Coming soon: GNOME 2.4 [LWN.net]

The second beta release of the GNOME 2.4 desktop is now available; see the announcement on FootNotes for download information. Given that the real 2.4 release is intended to happen in early September, it seems like a good idea to have a look at what this release will bring. It would appear, however, that the GNOME folks have been too busy hacking to put together a comprehensive document on what's been done in the 2.3 development series. So the best place to look is this writeup by Sayamindu Dasgupta, who played around with the 2.3.5 release for a bit.

One enhancement in 2.4 will be a new set of system administration tools. There have been a number of attempts at graphical adminstration tools for Linux over the years; with mixed success. Combining the numerous utilities, configuration files, and setup schemes into a unified interface is a hard problem. It is good to see that work is continuing in this area, however. Eventually somebody will get it right.

A good step in that direction is the new "change screen resolution" dialog. Linux doesn't require constant tweaking of the display settings the way certain other desktop operating systems seem to, but it's still a good idea to make it easy when the need arises.

On the browser front, Galeon is gone. Epiphany is now the browser bundled with GNOME. Some quick tests here in LWN labs (where Galeon has long ruled supreme) show that Epiphany pretty much works as expected; it is a reasonable, functioning browser. But we'll probably keep Galeon around for a while yet.

Accessibility is an important theme with 2.4; the "gnopernicus" screen reader has been improved and fixed up. There's a new set of "assistive technology" preferences which control which accessibility tools are started up at the beginning of a session. And, to help keep people from needing assistance in the future, GNOME now includes the obnoxious "time to take a typing break" nagging utility.

There's many other additions, of course; gedit has syntax highlighting, nautilus is improved, etc. See the writeup for more information. Or, better, download the beta and help shake out the last bugs so that 2.4 can be a truly stable release.

to post comments

Argh, wrong

Posted Sep 4, 2003 3:34 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (3 responses)

Very sad LWN just copied the content from one uninformed article without checking the facts.

For starts, there are no new admin tools in GNOME. Those are a separate, incomplete project.

Galeon isn't "gone." It was never there. THere has never been a browser in GNOME. Galeon wasn't replaced by Epiphany, Epiphany was simply added.

The cited article has some other inaccuracies; some based on bad reporting by the author, and some based on the fact that some experimental features in GNOME 2.3.5 were removed later as they weren't ready yet. (Like the media player, Totem.)

Argh, wrong

Posted Sep 4, 2003 4:13 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

Very sad LWN just copied the content from one uninformed article without checking the facts.

The GNOME project has done little to document the "facts." The right thing to do, of course, would have been to actually build and install the GNOME beta. But I'm filling in the development page in place of the normal editor, and lacked the time to do that.

So I fell back on the article linked to in the beta announcement. I thought it was reasonable to assume that the GNOME project would not point out the article if it had major problems with it.

If what I wrote is wrong, I apologize and appreciate the corrections. But if the article in question does not actually reflect the beta release, why does the beta announcement point to it?

Argh, wrong

Posted Sep 4, 2003 16:58 UTC (Thu) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link] (1 responses)

Hi Jon,

We linked this in the release notes as an interest piece more than anything else. It was a cool article, had a couple of minor doozies, but was a great review for people who haven't been tracking 2.3.

In terms of documentation, the release notes for 2.4 will rock the casbah, and I know of at least two detailed reviews of GNOME 2.4 currently being prepared to launch on our release date. So, the documentation will suck far less once we're point-oh final!

I'm putting a casual disclaimer about these issues into the 2.3.90 (Release Candidate 1) release notes. :-)

Thanks,

Jeff (Waugh, GNOME Release Team)

Argh, wrong

Posted Sep 4, 2003 17:45 UTC (Thu) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link]

Here's a good summary of the Epiphany/Galeon decision, thanks to the inimitable Luke Stroven of gnomedesktop.org fame:

http://www.gnomedesktop.org/comments.php?sid=1221&tid=14185

Coming soon: GNOME 2.4

Posted Sep 7, 2003 9:31 UTC (Sun) by IkeTo (subscriber, #2122) [Link]

Unluckily, Epiphany is unusable for me. I have literally 2000 bookmarks and it makes no sense at all to have a 2-level flat bookmark heirarchy. For now, mozilla-firebird works just fine.