Gnome Archive

Phoronix has a overview of the new volume control interface for GNOME currently in development. "One of the items being worked on by Red Hat for Fedora 11 is making the GNOME volume control and sound preferences area more intuitive and easier to use. With Fedora and most other distributions now using PulseAudio, they are beginning to take advantage of some of the features available through this sound server. Some of this work involves reworking the user interface for controlling GNOME Sound Preferences, which we are providing a glimpse of in this article. Among other benefits, there is finally the ability to adjust the volume level on a per-application basis."

Seems that both Motorola and Google have interest in seeing the Linux mobile footprint evolve. With a combined contribution of $20,000, they are focusing on major changes for GNOME 3. "It will be more than a tweak," Stormy Peters stated. "It will be the whole user experience, from the look and feel, to how files are managed to how it syncs with your mobile phone -- really the whole package. It will be very much a change for users and how they use their computers."

Last week, we reviewed the Aspire One, Acer's entry into the netbook market. The small but powerful device comes preloaded with either Linux or Windows XP, and we reviewed the Linux version. Even though most people will never need to go beyond the default Linpus Linux offering on the One, more advanced users will quickly hit the wall Acer set up: it has more or less completely locked down the Xfce 4.2.2 installation on the One. This bothered me - this is a powerful machine, so I want a powerful operating system. I went for Ubuntu 8.04.1 - read on for a few thoughts on how well GNOME's user interface fares on a small-screen device such as the One.

The GNOME Foundation has decided to hire a new executive director to continue its spread. In an announcement Monday at its user conference in Istanbul, Turkey, the foundation named Stormy Peters, who co-founded the foundation and formerly managed the open source program at Hewlett-Packard, to be the group's new executive director.

Thomas Thurman of Metacity fame has written a lengthy blog post on how Metacity themes work. "This is an article about how to theme Metacity. It is a work in progress, and I have had to dig deeply to find some answers. GNOME lets you theme a bunch of different things, but we’re only talking about window border themes here, which some people call Metacity themes."

In November 2007, we reported on the GNOME Board Elections of 2007, where Jeff Waugh was getting serious slack flack from some people in the GNOME community. One of the complaints centred around Waugh's apparent inability to properly take care of requests to be syndicated on Planet GNOME, or other maintenance issues related to PGO. Six months later, this complaint is still valid, according to Rodney Dawes.

Epiphany, GNOME's web browser, will drop support for the Gecko engine, focusing on WebKit instead. "we will choose only one web engine back-end to support and concentrate our efforts on it instead of spreading our efforts to multiple back-ends and restricting us to the common features all back-ends support. This single back-end will be WebKit." Assuming this is not an April Fool's joke, that is. Seriously, we ought to just shut down teh intertubes every April 1st. It's getting out of hand.

Ars reviews GNOME 2.22, and concludes: "In version 2.22 GNOME continues to provide a high level of performance, functionality, and ease of use that contributes significantly to the viability of Linux on the desktop. Despite the numerous advances that are being made in GNOME technologies, there are still a few notable places where GNOME falls short of both open and proprietary competitors. GNOME application file dialogs, for instance, still lack basic support for file management operations such as rename and delete and don't provide support for viewing multiple file thumbnails."

GNOME 2.22 isn't officially released yet, but here's a first look already. "Every six months, the GNOME team prepares a new and revolutionary release of the ever popular GNOME desktop environment. Today, we are proud to introduce you to the latest and greatest features of an 100% FREE and open source desktop. Whether you are on a Solaris machine or the latest Ubuntu distribution, GNOME is there and with every new release it makes your life... Simply Beautiful! Let's have a look at the new features of GNOME 2.22."

GNOME 2.22.0 release candidate has been released. "This is the last unstable release before 2.22.0. It's been a pretty fun ride since September. New features. Bug fixes. Translations. Documentation. Lots of bug triaging too. And we're getting ready to start again for 2.23! But before, we need to make sure 2.22.0 will be rock-solid. There's still a few days before the hard code freeze, so it's not too late to fix this last bug you're ashamed of."

GNOME 2.21.91 has been released. "This is our second beta release on our road towards GNOME 2.22.0, which will be released in March 2008. your mission is simple : Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it."

"Back in November we started sharing some of the exciting features planned for the GNOME 2.22 and 2.24 releases, and now that the first GNOME 2.22.0 Beta release is planned for later this week, we have taken another look at the packages set for inclusion and the changes that have actually been made. While nothing groundbreaking will be introduced in GNOME 2.22, this desktop environment does have some moderate changes worth noting. In this article are eight interesting packages that either have noticeable changes since GNOME 2.20 or are new to GNOME. This list isn't all-inclusive or ordered in any particular fashion, but just eight changes that had caught our attention."

The GNOME 2.21.4 Development Release is now available: This is the third release of the GNOME 2.21.x series, heading towards the stable GNOME 2.22.x release.

GNOME 2.20.2 has been released. "This is the second update to GNOME 2.20.0. The update fixes all known and unknown bugs and crashers." Not a whole lot more to say on this one.