The first in a new series of development builds of GNOME has been released. You can compile GNOME 2.13.1 by using these jhbuild modulesets. Planned features can be found here.
Philip Langdale of the Galeon team just announced that some major Galeon developers decided at the GNOME summit that the way forward for Galeon (which hasn't gotten much development in the last few months) was to shift focus to expanding the power of Epiphany's extensions system, and coding Galeon functionality as Epiphany extensions.
Here is a list of usability issues concerning GNOME. "Some time ago I decided to note everything that didn't make sense to me while using Hoary/Breezy with GNOME, or what I thought could be implemented better. I found the time to go through the list again, clarifying somt things and writing some use cases where each problem applies. Some of these might seem very nitpicky, but details are important too."
GNOME developers are making various changes to the open source desktop environment that should make it more suitable for embedded environments. Future versions of GNOME will include improved compatibility with styluses and performance enhancements, according to GNOME Foundation director Murray Cumming on Friday. This will include a focus on the GTK+, a toolkit used by GNOME to create graphical user interfaces.
"A crack team of QA and desktop specialists working at Red Hat is pleased to announce the public release of Dogtail. Dogtail is a GUI test automation framework written in Python that uses Accessibility (a11y) technologies to communicate with desktop applications. Dogtail scripts are written in Python and executed like any other Python program."
The first point release of the stable 2.12.x series of Gnome has been
released. This release includes the latest bugfixes and other
improvements such as updated translations.
"The time it takes to log in to GNOME has not improved much in recent years and does not compare favourably with other systems, especially closed-source systems. This work attempts to determine what causes GNOME startup to be slow and what can be done to address the problem."
Ken Mays of Blastwave.org has ported GNOME 2.12.0 to Sun Solaris x86 and has stable packages available for downloading here. Instructions for downloading other Blastwave packages are available in the user guide and mirrors section of the Blastwave organization's website.
The latest release of the GNOME Journal is available. This edition includes stories on Google's Summer of Code, GOCollab, the Banshee music player, and more.
The Gnome Project released version 2.12 yesterday. We had a quick look at it by using the latest Gnome Live CD (1.12-pre) and Foresight 0.9.0 (2.12 final) and here are our thoughts over 2.12 and Gnome's status in general.
"Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.12, the latest
version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment." Important changes include, but are not limited to: Clearlooks set to default theme, improved file manager (Nautilus), new document viewer (Evince), and much more. The release notes are here, download information can be found here.
"We all know that power management in Linux isn't all that it should be. All this is changing with the rise of Gnome Power Manager. This short article will show the progress we have made on the gnome-power mailing list, and the result of all the hard work from the various people contributing to the list. I'll cover what progress we have made, and detail some of the packages that exist at the moment."
GNOME 2.12 will be released to the world on September 7th, 2005, culminating 6 months of very exciting work by members of the project. A number of exciting technologies come together in GNOME 2.12 that will set the standard for free software desktops to come. Here is a sample of some of the outstanding work that has gone into GNOME thanks to its many contributors.
This recent article on Epiphany has garnered many comments, both on FootNotes and OSNews. This followup article addresses some concerns that have been raised about Epiphany.
Epiphany is a web browser for the GNOME desktop that aims to be simple and easy-to-use. FootNotes, a GNOME news site, has posted the Epiphany: The Web through the eyes of GNOME article.
GNOME 2.11.5 has been released. As with the Linux kernel, odd-numbered versions indicate development releases. Download: platform, desktop, and bindings.