Chromatic slipped this review under our door. You need a few laughs at this point in the summer (ok, Northern hemisphere residents at least) to distract you from the heat of summer and the cost of air conditioning, and Joy of Linux has some esoteric geek humor in store, even if it's intended mostly as a mostly serious field guide to Linux nerddom for amateur anthropologists, like parents, girlfriends and bosses.

battery841 writes: "Evolution 1.0 Beta 1 has been released. An announcement has been released. The RPMs and tarballs can be downloaded from Ximian. This is the first beta release, and a major step to the much awaited 1.0 release." The last time I tried Evolution it was very buggy, but that was a long time ago - time to give it another try.

Last week, you asked Shawn Gordon questions about his venture TheKompany, an outfit which has been (fairly) quietly working on a small flotilla of software for GNU/Linux systems, and some cross-platform applications as well. His responses are below; you might be surprised at a few of them. (And some lucky Debian hacker might even pick up a job.)

pdiaz writes: "Here is a report made by Sun Microsystems people about GNOME usability. They collected a bunch of professionals (lawyers, engineers, Graphic Designers, etc..) and put them in front of a Gnome desktop. They were asked to perform some tasks and tell what some icons, menus, etc., do. Some quotes are really funny, like when they asked what does the terminal emulator icon launch." Very interesting stuff, and this approach is necessary because once you've gotten accustomed to the system it's no longer possible for you to evaluate how it appears to an inexperienced user.

We sent 10 of your questions to IBM Linux exec Scott Handy a while back. Here are the answers. As is common with corporate types these days, a PR person had a hand in what was said, so please take that into account as you read on. But I don't think anything much was changed (I can usually tell) in this case, though.

ahde asks: "I tried to install Ximian Gnome 1.4 on a customized Redhat 6.1 box that their Red Carpet installer didn't like. No big deal, I thought I'd just download Gnome and install it myself, only to discover that there is apparently no such thing. Gnome.org tells you to download from Ximian, which only allows installs through their Red Carpet. I have nothing against Ximian, but is there another way to get Gnome without downloading a hundred separate RPMs and then going through dependency hell?"

metalhed77 writes: "A new version of the Nautilus file manager (1.0.4) has made its way out to the gnome ftps. here's the article on linuxtoday. It includes various improvements which are described on linux today, these primarily consisted of bug fixes and speed ups." Good to see that the effort that went into making Nautilus friendly wasn't wasted. But if you want to browse more than your hard drive, HeUnique points out another interesting project which is not distributed with the official KDE package. It's called: KDENOX ("KDE No X" -- you can use it with X or with framebuffer and QT Embedded: here's a screenshot). The gain? You get Konqueror without KDE, with SSL, cookies, proxy, bookmarks, fonts, and without KDE itself. The executable is small (4MB), doesn't take much RAM, and it works very nicely on low end machines ... (grab it from KDE CVS). Update: 07/08 01:17 AM by T : Here's a screenshot elsewhere; first person to mirror gets a lollipop.

Reader tempestdata indicates this CNN story, writing: "It appears Microsoft is facing quite a bit of opposition for its new licensing program." It looks like Redmond is granting a one-fiscal-year reprieve to the many companies who were caught off-guard by the announcement of new Microsoft licensing plans. Perhaps some of those companies would be interested in the new KDE 2.2.beta1 -- at least KDE and GNOME don't seem likely to institute monthly subscription fees.

Tonight, Slashback brings you good news on the Gnome Front, news that's either sobering or annoying on the Passport patrol, and a very useful checklist for those caught outside, simulating space travel, and pretty much alone.

jacobito writes "Perhaps this hasn't been posted because it could ignite a flame war, but here goes: The gnome-hackers list has been the center of some high drama lately. Martin Baulig, the Gnome 2.0 release coordinator, resigned this weekend due to disagreements over the use of bonobo-conf versus gconf and his license to implement architectural changes more or less unilaterally. Through the ensuing melee, fingers have been pointed both at individuals and at corporations, harsh language has been used, and at one point Miguel de Icaza made the memorable proclamation "You can now flame me, I am full of love." Really, though, neither the bickering nor the technical details are what make this affair newsworthy--what is exciting about this is watching a decentered, non-hierarchical, mostly-cooperative group of talents work through the process of getting along with each other and settling disputes, all without resorting to imposing a single dictatorial will upon the group (so far). To that end, Havoc Pennington has posted a draft of a Gnome Enhancement Procedure to provide a structured change process which will hopefully prevent future flamefests. Good reading."

infodragon writes "Linux Power has a really good interview with Jim Gettys, one of the origional X developers and now actively involved with GNOME." He's also done much work with the handheld iPaq.

accountant asks: "A very close friend of mine is a qualified usability tester. She gained her Master's Degree last September and now has a good job with a mega corporation. Unfortunately, times being what they are that mega corporation is looking at a mega merger and mega job cuts. It's tough finding jobs in usability at the moment (a lot of companies haven't grasped the concept of usability, nor usability specialists, and a lot of dot coms have no cash to take on more staff). It's especially tough if you have less than one year of experience. Usability, especially on the desk top, is a major priority for Open Sourced environments like KDE and Gnome. Who's doing the testing in such Open Source environments? Are they doing sizeable studies, running focus groups and doing statistical analysis on user test results? Money is handy, of course, but there must be opportunities to feed a resume and help the Open Source community. Your thoughts and URLs please?"

navindra writes: "While KDE and GNOME often grab the headlines, other projects are silently making progress. Dennis Leeuw tries to make sense of the situation in this interesting GNUstep article featured on LWN Daily."

John Buswell wrote a little opinion thing wrt Mandrake's Donations Page. He raises the arguable point: why would you donate money to a for-profit company? I've written my response too which is full of all sorts of pompous rhetoric to go along with it.

jiggywhiteboy writes: "Sun has released a preview version of the Gnome desktop for Solaris 8. The release includes version 1.4 of the desktop, Nautilus, Gnome-VFS, Bonobo, and GConf. Sun warns: "Exploring the GNOME 1.4 Desktop is an unsupported prerelease of the next-generation desktop for the Solaris Operating Environment. Given its prerelease status, we recommend that this software be installed on a non-mission-critical system, and used only by those who regularly test prerelease products" Try it out!"

Reader Torulf contributed the below review of Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface .Though the book does not spend much time on Open Source software, it emphasizes ideas that every programmer probably ought to bear in mind -- at least if they wants hisprograms to have users. (And yes, he takes explicit exception to some UNIX truisms.)

We've run several stories about Eazel, and recently posted word on its recent financial troubles and likely shutdown. Gramps writes "Eazel is indeed shutting down but the good news is that Nautilus development will continue. It's all in Bart Decrem's email to the gnome-hackers mailing list. It's been a great ride. Thanks, folks." (Read more.)

Florian Cramer asks: "There are many good addressbooks/calendars for GNU/Linux (plan, ical, jpilot, kalendar, gnome-calendar, gnome-card, to name only a few), but they all require X11. Does anyone know a decent console-based addressbook/calendaring solution, perhaps even one which can sync its data with Palm Pilots? That would be great for all the vi/mutt/lynx/bash people out there, and welcome for (a) underpowered hardware and (b) future Linux-based keyboard PDAs."

Isldeur writes: "Dennis Powell has a very interesting article on GNOME, Eazel, and the control thereof. However, while it is very thought provoking, it might inspire some heat. Still, I think these things are manifestly important to the ideal of Free Software to figure out!" A very well written article that says a lot of truth. I tend to think that some points are over beaten (lack of binaries for example. So what? Anyone can compile and distribute their own). Especially interesting is the point about Eazel and Paypal, and the comparison to OS/2. The difference, of course, is that this is Free Software in the speech sense, so it's a little more important than OS/2 IMHO. But there's some spicy words in here, and it's worth thought for those with objective minds.

keithp writes: "XFree86, Gnome and KDE are sponsoring the first XFree86 Technical Conference to be held concurrently with ALS in Oakland this November. We're looking for people interested in presenting novel and exciting stuff they're doing with XFree86 at all levels -- from X server hacks to toolkits, applications, theming and 3d graphics. There's also space for tutorials, BOFs and working groups -- if you're involved in an X-related group interested in getting together for non-electronic communication, we've got just the place."