Gnome Archive

The GNOME project just released 2.7.1 of the popular DE. More info and changelogs follow:

Here's a kind of an application that is sorely missing from a stock Gnome installation and not many Gnome users know about: Gnome-PPP, a front-end to the wvDial, a modem/ISDN dial-up software. Read more for some quick info on the app and a screenshot.

Much has been said, and been discussed about "spatial views" (found on Mac OS X's Finder and on BeOS' Tracker). Ever since the GNOME hackers decided that Nautilus, the file manager in GNOME, would sport a spatial way of working by default, the word "spatial" has became infamous. Colin Charles tries to clear up the waters and explain the advantages of using a spatial interface.

Gnome 2.6.1 was made available, a bugfix version which was pending release for about a week. Update: Michael Hall replies to Petreley's review of Gnome 2.6.

Continuing yesterday's Gnome story where we mentioned the webcam/voice project for Gaim, Tim Ringenbach wrote us in with more info and a preliminary screenshot from their project, gaim-vv.

Gnome 3.0 is a long way off still and I have already written a wishlist for Gnome, however this time around I thought I write some specific feature requests for the next major Gnome release (coming in more than a year from now). These are applications that I would like to see included by default on Gnome 3.0 for a more full and integrated experience.

API/ABI-stable bindings for the GNOME 2.6 Development Platform, for C++, Java, and Perl are now released. That means you can seriously consider those programming languages (and others) when developing GNOME-based applications, and you can be confident that your applications will not break when future versions of these bindings are released. OSNews hopes that the Python and GTK# bindings will become part of this great set in the near future too.

Red Hat, Ximian and Debian developers are discussing the future of Gnome and its place in the desktop marketplace at Planet Gnome (scroll to read all discussions taking place). In the meantime Dropline GNOME 2.6 became available for Slackware, while the Gnome bindings have reached RC status.

In response to the article about Free Software and usability, Brad Griffith decided to write up an article about the niceties of GNOME and its future. Mirror here.

In a release that marks the fruit of six months of hard work from hackers, maintainers, translators, testers, usability team and the accessibility team, GNOME 2.6.0 continues the high standards in the areas of usability, accessibility and internationalisation with this release.

Recent advocacy from Havoc Pennington and Miguel de Icaza may disagree on the exact high-level language to use for GNOME, but they both agree that a change needs to be made. However, Edd Dumbill thinks the debate so far has been taking a rather introspective view. To focus purely on language choice is to miss the biggest part of the picture, he says.

"Mr Shrap" has written an interesting write-up on a (still) touchy topic: the button order adopted in Gnome 2 and why he doesn't like it.

Rony Klein explains a few of the reasons why he prefers Gnome over KDE, an article accompanied by screenshots illustrating his case.

Download the second beta of Gnome 2.6, while you can read the announcement and changelog here.