Gnome Archive

The GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 4 release, "Thank You", is ready for your bug-busting and testing pleasure. It is available for immediate download. The GNOME 2.0 Desktop is a greatly improved user environment for existing GNOME applications. Enhancements include anti-aliased text and first class internationalisation support, new accessibility features for disabled users, and many improvements throughout GNOME's user interface.

The GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 3 release, "La lluvia en Sevilla es una maravilla", is ready for your bug-busting and testing pleasure! It is available for immediate download. The Changelog is here, while the final version is expected to be released on May 1st. In related news, GTK+ 2.01 released yesterday.

Ximian announced today that its distribution of GNOME, Ximian Desktop, is now availalble for Mandrake 8.1, Yellow Dog 2.1, and SuSE 7.3 among other Linux or Unix distributions. LinuxLaboratory features a review of the Ximian Desktop 1.4. In the meantime, six new GNOME 2.0 screenshots have been placed on the GNOME dot.plan site.

An alpha version of the new GTK+ 2.0 based, Gnome 2.0, is now available for download and testing. The new version enhances anti-aliased text and internationalisation support, accessibility features and more. Screenshots available. Our Take: Note on the Gnome roadmap that they expect to also break binary and source compatibility for version 3.0 as they currently do now for 2.0. I wonder if this is what makes proprierty systems (eg. Windows) more successful commercially. The support for backwards compatibility is certainly something that users will always appreciate if they can run their closed source programs for the years to come or, for open source apps, users will be able to compile for the new Gnome version without changes in the app's source code. However, supporting older versions, can cause "bloat". Is the trade off acceptable? Discuss.

Ximian and Hewlett-Packard have announced that Ximian GNOME is now available for HP-UX as a first step towards GNOME becoming the default desktop on HP-UX replacing CDE. HP-UX is the second 'heavy' Unix which abandons CDE for Gnome after Sun Solaris 9.

In this very interesting interview at MSDN, Miguel deIcaza, the founder of GNOME, Bonobo, Gnumeric and CTO at Ximian, talks about UNIX components, Bonobo, Mono, and Microsoft .NET.

"The newest version of the GNOME open source desktop will not be ready in time to ship with Solaris 9 next year, but it will be included with a subsequent Solaris 9 quarterly update, a Sun executive told searchSolaris... Sun's ultimate goal is to make GNOME 2.0 the new default desktop for Solaris. But there will be a period of transition she said, where users will be able to choose between GNOME and CDE." Full story at searchSolaris.com.

Bonobo is the component object model of the GNOME project. Bonobo provides a COM-like model, using CORBA as a location-transparent transport. It is the foundation of the GNOME vision to provide a fully Free Gnu Network Object Model Environment. In this series of three articles, Michael Meeks, component software engineer at Ximian, examines Bonobo in more detail: The first article (already published) gives an overview of what Bonobo can do for you and how it works; the second article will focus specifically on the client side and cover how to use components others have written; and the final article of the series will discuss how to write your own components.