The GNOME team has released GNOME 2.26, the latest release in the 2.x release branch. As everyone knows, GNOME is a multi-platform open source desktop environment. The 2.26 release continues GNOME's policy of incremental updates to a stable base, and as such, it comes packed with a boatload of new features.GNOME 2.26 includes the Brasero CD/DVD burning tool as the default burning application. Even though GNOME already supported burning capabilities, Brasero brings new features to GNOME such as audio track preview, track splitting, volume normalisation, full multisession support, integrity checks, a cover editor, and support for multiple burning backends. Note that the previous method of burning is still part of GNOME.
Work on GNOME's mail and groupware suite, Evolution , has focussed on users migrating from Windows. Evolution now supports importing Outlook .pst files, as well as support for Microsoft Exchange's MAPI protocol. This makes GNOME much more suited to work with Exchange servers.
There are also a few media-related improvements, such as the automatic subtitle downloader plugin in Media Player. There's also a new volume control applet that makes full use of PulseAudio's advanced audio features. The old Gstreamer mixer is still available to those who aren't using PulseAudio.
Other new features include, among others, video chat in Empathy, better multi monitor support, and fingerprint reader support. GNOME 2.26 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough, but if you can't wait, you can build it yourself.
