Preface to the alpha release of GNOME

Dear GNOME enthusiast,

This document accompanies the alpha release of GNOME, shipped in May of 1998. At this time GNOME is an interesting and useful suite of programs, but it is under very active development. This means that you will find many programs which are incomplete and some bugs which you would not expect from a mature product.

Having said this, GNOME is already today an exciting product, and many of its programs are quite useful.

What is GNOME

NOTE: If you tire of explanations and just want to get going with GNOME in a practical way, please skip the rest of this preface and read Chapter 1 immediately.

GNOME is a project which endeavors to provide a complete, consistent, state of the art and free user environment for UNIX systems. This includes:

• An application framework — this consists of a style guide for applications along with a set of libraries which enforce the style requirements. For example, the GNOME libraries allow a programmer to invoke standard menus and dialog boxes.

• A file manager — the GNOME file manager is based on the well known GNU midnight commander, which has been endowed with a GNOME–compliant graphical interface.

• A panel — this replaces the button–bars sometimes provided by UNIX window managers. The panel also allows the running programs in little squares in the panel, both by swallowing X Window programs and by running especially written applets.

• Session management support — applications are notified so they can save state information when a user logs out: the next time a session is started, these applications can pick up where they left off.

• A suite of GNOME applications — these have written (or adapted) to use the GNOME facilities, and thus present a consistent look and behaviour.

There are many more facets to GNOME, and much information can be found at the GNOME web page.

GNOME is a GNU project, was started in 1997, and has developed very quickly. GNOME can be thought of as an acronym standing for GNU Network Object Model Environment.