linux developers unite on desktop standards

[daniel49]

Text

A good development I think.

 

[Nothinman]

I like how they don't explain what standard they're talking about or even provide any links explaining it for them.

 

[daniel49]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I like how they don't explain what standard they're talking about or even provide any links explaining it for them.

yeah, was somewhat limited
Hopefully more details will come out.

 

[Bluestealth]

Standard locations for configuration files, program files, variables, and stuff would be nice ROFL

 

[Hyperblaze]

Originally posted by: Bluestealth
Standard locations for configuration files, program files, variables, and stuff would be nice ROFL

standard place for configuration files = /etc

standard place for binaries = /usr/bin

standard place for system binaries = /usr/sbin

standard place for services = /etc/rc.d

standard place for variables? that you'll have to explain in further depth

 

[xtknight]

Well, that's good to hear. I don't like having to find distro-specific information all the time just because I want to install a program someone's only tested on Ubuntu.

 

[Bluestealth]

Originally posted by: Hyperblaze

Originally posted by: Bluestealth
Standard locations for configuration files, program files, variables, and stuff would be nice ROFL

standard place for configuration files = /etc

standard place for binaries = /usr/bin

standard place for system binaries = /usr/sbin

standard place for services = /etc/rc.d

standard place for variables? that you'll have to explain in further depth

Yes but not all of them follow it.... btw /usr/local vs /usr I am not saying there are standards just that they are followed only somewhat... even worse is when there is a mix of both.

BTW in gentoo place for services = /etc/init.d... that one comes to mind right now, but there are others

 

[Nothinman]

Yes but not all of them follow it.... btw /usr/local vs /usr

/usr/local is untouched by distribution packages, anything in there is your responsibility.

I am not saying there are standards just that they are followed only somewhat... even worse is when there is a mix of both.

The same thing is true of Windows, you can never completely force people to use a single method. Just look at all of the different ways to autostart programs on Windows.

BTW in gentoo place for services = /etc/init.d... that one comes to mind right now, but there are others

/etc/init.d is the standard place for the scripts, /etc/rc.d is a RH thing is is normally a symlink to /etc/init.d IIRC.

 

[Bluestealth]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Yes but not all of them follow it.... btw /usr/local vs /usr

/usr/local is untouched by distribution packages, anything in there is your responsibility.

Yeah, I will keep using it when its recommended now that I know this

BTW in gentoo place for services = /etc/init.d... that one comes to mind right now, but there are others

/etc/init.d is the standard place for the scripts, /etc/rc.d is a RH thing is is normally a symlink to /etc/init.d IIRC.

Makes sense...

Thanks for clearing this up a bit, and I know that they arn't required to follow standards for applications but Id rather they choose to keep everything in their own program folder or in the standard locations not both

 

[xtknight]

Linux doesn't have a "Program Files" (a la Windows), does it? All the binaries are stuck in /usr/bin and icons in /opt/gnome/share/icons, and the manuals somewhere else, etc.? Aren't the period-prefixed directories in the home directory like a key in HKEY_CURRENT_USER? I guess it's just arranged by type in Linux, as opposed to "by application".

 

[drag]

In Linux you could do it windows-style if you realy realy realy wanted to. But there is not much point.

I like how they don't explain what standard they're talking about or even provide any links explaining it for them.

Well this is from msnbc.
(I bet Redhat wished they partly owned their own multinational newspaper/internet/television/cable media agency!! Quite a nice way to pimp Linux)

So that's about as accurate as it gets.

What they are talking about is "The Portland Project"
http://portland.freedesktop.org/wiki/

It's a effort to bring more unification to your desktop experiance.

For instance when I am in Gnome I can specify what browser, what media player, what email proggy, etc etc I'd like to use. If I want to use Grip or use Xine for certain things or xmms or totem for other things then it's not that difficult to configure. However the problem happens when I try to use KDE applications in my Gnome desktop.

When I am using Amarok and say.. it doesn't find the lyrics for the song I am listenning to I can easily open up a search in a browser from inside Amarok.. But it doesn't use the browser I use, which is Epiphany, it uses Konquerer which is the standard selected for my KDE desktop.. which I don't use and don't have configured how I want it.

What should happen is that it should be able to detect that I prefer Epiphany and open the search up in that instead. Also for things like file dialogs or at least file managers that would be nice.

For instance If I use Gnome-VFS stuff to mount a remove Samba/Win2k3 share on my Linux desktop I don't think I can access it from any KDE application.

So that is confusing to end users. Application designers that make something that works with either Gnome or KDE can't make it work well in the other desktop. So that makes their lives difficult if they want to provide some supported application to Linux corporate desktops.

Portland's goal is to make it so that this stuff will integrate well together. Like a program could just call 'open email to tom@blah.com with such and such as the subject and this or that in the message' and have it 'just work'. The system should just be able to automaticly open up Evolution, Kmail, Thunderbird, or whatever the user has as their preference.

Sort of like how you can now drop in any EWMH-compliant window manager as a replacementn for the default window managers in KDE and Gnome. It'll do that for other commonly used apps.

There already have some sample code for cross-environment libraries and some command line tools for scripting. But obviously it needs more polish and this is what this meeting is for. They hope to make it part of the LSB. It's a result of listenning to ISV developer's problems during that Linux desktop meeting that happenned a while back.

So they COULD be talking about that.
More details
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7478724750.html

The Free Standards Group (FSG) will unveil Linux Standard Base 3.1, the first LSB version to include explicit Linux desktop application support, April 25 at the Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego. The standard has already been endorsed by Linux leaders Red Hat and Novell, along with other major Linux players such as AMD, Asianux, CA, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Mandriva, RealNetworks, Red Flag, and Turbolinux, according to the FSG.

The thing about Freedesktop.org versus Linux standard base stuff is that the Freedesktop.org folks are working _developing_ standards. Linux standards base works to identify which "standards" are actually being used and have multiple implimentations among a few different vendors then (or something like that) and then publishes this information as guidelines which developers, who wouldn't know otherwise, can use as a baseline when choosing what this or that they want to develop with or support

----------------------------------


Otherwise the other thing that has been happenning lately is that you have all these printer manufacturers and the normal Linux groups getting together to work on improving printing support for Linux. Hopefully they will impove more advanced features being supported for printers in Gnome and KDE and get things like Lexmark printers working much easier.

More details on the printing stuff.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8281593260.html

The meeting was attended by about 40 developers from printer vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard, Lanier, and Lexmark; to operating system distributors like Apple Computer, Debian, and Novell; to those two Linux desktop powers, GNOME and KDE; and more. Their job? To nail down exactly what's wrong with printing and Linux, and to work out ways to resolve these problems once and for all.

So maybe the msnbc folks thought they could kill two birds with one stone by being generic??

 

[Nothinman]

Yeah, I will keep using it when its recommended now that I know this

It's only recommended when you compile something yourself, as long as you stick to your distribution's packages it should be completely empty.

Thanks for clearing this up a bit, and I know that they arn't required to follow standards for applications but Id rather they choose to keep everything in their own program folder or in the standard locations not both

I don't know of a single sane application that doesn't stick to the 'standard' shared locations.

 

[silverpig]

There are two popular, competing graphical user interfaces for Linux, KDE and GNOME. The LSB doesn't choose between them, but mandates compatibility at a lower level of the system. That makes it possible to develop applications that should run on a system regardless of which user interface is installed, the FSG said.

QT/GTK stuff?

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: silverpig

There are two popular, competing graphical user interfaces for Linux, KDE and GNOME. The LSB doesn't choose between them, but mandates compatibility at a lower level of the system. That makes it possible to develop applications that should run on a system regardless of which user interface is installed, the FSG said.

QT/GTK stuff?

Ya.. Those two are the most interesting to people making consumer applications for a Linux desktop.

 

[Bluestealth]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Yeah, I will keep using it when its recommended now that I know this

It's only recommended when you compile something yourself, as long as you stick to your distribution's packages it should be completely empty.

Thanks for clearing this up a bit, and I know that they arn't required to follow standards for applications but Id rather they choose to keep everything in their own program folder or in the standard locations not both

I don't know of a single sane application that doesn't stick to the 'standard' shared locations.

I know of a few, but not off the top of my head, none of them were preticularly important, but a bit of a pain in the ass to get working... just had to change them to locations where I wanted the programs and where common files were... and tell some not to use kernel headers, and instead use the vanilla headers... looking backwards compiling applications against kernel headers seems like the stone age lol

BTW most of the time I compile my own stuff, I kind of like Debian/Gentoo but since I started rolling my own more often I have been happier with the results. I do use /usr/local for applications I compile myself since it is recommended but I never knew why till you told me... mainly because I was too lazy to go find out the reason... a lot of applications will still try to put themselves into /usr instead of /usr/local but as long as they have a config script its easy to fix, and even if they don't its still fairly strait forward.

 

[Nothinman]

I know of a few, but not off the top of my head, none of them were preticularly important, but a bit of a pain in the ass to get working... just had to change them to locations where I wanted the programs and where common files were... and tell some not to use kernel headers, and instead use the vanilla headers... looking backwards compiling applications against kernel headers seems like the stone age lol

That and no application should ever use the real kernel headers, they should be using sanitized versions. The only things that should need real kernel headers are out of tree kernel modules. So if the app ignores the normal standard locations and needs real kernel headers to compile the author has zero clue.

BTW most of the time I compile my own stuff, I kind of like Debian/Gentoo but since I started rolling my own more often I have been happier with the results. I do use /usr/local for applications I compile myself since it is recommended but I never knew why till you told me... mainly because I was too lazy to go find out the reason... a lot of applications will still try to put themselves into /usr instead of /usr/local but as long as they have a config script its easy to fix, and even if they don't its still fairly strait forward.

Compiling packages on your own is pretty pointless but it's your time to waste, but as long as you're compiling things yourself it's your responsibility to make sure they go where you want them. And again I can't think of anything that tried to put itself in / or /usr other than really important stuff like modutils which has to be on / because you might need to load modules to be able to mount /usr.

 

[Bluestealth]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Compiling packages on your own is pretty pointless but it's your time to waste, but as long as you're compiling things yourself it's your responsibility to make sure they go where you want them. And again I can't think of anything that tried to put itself in / or /usr other than really important stuff like modutils which has to be on / because you might need to load modules to be able to mount /usr.

When you need non-standard options it is sometimes the only choice, also when you need a newer version of an app then there is a binary... just got sick of searching arround.

 

[Nothinman]

When you need non-standard options it is sometimes the only choice, also when you need a newer version of an app then there is a binary... just got sick of searching arround.

I've been using Debian for over 6 years and, ignoring custom kernels, I can count the times I've needed to compile something myself on one hand.

 

[smack Down]

I just wish they could come up with a standard way to install applications so I could go to a website and download the program I want. Double click and choose any options I want.

 

[Nothinman]

I just wish they could come up with a standard way to install applications so I could go to a website and download the program I want. Double click and choose any options I want.

That would be by source, that's the only way to provide the level of compatibility that would require. Technically it's possible and it'll probably get better as time goes on, but with all the different combinations of compilers, shared libraries, etc it's impossible to guarantee 100% binary compatibility.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I've been using Debian for over 6 years and, ignoring custom kernels, I can count the times I've needed to compile something myself on one hand.

I'd have to be a mutant to be able to do that.