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 Networked Object Model Environment.