GNOME Developer Tutorials

This page still exists as an archive, but the collection of links here is quite random. Please see our official developer site at library.gnome.org.

In this section you will find tutorials for creating GNOME applications, applets, components, and more.

Tutorial Topics

Tutorials are available that cover the following areas:

Developer Platform:: GConf, Glade, Gnome Canvas, GnomeVFS GObject, Gtk+, libxml, libxslt, ORBit, Pango,
Desktop:: Gnome 2, Gstreamer, Metacity, Panel Applets, Scrollkeeper
Miscellaneous:: autoconf/automake, Internationalization, Gnome Icons, Michael Meeks on C

autoconf/automake: Mark Galassi's autoconf tutorial; Shimaki Matsubara's Japanese autoconf/automake tutorial; Online version of GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool from New Riders.

GConf: Mikael Hallendal and Richard Hult (of Imendio) wrote: Introduction to GConf and GnomeVFS.; Havoc Pennington's article on Gconf online or a PostScript copy.

Glade: Rikke D. Gile's Graphical Interface Development with Glade2.; Ishan Chattopadhyaya wrote an introductory tutorial, Starting off in Glade/GTK+.; Glade ships with a FAQ, a Turbo Start guide, and a manual that are accessible from the Help menu.

GNOME Canvas: George Lebl wrote a nice tutorial, GNOMEnclature: Livening things up (Graphics made easy using the GNOME Canvas),for IBM developerWorks.

GnomeVFS: Mikael Hallendal and Richard Hult (of Imendio) wrote: Introduction to GConf and GnomeVFS.; Mikael Hallendal and Richard Hult (of Imendio) wrote Writing GnomeVFS Modules, for IBM developerWorks' Linux Zone.

Gnome Icons: Jakub Steiner's Gnome Icons Tutorial.

GStreamer: Application Development Manual ( PostScript | pdf ); Plugin Writer's Guide ( Postscript | pdf )

Gtk+: For a start you should take a look at the GTK+ 2.0 Tutorial; Tim-Philipp Müller's GTK+ 2.0 Tree View Tutorial. (tar.gz | pdf | docbook); Havoc Pennington's mini FAQ on Setting Colors in Gtk+; Shimaki Matsubara's Japanese GTK Tutorial.; A Korean GTK+ tutorial.

Internationalization: Malcolm Tredinnick has written an excellent document, called Internationalising GNOME applications, that explains the process of adding translation support to an existing GNOME application.; Shimaki Matsubara's Japanese gettext Tutorial.; Christian Rose's L10N Guidelines for Developers.

libXML

James Henstridge wrote the "Using the SAX Interface of Libxml" tutorial that gives an explanation of what the SAX interface of libxml is, when you might want to use it, and how to write parsers with it. It is a good idea to read this if you are planning on making your application use XML to read/write data. HTML | PostScript.

The home page for the libxml (gnome-xml) project has some useful links and information.

John Fleck's libxml tutorial

libxslt: John Fleck's libxslt tutorial.; libxslt home page.

Metacity: There is a tutorial about Creating a Metacity Theme.

Michael Meeks on C: Part One
Topics: Fatal Instinct: Bad List Iteration, A Good Pattern: Good List Iteration, Pitfalls With GHashTable; Part 2
Topics: Good Taste and Readability, BonoboXObject: Real World Usage, Inheriting vs. Aggregating; Part Three
Topics: Forward Declarations, Porting Code to Gnome 2.0, Avoiding Re-Entrancy Bugs, Dereferencing Function Pointers, Electric Fence

ORBit: Ewan Birney has information on using ORBit (the CORBA implementation used by GNOME).

Panel Applets: Read Gergo Erdi's tutorial on Writing GNOME panel applets using the GTK+/GTK-- widget set. HTML | PostScript (Gnome 1.x); Andrew Burton's tutorial on Writing GNOME panel applets in Gnome2.

Pango: Tony Graham's The Pango Connection: Part 1.; Tony Graham's The Pango Connection: Part 2.

Scrollkeeper: Dan Mueth's Writing ScrollKeeper OMF Files V1.0.

How You Can Help

If you would like to contribute a tutorial, refer to the Developer Documentation Project page.