Sat 11 Sep 2004
A good base for starting a freedesktop.org COM spec whould be DBUS. It is already designed with the idea of replacing KDE’s DCOP. Don’t know when or if that will happen but it has been designed in. Ryan Lortie (desrt on irc) wrote up a gphoto daemon in a couple of days, using dbus as the transport to connect the daemon to Gnome-VFS. Eventually the idea is to use this to so that more than one program can access a gphoto device at the same time. Since it uses DBUS, KDE can use it also. It is pretty snappy transferring megs of photos over unix sockets. What will most likely be needed for more intense programs is a shared memory transport.
As for Evangelizing GNOME to younger people I say the best way is to not. I tried to get my brother into it when he was 12 or 13 by dual booting his box. He never knew what to do with it. Now I just use it and have him ask questions when he feels like it. I feel that one day he will find a use for it and install it himself. In my opinion it is best for people to have a specific need that can be solved directly by Linux before you start installing it for them. Once they find Linux solves that need they often start evangelzing themselves and looking into all the nooks and cranies without any promting from anyone else. Isn’t that how we all got started? So I guess the best thing to expose a person to Linux by showing them the cool things you do with it. If they have questions, answere them and let them be the one to decide when they want to try it for themselves.
–
J5