BSD Today: What’s GNOME? [GNOME Backgrounder]

“The GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME) project was
initially announced in August 1997. The project’s goals were to
provide a consistent user interface, user-friendly tools, a UNIX
standard for component programming, and a consistent mechanism for
printing. Another project goal was to provide a desktop environment
with a more open license, using the LGPL’d GTK+ library, as opposed
to the potential problems perceived by the use of Qt in the KDE
project at that time.”

“While GNOME runs on top of the X Window System and provides
window manager-like features, it is not dependent on any one window
manager. GNOME provides capabilities such as drag-and-drop,
printing, and rendering internationalized text among other things.
GNOME also promotes using software components that can communicate
with one another using Bonobo, the GNOME architecture for creating
reusable software components and compound documents.“

“Another aspect of GNOME is a completely new set of applications
to provide increased usability to users. There is a GNOME groupware
communications package called Evolution that includes mail,
calendar, messaging, and address book services. The GNOME project
also includes an office suite, originally made up of programs such
as AbiWord and Gnumeric, but there is now talk that the recently
open sourced StarOffice suite will be rewritten to become the new
GNOME Office suite. Numerous traditional programs such as mail
readers, MP3 front ends, and editors are also being written to take
advantage of GNOME’s infrastructure.”

Complete
Story