Florent Thoumie

As you should know if you’re a FreeBSD on desktop user, Gnome 2.16 has been committed to the FreeBSD Ports Tree few days ago. Being a Gnome user myself, I upgraded from 2.14 to 2.16 as soon as I had a little free time. To say the least, it’s been quite painful (I’m not blaming anyone, that’s just a fact, I don’t really care if I need to spend 2 hours checking what’s wrong and how to fix, really). If you haven’t yet upgraded, you might have problems related to the PREFIX change (Gnome moved from X11BASE to LOCALBASE, which by default are respectively /usr/X11R6 and /usr/local). You can also experience problems with duplicated origins, which means, you’ll end up with package X-2.14 installed in X11BASE and X-2.16 in LOCALBASE. Depending on whether dependant packages check libraries and header files in X11BASE or in LOCALBASE first, this might break the build. Anyway it’s done now and there won’t be a PREFIX move again (for Gnome at least).

Note: I’m reinstalling my laptop with FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE and a fresh Ports Tree. Though it’s not over yet, I’m pretty sure it’ll be ok. If you’re installing a new machine, set X11BASE to ${LOCALBASE} in make.conf and symlink /usr/X11R6 to /usr/local. Be aware that you may have some not-yet-discovered CONFLICTS arising (some X package overwriting files from package Y).

So what’s new in 2.16 for FreeBSD. Well, if I had to give only one name, that would be HAL. HAL stands for Hardware Abstraction Layer. Read the freedesktop page, it’s not wasted time. Now, things just works. When you plug your USB key, the HAL daemon will mount it and nautilus will pop-up a browsing window. When you insert an audio CD or a DVD, totem will start and play the content (well, doesn’t work here at the moment, but that might be a local problem). That’s a basic feature, Windows has had it for years now, but that’s definitely a step in the right direction. What next? D-BUS. Well, it’s not really new, but more and more applications are using it. D-BUS is a mean for applications to communicate with each other. For example, now Evolution is sending a D-BUS message everytime it receives a new mail (via a plug-in). Then it becomes very easy to write a small app that listens on the bus and uses libnotify to show a pop-up everytime a message is sent (actually, there’s already a PoC here).

Last year I got a PowerBook G4 which I’m playing with on a regular basis. The killer-apps I found were Expose, Spotlight and the Dock. Expose is Apple’s software that “expose” all your windows at the same time, it’s a good replacement for Alt-Tab that uses the mouse instead of the keyboard. It’s only really useful if you combine it with sensitive corners otherwise you have to use both the mouse and the keyboard. Spotlight is an integrated search engine, that finds almost everything indexed related to keywords (like your mails if you’re using Apple Mail, files, applications, ...).

Since I try to be on the bleeding-edge when it comes to shiny new UNIX features (not that I understand everything, far from it), I read about new features/applications in the X domain (XGL, AiGLX, Compiz, Beryl, ...), I saw the Beryl has its own version of Expose (*hint*: search beryl+aiglx on youtube). Yay, problem is, we don’t have a recent X.org and beryl in ports (may come as an Xmas present :-)). Ok, I’ll wait for this one. Next. Some months ago, I read about Beagle, a project similar to Spotlight. It indexes your stuff, and you can then make queries. Problem was at that time, beagle depended on a kernel with inotify support (which is completely Linux-centric). Well actually, it doesn’t depend on it, but that’s unusable without it. Then some people (jylefort@, IIRC) wrote a kqueue replacement. And there was much rejoicement. I tested beagle yesterday evening, and besides few crashes and some things I don’t understand yet (supposed to index Evolution mails but it doesn’t), it seems to work pretty well. Grin, that’s another win. Then what can we use on Unix, us, Dock-lovers. I need to say that I hate Gnome panels, really. At some point, I used a gdesklets plugin, and though it was really nice at that time (2003 IIRC), it was eating all my RAM. Meet akamaru. As you can read, the initial goal wasn’t to create a dock. This is just awesome, and I mean it, have a look at youtube again and search for kiba. Agreed, you don’t need all these effects, but that’s what makes it awesome. I tried it few weeks ago and the configuration of the dock wasn’t really straight-forward. I had to edit a shell script that wrote gconf entries I think. It seems kiba-dock is a fork of the demo-dock, I’m not sure. Anyway, it doesn’t seem to work if you don’t have XGL or AIGLX with compositing enabled. Anyway, things are really getting better and it’s not hard to conceive that all those Windows replacements (Ubuntu, Fedora Core, SLED) will gain a lot of popularity in the next few months/years.