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GNU is Not Unix GNOME GUI Programming The Gimp Technology

GTK 2.6.0 Released 255

Posted by michael from the rated-n-for-gnome dept.
baijum81 writes "GTK 2.6.0 has been released. As usual Pango and Glib have been released along with it. Release notes are here: GTK, Pango and Glib."
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GTK 2.6.0 Released More

GTK 2.6.0 Released

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  • They're improving the file dialogs... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @06:31PM (#11120656)
    ...which is good. The file chooser improved a lot on GTK2, but it could still use some polish.

    BTW, does anyone knows if GTK supports the Composite render extension available on X.ORG? Or perhaps it has nothing to do with it and doesn't need it? I tried enabling compositing on XFCE 4.2rc2, and while the desktop looked MUCH better (with true transparency, window shadows and the works), it slowed my system to a crawl.

    • Re:They're improving the file dialogs... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That's a video driver issue, unfortunately. There's only one driver for Xorg at the moment that accelerates the necessary operations for translucency. (the non-free nNivia driver).

      There's a planned port of the Kdrive acceleration architecture that'll make it much easier to accelerate it with other drivers.
      • That's a video driver issue, unfortunately. There's only one driver for Xorg at the moment that accelerates the necessary operations for translucency. (the non-free nNivia driver).

        Yes, i'm aware. I'm running the latest binary drivers from nVidia, and even "experimental" extensions like XRenderAccel desktop works just fine, and gives a nice speed boost to my desktop. OpenGL renders great as well, but for some reason, Composite + XFCE work awfully slow, like it's working on software mode. I though perhap

    • Re:They're improving the file dialogs... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by flithm ( 756019 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @06:44PM (#11120759) Homepage
      Just so people don't get the wrong idea about Composite or Xorg, on my relatively modern (but by no means uber) computer xorg + composite + translucency + drop shadows doesn't slow it down one bit. In fact with all the effects on the windows actually appear to slide around smoother than they did before, although I'm sure this some kind of psychological effect.

      Also of note is that I have one graphics card driving two monitors, and it's still not an issue.

      Don't be afraid to try Composite on Xorg! And if you run into problems submit bug reports! Xorg has great promise. Let's all help to make it as good as it could be (and no I'm in no way related to the Xorg project. I just think eye-candy is where its at).
      • Nonono, don't get me wrong; i have nothing but praise for the work the X.Org team is doing! It just strikes me as odd that it would run so slow, and thought perhaps GTK had a problem with Composite.

        I've been following the project closely, and i think it's becoming to be all that XFree should've been by now.
      • although I'm sure this some kind of psychological effect

        I don't think it was. The way I understand the Composite extension, all windows draw to an off-screen buffer, which the compositing manager displays. When using the a compositing manager, you don't have to ask the client applications to redraw themselves when exposed by moving a window, so moving windows should be considerably less CPU/network/context switch intensive.
      • You really need to have hardware acceleration enabled to use composite effectively. I've found that with the NVIDIA binary drivers, and RenderAccel enabled, it feels much, much smoother than without the composite manager running. If you have an NVIDIA card, you can do this in your video device section:

        Option "RenderAccel" "true"

        Then run "xcompmgr -c" on the active $DISPLAY while X is running (unless your window manager du jour has built-in composite support) and you're ready to go.
      • That's because you are using NVidias binary driver, right?
        Then you have the RENDER extension hardware accellerated, and RENDER is used to compose and draw the transparent bitmaps.
        Some X.org OSS drivers also have accellerated render, not as good as nvidias though.

        (ATI's driver sucks :-)
      • you're obviously on crack - or you have translucency turned on for that one little window that's never above anything else.

        try joining xorg on freenode. The channel topic says it sall "composite is slow, we know".

        now, don't get me wrong. I love what the composite extension can do; But don't go getting people's hopes up, "ooh, my 900Mhz celeron proc with a 32 meg graphics card will look just like my dads powerbook" cuz it ain't gonna happen.
      • Bug report #11120759:
        Assumption that all graphic hardware manufacturers have binary drivers for the current stable Xorg release which allow for translucency and shadows to work is incorrect.

        Affects: Many, if not all ATI cards and Xorg >= 6.8.0

        Workaround: harass the hell out of ATI [ati.com]
    • "The file chooser improved a lot on GTK2, but it could still use some polish."

      What I've never understood is why, in newer releases, they don't provide the filechooser with a backwards-compatible link library so that the older programs will at least interface with the operating system somewhat like newer programs. Something like an LD_PRELOAD that we could do so that every application doesn't wind up with it's own file chooser.

      That's the big problem w/ many Linux apps -- they are all their own beast. To
      • Wouldn't that be something like Gentoo? You set up your USE=gtk2 and compile the entire system against it, rather than a bunch of binaries which are linked against who knows what version of pick a widget set. I know my system seems pretty consistent.
        • I haven't used Gentoo, but I was pretty sure that the version of Gtk used was based on the version the application was coded for, so if it hasn't been ported to Gtk2 yet, it just uses the Gtk1 widgets.

          Otherwise, I imagine RedHat and others would have more consistency between apps.

  • I love Gnome and GTK (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bonch ( 38532 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @06:36PM (#11120697)
    ...but when are they going to just go full-on GTK# running on a Mono framework? :D

    Beat Microsoft at its own .NET game.
    • Slightly before Microsoft patent-sues GNOME out of existence...

      I love gtk+/GNOME, but Mono is idiotic. Microsoft will not let it stand, should it ever become a threat.

  • Thanks!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by NotoriousQ ( 457789 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @06:36PM (#11120700) Homepage
    My thanks as usual to the people who build GTK and Pango. I guess that I have not yet really learned to appreciate the people behind the curtain, the GLib people, but since they make GTK possible, thanks to them as well.

    Currently GTK is one of my favorite toolkits. The reason: Pango. I use multiple languages in my documents, as well as the compose button, and all GTK apps handle it perfectly (I use utf-8 of course). And although the input methods are somewhat redundant architecture that should be lower than the level of the toolkit IMHO, GTK input methods are the best, especially when combined with UIM.

    Thank again to all the people involved.

    BTW: is there a keyboard shortcut to switching input methods. UIM has it, but I sometimes need to switch to cyrillic translit (can not use ru phonetic since the keyboard is in dvorak) from Chinese and back, and that is a bit painful?

    • Re: Thanks!! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Black Parrot ( 19622 )


      > Currently GTK is one of my favorite toolkits. The reason: Pango. I use multiple languages in my documents

      I just recently discovered that GTK+ with Pango has cool monolingual uses as well, since it supports a simple markup language that lets you very easily do things to the text in your menus, buttons, etc., such as italicize, sub- or superscript, etc.

      Google for "pango markup language" for more info.

    • Let me chime in here with a "Me too!"

      GTK is what makes my desktop go. I love it. Nice job, folks.

  • A lot of stuff in Gtk is replacing Gnome widgets.. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Abcd1234 ( 188840 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @06:41PM (#11120728) Homepage
    If you read the release notes, it's interesting to see that many of the changes are the creation of widgets that are intended to replace stuff in the Gnome libraries (e.g., the new icon viewer widget). It makes one wonder where the line should be drawn between the widget set and an aggregate library. Moreover, I wonder what the drivers are for moving these things back into Gtk if they're already present in the Gnome stuff (other than to reduce dependencies).
    • Don't think in terms of reducing dependencies as far as packages to install. Think in terms of reducing dependencies as in eliminating Gnome altogether. I hate Gnome. I think it sucks, and I refuse to use it. Every time I try using it, I end up hating it more. Same goes for KDE. The more useful Gtk+ (isn't that the actual name, as opposed to the inaccurate-as-always story blurb?) becomes without any additional libraries, the more likely it is that applications will be written directly atop Gtk+ rather
    • Much of the stuff in the GNOME libraries would be equally useful in non-GNOME applications, so it makes sense to make it available to them.

    • Moreover, I wonder what the drivers are for moving these things back into Gtk if they're already present in the Gnome stuff.

      My assumption is that the parts being moved aren't really Gnome-specific. Applications that want to use those dialogs would have to include libgnome and libgnomeui, which are only available under Linux and very tied into the GNOME environment. For instance, an application which wanted to use a standardized About dialog would have to include the GNOME libraries. This moves it into G

    • Re:A lot of stuff in Gtk is replacing Gnome widget (Score:4, Informative)

      by Burnon ( 19653 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @09:45PM (#11122104)
      Much of the motivation on the devel mailing lists seemed to be oriented around the idea that the gnome libraries had things in them that weren't quite ready for the gtk/glib guys to commit to supporting in the API-stable 2.x series forever. So the code was put into GNOME libraries to get GNOME apps out the door. When implementations and APIs for things that are generally useful to people doing GTK-only stuff got clean enough for everyone concerned, then they got picked up.

  • A new GTK release (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GreatBunzinni ( 642500 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @06:43PM (#11120745)
    Here is a new GTK release and I bet that once again it will be almost impossible to install it easily and successfully through the config/make/make install way. Damn those dependencies. Damn them to hell.

  • GTK != Grand Theft Potassium (Score:3, Funny)

    by viva_fourier ( 232973 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @06:45PM (#11120765) Journal
    Sorry to disappoint you chemistry geeks out there, it's been verified: I did a search on GTK and did not find any Grand Theft K 3d chemistry gaming references...apparently it's some toolkit for gimps.

    Move along, nothing to see here.
  • Over the holidays I want to sit down and play with wxWidgets [wxwidgets.org] (formerly wxWindows) to try and make some cross platform GUIs. I believe wx compiles against GTK, though I haven't tried this yet myself. Anyone have experience with this? Do changes in GTK impact wx? (ideally they shouldn't)
    • We haven't tested wx with 2.6.0 yet so it is possible that currently something is broken (as you say, ideally it shouldn't be, but in practice GTK+ minor version upgrades have often proved to have not so minor compatibility problems). However our next 2.5.4 release will definitely work with it as will the next stable 2.6.0 (of wx, not GTK+). Hopefully they will match each other as perfectly as their versions do ;-)
  • C'mon guys, it's 2004: time to start publishing release notes in HTML.
  • Now all I want for Christmas is kernel 2.6.10+reiser4.

  • Speed improvements (Score:3, Interesting)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @07:56PM (#11121347) Homepage Journal
    Some X protocol round trip reduction improvements have made it to this release, so if you've been frustrated by a gnome program over an ssh session taking 30 seconds to start (I sure have!) then 2.6 will probably speed things up.
    • I would like to know if 2.6 has finally brought 2.x up to the performance of 1.2 (or maybe even better?).

      On Solaris I still build most applications with GTK+ 1.2.x because I've found 2.4.x to be significantly slower, even without AA fonts, and all of the pretty eyecandy. Doing the same thing as 1.2, it seems that 2.4 is just plain slower.

  • Fortran? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Aardpig ( 622459 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @08:22PM (#11121578)
    Bah, no bindings for Fortran. It would be nice to see a decent open-source GUI toolkit for Fortran; a front end does wonders for the ability of PHBs to appreciate a piece of code.

  • No matter how hard C is, gtk/glib is impressive. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by master_p ( 608214 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @09:53PM (#11122135)
    I prefer Qt, as I think C++ is better overall, but I've got to give credit to the gtk/glib guys. They've done a tremendous API, all in C!
  • I'm glad they brought back the ability to type a path in the file dialog, with search-ahead. This was sorely lacking in GNOME lately.

  • I just spent the past day rebuilding fontconfig, libiconv, libintl, etc. to get pango to build on Mac OS X. This is painful. darwinports and fink are both helpful but not enough. Still don't have it building. Any slashdot gnome wizards want to take a whack at this one?


    creating libpangox-1.0.la
    (cd .libs && rm -f libpangox-1.0.la && ln -s ../libpangox-1.0.la libpangox-1.0.la)
    gcc -dynamiclib -o .libs/libpangoft2-1.0.0.600.0.dylib .libs/pangofc-font.o .libs/pangofc-fontmap.o .libs/pangof

  • Two Questions (Score:4, Interesting)

    by KidSock ( 150684 ) on Friday December 17, 2004 @11:20PM (#11122534)
    On Windows, if you type a sequence of characters quickly in a list control (such as in a file dialog) the focus jumps to an item that begins with those letters. Will GTK every implement that?

    Also, is there is a way to change the standard file dialog without recompiling everything? I want to set my own custom file dialog.
    • It is possible to modify your file dialog without recompiling everything every time. You do need to recompile everything once. Make sure you get the source for the exact same version you have, and compile it all to get the .o files.

      After that, make your changes to gtk-file-selector.c and make libgtk-x11-2.whatever, then copy that file into /usr/lib or wherever your gtk lives. You should probably back up your old version first.

      Check out this selector [chello.nl] before you start implementing your own. You may find

      • I don't think you understood the question you answered. I'm pretty sure that KidSock wanted to know if it is possible to implement custom file dialogs on a per application basis and also different dialogs within a single application, not changing the core Gtk file selector for everything, which seems to be what you are suggesting.

        As much as I hated programming in MFC (Windows C++ toolkit), this was definitely doable there, if poorly documented. This should be possible in Gtk, I would hope. A quick Google s

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