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Friday 03rd of September 2010

GNOME Desktop Environment

GNOME desktop environment screenshot

GNOME desktop environment logoGNOME is a desktop environment—the graphical user interface which runs on top of a computer operating system—composed entirely of free software. It is an international project that 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 as part of Java Desktop System in Solaris.

The name originally stood for GNU Network Object Model Environment, though this acronym is deprecated.

The GNOME project provides two things: The GNOME desktop environment, an intuitive and attractive desktop for users, and the GNOME development platform, an extensive framework for building applications that integrate into the rest of the desktop.

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.

 

Major subprojects

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.
  • GVFS – 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
 

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