A first look at Ximian Desktop 2

A first look at Ximian Desktop 2

I missed Ximian Desktop. I gave it up last fall when I installed Red Hat 8.0. It's not that I didn't like Bluecurve, the new desktop treatment for GNOME and KDE that Red Hat included with 8.0, but it just wasn't Ximian. The months went by and I began to wonder if Ximian would ever release a new version of its desktop. The real problem, of course, was not Red Hat's Bluecurve, but getting Ximian completely ported to GNOME 2.

Ximian is a commercial endeavor founded by Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza, who founded the GNOME project. Their goal was to accelerate the adoption of Linux as a desktop platform. The Ximian Desktop represents a natural extension of the GNOME desktop. When a friend asked me what the difference was between GNOME or Bluecurve and the Ximian Desktop, I answered "polish, polish, polish."

A month or two ago Ximian asked if I would like to participate in a beta for its new desktop offering. I said yes, but only if it supported Red Hat 9. Ximian marketing folk said it would and swore me to secrecy. The following is what I found in the last two weeks: Ximian 2 is drop-dead gorgeous. It is much more powerful than it was before, and many tweaks are now in the interface. A couple of the tweaks I didn't like, but most I did. I'll get into those specifics a little later in the story. Let's start at the beginning.

It was a big download, and it took almost two hours for it to download and install. That's over broadband cable courtesy of TimeWarner/RoadRunner. While that's a largish chunk of time, it was easy time. Very little was required of me by the installation process. Keep in mind that the beta I downloaded was much larger than the production version, thanks to the debugging code in the beta.

The screenshot you see below is what the Ximian 2 desktop looks if you select the recommended option of letting Ximian configure everything for you instead of sticking with your current GNOME configuration.

Click here to see image

Across the top panel are the familiar Program System Help icons on the left. Also present on the left is an icon for volume control. I can't remember if that was present on the old Ximian desktop. On the right are three icons for three standard offerings: Evolution, Galeon, and OpenOffice.Org. Just to the right of them are the time and a drop-down menu showing the programs running currently.

Three items are placed on the desktop itself. Nautilus opens when I double-clicked on my home folder. Clicking on "My Computer" brings up icons for various types of configuration chores, from printers to Samba to fonts. The third item is a trashcan.

The bottom panel contains a large area for displaying running tasks, a four-desktop switcher, and the Show Desktop icon by Red Hat, which I mentioned in my recent Mandrake 9.1 first impression.

Click here to see image