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'GNOME' is an international effort to build a complete desktop environment—the graphical user interface which sits on top of a computer operating system—entirely from free software. This goal includes creating software development frameworks, selecting application software for the desktop, and working on the programs which manage application launching, file handling, and window and task management.
GNOME is part of the GNU Project and can be used with various Unix-like operating systems, most notably Linux and Solaris.
The official pronunciation of the name is with a hard “G”, although (as in the English word "gnome") is also in common usage.

Contents

Aims

Origin

Project structure

Platforms

Architecture

Look and feel

Usability

Freedesktop.org and GNOME

Applications

Stable releases

Source code

Future developments

See also

References

External links

Aims

The GNOME project puts heavy emphasis on simplicity, usability, and making things “just work”. The other aims of the project are:

★ Freedom—to create a desktop environment that will always have the source code available for re-use under a free software license.

★ Accessibility—ensuring the desktop can be used by anyone, regardless of technical skill or physical disability.

★ Internationalization and localization—making the desktop available in many languages. At the moment GNOME is being translated to over 100 languages.

★ Developer-friendliness—ensuring it is easy to write software that integrates smoothly with the desktop, and allow developers a free choice of programming language.

★ Organization—a regular release cycle and a disciplined community structure.

★ Support—ensuring backing from other institutions beyond the GNOME community.

Origin

GNOME was launched by the GNU project in August 1997 in response to licensing concerns over software used by KDE,^[1] a free software desktop environment that relies on the Qt widget toolkit. At the time, Qt did not use a free software license and members of the GNU project became concerned about the use of such a toolkit for building a free software desktop and applications. Two projects were started: the Harmony toolkit, to create a free replacement for the Qt libraries, and GNOME to create a new desktop without Qt and built entirely on top of free software.^[2] The initial project leaders for GNOME were Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena.
In place of the Qt toolkit, GTK+ was chosen as the base of the GNOME desktop. GTK+ uses the Lesser General Public License (LGPL), a free software license that allows software linking to it, such as applications written for GNOME, to use a much wider set of licenses, including proprietary software licenses.^[3] The GNOME desktop itself is licensed under the LGPL for its libraries, and the GPL for applications that are part of the GNOME project itself. While Qt is dual-licensed under both the QPL and the GPL, the freedom to link proprietary software with GTK+ at no charge makes it differ from Qt.
The name “GNOME” was proposed as an acronym of 'GNU Network Object Model Environment' by Elliot Lee, one of the authors of ORBit and the Object Activation Framework. It refers to GNOME’s original intention of creating a distributed object framework similar to Microsoft’s OLE.^[4] This no longer reflects the core vision of the GNOME project, and the full expansion of the name is now considered obsolete. As such, some members of the project advocate dropping the acronym and re-naming “GNOME” to “Gnome”.^[4]

Project structure

As with most free software projects, the GNOME project is loosely managed. Discussion chiefly occurs on a number of public mailing lists.^[4]
In August 2000 the GNOME Foundation was set up to deal with administrative tasks, press interest and to act as a contact point for companies interested in developing GNOME software. While not directly involved in technical decisions, the Foundation does coordinate releases and decide which projects will be part of GNOME. Membership is open to anyone who has made a non-trivial contribution to the project.^[4] Members of the Foundation elect a board of directors every November, and candidates for the positions must be members themselves.
Developers and users of GNOME gather at an annual meeting known as GUADEC in order to discuss the current state of the project and its future direction.^[4]

Platforms

Originally designed for Linux, GNOME now runs on most Unix-like systems and in particular has been adopted by Sun Microsystems as part of Java Desktop System, replacing the Common Desktop Environment on their Solaris platform. It is the default desktop environment for many modern desktop Linux distributions, including Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. A list of Linux distributions that include GNOME is maintained on the GNOME website.^[4]
An official GNOME LiveCD, which allows a computer to boot directly from a Compact Disc without removing or changing existing operating systems, is available for download from the GNOME website.^[4]
Many GNOME components have been ported to Cygwin, allowing GNOME applications to run on Microsoft Windows.

Architecture

GNOME is built from a large number of different projects. A few of the major ones are listed below:

★ Bonobo – a compound document technology.

★ GConf – for storing application settings.

★ GNOME VFS – a virtual file system.

★ GNOME Keyring – for storing encryption keys and security information.

★ GNOME Translation Project – translate documentation and applications into different languages.

★ GTK+ – a widget toolkit used for constructing graphical applications. The use of GTK+ as the base widget toolkit allows GNOME to benefit from certain features such as theming (the ability to change the look of an application) and smooth anti-aliased graphics. Sub-projects of GTK+ provide object oriented programming support (GObjects), extensive support of international character sets and text layout (Pango) and accessibility (ATK). GTK+ reduces the amount of work required to port GNOME applications to other platforms such as Windows and Mac OS X.

★ Human interface guidelines (HIG) – research and documentation on building easy-to-use GNOME applications.

★ LibXML – an XML library.

★ ORBit – a CORBA ORB for software componentry.
A number of language bindings are available allowing applications to be written in a variety of programming languages, such as C++ (gtkmm), Java (Java-GNOME), Ruby (ruby-gnome2), C# (Gtk#), Python (PyGTK), Perl (gtk2-perl) and many others. The only languages currently used in applications that are part of an official GNOME desktop release are C, C# and Python.^[4]

Look and feel

GNOME is designed around the traditional computing desktop metaphor. Its handling of windows, applications and files is similar to that of contemporary desktop operating systems. In its default configuration, the desktop has a launcher menu for quick access to installed programs and file locations; open windows may be accessed by a taskbar along the bottom of the screen and the top-right corner features a notification area for programs to display notices while running in the background. However these features can be moved to almost anywhere the user desires, replaced with other functions or removed altogether.
The appearance of GNOME can be changed by the use of themes, which are sets consisting of an icon set, window manager border and GTK+ theme engine and parameters. Popular GTK+ themes include Bluecurve and Clearlooks (the current default theme).
GNOME puts emphasis on being easy for everyone to use. The HIG helps guide developers in producing applications which look and behave similarly, in order to provide a cohesive GNOME interface.

Usability

Since GNOME v2.0, a key focus of the project has been usability. As a part of this, the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) were created, which is an extensive guide for creating quality, consistent and usable GUI programs, covering everything from GUI design to recommended pixel-based layout of widgets.
From the GNOME HIG introduction:^[4]
During the v2.0 rewrite, many settings were deemed to be of little or no value to the majority of users and were removed. For instance, the preferences section of the Panel were reduced from a dialog of six tabs to one with two tabs. Havoc Pennington summarized the usability work in his 2002 essay "Free Software UI", emphasizing the idea, that all preferences have a cost, and it's better to "unbreak the software" than to add a UI preference to do that:^[4]
This less-is-more design methodology is not without detractors, one of them being Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, who commented in a usability-related discussion on the GNOME mailing list:^[4]

Freedesktop.org and GNOME

freedesktop.org is a project to assist interoperability and shared technology between the different X Window desktops such as GNOME, KDE or Xfce. Although it is not a formal standards organization, freedesktop.org defines certain basic features of an X Desktop, including drag and drop between applications, window manager specifications, menu layouts, recent files lists, copy and pasting between applications and a shared MIME type database, among other things. Following freedesktop.org specifications allows GNOME applications to appear more integrated into other desktops (and vice versa), and encourages cooperation as well as competition.
Examples of technologies originated at freedesktop.org which now form part of GNOME’s core technology set include:

★ Cairo – a sophisticated 2D vector graphics library.

★ D-Bus – interprocess communication system.

★ GStreamer – a multimedia framework.

★ HAL – a specification and an implementation of a hardware abstraction layer.

★ Poppler – a PDF rendering library.

★ Tango Desktop Project – which aims to provide a common visual standard across different platforms.
These initiatives aim to allow users and developers to choose the technologies and applications they like regardless of which desktop environment they use.

Applications

Along with those applications bundled with the desktop, a large number of other applications have been developed for use in GNOME. See List of GNOME applications for a more complete list.
The following selection of applications typically supplied as part of a GNOME release:

★ Ekiga – a phone and video conferencing application using voice over IP.

★ Epiphany – a web browser.

★ Evince – a document viewer for PDF and PostScript documents.

★ Evolution – an email and groupware application.

★ Eye of GNOME – a simple image viewer.

★ File Roller – an archive manager.

★ gedit – a text editor.

★ gnome-dictionary – a DICT protocol client.

★ gnome-panel – a desktop panel for launching applications and showing applets.

★ gnome-screenshot - a tool for taking screenshots in GNOME.

★ GNOME Terminal – a terminal emulator.

★ Metacity – a window manager.

★ Nautilus – a file manager.

★ Sound Juicer – a CD ripping tool.

★ Tomboy – a notetaking tool.

★ Totem – a media player.
The following is a selection of applications that use technology from the GNOME project and are likely to be used on an average GNOME desktop:

★ AbiWord – a word processor.

★ Banshee – a music player.

★ F-Spot – a digital photo organizer.

★ Deluge - a Bittorent Client

★ The GIMP – an advanced bitmap graphics editor.

★ GnomeBaker – a CD/DVD authoring application.

★ Gnumeric – a spreadsheeting program.

★ GnuCash – double-entry book-keeping software.

★ Inkscape – a vector graphics drawing application.

★ Planner – Planner[1] is the GNOME project management tool similar to Microsoft Project

★ Pidgin – an instant messaging client formerly known as Gaim.

★ Rhythmbox – a music-management application similar to iTunes.

★ Soundconverter - an Audio Conversion tool.

★ Thoggen - a DVD Ripping Program

Stable releases

Each of the parts making up the GNOME project has its own version number and release schedule. However, individual module maintainers coordinate their efforts to create a full GNOME stable release on a roughly six-month schedule. The releases listed in the table below are classed as stable. Unstable releases for testers and developers are not listed, nor are bugfix releases for individual modules.

Version	Date	Information
	August 1997[4]	GNOME development announced
1.0	March 1999 [16]	First major GNOME release
1.0.53	October 1999 [17]	"October"
1.2	May 2000 [18]	"Bongo"
1.4	April 2001 [19]	"Tranquility"
2.0	June 2002 [20]	Major upgrade based on GTK2. Introduction of the Human Interface Guidelines.
2.2	February 2003 [21]	Multimedia and file manager improvements.
2.4	September 2003 [22]	Epiphany, accessibility support.
2.6	March 2004 [23]	Nautilus changes to a spatial file manager, and a new GTK+ file dialog is introduced. A short-lived fork of GNOME, GoneME, is created as a response to the changes in this version.
2.8	September 2004 [24]	Improved removable device support, adds Evolution.
2.10	March 2005 [25]	Lower memory requirements and performance improvements. Adds: new panel applets (modem control, drive mounter and trashcan); and the Totem and Sound Juicer applications
2.12	September 2005 [26]	Nautilus improvements; improvements in cut/paste between applications and freedesktop.org integration. Adds: Evince PDF viewer; New default theme: Clearlooks; menu editor; keyring manager and admin tools. Based on GTK+ 2.8 with Cairo support.
2.14	March 2006 [27]	Performance improvements. Adds: Ekiga video conferencing application; Deskbar search tool; Pessulus lockdown editor; Fast user switching; Sabayon system administration tool.
2.16	September 2006 [28]	Performance improvements. Adds: Tomboy notetaking application; Baobab disk usage analyser; Orca screen reader; improvements to Totem, Nautilus and GNOME Power Manager; compositing support for Metacity; new icon theme. Based on GTK+ 2.10 with new print dialog.
2.18	March 2007 [29]	Performance improvements. Adds: Seahorse GPG security application, allowing encryption of emails and local files; Baobab disk usage analyser improved to support ring chart view; Orca screen reader; improvements to Evince, Epiphany and GNOME Power Manager, Volume control; two new games, GNOME Sudoku and glchess. MP3 and AAC audio encoding.

Source code

GNOME releases are made to the ftp.gnome.org FTP server^[4] in the form of source code with configure scripts, which are compiled by operating system vendors and integrated with the rest of their systems before distribution. Most vendors use only stable and tested versions of GNOME, and provide it in the form of easily installed, pre-compiled packages. The source code of every stable and development version of GNOME is stored in the GNOME Subversion source code repository.^[4]
The process of downloading the source code, compiling and installing the entire GNOME desktop manually is a laborious and time-consuming process, and a number of build-scripts (such as JHBuild or GARNOME) can be used to automate it.

Future developments

There are many sub-projects under the umbrella of the GNOME project, and not all of them are currently included in GNOME releases. Some are considered purely experimental concepts, or for testing ideas that will one day migrate into stable GNOME applications; others are code that is being polished for direct inclusion. Some examples include:

★ Project Soylent – making “people” and their interactions first-class objects within the GNOME framework.^[4]

★ Project Ridley – to consolidate several small undermaintained libraries into GTK+, such as libgnome and libgnomeprint.

★ The use of the Mozilla project’s XUL on the GNOME desktop.^[4]

See also

★ Comparison of X Window System desktop environments

★ GnomeFiles

★ Gnome Speech

References

1. The GNU Project
2. Stallman on Qt, the GPL, KDE, and GNOME Richard Stallman
3. http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/lgpl.html
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16. GNOME press release for version 1.0
17. GNOME press release for version 1.0.53
18. GNOME press release for version 1.2
19. GNOME press release for version 1.4
20. GNOME press release for version 2.0
21. GNOME press release for version 2.2
22. GNOME mailing list post announcing the release of version 2.4
23. GNOME mailing list post announcing the release of version 2.6
24. GNOME press release for version 2.8
25. GNOME press release for version 2.10
26. GNOME press release for version 2.12
27. GNOME press release for version 2.14
28. GNOME mailing list post announcing the release of version 2.16
29. GNOME mailing list post announcing the release of version 2.18
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External links

★ The GNOME website

★ FootNotes – a news site and discussion forum

★ GNOME Journal – an online magazine devoted to the GNOME Desktop

★ ''GNOME Project Listing''