Gnome Archive

Here's a tour of the pre-alpha demo release of GNOME Online Desktop included in Fedora 8. Learn more about what it does and how you can get involved in the project, writes Havoc Pennington.

"A FOSSCamp session led by Red Hat developers presented the GNOME Online Desktop project, the nexus of GNOME's efforts to integrate support for modern web services into the open source desktop environment. As social networking web sites and other Web 2.0 technologies become more pervasive, some believe that desktop computers will increasingly be seen primarily as vehicles for accessing content that resides in the cloud. This shift away from conventional desktop applications will give open source software a bit of an advantage, since web applications are largely platform-neutral. Providing improved web services integration in the desktop environment could theoretically make GNOME a more appealing choice for a growing number of users who depend primarily on web applications."

Ars has reviewed GNOME 2.20. "GNOME 2.20 was officially released last week after six months of development. The new version includes strong incremental improvements that contribute to a better user experience and provide more flexibility and integration opportunities for third-party software developers."

GNOME 2.20 has been released. "The improvements in GNOME 2.20 include: Improved support for right-to-left languages; desktop search integrated into the file chooser dialog; convenient new features in the Evolution email and calendar client; enhanced browsing of image collections; simplified system preferences; efficient power management and incredibly accurate laptop battery monitoring. Developers receive more help with application development thanks to a new version of the GTK+ toolkit, improved tools, and a great new documentation web site."

GNOME 2.20.0 beta 2 (2.19.91) has been released. "This is our eighth development release on our road towards GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007. All new features should all be there, so your mission is simple : Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it."

"It seems like just yesterday that the GNOME Project got its start, but actually it was a decade ago that Miguel de Icaza got the ball rolling. While de Icaza has largely focused his time on Mono recently, the GNOME community has kept making progress. To get some perspective on GNOME's history, I spoke to de Icaza and longtime GNOME contributor and GNOME Foundation board member Jeff Waugh."

"We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based entirely on free software." Those were the opening lines of Miguel De Icaza's email announcing the GNU Network Object Model Environment, better known as GNOME, exactly (in my timezone) ten years ago, on 15th August 1997. They have come a long way from this, to this.

"About half a year ago I was looking around me and seeing stagnation in the GNOME community. I was concerned that GNOME had lost its momentum and that we were just making boring incremental releases that added very little new functionality. I think I was very wrong. I'd like to take this time to list some things that are happening right now in the GNOME community that have me very excited. These are the projects that are actively improving the future of the GNOME desktop." Let's hope a punctuation checker will be part of GNOME too. One Aaron is enough.

GNOME 2.19.6 has been released yesterday. "This is our sixth development release on our road towards GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007. New features are still arriving, so your mission is simple : Go download it. Go compile it. Go test it. And go hack on it, document it, translate it, fix it."

"During this years GUADEC Red Hat developer Havoc Pennington proposed his idea of an 'Online Desktop' to the developers of the GNOME project. Through deep integration with web services and 'zero-maintenance' the Open Source client aims to get the 'perfect window to the Internet'. During GUADEC Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to talk to Pennington about advantages and possible problems of the Online Desktop concept, the necessity of Windows-support and about Red Hats 'return to the desktop'."

During his opening speech at the GNOME Developers conference GUADEC Jono Bacon, community manager for the Ubuntu distribution, called for a common vision inside the project, an area in which the project as a whole is currently lacking. Only a few hours later Red Hat developers Havoc Pennington and Bryan Clark presented their own proposal for a reinvention of the Open Source desktop: The GNOME Online Desktop. My take: As I have been saying for a long time, GNOME needs a vision (and leaders) for the future. I'm glad that people are finally stepping up.

Both the stable and unstable GNOME branches have been updated today; both GNOME 2.18.3 ("This is the final release in a series of point releases for the stable 2.18 branch.") as well as GNOME 2.19.4 ("This is our fourth development release on our road towards GNOME 2.20.0, which will be released in September 2007.") have been released.

The latest issue of the GNOME Journal has just been published. It features an article about GStreamer audio effects, an interview with Ken VanDine about GNOME 2.18 Live Media releases, an introduction to Accerciser, and a summary of GNOME.conf.au 2007. Writers in this edition are Stefan Kost, Paul Cutler, Eitan Isaacson, and Davyd Madeley, respectively.

The GNOME Community Roadmap is a big-picture view of functionality we expect GNOME to include in short-term and long-term future. The roadmap is based on feedback from current GNOME developers and other community members. This roadmap shows the ideas and hopes of GNOME contributors for the near future.