Linux and GNOME on the desktop What next

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Linux and GNOME on the desktopWhat next ?

• Jody Goldberg
• GNOME Foundation Board

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What is GNOME

• Started in 1997 at the University of Mexico
• A complete free desktop environment

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Technical Goals Usability

• Usability
• Internationalization
• Accessibility
• Portability

• Consistency (HIG)
• Human Interface Guidelines
• Simplicity
• Few visible options
• Editor for less frequently used settings

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Technical Goals Internationalization

• Usability
• Internationalization
• Accessibility
• Portability

• Pango
• Unicode
• Extensive translation and localization teams

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Technical Goals Accessibility

• Usability
• Internationalization
• Accessibility
• Portability

• ATK, AT-SPI
• Accessibility Tool Kit
• Also used in OOo
• User tools
• Magnifier
• GOK
• Dasher
• 2002 Hellen Keller Award

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Technical Goals Portability

• Usability
• Internationalization
• Accessibility
• Portability

• Languages
• Python, Perl
• C, C
• Platforms
• Windows
• Novell and GAIM
• Macintosh
• CinePaint
• Handhelds
• GPE

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Management Goals Releases

• Time based releases
• Release team to coordinate the myriad elements

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Project Goals Foundation

• Elected by project contributors
• Non-Technical coordination
• Plan and fund conferences
• Handle Trademarks
• Advisory board

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Project Goals ISV Support

• Lesser GPL (LGPL) platform libraries
• API/ABI stability
• Coordinate problem reports

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Deployments China

• Java Desktop System from Sun
• China committed to deploying 200 million open
  standards-based desktops over time

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Deployments Largo Florida

• Municipal Government
• 900 Users
• Total annual budget of 1.3 M USD
• Now running tablets in the Police Cars

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Deployments Sao Paolo Overview

• Public access points running GNOME for entire
  province
• 72 of 107 centers have been deployed so far
• 150,000 Users per week
• 10,000 USD per center

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Deployments Sao Paolo Map

• www.telecentros.sp.gov.br/mapa.php

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Deployments Sao Paolo ATMs
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Deployments Extremadura, Andalucia

• Provinces in Spain
• 80,000 Machines in the first phase for education
• Additional 240,000 machines in municipal
  governments in the next phase

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Things to Improve shared platform

• Projects develop their own platform libs
• Glib vs nspr vs QT vs standard c vs CORBA
• How many string apis do we need ?
• MIME types and their handlers
• Mozilla vs GNOME vs KDE
• Freedesktop.org
• .NET ?
• Adopt the Gettys Doctrine

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Things to Improve MS Office Compatibility

• Good
• Applications are generally usable
• Some are starting to surpass MS Office
• "Persons who wish to use a spreadsheet to perform
  statistical analyses, and who are concerned about
  the accuracy of their results, are advised to use
  Gnumeric rather than Excel.
• Dr. B. D. McCullough
• Not so Good
• VBA import and translation is still unsolved
• Few apps support encryption
• Word Art (WMF/EMF) display is at best ugly

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Things to Improve Fonts

• Bitstreams Vera fonts solve the Out of the Box
  problem
• Symbol fonts do not match magic MS bullets
• No free metric compatible fonts
• Arial
• Bitstream Vera

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Coming Attractions Evolution Integration

• Make the addressbook and calendar easily
  available to all desktop applications
• S/MIME support
• Aggregate multiple calendars
• OpenGroupware.org backend
• Groupwise backend

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Coming Attractions File Selector

• At long last !
• GTK 2.4 contains GNOME-VFS and stock filesystem
  implementations

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Coming Attractions Management

• Building a child proof desktop
• Supporting kiosk deployments for libraries,
  government and education
• Corporate deployments
• Decreased support costs
• Remove Control
• GNOME-Network VNC sharing tool

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Coming Attractions Dashboard

• A prototype context sensitive association engine

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More Information

• Web Sites of interest
• GNOME http//www.gnome.org
• Extremadura
• http//www.linex.org/linex2/linex/ingles/index_i
  ng.html
• Brazil Telecentros
• http//www.telecentros.sp.gov.br/english/index.php
  
• Questions ?
• jody_at_gnome.org