Development [LWN.net]

The GNOME 2.12 Desktop and Developer Platform

The GNOME project has announced the release of version 2.12 of the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform:

The GNOME Foundation today released the latest version of the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform, the leading desktop for Linux and Unix operating systems. Version 2.12 improves the usability and power of GNOME in response to user feedback and developer contributions, and includes thousands of changes which refine the easiest and friendliest free software desktop. In keeping with GNOME's "users first" philosophy, GNOME makes stable releases every six months. This allows developers and distributors to plan their GNOME-based products with confidence. As a result, distributions such as Fedora, SUSE, and Ubuntu will include GNOME 2.12 in the next release of their products, providing GNOME 2.12 to millions of users.

[GNOME 2.12] The GNOME 2.12 start page introduces the new release, and includes a link to a bootable Live CD for those wishing to give the software a test run. The version 2.12 release notes is a good starting place for release information.

The changes in this release are grouped according to the needs of users, systems administrators, and software developers. The What's New For Users document lists the user-visible changes. These include:

The new ClearLooks default theme for an uncluttered screen presentation.
The Nautilus file manager has a new list view display option for simplified navigation.
Nautilus also has improved text dragging operations.
The CD burning utility now has the ability to easily copy Audio CDs.
The clipboard utility adds the ability to remember copied data after the source window has been closed.
The control panel can now be run with a vertical orientation.
Applications can now cause their Window List entries to flash in order to gain attention.
The Totem video player has had a number of enhancements.
The Sound Juicer CD ripper application has enhancements for supporting portable music players.
The Epiphany web browser adds a new Find Bar, better error messages, shareable bookmarks, and support for the GNOME printing system.
The Evolution Email and Groupware client has had improvements to the menu layout and attachments bars, and adds support for Groupwise proxy and IMAP accounts.
The Control Center has a new About Me panel for managing personal information.
Improvements have been added to the Evince document viewer, the GNOME image viewer, the Yelp Help Viewer, the GNOME search tool, GNOME Dictionary, and the games.

The What's New For Administrators document lists changes to the administration utilities, including:

Improvements to the Sabayon user profile manager.
The menu system now uses the freedesktop menu specification, a menu editor is available for customizations.
A new Services Administration tool is available under the System Tools configuration menu, it is used for configuring the services that run at boot time.
The System Log Viewer application provides a standard GUI interface for observing system log files.

What's New For Developers introduces a number of API enhancements to the GTK+ GUI framework, and Cross-platform development improvements. Also, this release of GNOME adds support for the Cairo SVG library.

The GNOME Internationalization effort continues to increase the number of supported languages.

For a hint at what's to come in the next release, see the Looking to GNOME 2.14 and Beyond document.

Comments (5 posted)

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