0 libraries. The GNOME integration includes drag and dropbetween Nautilus, the GNOME file manager. gedit uses the GNOME help system for documentation. It also uses virtual file system and GNOME printing framework. Currently, Windows and Mac versions are being built.
GNOME Applications -Multimedia Image Viewer: Eye Of Gnome Eye of GNOME is the official image viewer for the GNOME desktop environment. Unlike some other image viewers, Eye of GNOME will only view images. It does, however, provide basic effects for improved viewing, such as zooming, fullscreen, rotation, and transparent image background control.
File formats Eye of GNOME supports the following file formats: ANI - Animation BMP - Windows Bitmap Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) ICO - Windows Icon JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group PCX - PC Paintbrush Portable Network Graphics (PNG) PNM - Portable Anymap from the PPM Toolkit RAS - Sun Raster Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) TGA - Targa Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) Wireless Application Protocol Bitmap Format (WBMP) X BitMap (XBM) X PixMap (XPM) Some Screen shots of the Eye source: http://projects.gnome.org/eog/screenshots.html Eye of GNOME in action!
Eye of GNOME's main window, showing a lovely hen.
The collection view, which allows you to browse your images.
The properties dialog allows you to check the details of your image.
...And also the EXIF/XMP metadata of your images.
With the print dialog, you can set the size and position of your image for printing.
Video player: Totem Totem is a media player (audio and video) for the GNOME computer desktop environment which runs on Linux, Solaris, BSD and other Unix and Unix-like systems. It is officially included in GNOME starting from version 2.10 (released in March 2005), but de facto it was already included in most GNOME environments. The default backend is GStreamer framework but Totem can also use xine libraries. Totem is included as the default media player in many desktop Linux distributions, includingUbuntu, Mandriva Linux and others. Release under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, Totem is free software. Features There are two distinct versions of Totem, though the difference is not visible at the user interface level. One of them is based on GStreamer, which is a plugin-based multimedia framework. This version has superior extensibility and supports a larger variety of media formats. The other one is based on xine, which is a regular multimedia library. Currently it has better encrypted DVD playback support and can play some files the GStreamer version can't handle. An outstanding feature of Totem is its close integration with the GNOME desktop environment and its file manager, Nautilus. This includes generating thumbnails of video files when browsing in Nautilus and a video plugin for Netscape-compatible browsers (e.g. Firefox). Thanks to a large number of plugins developed for GStreamer, Totem is able to play all mainstream media formats, both open and proprietary ones. It also understands numerous playlist formats, including SHOUTcast, M3U, XML Shareable Playlist
Format (XSPF), SMIL, Windows Media Player playlists and RealAudio playlists. Playlists are easily manageable using drag-and-drop features. Full-screen video playback is supported on nearly all X configurations, including multi-headXinerama setups, and on displays connected to the TVOut. Brightness, contrast and saturation of the video can be dynamically adjusted during playback. 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 5.1 and stereo sound is supported. On computers with an infrared port, Totem can be remotely controlled via LIRC. Stills can be easily captured without resorting to external programs. There is also a plugin for telestrator-like functionality using Gromit. The loading of external SubRip subtitles, both automatic and manual (via the command-line), is also supported. This is the official documentation from Totem's Home page source: http://projects.gnome.org/totem/ Play any xine- or GStreamer-supported file (depending on the backend chosen) LIRC support Shoutcast, m3u, asx, SMIL and ra playlists support (also usable from a shipped LGPL library) DVD (with menus), VCD playback, disc-type automatically detected TV-Out configuration with optional resolution switching 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 5.1, stereo and AC3 Passthrough audio output Fullscreen mode (move your mouse and you get nice controls) with Xinerama, dual-head and Viewport support Remote operation mode to control a running Totem Seek and Volume controls Aspect ratio changing, Scaling based on the video's original size Full keyboard control Playlist with Repeat and Shuffle modes, with saving feature and drag'n'drop reordering GNOME and Nautilus integration (Totem registers the file-types, adds a menu item, uses the proxy configuration, saves sessions, and registers pnm, mms, uvox and rtsp schemes, removes playlist items from a disc that's getting ejected) Properties window (information about the current movie) Drag'n'drop and mousewheel actions Screenshot feature Brightness, Contrast, Hue and Saturation control Visualisation plugin when playing audio-only files Telestrator mode using Gromit Video thumbnailer Nautilus properties page Works on remote displays
Automatic external subtitle load, or manual (only on the command-line, use like: totem file:///file.avi#subtitle:file.srt) DVD, VCD and OGG/OGM subtitles and languages support Dialog for more accurate seeking Authentication dialogs when location requires it Online help (in English, German, Spanish, Russian, French and Bulgarian) Codecs Totem can display a variety of formats, based on what backend you use. To see what backend you are using check the "About" dialog of Totem. GStreamer When using the GStreamer backend, you can install multiple plugin packages. You can install them the same way as you would install totem. Some information about the gstreamer-plugins packages can be found here. • gst-plugins-base the basic and essential plug-ins for GStreamer •
gst-plugins-good the plug-ins for most Open formats
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gst-plugins-ugly good-quality plug-ins that might pose distribution problems, needed for DVD playback
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gst-plugins-bad a set of plug-ins that need more work, needed for YouTube videos
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gst-ffmpeg FFmpeg-based plug-in, contains all the basic decoders for popular codecs, such as DivX and WMV
•
Pitfdll Plug-ins using the Windows codec DLLs for which no free software implementation exists yet.
xine-lib Everything's included in this version, apart from some proprietary codecs that require Windows DLLs. Check the FAQ on xine-lib's website. That should sort most of you out. DVB support Using Totem, you can watch TV on over-the-air and satellite digital television. You'll need a DVB-T or DVB-S card supported by Linux, and a channels.conf file containing the channel tuning information.
GStreamer You will need gst-plugins-bad 0.10.6, as well as Fluendo's MPEG demuxer to have playback working. The channels.conf file should be named ~/.gstreamer-0.10/dvb-channels.conf. xine-lib The channels.conf file should be placed in ~/.xine/. YouTube support With the YouTube plugin you can browse YouTube and watch videos from it. You'll need gstreamer-plugins-bad 0.10.6 or a recent version of xinelib. Even if videos play correctly, seeking may not yet work for them but work is ongoing to fix this.
Audio Player: Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is an audio player that plays and helps organize digital music. Originally inspired by Apple's iTunes, it is free software, designed to work well under theGNOME Desktop using the GStreamer media framework. It is currently under active development. Features Rhythmbox offers a growing number of features, including: Music playback Playback from a variety of digital music sources is supported. The most common playback is music stored locally as files on the computer (the 'Library'). Rhythmbox supports playing streamed Internet radio and podcasts as well. The Replay Gainstandard is supported by using GConf-editor. Searching and sorting of music in the library is supported. Playlists may be created to group and order music. Users may also create 'smart playlists,' ones that are automatically updated (like a database query) based on a customized rule of selection criteria rather than an arbitrary list of tracks. Music may be played back in shuffle (random) mode or repeat mode. Track ratings are supported and used by the shuffle mode algorithm to play higher-rated tracks more often. Music importing Audio CD ripping (requires the optional Sound Juicer package) Comprehensive audio format support through GStreamer iPod support (experimental) Audio CD burning Since the 0.9 release, Rhythmbox can create audio CDs from playlists. Album Cover display Since the 0.9.5 release, Rhythmbox can display cover art of the currently playing album. However, rather than reading the embedded ID3 tags for album artwork, the plugin searches the internet to find corresponding artwork. Song Lyrics display Since the 0.9.5 release, Rhythmbox can provide song lyrics of the currently playing song (as long as they are stored in a lyrics database likeleoslyrics). Integration Rhythmbox has been extensively integrated with a number of external programs, services and devices including: Nautilus file manager context-menu integration (off by default in version 0.8.8), "hover mode" playback in Nautilus XChat, via an XChat plugin. Rhythmbox XChat Announcer (Perl) Pidgin-Rhythmbox automatically updates the Pidgin user profile with details of the currently playing track
Gajim and Pidgin include options for automatically updating the user status with details of currently playing track Music Applet (previously known as the Rhythmbox Applet), a GNOME panel applet that provides Rhythmbox playback controls from within the panel Shuffle, a gDesklet providing an interface for Rhythmbox resembling an iPod Shuffle Rhythmlet, another gDesklet that retrieves album art locally or from Amazon.com, has configurable display strings, playback controls, editable ratings and a seek bar SideCandyRhythmbox, a gDesklet-based Rhythmbox control and SideCandy display Rhythmbox XSLT allows the music library to be viewed as a
Prasham Trivedi (6044) As a partial fulfillment of the course of B.E.I.T.
SHANTILAL SHAH ENGINEERING COLLEGE
CERTIFICATE This is to certify that below mentioned student Mr. Prasham H Trivedi(Roll No. 6040) of semester 8th , course B.E.I.T. , have successfully and satisfactorily completed his Seminar report on “Linux Desktop Environment” in subject Seminar report and produced this report of year 2009 and submitted to S.S.E.C., BHAVNAGAR.
DATE OF SUBMISSION: ---------------------------------------------
STAFF IN CHARGE:
HEAD OF DEPARTMENT:
PRINCIPAL:
Table of Contents Desktop Environments Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………… ………3 GNOME
13
KDE………………………………………………………………………………………………………… …………………………………………52 The Battle: Gnome vs. KDE……. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….…89 XFCE: The Underdog………………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………………….90 Conclusion And Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………… ……………….93
1. Desktop environment introduction In graphical computing, a desktop environment (DE) commonly refers to a style of graphical user interface (GUI) that is based on the desktop metaphor which can be seen on most modern personal computers today. Desktop environments are the most popular alternative to the older command-line interface (CLI) which today is generally limited in use to computer professionals. A desktop environment typically consists of icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. Software which provides a desktop environment might also provide drag and drop functionality and other features which make the desktop metaphor more complete. On the whole, a desktop environment is to be an intuitive way for the user to interact with the computer using concepts which are similar to those used when interacting with the physical world, such as buttons and windows. -Source WIKIPEDIA The term desktop environment did not originally refer to software, and was adopted as a way to describe a particular style of user interface
provided by that software. Desktop environment therefore is first and foremost describing the style of a user interface, in that it is like a desktop. However a program, or set of programs which simulate a desktop environment may sometimes themselves be referred to as a desktop environment, with a desktop environment being considered either a window manager, or a suite of programs which includes a window manager. There is some disagreement on precisely what constitutes a desktop environment, and how one distinguishes one from a window manager. While historically, and even logically, this may seem incorrect as a suite of applications are obviously not required to provide desktop metaphor, suites such as the The K Desktop Environment have popularized this usage, and may provide a more complete desktop environment consisting of a number of supporting programs, configuration tools, and in the case of KDE a large number of other applications such as office and productivity software, and games. A more correct term for application suites like KDE might be something more along the lines of a desktop manager. However, for the moment, the term desktop environment in relation to computer science refers both to a type of user interface, and to a lesser extent a particular class of window manager.
X Window System
Figure 1 X Window System graphical user interface and applications common to the MIT X Consortium's distribution running under thetwm window manager: X Terminal, Xbiff, xload and a graphical manual pagebrowser.
The X Window System (commonly X or X11) is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a graphical user interface(GUI) for networked computers. It implements the X display protocol and provides windowing on raster graphics (bitmap) computer displays and manages keyboard and pointing device control functions. In its standard distribution, it is a complete, albeit simple, display and human interface solution, but also delivers a standard toolkit and protocol stack for building graphical user interfaces on most Unix-like operating systems andOpenVMS, and has been ported to many other contemporary general purpose operating systems. All modern GUIs, such as GNOME, KDE, andXfce, developed for Linux and other UNIX-like systems use the X Window System as a foundation. X provides the basic framework, or primitives, for building such GUI environments: drawing and moving windows on the screen and interacting with a mouse and/or keyboard. X does not mandate the user interface — individual client programs handle this. As such, the visual styling of X-based environments varies greatly; different programs may present radically different interfaces. X is built as an additional application layer on top of the operating system kernel. Unlike previous display protocols, X was specifically designed to be used over network connections rather than on an integral or attached display device. X features network transparency: the machine where an application program (the client application) runs can differ from the user's local machine (the display server). X originated at MIT in 1984. The current protocol version, X11, appeared in September 1987. The X.Org Foundation leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X.org Server, available as free software under the MIT Licenseand similar permissive licenses.
Design
In this example, the X server takes input from a keyboard and mouse and displays to a screen. A web browser and a terminal emulator run on the user's workstation, and a system updater runs on a remote server but is controlled from the user's machine. Note that the remote application runs just as it would locally. X uses a client-server model: an X server communicates with various client programs. The server accepts requests for graphical output (windows) and sends back user input (from keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen). The server may function as: •
an application displaying to a window of another display system
•
a system program controlling the video output of a PC
•
a dedicated piece of hardware.
This client-server terminology — the user's terminal as the "server", the remote or local applications as the "clients" — often confuses new X users, because the terms appear reversed. But X takes the perspective of the program, rather than that of the end-user or of the hardware: the local X display provides display services to programs, so it acts as a server; any remote program uses these services, thus it acts as a client.
The communication protocol between server and client operates network-transparently: the client and server may run on the same machine or on different ones, possibly with different architectures and operating systems, but they run the same in either case. A client and server can even communicate securely over the Internet by tunneling the connection over an encrypted network session. An X client itself may contain an X server having display of multiple clients. This is known as "X nesting". Open-source clients such as Xnestand Xephyr support such X nesting. To use a client program on a remote machine, the user does the following: •
On the local machine, open a terminal window
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use telnet or ssh to connect to the remote machine
•
request local display/input service ( export DISPLAY=[user's machine]:0 )
The remote X client will then make a connection to the user's local X server, providing display and input to the user. Alternatively, the local machine may run a small program that connects to the remote machine and starts the client application. Practical examples of remote clients include: •
administering a remote machine graphically
•
running a computationally intensive simulation on a remote Unix machine and displaying the results on a local Windows desktop machine
•
running graphical software on several machines at once, controlled by a single display, keyboard and mouse.
X is primarily a protocol and graphics primitives definition and it deliberately contains no specification for application user interface design, such as button, menu, or window title bar styles. Instead, application software – such as window managers, GUI widget toolkits and desktop environments, or application-specific graphical user interfaces - define and provide such details. As a result, there is no typical X interface and several desktop environments have been popular among users. A window manager controls the placement and appearance of application windows. This may have an interface akin to that of Microsoft Windows or of the Macintosh (examples include Metacity in GNOME, KWin in KDE or Xfwm in Xfce) or have radically different controls (such as a tiling window manager, like wmii or Ratpoison). The window manager may be bare-bones (e.g. twm, the basic window manager supplied with X, or evilwm, an extremely light window manager) or offer functionality verging on that of a full desktop environment (e.g. Enlightenment).
Many users use X with a full desktop environment, which includes a window manager, various applications and a consistent interface. GNOME,KDE and Xfce are the most popular desktop environments. The Unix standard environment is the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). Thefreedesktop.org initiative addresses interoperability between desktops and the components needed for a competitive X desktop. As X is responsible for keyboard and mouse interaction with graphical desktops, certain keyboard shortcuts have become associated with X. Control-Alt-Backspace typically terminates the currently running X session, while Control-Alt in conjunction with a function key switches to the associated virtual console. Note, however, that this is an implementation detail left to an individual X server and is by no means universal; for example, X server implementations for Windows and Macintosh typically do not provide these shortcuts.
Implementations The X.Org reference implementation serves as the canonical implementation of X. Due to liberal licensing, a number of variations, both free andproprietary, have appeared. Commercial UNIX vendors have tended to take the reference implementation and adapt it for their hardware, usually customising it heavily and adding proprietary extensions.
Figure 2 Cygwin/X running rootless on Microsoft Windows XP. The screen shows X applications (xeyes, xclock, xterm) sharing the screen with native Windows applications (Date and Time, Calculator).
Up to 2004, XFree86 provided the most common X variant on free Unix-like systems. XFree86 started as a port of X for 386-compatible PCs and, by the end of the 1990s, had become the greatest source of technical innovation in X and the de facto standard of X development. Since 2004, however, theX.Org reference implementation, a fork of XFree86, has become predominant.
While it is common to associate X with Unix, X servers also exist natively within other graphical environments. HewlettPackard's OpenVMS operating system includes a version of X with CDE, known as DECwindows, as its standard desktop environment. Apple's Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther) andMac OS X v10.4 (Tiger) includes X11.app, based on XFree86 4.3 and X11R6.6, with better Mac OS Xintegration, on Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard) Apple included X.org (X11R7.2 Codebase) instead of XFree86 (X11R6.8). Third-party servers under Mac OS 7, 8 and 9 included White Pine Software'seXodus and Apple's MacX. Microsoft Windows does not come with support for X, but many thirdparty implementations exist, both free software such as Cygwin/X, Xming and WeirdX; and proprietary products such asXmanager, MKS X/Server, Exceed and X-Win32. They normally serve to control remote X clients. When another windowing system (such as those of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS) hosts X, the X system generally runs "rootless", meaning the host windowing environment looks after the root window (the background and associated menus) and manages the geometry of the hosted X windows — although some servers (Xmanager, and Exceed, for example) can also create the root window for the remote clients to display to as a separate window in the host system.
X terminal In computing, an X terminal is a display/input terminal for X Window System client applications. X terminals enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1990s when they offered a lower total cost of ownership alternative to a full Unix workstation. An X terminal runs an X server. (In X, the usage of "client" and "server" is from the viewpoint of the programs: the X server supplies a screen, keyboard, mouse and touchscreen to client applications.) This connects to an X display manager (introduced in X11R3) running on a central machine, using XDMCP (X Display Manager Control Protocol, introduced in X11R4). Thin clients have somewhat supplanted X terminals in that they are 'fattened' with added flash memory which contains software that duplicates much of the various Microsoft operating systems, thus acquiring the ability to "speak" a range of remote desktop protocols. Due to the existence of free software implementations of multiple protocols X terminals which do not have this extra flash memory have been commercially obsoleted by more general-purpose thin clients and by low cost PCs running an X server.
Limitations and criticisms of X Limitations and criticisms of X The UNIX-HATERS Handbook (1994) devoted an entire chapter to the problems of X. Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System (1990) by Gajewska, Manasse and McCormack detailed problems in the protocol with recommendations for improvement. User interface issues The lack of design guidelines in X has resulted in several vastly different interfaces, and in applications that have not always worked well together. The ICCCM, a specification for client interoperability, has a reputation as being difficult to implement correctly. Further standards efforts such as Motif and CDE did not alleviate problems. This has frustrated users and programmers. Graphics programmers now generally address consistency of application look and feel and communication by coding to a specific desktop environment or to a specific widget toolkit, which also avoids having to deal directly with the ICCCM. The X protocol provides no facilities for handling audio, leaving it to the operating system or its audio subsystems like OSS or ALSA to provide support for audio hardware and sound playback. Most programmers simply use local, OS-specific sound APIs. The first generation of client-server sound systems included rplay and Network Audio System. More recent efforts have produced EsounD (GNOME), aRts (KDE), andPulseAudio to name a few. In 2001, the X.org foundation announced the development of the Media Application Server (MAS) to remedy this problem. However, none of these are generally used as a solution to the problem. Another effort, X11 AUDIO, was announced by Helge Bahmann in September 2007 as an extension to the X server. Network
Figure 3 Example of tunnelling an X11 application over SSH.
An X client cannot generally be detached from one server and reattached to another, as with Virtual Network Computing (VNC), though certain specific applications and toolkits are able to provide this facility. Workarounds (VNC :0 viewers) also exist to make the current Xserver screen available via VNC. Network traffic between an X server and remote X clients is not encrypted by default. An attacker with a packet sniffer can intercept it, making it possible to view anything displayed to or sent from the user's screen. The most common way to encrypt X traffic is to establish a Secure Shell(SSH) tunnel for communication. Client-server separation X's design requires the clients and server to operate separately, and device independence and the separation of client and server incur overhead. Most of the overhead comes from network round-trip delay time between client and server (latency rather than from the protocol itself): the best solutions to performance issues depend on efficient application design. A common criticism of X is that its network features result in excessive complexity and decreased performance if only used locally. That used to be the case, but modern X implementations are able to use unix domain sockets and shared memory (the MIT-SHM extension) to work around the network overhead[citation needed]. The programmer must still explicitly activate and use those extensions in order to improve performance and must also provide fallback paths in order to stay compatible with older implementations.
Competitors to X For graphics, Unix-like systems use X almost universally. However, some people have attempted writing alternatives to and replacements for X. Historical alternatives include Sun's NeWS, which failed in the market, and NeXT's Display PostScript, which was discarded in favor of Apple's entirely new Quartz in Mac OS X. Mike Paquette, one of the authors of Quartz, explained why Apple did not move from Display PostScript to X, and chose instead to develop its own window server, by saying that once Apple added support for all the features it wanted to include in to X11, it would not bear much resemblance to X11 nor be compatible with other servers anyway. Other attempts to address criticisms of X by replacing it completely include Berlin/Fresco and the Y Window System. These alternatives have seen negligible take-up, however, and commentators widely doubt the viability of any replacement that does not preserve backward compatibility with X. Other competitors attempt to avoid the overhead of X by working directly with the hardware. Such projects include DirectFB and the very smallFBUI. The Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI), which aims to provide a reliable kernel-level interface to the framebuffer, may make these efforts redundant. However, in Linux embedded systems requiring real-time capabilities (e.g. using RTAI), the use of hardware acceleration via DRI is discouraged; X may be unsuitable for such applications. Other ways to achieve network transparency for graphical services include: •
the SVG Terminal, a protocol to update Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) content in a browser in near-real-time
•
Virtual Network Computing (VNC), a very low-level system which sends compressed bitmaps across the network; the Unix implementation includes an X server
•
Citrix XenApp, an X-like product for Microsoft Windows
•
Tarantella, which provides a Java client for use in web browsers
•
RAWT, IBM's Java-only Remote AWT, which implements a Java "server" and simple hooks for any remote Java client
Desktop Environments The most common desktop environment on personal computers is the one provided by Microsoft Windows; another common environment is the one provided by Apple Mac OS X. Other mainstream desktop environments for Unix-like operating systems using the X Window System include KDE, GNOME, Xfce and CDE. A number of other desktop environments also exist, including (but not limited to): Aston, EDE, GEM, IRIX Interactive Desktop, Sun's Java Desktop System, Jesktop, Mezzo, Project Looking Glass, ROX Desktop, UDE, Xito, XFast. X window managers that are meant to be usable stand-alone — without another desktop environment — also include elements reminiscent of those found in typical desktop environments, most prominently Enlightenment. Other examples include Window Maker and AfterStep, which both feature the Nextstep GUI look and feel. The Amiga approach to desktop environment was noteworthy; the original Workbench desktop environment in AmigaOS evolved through time to originate an entire family of descendants and alternative desktop solutions. Some of those descendants are the AmigaOS 4.0 Workbench based on the ReAction_GUI object oriented GUI engine, the Ambient desktop of MorphOS based on the MUI (Magical User Interface) objectoriented GUI engine, the ScalOS third-party desktop environment for Amiga, the Zune graphical environment of the AROS open source OS, and the Feelinthird party programming environment which has its internal GUI engine built on the XML markup language. Third party Directory Opus software which was originally just a navigational file manager program then evolved to became to a complete Amiga desktop replacement called DirOpus "Magellan". There is the Workplace Shell that runs on IBM OS/2 or eComStation. The BumpTop project is an experimental desktop environment. Its main objective is to replace the 2D paradigm with a "real world" 3D implementation, where documents can be freely manipulated across a virtual table.
.GNOME Environment The name “GNOME” was proposed as an acronym of GNU Network Object Model Environment. GNOME is... Free GNOME is Free Software and part of the GNU project, dedicated to giving users and developers the ultimate level of control over their desktops, their software, and their data. Find out more about the GNU project and Free Software at gnu.org. Usable GNOME understands that usability is about creating software that is easy for everyone to use, not about piling on features. GNOME's community of professional and volunteer usability experts have created Free Software's first and only Human Interface Guidelines, and all core GNOME software is adopting these principles. Find out more about GNOME and usability at the GNOME Usability Project. Accessible Free Software is about enabling software freedom for everyone, including users and developers with disabilities. GNOME's Accessibility framework is the result of several years of effort, and makes GNOME the most accessible desktop for any Unix platform. Find out more at theGNOME Accessibility Project. International GNOME is used, developed and documented in dozens of languages, and we strive to ensure that every piece of GNOME software can be translated into all languages. Find out more at the GNOME Translation Project. Developer-friendly Developers are not tied to a single language with GNOME. You can use C, C++, Python, Perl, Java, even C#, to produce high-quality applications that integrate smoothly into the rest of your Unix or GNU/Linux (commonly referred to as Linux) desktop.
Organized GNOME strives to be an organized community, with a foundation of several hundred members, usability, accessibility, and QA teams, and an elected board. GNOME releases are defined by the GNOME Release Team and are scheduled to occur every six months. Supported Beyond the worldwide GNOME Community, GNOME is supported by the leading companies in GNU/Linux and Unix, including HP, IBM, Mandriva, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun. Find out more at foundation.gnome.org. A community Perhaps more than anything else, GNOME is a worldwide community of volunteers who hack, translate, design, QA, and generally have fun together. Find out more at GNOME Developer's site. -Source http://www.gnome.org/
History GNOME In 1996, the KDE project was started. KDE was free software from the start, but members of the GNU project were concerned with KDE's dependence on the then non-free Qt widget toolkit. In August 1997, two projects were started in response to this issue: the Harmony toolkit (a free replacement for the Qt libraries) and GNOME (a different desktop not using Qt, but built entirely on top of free software). The initial project leaders for GNOME were Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena. In place of the Qt toolkit, GTK+ was chosen as the base of the GNOME desktop. GTK+ uses the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), a free software license that allows GPL-incompatible software (including proprietary software) to link to it. The GNOME desktop itself is licensed under the LGPL for its libraries, and the GPL for applications that are part of the GNOME project. Having the toolkit and libraries under the LGPL allows applications written for GNOME to use a much wider set of licenses (including proprietary software licenses). In 1998, Qt became open source. While Qt is dual-licensed under both the QPL and the GPL, the freedom to link proprietary software with GTK+ at no charge makes it differ from Qt. However proponents of the free software philosophy deem the LGPL a disadvantage for free softwaredevelopers. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it. With Qt licensed under the GPL, the Harmony
Project stopped its efforts at the end of 2000, as KDE did not depend on nonfree software anymore. In contrast, as of 2009, the development of GNOME did not stop. Look and feel
Figure 4 The GNOME Desktop
GNOME is designed around the traditional computing desktop metaphor. Its handling of windows, applications and files is similar to that of contemporary desktop operating systems. In its default configuration, the desktop has a launcher menu for quick access to installed programs and file locations; open windows may be accessed by a taskbar along the bottom of the screen and the top-right corner features a notification area for programs to display notices while running in the background. However these features can be moved to almost anywhere the user desires, replaced with other functions or removed altogether. GNOME uses Metacity as its default window manager. Users can change the appearance of their desktop through the use of themes, which are sets consisting of an icon set, window manager border and GTK+ theme engine and parameters. Popular GTK+ themes include Bluecurve andClearlooks (the current default theme). GNOME puts emphasis on being easy for everyone to use. The HIG helps guide developers in producing applications which look and behave similarly, in order to provide a cohesive GNOME interface.
Usability Since GNOME v2.0, a key focus of the project has been usability. As a part of this, the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) were created, which is an extensive guide for creating quality, consistent and usable GUI
programs, covering everything from GUI design to recommended pixel-based layout of widgets. During the v2.0 rewrite, many settings were deemed to be of little or no value to the majority of users and were removed. For instance, the preferences section of the Panel were reduced from a dialog of six tabs to one with two tabs. Havoc Pennington summarized the usability work in his 2002 essay "Free Software UI", emphasizing the idea that all preferences have a cost, and it's better to "unbreak the software" than to add a UI preference to do that: A traditional free software application is configurable so that it has the union of all features anyone's ever seen in any equivalent application on any other historical platform. Or even configurable to be the union of all applications that anyone's ever seen on any historical platform (Emacs *cough*). Does this hurt anything? Yes it does. It turns out that preferences have a cost. Of course, some preferences also have important benefits - and can be crucial interface features. But each one has a price, and you have to carefully consider its value. Many users and developers don't understand this, and end up with a lot of cost and little value for their preferences dollar. Some people believe that GNOME should be more functional. One of these is Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, who commented in a usability-related discussion on the GNOME usability mailing list: This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do. Please, just tell people to use KDE. —Linus Torvalds
GNOME Applications -Basic Tools 1 File Manager: Nautilus
Figure 5 Screenshot of Nautilus 2.22.1 in Spatial mode
Nautilus is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. The name is a play on words, evoking the shell of a nautilus to represent anoperating system shell. Nautilus replaced Midnight Commander in GNOME 1.4 and was the default from version 2.0 onwards. Nautilus was the flagship product of the now-defunct Eazel Inc. Released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, Nautilus is free software. History Version 1.0 was released on March 13, 2001, and incorporated into GNOME 1.4. Version 2.0 was a port to GTK+ 2.0. Version 2.2 saw a lot of changes to make it more compliant with User Interface Guidelines. Version 2.4 switched the desktop folder to ~/Desktop (the ~ represents the user's "Home" folder) to be compliant with freedesktop.orgstandards. In the version included with GNOME 2.6, Nautilus switched to a spatial interface. The "classic" interface is still available by a filing cabinetshaped icon, by an option in the "Edit -> Preferences -> Behavior" menu in Nautilus, in a folder's context menu, and by using the "--browser" switch when started by a command via a launcher or shell. Several Linux distributions have made "browser" mode the default.
GNOME 2.14 introduced a version of Nautilus with improved searching, integrated optional Beagle support and the ability to save searches asvirtual folders. With the release of GNOME 2.22, Nautilus has been ported to the newly introduced GVFS, the replacement virtual file system for the agingGnomeVFS. The latest stable release of Nautilus (2.24.0) adds some new features (tabbed browsing, better tab completion etc.). Features Nautilus supports browsing local filesystems as well as filesystems available through the GVFS system, including FTP sites, Windows SMBshares, ObexFTP protocol often implemented on cellphones, Files transferred over shell protocol, HTTP and WebDAV servers and SFTPservers. Bookmarks, window backgrounds, emblems, notes, and add-on scripts are all implemented, and the user has the choice between icon, list, or compact list views. In browser mode, Nautilus keeps a history of visited folders, similar to many web browsers, permitting easy access to previously visited folders. Nautilus can display previews of files in their icons, be they text files, images, sound or video files via thumbnailers such as Totem. Audio files are previewed (played back over GStreamer) when the pointer is hovering over them. For its own interface, Nautilus includes original vectorized icons designed by Susan Kare. With the use of the GIO library, Nautilus tracks modification of local files in real time, eliminating the need to refresh the display manually. GIO internally supports Gamin and FAM, Linux's inotify, and Solaris' File Events Notification system.
E-mail client: Evaluation
Figure 6 Screen shot of evaluation
Evolution or Novell Evolution (formerly Ximian Evolution, prior to Novell's 2003 acquisition of Ximian) is the official personal information manager and workgroup information management tool for GNOME. It combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions. It has been an official part of GNOME since version 2.8 in September 2004. Evolution development is sponsored primarily by Novell. Its user interface and functionality are similar to Microsoft Outlook. Features include: iCalendar support, full-text indexing of all incoming mail, powerful email filters writable in Scheme, and a "Search Folders" feature (i.e., saved searches that look like normal mail folders). Evolution can be connected to a Microsoft Exchange Server using its web interface and an Evolution add-on formerly called Ximian Connector. Using gnome-pilot, it may be synchronized with Palm Pilot devices, and OpenSync enables it to be synchronized with mobile phones and otherPDAs. Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Evolution is Free software. Evolution 2 Evolution 2, which has been available since September 2004, delivers these features: integrated connectivity to Novell GroupWise integrated connectivity to Microsoft Exchange Server integrated support for GPG email encryption improved offline support for IMAP accounts numerous calendar improvements support for S/MIME, enhanced contact management Pidgin instant messaging integration improved desktop integration. improved compliance with GNOME's Human interface guidelines
integrated SpamAssassin functionality (with user-defined spam score and whitelist rules in ~/.spamassassin/) a connector for Scalix is available
Distribution Evolution 2.22 was released on 2008-03-11, together with GNOME 2.22 (March 2008). GNOME is the default desktop environment for several Linux distributions, most notably Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. Foresight Linux showcases the latest releases of GNOME. Novell distributes Evolution with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and the openSUSE community project. Evolution 2.22 is also available as source code. Some pre-built install packages are available for other operating systems, but only for older versions.
X Window Manager : Metacity
Figure 7 metacity enabled desktop
Metacity is a compositing window manager used by default in the GNOME desktop environment. The development of Metacity was started by Havoc Pennington and it is released under the GNU General Public License. Before the introduction of Metacity in GNOME 2.2, GNOME used Enlightenment and then Sawfish as its window manager. Although Metacity is part of the GNOME project and designed to integrate into the GNOME desktop, it does not require GNOME to run, and GNOME can be used with different window managers provided that they support the part of the ICCCM specification that GNOME requires. Metacity uses the GTK+ graphical widget toolkit to create its user interface components, which makes it themeable and makes it blend in with other GTK+ applications. Philosophy Metacity's focus is on simplicity and usability rather than novelties or gimmicks. Its author has characterized it as a "Boring window manager for the adult in you. Many window managers are like Marshmallow Froot Loops; Metacity is likeCheerios.".
What is Metacity’s role in GNOME Shell? GNOME Shell uses a fork of Metacity called Mutter (i.e. Metacity with Clutter). Whether this will become the main Metacity in future, or whether the two will be developed in parallel, or whether it’ll be merged back upstream and have some way of controlling which control path is taken, is not yet decided.
Widget Toolkit: GTK+ GTK+, or The GIMP Toolkit, is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is one of the most popular toolkits for theX Window System, along with Qt. GTK+ was initially created for the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), a raster graphics editor, in 1997 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, members of eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF) at UC Berkeley. Licensed under the LGPL, GTK+ is free software and is part of the GNU Project. Design GTK+ is written in the C programming language, and its design uses the GObject object system. The GNOME platform provides language bindingsfor: C++ (gtkmm) Perl (Gtk2-perl) Ruby (ruby-gtk2) Python (PyGTK) Java (java-gnome) (not available for Microsoft Windows) C# (Gtk#) PHP (PHP-GTK) Others have written bindings for many other programming languages (including Ada, D, Haskell, Lua, Ocaml, Pascal, Pike, Javascript, Tcl ,Euphoria and all .NET programming languages). GTK-server provides a stream-based IPC interface to GTK+ allowing it to be used from any language with I/O capabilities, including shell scripts. Bindings for many languages can be generated automatically via GObject-introspection. Languages purpose-written for GObject and therefore GTK+ include Vala and GOB. Like Qt, but unlike several other widget toolkits, GTK+ is not based on Xt. This allows flexibility and allows GTK+ to be used on platforms where the X Window System is unavailable. However, without this dependency, GTK+ lacks access to the X resources database, the traditional way for customizing X11 applications. GTK+ initially contained some utility routines that did not strictly relate to graphics, for instance providing such data structures as linked lists
andbinary trees. Such general utilities, along with the object system called GObject, have now migrated into a separate library, GLib, which programmers can use to develop code that does not require a graphical interface. Platforms GTK+ was originally targeted at the X Window System, and this remains its primary target platform. Other targeted platforms are Microsoft Windows (Windows 2000 and upwards, near complete support), DirectFB, and Quartz (Mac OS X v10.4 and upwards, still under development). Look and feel The end-user can configure the look of the toolkit, down to offering a number of different display engines. Engines exist which try to emulate the look of other popular toolkits or platforms such as Windows 95, Motif, Qt and NEXTSTEP. History GTK+ 2 has succeeded GTK+ 1. Its new features include improved text rendering using Pango, a new theme engine, improved accessibility using the Accessibility Toolkit, complete transition to Unicode using UTF-8 strings and a more flexible API. However, GTK+ 2 lacks compatibility with GTK+ 1, and programmers must port applications to it. Starting with version 2.8, GTK+ 2 depends on the Cairo library for rendering with vector graphics in GTK+ 2. Releases Release Latest minor Initial release date Major enhancements series version 1.0.x ? ? 1.0.? 1.2.x 27 February 1999 ? 1.2.10 GObject, Unicode UTF-8 2.0.x 11 March 2002 2.0.9 support 2.2.x 22 December 2002 ? 2.2.4 2.4.x 16 March 2004 ? 2.4.14 2.6.x 16 December 2004 ? 2.6.10 2.8.x 13 August 2005 Cairo integration 2.8.20 2.10.x 3 July 2006 ? 2.10.14 14 2.12.x GtkBuilder 2.12.12 September 2007 4 Jpeg2000 load 2.14.x 2.14.7 September 2008 support Future developments Project Ridley is an attempt to consolidate several libraries that are currently external to GTK+, including: libgnome, libgnomeui,
libgnomeprint22, libgnomeprintui22, libglade, libgnomecanvas, libegg, libeel and gtkglext. Developers are also considering new directions for the library, including breaking ABI, removing deprecated API components, and adding an integrated scene graph system, similar to the Clutter graphics library, effectively integrating GTK+ with OpenGL. GTK hello world GTK hello world in Linux #include
/* Connect the destroy event of the window with our on_destroy function * When the window is about to be destroyed we get a notificaiton and * stop the main GTK loop */ g_signal_connect (G_OBJECT (window), "destroy", G_CALLBACK (on_destroy), NULL); /* Create the "Hello, World" label */ label = gtk_label_new ("Hello, World"); /* and insert it into the main window */ gtk_container_add (GTK_CONTAINER (window), label); /* make sure that everything, window and label, are visible */ gtk_widget_show_all (window); /* start the main loop */ gtk_main (); return 0; } Uses
Figure 8 Screenshot of GIMP 2.0. GTK+ is responsible for managing the interface components of the program, including the menus, buttons, input fields, etc.
Environments that use GTK+ GNOME is based on GTK+, meaning that GNOME programs use GTK+ Xfce is based on GTK+, though its applications typically do not depend on as many libraries (this is the difference between something being branded as a “GNOME program” or as a “GTK+ program”). LXDE is based on GTK+, stands for "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment" ROX Desktop a lightweight desktop, with features from the GUI of RISC OS
GNOME Applications- Basic Tools 2 Terminal Emulator: Gnome Terminal GNOME terminal, also identified as gnome-terminal, is a terminal emulator written by Havoc Pennington and others. It is part of the free software GNOME desktop environment software suite. This allows users of GNOME to execute commands using a real UNIX shell whilst still remaining on their graphical desktop. Along with this comes the benefits of being able to move the window, resize it and shift it to another desktop, just like any other window in GNOME. GNOME Terminal is similar to the xterm terminal emulator, and has a nearly identical feature set. Some of the more important features of the two include their support for coloured text (the output of a command such as ls -color=auto shows the use of this feature well), and support for mouse events within the window. Mouse events are commonly used within ncurses based applications for using menus or buttons that normally would have been selected using the keyboard. The application aptitude makes use of this feature. GNOME Terminal emulates many, but not all, of the escape sequences supported by xterm, and provides a useful subset of the VT102 DEC terminal. Newer versions support compositing and real transparency, as well as multiple tabs. It also supports URL detection (i.e., making links visible in the terminal clickable, and thus simpler to open in a web browser, ftp- or mail client than via copy-pasting). Much of GNOME Terminal's functionality is provided by the VTE widget.
Text Editor : G Edit
gedit is a free software, UTF-8 compatible text editor for the GNOME desktop environment. It is mainly designed for editing program code, and structured text, such as markup languages. It is designed to have a clean, simple graphical user interface according to the philosophy of the GNOME project, and it is the default text editor for GNOME.
Features
gedit includes syntax highlighting for various program code and text markup formats. gedit also has GUI tabs for editing multiple files. Tabs can be moved between various windows by the user. It can edit remote files using GVFS (GnomeVFS is now deprecated) libraries. It supports a full undo and redo system as well as search and replace. Other typical code oriented features include line numbering, bracket matching, text wrapping, current line highlighting, automatic indentation and automatic file backup. Some advanced features of gedit include multilanguage spellchecking and a flexible pluginsystem allowing to dynamically add new features, for example snippets and integration with external applications including terminal. A number of plugins are included in gedit itself, with more plugins in the gedit-plugins package and online. gedit has an optional side pane displaying the list of open files and (in a different tab of the side pane) a file browser. It also has an optional bottom pane with a Python console and (using gedit-plugins) terminal. gedit automatically detects when an open file is modified on disk by another application and offers to reload that file. Using a plugin (in gedit-plugins
package), gedit can save and load sessions, which are lists of currently open tabs.[citation needed] gedit supports printing, including print preview and printing to PostScript and PDF files. Printing options include text font, and page size, orientation, margins, optional printing of page headers and line numbers, as well as syntax highlighting.[citation needed] Architecture Designed for the X Window System, gedit uses the GTK+ 2.0 and GNOME 2.0 libraries. The GNOME integration includes drag and dropbetween Nautilus, the GNOME file manager. gedit uses the GNOME help system for documentation. It also uses virtual file system and GNOME printing framework. Currently, Windows and Mac versions are being built.
GNOME Applications -Multimedia Image Viewer: Eye Of Gnome Eye of GNOME is the official image viewer for the GNOME desktop environment. Unlike some other image viewers, Eye of GNOME will only view images. It does, however, provide basic effects for improved viewing, such as zooming, fullscreen, rotation, and transparent image background control.
File formats Eye of GNOME supports the following file formats: ANI - Animation BMP - Windows Bitmap Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) ICO - Windows Icon JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group PCX - PC Paintbrush Portable Network Graphics (PNG) PNM - Portable Anymap from the PPM Toolkit RAS - Sun Raster Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) TGA - Targa Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) Wireless Application Protocol Bitmap Format (WBMP) X BitMap (XBM) X PixMap (XPM) Some Screen shots of the Eye source: http://projects.gnome.org/eog/screenshots.html Eye of GNOME in action!
Eye of GNOME's main window, showing a lovely hen.
The collection view, which allows you to browse your images.
The properties dialog allows you to check the details of your image.
...And also the EXIF/XMP metadata of your images.
With the print dialog, you can set the size and position of your image for printing.
Video player: Totem Totem is a media player (audio and video) for the GNOME computer desktop environment which runs on Linux, Solaris, BSD and other Unix and Unix-like systems. It is officially included in GNOME starting from version 2.10 (released in March 2005), but de facto it was already included in most GNOME environments. The default backend is GStreamer framework but Totem can also use xine libraries. Totem is included as the default media player in many desktop Linux distributions, includingUbuntu, Mandriva Linux and others. Release under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, Totem is free software. Features There are two distinct versions of Totem, though the difference is not visible at the user interface level. One of them is based on GStreamer, which is a plugin-based multimedia framework. This version has superior extensibility and supports a larger variety of media formats. The other one is based on xine, which is a regular multimedia library. Currently it has better encrypted DVD playback support and can play some files the GStreamer version can't handle. An outstanding feature of Totem is its close integration with the GNOME desktop environment and its file manager, Nautilus. This includes generating thumbnails of video files when browsing in Nautilus and a video plugin for Netscape-compatible browsers (e.g. Firefox). Thanks to a large number of plugins developed for GStreamer, Totem is able to play all mainstream media formats, both open and proprietary ones. It also understands numerous playlist formats, including SHOUTcast, M3U, XML Shareable Playlist
Format (XSPF), SMIL, Windows Media Player playlists and RealAudio playlists. Playlists are easily manageable using drag-and-drop features. Full-screen video playback is supported on nearly all X configurations, including multi-headXinerama setups, and on displays connected to the TVOut. Brightness, contrast and saturation of the video can be dynamically adjusted during playback. 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 5.1 and stereo sound is supported. On computers with an infrared port, Totem can be remotely controlled via LIRC. Stills can be easily captured without resorting to external programs. There is also a plugin for telestrator-like functionality using Gromit. The loading of external SubRip subtitles, both automatic and manual (via the command-line), is also supported. This is the official documentation from Totem's Home page source: http://projects.gnome.org/totem/ Play any xine- or GStreamer-supported file (depending on the backend chosen) LIRC support Shoutcast, m3u, asx, SMIL and ra playlists support (also usable from a shipped LGPL library) DVD (with menus), VCD playback, disc-type automatically detected TV-Out configuration with optional resolution switching 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 5.1, stereo and AC3 Passthrough audio output Fullscreen mode (move your mouse and you get nice controls) with Xinerama, dual-head and Viewport support Remote operation mode to control a running Totem Seek and Volume controls Aspect ratio changing, Scaling based on the video's original size Full keyboard control Playlist with Repeat and Shuffle modes, with saving feature and drag'n'drop reordering GNOME and Nautilus integration (Totem registers the file-types, adds a menu item, uses the proxy configuration, saves sessions, and registers pnm, mms, uvox and rtsp schemes, removes playlist items from a disc that's getting ejected) Properties window (information about the current movie) Drag'n'drop and mousewheel actions Screenshot feature Brightness, Contrast, Hue and Saturation control Visualisation plugin when playing audio-only files Telestrator mode using Gromit Video thumbnailer Nautilus properties page Works on remote displays
Automatic external subtitle load, or manual (only on the command-line, use like: totem file:///file.avi#subtitle:file.srt) DVD, VCD and OGG/OGM subtitles and languages support Dialog for more accurate seeking Authentication dialogs when location requires it Online help (in English, German, Spanish, Russian, French and Bulgarian) Codecs Totem can display a variety of formats, based on what backend you use. To see what backend you are using check the "About" dialog of Totem. GStreamer When using the GStreamer backend, you can install multiple plugin packages. You can install them the same way as you would install totem. Some information about the gstreamer-plugins packages can be found here. • gst-plugins-base the basic and essential plug-ins for GStreamer •
gst-plugins-good the plug-ins for most Open formats
•
gst-plugins-ugly good-quality plug-ins that might pose distribution problems, needed for DVD playback
•
gst-plugins-bad a set of plug-ins that need more work, needed for YouTube videos
•
gst-ffmpeg FFmpeg-based plug-in, contains all the basic decoders for popular codecs, such as DivX and WMV
•
Pitfdll Plug-ins using the Windows codec DLLs for which no free software implementation exists yet.
xine-lib Everything's included in this version, apart from some proprietary codecs that require Windows DLLs. Check the FAQ on xine-lib's website. That should sort most of you out. DVB support Using Totem, you can watch TV on over-the-air and satellite digital television. You'll need a DVB-T or DVB-S card supported by Linux, and a channels.conf file containing the channel tuning information.
GStreamer You will need gst-plugins-bad 0.10.6, as well as Fluendo's MPEG demuxer to have playback working. The channels.conf file should be named ~/.gstreamer-0.10/dvb-channels.conf. xine-lib The channels.conf file should be placed in ~/.xine/. YouTube support With the YouTube plugin you can browse YouTube and watch videos from it. You'll need gstreamer-plugins-bad 0.10.6 or a recent version of xinelib. Even if videos play correctly, seeking may not yet work for them but work is ongoing to fix this.
Audio Player: Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is an audio player that plays and helps organize digital music. Originally inspired by Apple's iTunes, it is free software, designed to work well under theGNOME Desktop using the GStreamer media framework. It is currently under active development. Features Rhythmbox offers a growing number of features, including: Music playback Playback from a variety of digital music sources is supported. The most common playback is music stored locally as files on the computer (the 'Library'). Rhythmbox supports playing streamed Internet radio and podcasts as well. The Replay Gainstandard is supported by using GConf-editor. Searching and sorting of music in the library is supported. Playlists may be created to group and order music. Users may also create 'smart playlists,' ones that are automatically updated (like a database query) based on a customized rule of selection criteria rather than an arbitrary list of tracks. Music may be played back in shuffle (random) mode or repeat mode. Track ratings are supported and used by the shuffle mode algorithm to play higher-rated tracks more often. Music importing Audio CD ripping (requires the optional Sound Juicer package) Comprehensive audio format support through GStreamer iPod support (experimental) Audio CD burning Since the 0.9 release, Rhythmbox can create audio CDs from playlists. Album Cover display Since the 0.9.5 release, Rhythmbox can display cover art of the currently playing album. However, rather than reading the embedded ID3 tags for album artwork, the plugin searches the internet to find corresponding artwork. Song Lyrics display Since the 0.9.5 release, Rhythmbox can provide song lyrics of the currently playing song (as long as they are stored in a lyrics database likeleoslyrics). Integration Rhythmbox has been extensively integrated with a number of external programs, services and devices including: Nautilus file manager context-menu integration (off by default in version 0.8.8), "hover mode" playback in Nautilus XChat, via an XChat plugin. Rhythmbox XChat Announcer (Perl) Pidgin-Rhythmbox automatically updates the Pidgin user profile with details of the currently playing track
Gajim and Pidgin include options for automatically updating the user status with details of currently playing track Music Applet (previously known as the Rhythmbox Applet), a GNOME panel applet that provides Rhythmbox playback controls from within the panel Shuffle, a gDesklet providing an interface for Rhythmbox resembling an iPod Shuffle Rhythmlet, another gDesklet that retrieves album art locally or from Amazon.com, has configurable display strings, playback controls, editable ratings and a seek bar SideCandyRhythmbox, a gDesklet-based Rhythmbox control and SideCandy display Rhythmbox XSLT allows the music library to be viewed as a
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