Michael Wood

Thos and I have been working on guadec.org (GNOME User And Developer European Conference) over the weekend which is now coming along nicely. More importantly is that the 2007 call for papers deadline has been extended to the 15th march (tomorrow) more info here http://www.guadec.org/callforpapers good news for those who didn’t make the first deadline !

A lot of people who are new to linux may not even realise what GNOME is, here is a little non technical guide.
GNOME IS:

• An integrated window manager
• Settings management suite
• Common desktop Applications such as gedit, evolution, gaim
• Menus and icons
• Graphical login management
• Integration between applications
• Provide GUIS to systems such as gstreamer, power management
• Accessibility tools
• File manager
• System tools
• Screensaver
• Session manager
• Rendering engines
• Desktop, panels, window list, applets
• A community driven project fully open source
• Committed to providing a clean and accessible interface
• Cross platform
• The default window manager for Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat Enterprise, OpenSuse.. etc

GNOME is NOT:

• A distribution
• Ubuntu, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat Enterprise, OpenSuse etc
• A kernel
• The only window manager

The main confusion seems to be when new releases of Distributions come out and people say for example “ah the new ubuntu feisty has this cool new feature where you can choose how to manage your saved password on connected servers” where infact they mean “ah the new ubuntu feisty comes with the latest version of gnome where you can choose how to manage your saved password on connected servers”

Distros ARE:

• Methods of Distributing open source software
• The technology your distribution distributes the software using, e.g. rpm / yum, deb / apt etc
• Changes to default settings , e.g. the colour scheme
• Customised kernels , e.g. support for bluetooth devices compiled
• A collection of precompiled packages
• A body to bring technologies and software together under one roof
• Communities
• Support for your configurations
• Default software
• Sometimes commercial products

that is all.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 3:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.