Skip to Content
Professional Linux® Programming
book

Professional Linux® Programming

by Jon Masters, Richard Blum
March 2007
Intermediate to advanced
502 pages
14h 4m
English
Wrox
Content preview from Professional Linux® Programming

Chapter 11. The GNOME Developer Platform

You are probably familiar or at least acquainted with the popular GNOME desktop environment. Often seen as a competitor to the similarly popular K Desktop Environment (KDE), GNOME is one of the flagship open source projects and one of the best ways to make GNU/Linux systems usable by the average person.

The desktop environment is based upon a stack of libraries known as the GNOME Developer Platform; the applications such as the panel, session manager, and web browser, which form the user's experience of GNOME are known as the GNOME Desktop. Both Platform and Desktop are released simultaneously on a strict every-six-month schedule, so the development philosophy is generally one of incremental improvement instead of radical change and rewriting. Some libraries usually considered as part of the Platform are not released on this schedule—Glib and GTK+ are developed on their own schedule, as they are not a part of the GNOME Project even though they share many core developers.

This chapter explores the GNOME Developer Platform by building a simple music player application using only libraries found within the Platform. By the end of the chapter, you should have a good starting point for further exploration of the libraries and the development of new GNOME applications. To assist you, a number of possible improvements to the music player will be presented, which will require some research to discover the appropriate solutions for. It is assumed that ...

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.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

PHP Advanced for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickPro Guide

PHP Advanced for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickPro Guide

Larry Ullman

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780471776130Purchase book