Chapter 6: GNOME

Overview

The GNU Network Object Model Environment, also known as GNOME, is a powerful and easy-to-use environment consisting primarily of a panel, a desktop, and a set of GUI tools with which program interfaces can be constructed. GNOME is designed to provide a flexible platform for the development of powerful applications. Currently, GNOME is supported by several distributions and is the primary interface for Red Hat. GNOME is free and is released under the GNU Public License. You can download the source code, as well as documentation and other GNOME software directly, from the GNOME Web site at www.gnome.org. Several companies have joined together to form the GNOME Foundation, an organization dedicated to coordinating the development of GNOME and GNOME software applications. These include such companies as Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard as well as Linux distributors such as Mandrake, Red Hat, and TurboLinux, along with GNOME developers such as Ximian. Modeled on the Apache Software Foundation, which developed the Apache Web server, the GNOME Foundation will provide direction to GNOME development as well as organization, financial, and legal support.

The core components of the GNOME desktop consist of a panel for starting programs and desktop functionality. Other components normally found in a desktop, such as a file manager, Web browser, and window manager, are provided by GNOME-compliant applications. GNOME provides libraries of GNOME GUI tools that developers can use to create GNOME applications. Programs that use buttons, menus, and windows that adhere to a GNOME standard can be said to be GNOME-compliant. The official file manager for the GNOME desktop is Nautilus. The GNOME desktop does not have its own window manager as KDE does. Instead, it uses any GNOME-compliant window manager. The Metacity window manager is the one bundled with the GNOME distribution.

Support for component model interfaces is integrated into GNOME, allowing software components to interconnect regardless of the computer language in which they are implemented or the kind of machine on which they are running. The standard used in GNOME for such interfaces is the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), developed by the Object Model Group for use on Unix systems. GNOME uses the ORBit implementation of CORBA. With such a framework, GNOME applications and clients can directly communicate with each other, enabling you to use components of one application in another. With GNOME 2.0, GNOME officially adopted GConf and its libraries as the underlying method for configuring GNOME and its applications. GConf can configure independently coordinating programs such as those that make up the Nautilus file manager.

You can find out more about GNOME at its Web site at www.gnome.org. This site not only provides a detailed software map of current GNOME projects with links to their development sites, it also maintains extensive mailing lists for GNOME projects to which you can subscribe. The Web site provides online documentation, such as the GNOME User's Guide and FAQs. If you want to develop GNOME programs, check the GNOME developer's Web site at developer.gnome.org. The site provides tutorials, programming guides, and development tools. Here you can find the complete API reference manual online, as well as extensive support tools such as tutorials and integrated development environments (IDEs). The site also includes detailed online documentation for the GTK+ library, GNOME widgets, and the GNOME desktop.

Note

Currently, new versions of GNOME are being released frequently, sometimes every few months. GNOME releases are designed to enable users to upgrade their older versions easily. For Red Hat, you can use the update utility Red Hat Network or download packages from the Red Hat and Fedora download sites and install with redhat-config-packages. Packages can also be downloaded from the GNOME FTP site at ftp.gnome.org.