Observations on Gnome-2.14

[Kevin Oberman]

I have one system running V6-stable that is now running Gnome-2.14. Some
things are really nice about it, but there are some oddities and some
things that need touching.

First, an easy one...netspeed_applet needs to be rebuilt. I think a bump
of PORTREVISION is in order.

When I first started 2.14, I got messages that several icons
(gnome-calculator, logout, screen-lock) could not be found and were
displayed as white icons with a red 'X'. But after acknowledging the
message, all of the icons appeared and work fine. 

This might be a race as I am running i386 on an AMD dual-core 4400+
Athlon-64 processor and it may be getting something done before things
are ready. This is also intermittent. It happens about half the time
when I start Gnome. (I use startx, not gdm.)

On several start operations the icons in the weather applet are
missing. Other times they appear. Probably the same "can't find icon"
issue.

gnome-terminal has sometimes crashed on logout from Gnome. I have not
tried to debug this at all. I do see that the contents of
.gnome2/session no longer have information on all of the gnome-terminal
windows. Just a simple command, so I guess gnome-terminal is storing
this somewhere else. (I need to find out where to debug why at least one
window never restarts.)

Sessions are a bit messed up. As already reported, all manually
startup-sessions are gone after the upgrade and must be re-entered. No
longer is there an ordering option, but this might be settable via the
"Current Session" tab. I'll paly around with it if I get a little time.

The logout tool no longer has a check-box to save the session. I THINK I
saved it by going into the "Sessions" prefs and selecting to
automatically save the session on logout and logging out. I then logged
back in and de-selected that option. There is still an option (which is
selected) to "Ask on logout". It appears to be a no-op in 2.14, though.

On several start operations the icons in the weather applet are
missing. Other times they appear. Probably the same "can't find icon"
issue.

Noise level issue: we really need a FreeBSD splash. The default Gnome
splash is just too boring looking.

Problems I was having with calling ssh-add at session start are gone. I
never reported this, but if I included ssh-add (with gnome-ssh-askpass)
in the "Startup Programs" the startup would have for between 1 and 3
minutes and sometimes the wnck-applet would go into a loop and eat one
CPU. Killing wnck-applet would fix the problem as it automatically
restarts. In any case, this issue looks like it is gone!

Big win in performance. Not everything is faster, but many things are
very noticeably faster. I'll have a better idea about this tomorrow when
I have a slower system upgraded. My dual-core is new and things always
seem to be fast, but I think I really like it.

Thanks to the entire Gnome team for the work on this. It has thus far,
been the least painful Gnome version upgrade I have ever had.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634