Penguin
Note: You are viewing an old revision of this page. View the current version.

Experiences Installing Ximian Desktop 2

14/6/03, CraigBox

I like Ximian. Primate instinct, perhaps. They have been putting the polish on desktop Linux for a little over three years now, both with their excellent GNOME mail client Evolution and their GNOME customization platform, Ximian Desktop.

With the 9.x releases of RedHat and Mandrake, the bar has been released for desktop environments. KDE 3 and GNOME 2 have both made inroads on usability and functionality, filling a lot of the gaps that Ximian's 1.4 desktop release filled over standard GNOME 1.4. With the popularity of Red Hat's clean BlueCurve theme, and the full suite of GTK2 applications that are nearing completion, some naysayers predict the end of XD2's niche. I've decided to install it on a spare computer (which, incidentally, is for sale on the GarageSale page!), have a play, and decide if it's good enough to replace the standard Red Hat GNOME installation I use day-to-day.

Downloading and installing

The XD2 directory on Ximian's FTP site was a little over 450Mb, so I grabbed it over a fast connection and bought it home. Unfortunately, that's not enough. You also need the ximian-evolution/ and redcarpet/ directories, but this isn't made obvious. Not a problem for those who are just doing an install off the Internet, but a black mark nonetheless.

The default selection installs the main XD2 components, Bitstream Vera fonts, and OpenOffice.org (Ximian edition). You can also select the development packages and the old GNOME Office components such as Abiword/Gnumeric if you desire.

After downloading all the rest of the directories off Ximian and completing my local mirror (a step you won't have to go through if you're installing off the web or off a CD), then the installer started downloading all the packages off my local web server. However, it also needed some newer versions of GNOME software and some Red Hat updates, which it got at a blistering 1k/s off Ximian's webserver. I guess this is why you're supposed to pay for Red Carpet Express.

Installation took over half an hour, even on a 1ghz+ machine. I guess replacing 444 packages isn't an easy task. Few questions - it wants to know if you want to use GDM (yes) and CUPS (yes), and warns that some functionality will be lost if you don't.

You can obtain an unofficial ISO image from the following URL. ftp://ftp.biochem.uthscsa.edu/pub/linux/Redhat/Ximian-Gnome/

Initial setup

Upon clicking OK, the installer restarted X (There was no option not to do this - so make sure you've saved anything you were working on while it installed) and dropped me into the Ximian GDM theme with its big friendly invitation to "Login".

Loading works much like Red Hat's Bluecurve - a KDE-like screen with icons across the bottom giving progress reports, then the now-famous Ximian layout of a Programs, Settings, Help menu across the top, and a task bar across the bottom.

Desktop - Interface

Much like the old XD 1.4, XD2 has a very clean menu structure - a great relief after the mess which is Red Hat's menu structure. The Programs menu has "Applications", which contains the OpenOffice.org components and other useful parts (such as MrProject). The "Games" menu has a handful of Gnome games like Iagno (I didn't get it at first, but think "Othello" -- it's a Reversi/Othello implementation) and SameGnome. The mess of games that Red Hat installs by default are shunted into the "More" menu at the bottom.

At the bottom of the Programs menu is Evolution and "Web Browser". The default web browser is Galeon, which is a bit cleaner than Mozilla but isn't what I'm used to, so I might change back to Mozilla as the default. I realise that Evolution is a Ximian product, but you should either say "Evolution" and "Galeon" or "E-Mail/Groupware" and "Web Browser".

The desktop has a link to your home folder, a trash can and "My Computer", which takes you to a Control Panel-like configuration pane instead of your folders. These icons cannot be removed from the desktop."My Computer" gives you a better interface to SMB shares ans NFS shares. However one gripe that I found was though I mounted my XP partiton as /mnt/win it showed up as CDROM(1)? in "My Computer". I am also looking for additional themes for the XD2.


Changing the default web-browser for Ximian Evolution.

I wanted to change the default browser that fires up when I click on links in Evolution. If you'd like to do the same all you have to do is type the following command
  1. gnome-default-applications-properties

And enter mozilla "%s" in the Custom Web Browser box. (or whatever you want your browser to be). To make the link open in a new mozilla tab, try mozilla -remote 'openURL(%s,new-tab)'

Additionally, if you find you aren't able to run Galeon after upgrading to XD2, and instead, you get this error:

INTERNAL ERROR on Browser End: No manager for initializing factory? System error?:: Success

I fixed this issue by removing the /usr/lib/mozilla and /usr/lib/mozilla-1.2.1/ directories, leaving only /usr/lib/mozilla-1.3.1/. I guessed that the problem was caused by the Flash plugin, but from what I read: " the problem is in the Java plugin by Sun. You need to remove it and install the blackdown java plugin" instead.

(From The Linux Pimp)