Skip to Main Content
Linux in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition
book

Linux in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition

by Ellen Siever, Stephen Figgins, Aaron Weber
June 2003
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
944 pages
43h 1m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Linux in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition

Chapter 17. GNOME

One of the two popular desktop environments used with Linux, GNOME is provided as the default desktop for Red Hat, Debian, and several other popular distributions. As a graphical environment, GNOME provides users with a highly customizable user interface and consistent functionality of common GUI features such as menus, toolbars, and buttons. In addition, it offers users a growing set of native applications to create a productive computing system. The number and quality of applications are a testament to the developer-friendly GNOME libraries; many GNOME technologies are also used in nongraphical or totally unrelated software. GNOME is distributed with most Linux distributions, and you can also get it from the GNOME web site (http://www.gnome.org) or from Ximian (http://www.ximian.com), a company that specializes in the GNOME desktop.

GNOME stands for "GNU Network Object Model Environment,” and although the name is admittedly obscure, it does point to one of GNOME’s core technologies: its CORBA-based objects. CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) specifies methods that allow interaction among applications through the sharing and embedding of component objects. For example, a spreadsheet created by Gnumeric (a GNOME spreadsheet program) can be placed as an object into an AbiWord document, and the Nautilus file browser can display images, web pages, and so forth by embedding an image viewer and HTML display engine. GNOME uses two libraries to do this: ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

Ellen Siever, Stephen Figgins, Robert Love, Arnold Robbins
Linux in Action

Linux in Action

David Clinton
Hands-On System Programming with Linux

Hands-On System Programming with Linux

Kaiwan N. Billimoria, Tigran Aivazian
Embedded Linux for Developers

Embedded Linux for Developers

Alexandru Vaduva, Alex González, Chris Simmonds

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596004826