A first look at Ximian Desktop 2
Source: Linux World
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.
