William Computer Blog

GNOME 2.12 on Breezy Badger

GNOME 2.12 was released yesterday with many new features and bug fixes. I decided to upgrade my Ubuntu Linux from version 5.04 (The Hoary Hedgehog) to version 5.10 (The Breezy Badger).

Upgrading ubuntu

The “The Breezy Badger” is still in development stage, only use it for experimental purpose. I decided to go ahead and upgrade since this computer is not my main desktop computer.

Following the guide from Unofficial Ubuntu 5.04 Starter Guide, I replaced /etc/apt/sources.list with a new one.

Once the file is replaced, I go to terminal and I apt-get update, and apt-get dist-upgrade. It took me 1 hour to download all 500MB of packages and took me another 1 hour to install them on a AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz computer. Once the upgrade is done, I closed every program and reboot.

Clearlooks

GNOME 2.12 introduces a new theme called clearlooks. When I boot into my ubuntu after upgrading, I was still using the “Human” theme, the default theme of Ubuntu Linux. Changing the theme is easy, go to System > Administrator > Themes. Choose Clearlooks.

Drag and Drop

I don’t know whether GNOME is capable of this or not. I just found out, just like Mac OS X you can drag and drop highlighted text to your desktop/folder to save it as a text file. Example, Highlight a paragraph of text from Firefox to the desktop, it will be saved as a text file on the desktop.

Even better the icon of that text file would be a preview of the actual content of the text file, which is that text you dragged from your browser.

For developers

GNOME uses GIMP Toolkit (GTK+) as the base widget toolkit. GNOME 2.12 depend on GTK+ 2.8, the first GTK release to render a majority of its interface widgets with Cairo.

Cairo is an open source vector graphics library that provide new graphic effects. Cairo is intended to compete with similar technologies such as WPF from Microsoft and Quartz from Apple Computer. Visit Cairo for more information about it.

• September 9, 2005