A Look at GNOME 2.14 Built on the shoulders of giants, GNOME 2.14 hits the shelves on the 15th of March. As well as new features and more polish, developers have been working around the clock to squeeze more performance out of the most commonly used applications and libraries. This is a review of some of the most shiny work that has gone into the upcoming GNOME release. Speed King Significant improvements in GNOME 2.14 have lead to noticable speed-ups throughout the desktop. The speed of font rendering has been improved and a new memory allocator called GSlice, which is in many ways similar to the slab allocator in the Linux kernel offer significant performance increases throughout GNOME. Specific identified slow points in GNOME such as logging in have also been optimised by our crack team of speed kings. 
Performance comparison of GMemChunk (older allocator),
Malloc and GSlice with 1, 5, 10 and 20 threads each
doing 1 million allocations and deallocations of a GList. One application that got a lot of attention is GNOME Terminal which can now display the entire contents of the dictionary on the screen literally in a second, or in under 2 seconds using antialiased fonts (using antialiased fonts it took xterm 1m 13s to do the same!). 
time cat /usr/share/dict/words — all
terminals using the Fixed font at 80x25 characters. Locked Out Part of the newly formed GNOME Admin Suite, a collection of tools for Administrators is Pessulus, a lockdown editor for GNOME. Pessulus allows administrators to disable certain functionality in the GNOME desktop. This feature is useful in corporate environments and Internet cafés where users should not be allowed to edit panels, use the command line, &c. 
Locking the screen, logging out and switching the machine off
has been disabled for users. Push It Also in the new Admin Suite is Sabayon. This powerful tool allows administrators to create profiles for groups of users, for example Programmers or Admin Staff and set certain default and mandatory settings for these groups. Administrators can quickly edit and deploy profiles by changing settings inside a live, nested GNOME session. 
Editing the profile for Penguins interactively. Searching for Love GNOME 2.14 should be called Searchable GNOME, with the addition of powerful new searching systems in Nautilus and Yelp. Both have a traditional search mode plus a fast, superhot mode for those of you who are Beagle-enabled! 
Searches in Nautilus can be saved and reopened later like folders. Help! As mentioned Yelp, GNOME's Help Browser also has freshly added searchability, but it has also gained much, much more. Access to UNIX manpages and GNU Info pages is now enabled by default (they even get searched!), you can now print hard copies of your manuals and to top it off, the whole thing got a lot faster. 
Search for help, plus read manuals and info files Message To My Girl Ekiga, formerly known as GNOME Meeting, has hit version 2.0! Ekiga now sports incredible functionality including both SIP and H323 support for Voice and Video over IP; automatic STUN configuration; PC-2-Phone support for making those cheap international calls and much more. As well as being an excellent VoIP client, Ekiga also integrates with your Evolution addressbook or company LDAP directory as well as VoIP provider White Pages services so you don't need to remember VoIP addresses. 
SIP call in progress with both audio and video. In addition to Ekiga, users without existing SIP accounts can register one with Ekiga.net giving them free SIP presence on the Internet. Metacity, the GNOME window manager, has received several exciting new features. First off is edge resistance: this means that window edges now have offer some resistance as you attempt to move windows past each other, making it possible to line windows up easily. The edges of monitors and panels also offer some resistance to make it possible to line windows up against monitor edges. Multimonitor support, both with and without Xinerama has been improved with Metacity now conciously avoiding placing small windows and dialog boxes across monitor boundaries. This means that many older applications such as GTK+ 1.2 applications and Motif applications which want to put dialog boxes in the middle of the screen will have their dialog boxes moved to one side to remain readable. To help users who utilise remote X windows, Metacity will mark windows that are running on a different host to Metacity itself. This will help users identify what machine a graphical application is running on and help to prevent possibly destructive tasks from accidentally being run on the wrong machine. Finally, Metacity now has an integrated compositing manager. The new compositing manager uses libcm and OpenGL and implements all of the staple compositing features like drop shadows, menu fades and "wobbly minimise". Showing obscured windows and resizing windows no longer suffers from tearing or redraw effects as this is now handled in offscreen memory before compositing. Integrating the compositing manager with Metacity allows for the strength of a combined window and compositing manager along with Metacity's good support for legacy and broken applications. The Metacity compositing manager requires the latest features of unstable X.org and requires the new texture-from-pixmap extension, as a result this feature is turned off by default. 
the Metacity Compositing Manager doing dropshadows (with a theme using the Clearlooks 2.7 Cairo-based engine) You've Got The Whole World In Your Hand Introducing Deskbar, a fabulous new panel applet for the GNOME Desktop. Deskbar offers you the ability to execute programs, open bookmarks, use search engines, do live Google searches, live Yahoo searches, live Beagle searches and much, much more. Deskbar search plugins are written in Python, so new search plugins can be rapidly developed. 
Deskbar on the Panel Deskbar also offers a reduced size mode for small panels or vertical panels where the entry field slides out from the panel. Changes An important feature for home use, fast user switching is now available throughout the desktop. As well as optional user switching from your panel, you can also switch users from the Log-Out dialog and from the screensaver. 
switch users straight from the panel Evolution The latest version of Evolution offers support for a number of new protocols and servers, including the new Hula server and CalDAV, a calendaring protocol similar to WebDAV. This support completes a long missing part of the free/open groupware suite, and goes along with IMAP and LDAP to provide on the go roaming connection to your calendars. As with a local, Groupwise or Exchange calendar, these calendars can be edited and shared with other users. 
viewing calendars in Evolution, including a CalDAV calendar and a Webcal Calendar Evolution now completely integrates Exchange support as an E-plugin (no more Exchange button) and has support for Memo (or VJOURNAL) entries in iCal files. Writing Montage gedit, GNOME's flexible text editor, has got many new UI features as part of extensive UI work carried out on multidocument support. As a result, it is now much easier to work on multiple documents (for example source code) using gedit. Combined with powerful syntax highlighting and other features, gedit is very useful for working on many different multidocument projects. 
gedit, with a number of source files open, can save to remote servers A long requested feature in gedit is finally ready and stable. gedit can now both read and write to remote files, making it a powerful tool for editing remote files (such as websites) without suffering network lag from the remote machine. Also new, is the ability to write plugins in Python, the functionality of gedit can now be extended easily without having to write C code. New useful plugins include one to execute external commands (such as make) using shortcut keys, support for tag-based completion and an interactive Python console. 
from gedit's plugins dialog, we can configure active plugins to suit our requirements Sharp Dressed Man As every dapper man knows, girls go crazy for smooth looking graphics. Thanks to the availablity of Cairo in the desktop the end of bad graphics and jagged lines is in sight. 
no more raggedy lines in GNOME's System Monitor Daysleeper GNOME Screensaver is a new screensaver module for GNOME. As well as new screensavers, it can use old favourites from Xscreensaver. GNOME Screensaver offers good integration with the upcoming GNOME Power Manager, accessibility support and translatable dialogs. 
GNOME Screensaver configuration previews Floating Feet It's Only Sound Making multimedia better, GNOME 2.14 will ship with GStreamer 0.10, the latest branch of the popular multimedia platform. GStreamer 0.10 is faster and more stable than any of its predecessors and you can see this in GNOME. Totem, Sound Juicer and the mixer have all been updated to GStreamer 0.10. GStreamer 0.10 is also compatible with the upcoming licensed media plugins from Fluendo (you can get their MP3 plugin now). Choices Sometimes things that were complicated for ages just get really simple; like with the preferred applications dialog. The term is stetic. 
choose your preferred applications from the registered list, or enter your own custom command 
the sound preferences also offers more choices more simply Do You See What I See? There is a lot of fantastic stuff coming up in the world of GNOME. These are not yet part of the official GNOME Desktop, but are already getting tight integration and may appear in distributions near you. Once they've gotten more testing and review — expect them in GNOME too. 
GNOME Power Manager GNOME Power Manager is a next generation power management system built on top of the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). It gives users the power to control many aspects of power management on the desktop, especially on laptop computers. 
Notification Framework The notification framework is a set of notification widgets that have been sorely lacking from GNOME for some time. Many applications can already take advantage of the notification framework if it is present. Many people find notification popups in other desktop environments irritating, so to prevent this GNOME is working on clearcut recommendations for its Human Interface Guidelines before GNOME 2.16. Loved this Page? If you loved this page, you should also check out The GNOME Journal, official journal of the GNOME Project. Read it today! All comments/complains/queries/flames to Davyd Madeley.
Thanks to Andy Fitzsimon for help with producing performance graphics.
Thanks to Ray Strode for pictures of the Metacity compositing manager.
Thanks to Harish Krishnaswamy for lending me a Hula account.
Thanks to the extended GNOME community for all the proof reading.
GNOME © 1997-2006, Free Software Foundation and others
This page © 2006, Davyd Madeley
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. | 
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