Gnome Archive

A very, very long time ago I personally advocated the inclusion of a certain feature into GNOME. We set up a poll at OSNews, which resulted in a very, very resounding "yes!" from the OSNews community - many of which are GNOME users. The feature in question was the global application menubar, which allowed the GNOME desktop to have a menu bar atop the screen similar to that of Mac OS X. The poll is long gone, the debate thread in the Bugzilla has died out, and no decision has yet been made. I wanted to know where this feature stands, and how much the developers have improved it, and I was in for a surprise.

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."

The GNOME project has released GNOME 2.24 today. In case you're new here: "GNOME 2.24 is the latest version of the GNOME Desktop: a popular, multi-platform desktop environment for your computer. GNOME's focus is ease of use, stability, and first class internationalisation and accessibility support. GNOME is Free and Open Source Software and provides all of the common tools computer users expect of a modern computing environment, such as e-mail, groupware, web browsing, file management, multimedia and games. Furthermore, GNOME provides a flexible and powerful platform for software developers, both on the desktop and in mobile applications." GNOME 2.24 comes packed with changes.

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 KDE project saw the writing on the wall. They saw that they had reached a certain limit when it came to what could be done with the KDE 3.x series - they named it the "big friggin' wall", and decided that in order to get over that wall, incremental updates wouldn't do - they needed massive changes, a big jump, and they went for it. It's been a rough road, but it seems as if KDE 4.1 is showing signs of the vision becoming a reality. And it now seems as if several people within the GNOME community are seeing the writing on the wall too: GNOME 2.x has reached its goal - now what?

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."

GNOME 2.22.1 has been released. "This is the first update to GNOME 2.22. Come and see all the bug fixing, all the new translations and all the updated documentation brought to you by the wonderful team of GNOME contributors! A lot of work has been done in the stable branch to make it even more solid than it was."

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.

The GNOME development community has announced the official release of version 2.22 after six months of development. GNOME is an open-source desktop environment that supplies a complete user interface and an assortment of programs for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. GNOME 2.22 includes some important new architectural features and a handful of significant new programs. Among the most important enhancements in GNOME 2.22 are the GVFS virtual file system framework, which brings improved network transparency to GNOME desktop applications, and the PolicyKit framework, which provides improved support for secure privilege elevation.

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."

The GNOME Foundation is running an accessibility outreach program, offering USD 50000 to be split among individuals. This program will promote software accessibility awareness among the GNOME community as well as harden and improve the overall quality of the GNOME accessibility offering. The program is sponsored by GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google's Open Source Program Office, Canonical, and Novell. This is the second in a series of outreach programs coordinated and run by the GNOME Foundation.

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."

There is a controversy in the Linux world. It doesn't have to do with Microsoft, or anything overtly technical. It may seem, to the outsider, the open source equivalent of the question, "Boxers or briefs?" But it's much more serious than that. More here.

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.