What is GNOME?

GNOME is the GUI desktop of the GNU Project.

To quote from the original announcement from comp.os.linux.announce, GNOME is intended to be "a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based entirely on free software."

I, your lowly FAQ maintainer, like to explain GNOME as everything that's expected in a modern programming environment. In this respect, it is approximately equivalent to CDE, Win32, NextStep, or KDE. The big difference is that, unlike any of the above-mentioned examples, every single component of GNOME is Free Software.

For the project geographers out there, here are some of the higher mountains to be found in GNOME-land:

• GNOME uses the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker Architecture to allow software components to inter-operate seamlessly, regardless of the language in which they are implemented, or even what machine they are running on! (See CORBA)

• The GNOME community is working hard on developing an object model called Bonobo. Based on CORBA and similar to Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding, v2 (OLE2), Bonobo will allow programmers to export and/or import componentized resources. This, for example, would allow users to use whatever editor they like in their development environment, provided that their editor supported via CORBA a standardized editor interface (See Bonobo)

• GNOME is not tied to any one window manager. You can chose your favorite window manager and use it with GNOME. (See Window Manager)

• GNOME uses the Gimp Tool Kit (GTK+) as the graphics toolkit for all graphical applications. GTK+ has tons of neat features, but my three favs are: (1) support for multiple languages, including C, C++, Objective-C, Scheme, Perl, and others; (2) themability, where a user can change the look and feel of all GTK+ apps on a machine while apps are running, which is just unbelievably cool; (3) and finally, GTK+ is licensed under the LGPL, meaning that it is completely Free Software, just like the rest of GNOME. (See GTK+)

• Along with GTK+, GNOME uses Imlib, an image library for the X Window System which supports multiple image formats, from XPM to PNG, and multiple bit-depths, from 24-bit True Color down to 1-bit Black and White, all transparently to the programmer. (See Imlib)

• All GNOME applications are session aware. This means, e.g., that if you shut down the GNOME word processor and then start it back up again, it will open up the document which you had open before, and put your cursor back at the same place. This is accomplished via the X Session Management system, as implemented in the GNOME Session Manager. (See Session Management)

• GNOME uses the DocBook SGML standard for all documentation, which allows programmers to write documentation in a straightforward way. Documentation can then be viewed with the GNOME help browser, or rendered into HTML and viewed with a web browser, or converted into LaTeX or postscript and printed out. (See SGML)

• GNOME supports the Uniforum standard internationalization and localization methods, allowing support for new languages to be added without even requiring a recompile of the application. (See Internationalization & Localization)

• GNOME applications will support several Drag and Drop protocols for maximum interoperability with other applications. (See Drag and Drop)

• GNOME will support 3D programming with OpenGL, allowing people to use 3-dimensional graphics right in their GNOME apps, whether they be scientific applications or games. GNOME uses Mesa, which is a free software implementation of the OpenGL standard. (See OpenGL)

If all of this seems ambitious, that's because it is! Read on to find out more!