After a few problems using red-carpet in the beginning, it seems to like me now. The problem seems to be that you cannot start up the front-end until rcd has connected to a mirror. This is bad IMO. I really like Red carpet as a package manager, with or without the update capabilities. They should find a way to start it and make the on-line channels unavailable until rcd has managed to connect. I imagine it is useless without an internet connection like it is. I could be wrong about the whole starting up thing though, but it never allows me to connect until a long while after starting the daemon.
What new in Red Carpet. It allows you to use directories as channels, which is pretty nifty. Since I keep the iso's for Redhat 9 on my hard drive, I automount them at startup and have added them as channels to Red Carpet. So now I can pull dependencies from there if I am installing new rpms if I use Red Carpet to install them. Pretty neat heh.
Control Panel
This is actually looking very good, but the best (return for Redhat users) is the menu editing. I can now add menu items using Nautilus. I have already customized a few which were not appearing there. The control panel works very well and is ultra intuitive. I remember missing Mandrake's one, but this is turning out to be very handy indeed.
Galeon
Galeon is used here as the browser. This may actually become interesting as GNOME has adopted Epiphany for 2.4, but it works well. I do not know how to clear my drop down list in the Location bar. This is minor but can irritate. It works well though and looks very nice too.
Other
They have added a few of their own things there. Although it now calls my hard drives CD Roms in 'My Computer' and in fact, anything I mount in fstab. This is what it looks like now. The first 2 are my CD Writer and DVD-ROM and the next 3 would be hard drives (partitions) and the next 3 would be mounted iso's. I have no way of changing this that I know yet.
Acme is provided too for all your multimedia keys, and there is the volume icon for volume changing.
I can also not rename the My Computer icon, or remove it. It may be a little annoying.
The gFTP package provided by Ximian was not compiled with the gtk2 flags, and therefore looked a little 'old'. I promptly removed it and reinstalled the Redhat provided one.
We also got a new skin for XMMS, which is welcome. The more the merrier I say. It does help to give the desktop a uniform look.
Problems
I have lost the ability to use apt-get to keep my install up to date. Apt-get says there are conflicts there. If we had a contributed packages channel in Red Carpet, this could be not too big a problem, but I was accustomed to installing my 3rd party apps from there. Since I am going to be keeping XD2, apt has had to go. Red Carpet should step in its shoes nicely for all other purposes though. I don't know which has the problem there though, whether it is Red Carpet or apt.
It would not be a proper review if I did not mention the file selector. It seems a little work can actually go a long way. But the file selector stil needs improvement. It is now much easier to use with its Documents, Desktop and Home buttons. The new Gtk file selector is badly needed though because it ruins an otherwise next to perfect experience. But, then again, I would rather wait for a good selector than have a rushed one.
And this may sound improbable, but even my XMMS seems to be skipping less now.
Final Word
I would like to conclude by giving score for each of the sections I have reviewed.
Installation – (No score). I shall not even score this as it would be embarrassing. Ximian, fix this. An good idea in my opinion is to provide a iso for the installation. Then people could run an automated install from a CD. Could help matters immensely here.
Look and feel – (9/10). I rate what they have done very highly here. Everything looks top notch and is very professionally done here. It goes to sow that at times, you just need a budget(for maybe user testing) to get these things correct. This is not done by people scratching an itch, (Unless money counts as an itch), therefore it is focused for ease of use and providing excellent defaults
Customizability – (8/10). Its GNOME and therefore you will have to dig into Gconf to make much headway. But what is provided is adequate, especially comparing with Windows where you cannot change the look and feel of widgets that much.
Speed – (8/10). It does feel faster than the default Redhat GNOME, but Redhat has never been a speed demon anyway. But everything looks tweaked well.
Defaults – (9/10). The defaults provided are impressive. The only thing that prevented it from getting a perfect 10 was that the theme seemed a little too light colored and at times lacks definition. Otherwise impressive.
Usability – (8/10). Openoffice.org, whilst probably being one of the most important apps here, badly needs serious integration with the rest of the desktop. A lot of the integration here is on the surface, but it still suffers from using its own widgets. Maybe it is time to make a full fledged Gtk port whilst retaining full functionality and document compatibility. But then again, getter said than done. But the whole thing is still usable overall.
Provided apps - (8/10). The desktop comes with nearly everything necessary to have a fully working desktop which does not need too much more. The productivy apps are good, but could use even more polish and full Gtk port. (What ever happened to the Gtk port)
About the Author:
Maynard Kuona is an undergrade student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He is doing a third year in Actuarial Science (damn hard course), and he enjoys computing immensely.
- "Ximian Desktop 2 Review, Part I"
- "Ximian Desktop 2 Review, Part II"
