Preface
GNOME is a project to build a complete desktop and development platform based entirely on free software. Many companies, governments, schools, institutions, and individuals have deployed the GNOME desktop on their systems. If you are a developer of third-party software ("Independent Software Vendor" or ISV, or "Independent Software Developer" (ISD) if you don't do it commercially), you may want to ensure that your existing software runs properly under GNOME. This guide explains how to integrate existing software with GNOME, without actually rewriting that software to explicitly use the GNOME platform libraries and development tools.
This guide will be useful in the following situations:
- You are a software developer or distributor who has an application that is not explicitly designed to work with GNOME, but you want to ensure that it runs comfortably within a GNOME desktop.
- You are a system administrator for an institution that has deployed GNOME desktops to its users. You also have legacy or in-house applications, and you want your users of GNOME to be able to access those applications comfortably.
- You are writing a GNOME application proper and you need a checklist of basic things to do to ensure that your application integrates well with the rest of the GNOME desktop.
In general, this guide is about integrating existing software into a GNOME desktop. On the other hand, if you are considering writing new software, we encourage you to develop it completely with GNOME as your target platform; please refer to the GNOME Developer's Site for more information.
One of the main concerns of GNOME is the user experience. Users should have a comfortable computing environment: this means having a complete desktop and a set of applications which operate together in a consistent way. With relatively little work, applications which are not written explicitly with GNOME in mind can be made to run comfortably within a GNOME desktop.