Gnome Archive

During the currently ongoing GUADEC conference in Den Haag the GNOME release team announced that GNOME 3.0 would be delayed for another six months and is now scheduled for March 2011. "We could release in September and have something working that is okayish, but it's not up to the standards we have" release team member Vincent Untz explains the reasoning. There's coverage of this issue at derStandard.at and an official GNOME press release.

The problem with just about every virtual desktop implementation is just that - they're virtual. This means that beyond the ability to move windows to specific desktops, you're still looking at exactly the same desktop, no matter what virtual desktop number you switched to. A mockup for GNOME Shell is trying to take the virtual out of virtual desktop.

The GNOME team has released version 2.30 of their open source desktop environment. "The GNOME Project's focus on users and usability continues in GNOME 2.30 with its hundreds of bug fixes and user-requested improvements. The sheer number of enhancements makes it impossible to list every change and improvement made."

Ah, Nautilus, GNOME's default file manager. It's been with us for a long time now, and it has certainly been at the centre of a number of controversies. Do we go with a spatial or a navigational Nautilus? Should we replace the location bar with a breadcrumb bar? And now, it's time to move on. Recently, it has become apparent to many that Nautilus could use a make-over.

GNOME Shell is the new core user interface for GNOME 3. GNOME Shell 2.29.0 brings a lot of new features and improvements, the most noticeable being a new message tray showing notifications sliding into the bottom of the screen, a status area for past notifications, the ability to set your presence to the user status menu, switching the overview between a grid and linear view of workspaces.

In the item we ran yesterday about GNOME and the GNU Project, one aspect got snowed under a little bit. It turns out a claim made in the iTWire article about the role a blog post by Miguel De Icaza was false, and even though the claim wasn't ours, I did repeat it, and therefore, should correct it too. I also need to offer apologies for not framing the opening of the article clear enough - had I framed it better, a lot of pointless discussion and name-calling could've been avoided.

The GNOME Journal team has published issue 17 of the GNOME Journal, titled "Women In Open Source". This is their first issue with a unified theme, and with all articles written by women from the open source community. The idea and execution of this issue was created by the GNOME Women community. It comes packed with articles about GNOME and its underlying frameworks.

GNOME 3, the much talked about next generation GNOME introduces a radical shift from the interface found in GNOME 2.x. Digitizor has a quick visual tour of GNOME 3 in Ubuntu 9.10.

Today, the GNOME team has released GNOME 2.28. It builds on the solid foundation laid out by all the previous releases, and adds in a number of new features and improvements, on top of all the bug fixes and performance improvements, of course.

Have you ever been bitten by accidentally loading multiple instances of the same application in GNOME? When you click on the launcher of an already-running application in GNOME, it will load up another instance of the same application, instead of switching to the already running one. This can lead to bugs and other unforeseen behaviour, which of course isn't desirable. In GNOME 3, this issue has been resolved.

This morning Intel has announced the release of Clutter 1.0.0, the graphics library that is gaining speed within the GNOME development community (it is used by Gnome Shell). "This toolkit provides a library/API for creating rich user interfaces in a relatively easy to use way that conceals much of the challenges of programming your application to directly use OpenGL or OpenGL ES. Clutter is already being used within Moblin V2 and its user interface is very impressive."

Quite a little interesting tidbit on Planet GNOME today. As we all know, the default file manager for the GNOME desktop is Nautilus. While there's nothing inherently wrong with it, it does have this odd interface where actually more screen space is dedicated to controls and buttons than to the actual part that matters: your files. As part of Ubuntu's Papercuts project, a fix has been worked on.

Git has increasingly become the standard distributed source code management tool for free and open source software projects with the likes of Xorg, Samba, WINE, Perl and Ruby on Rails using it already. GNOME has now joined the Git bandwagon. A survey among GNOME contributors showed Git to be by far the most popular choice. Developers Behdad Esfahbod, Kristian Høgsberg, Owen Taylor, and Federico MenaQuintero and a number of volunteers formed a team and have helped migrate all the GNOME projects to Git. They have published the details of the migration.

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.