The GNOME Project

GNOME is an acronym for GNU's Network Object Model Environment. GNOME addresses a number of issues that have not previously been addressed in the UNIX world, such as:

The GNU GNOME project was initially announced in August 1997. After just one year of development, approximately two hundred programmers worldwide are now involved in the project.

The original announcement called for developers to shape the GNOME project in a number of forums: the GNU announce mailing lists; the Guile mailing list; and the GTK+ and GIMP mailing lists. The programmers and other people who influenced the project were mainly free software enthusiasts with diverse areas of expertise, including graphics programming and language design.

The GNOME team has been working steadily toward creating a foundation for future free software development. GNOME provides the toolkit and reusable component set to build the free software end users are eager for.

Our recent releases of the GNU Network Object Model Environment have been GNOME 0.20, the first version of GNOME that showed signs of integrations, released in May 1998; the Drooling Macaque 0.25 release, with more features; and finally, our latest public release, GNOME 0.30, codenamed Bouncing Bonobo.

The GNOME 0.20 release was the first release included in a CD-ROM distribution. Red Hat 5.1 shipped with a technology preview of the GNOME desktop environment and it was first demonstrated at the 1998 Linux Expo in North Carolina.

Before the Drooling Macaque release, GNOME software releases were coordinated by two or three people on the team. This became a significant burden, as precious time was being used coordinating each release. We have been trying to make the release process more modular and have assigned different modules to package maintainers. Each package maintainer is responsible for packing, testing and releasing their packages independently of the main distribution, which we consider to be the core libraries and the core desktop applications. So far we have had some success, but there is still room for improvement. We will continue to polish the release process to make it simpler.

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The most recent GNOME release, Bouncing Bonobo, is the first to feature the GNOME spreadsheet Gnumeric.

In January 1998, Red Hat announced the creation of the Red Hat Advanced Development Laboratories (RHAD). The initial objective of Red Hat Labs was to help the GNOME effort by providing code and programmers and by helping us manage the project resources.

All code contributed to GNOME by Red Hat Advanced Laboratories has been provided under the terms of the GNU GPL and the GNU LGPL licenses. Several GTK+ and GNOME developers have been hired by Red Hat and they have rapidly provided the GNOME project with a number of important features.

For example, Rasterman has implemented themes for GTK+; the GTK+ themes allow a user to change the appearance of the widgets. This is done by abstracting the widget drawing routines from the toolkit and putting those drawing routines in modules that can be loaded at runtime. Thus, the user can change the appearance of applications without shutting them down or restarting the desktop.

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GTK+ themes are fully working. So far, a number of theme front-ends have been written. At the time of this writing, available themes include Motif, Windows95, Metal, native-GTK+ and a general purpose Bitmap-based engine (see Resources). The web site http://gtk.themes.org/ keeps an up-to-date list with many contributed themes from which to choose.

Various important changes to the GTK+ toolkit required for the GNOME project, such as the menu keyboard navigation code and the enhanced “Drag and Drop” protocols (XDND and Motif DND), were written by Owen Taylor, a famous GTK+ hacker now working for Red Hat Labs.

Assorted applications were created or are maintained nowadays by the GNOME team at RHAD as well: the Ghostscript front end (by Jonathan Blandford), the GNOME Help Browser and the GNOME RPM interface (Marc Ewing and Michael Fullbright), the GNOME Calendar and GNOME Canvas (Federico Mena) and the ORBit CORBA 2.2 implementation (Elliot Lee).