GNOME 2.20: A new hope!

[Dark Star]

GNOME is a free software and part of the GNU project, dedicated to giving users and developers the ultimate level of control over their desktops, their software, and their data.

The GNOME team has announced last night the immediate availability of the 2.20 version, which brings important features, bug fixes and improvements: "GNOME 2.20 is the latest version of the GNOME Desktop: a popular, multi-platform desktop environment. GNOME's focus is ease of use, stability, and first class internationalization and accessibility support. Based on Free and Open Source Software, GNOME provides all of the common tools computer users expect of a modern computing environment, as well as a flexible and powerful platform for software developers."

Let's have a look over the new features you'll find in GNOME 2.20:

Evolution received new features, such as:

Attachment warning - a feature that warns you when you forget to insert attachments in your e-mails, if the word "attachment" is found in the e-mail body.

New notification icon: A brand new system tray icon has been implemented, so you know immediately when a new e-mail arrives.

Backup e-mails: Finally, you can now backup and restore your e-mails when you want to move to a new computer or reinstall your operating system.

Evolution's 7-day events view :The calendar's "Show" drop-down function allows you to access the next 7 days’ appointments.

Epiphany comes with some interesting features, such as: Show bookmarks and history in the address bar, with favicons .The address bar inline completion is more intuitive now, as it shows the URLs from both history and bookmarks archives.


Eye of GNOME - faster than ever! :Besides the fact that Eye of GNOME is much faster and stable, it comes now with a brand new image properties dialog that shows basic information and metadata about your images. On the other hand, Eye of GNOME has an "Open with..." menu that allows you to open the images in graphic editors such as GIMP.

Evince supports interactive PDF forms!: There is a new function implemented in Evince that allows you to edit PDF forms.

Totem installs multimedia codecs for your favorite movies! : You can now enjoy all of your movies, because Totem offers to install multimedia codecs required by popular video formats. Moreover, you can now watch embedded videos on more web pages and the best of all is that it includes full screen support.

Tomboy - what a good boy! : Tomboy is GNOME's default note taking application, that comes now with new features like note synchronization and it remembers all opened notes, showing them again after a computer restart.

Gedit - simple, powerful and almost perfect! :GNOME's default text editor comes with a brand new syntax-highlighting system that supports syntax highlighting for scripting languages like PHP or Ruby. Moreover, it can highlight words like "FIXME" and "TODO" inside code comments.

Nautilus brings new features, such as: Recently used files When you want to choose a file from your computer, the "Open Files" window shows a list with recently used files and it offers you the possibility to search for files, with the help of Tracker or Beagle.

Hard drive properties : Nautilus will offer you more information about your mounted hard drives, including a pie chart that shows used and free space.

Image thumbnails: Nautilus will show the correct orientation of image thumbnails by using the EXIF camera information, whether it's a portrait or landscape.

File roller - GNOME's default file archiver.

The File roller comes with two very interesting features:

1. You can now open and save archives from networked locations (for example mounted ssh servers).
2. You can now copy/paste or drag and drop files between archives.

GNOME Panel's "Window List" applet no longer resizes its buttons, when the length of the window titles changes, and the "Window Selector" applet allows you to sort its drop-down list by workspace.

Control Panel brings you a redesigned "Appearance Preferences" window with Theme, Background, Fonts, Interface tabs, in order to simplify the Preferences menu, and the "Preferred Applications" window contains a new tab called Accessibility.

GNOME Keyring, the passwords keeper, no longer asks you for a master password when you unlock your screen or when you login into GNOME.


Moreover, the Password and Encryption Keys tool shows you more notification details when you import keys, and you can the type of the archive when you encrypt multiple files

Yelp, the GNOME's help system, has been much improved and it will show you the help pages more quickly.

GDM, the GNOME Display Manager, just got smarter, as it can emulate your system's language, in other words the GNOME's login screen will be automatically translated into the language you selected for the system.

GNOME Screensaver has a brand new and smart function (a button actually) called "Leave Message", which allows your friends or colleagues to leave you messages when you're out of the office.

Improved support for Arabic and Hebrew languages has been added into GNOME 2.20, such as:

• Window title buttons (such as minimize, maximize, and close) appear in mirrored order.
• Window title menu items are now aligned to the right.
• The alt-tab window switcher lists and moves through windows from right to left.
• The ctrl-alt-arrow workspace switcher lists and moves through workspaces from right to left.

Home Page : GNOME: The Free Software Desktop Project
Release Notes : GNOME 2.20 Release Notes

[praka123]

whaow!nice post.I am a Gnome user for(ever).Gnome rules!!!

[Garbage]

oh yeh... very nice post !!

Thanks for Information !!

Shashwat, u r my NEWS source for Open Source !!

Keep Posting !!!

[dd_wingrider]

very nice post and very informative

[techdoc]

very good and informative post ,thanks..

[infra_red_dude]

yeah, read it at gnome's site. i wonder when will the official distro packages appear on the repos.

[praka123]

Gnome guys calls distros be it linux,*BSDs or any *NIX as "footwear" for Gnome

[Garbage]

2 most interesting features I found in Foresight Linux (first linux distro having Gnome 2.20) is it can play many Audio & Video formats without need of installing extra codecs.

and secondly, it have Native NTFS R/W support !!!

Very nice for me(at least) !!

[QwertyManiac]

Those look like Distro features to me, not GNOME's !

[aditya.shevade]

^^ Yeah. NTFS read write is a distro feature. But as mentioned in the first post, Totem will now install codecs (maybe like Ubuntu). Good thing for people like me. (Had a bad time installing codecs for SuSE).

As for gnome.... it rocks.

[infra_red_dude]

^^^ not actually. its clearly mentioned on the gnome site that ondemand codec installation will be a feature of the distros, not gnome.

[aditya.shevade]

^^ Then I am not as excited as I was before.....

[src2206]

Originally Posted by shirish_nagar

2 most interesting features I found in Foresight Linux (first linux distro having Gnome 2.20) is it can play many Audio & Video formats without need of installing extra codecs.

and secondly, it have Native NTFS R/W support !!!

Very nice for me(at least) !!

Knoppix also have this feature from a number of previous versions

[Nav11aug]

as a Gnome user.. oly loookin fwd fr it ... haha

[gary4gar]

Great going gnome...now i am seeing some very good developments of OSS projects..


thanks for reporting Shashwat Pant

[kumarmohit]

Great as if other OSs were not enuf, now GNONE has also decided to go blue way with blue title bars and all

I hate this blue. Gonna change it as soon as as i can on my copy in office.

[aditya.shevade]

Originally Posted by src2206

Knoppix also have this feature from a number of previous versions

Knoppix has always been the best LIVE distro out there.... my first one. I still like it a lot.

[iMav]

sorry for the n00bi question but is this a distro version as in dwnld and run live version or install

[praka123]

it needs "footwear" or distro otherwise u need to compile it using garnome or jhbuild.

testing new gnome 2.20 -latest gutsy beta!
unlike kde-livecds are rare for gnome new releases until unless some new distros bundles it.

[QwertyManiac]

Originally Posted by iMav

sorry for the n00bi question but is this a distro version as in dwnld and run live version or install

Its not an OS man, just the DE software. You can download and test the latest GNOME implementation (onto an OS) via Foresight Linux

[praka123]

^yeah!forgot Foresight Linux and Conary experiance

[contactpraven2001]

keep going buddy ........... gnome ........... gnome........

[subratabera]

GNOME 2.20 will surely give tough competition to upcoming KDE 4.0...Let's wait and watch...

[infra_red_dude]

err.. well if you consider the stock eye candy then gnome loses out to kde.

[praka123]

Originally Posted by infra_red_dude

err.. well if you consider the stock eye candy then gnome loses out to kde.

ofcourse!Gnome lives for simplicity and usability,while Trolltech's-qt's Kde is for options and options to set and eyecandy by default.

[infra_red_dude]

but hey wid gnome in our hands we can even compete wid Mac OS X for eyecandy!!

[praka123]

^I hope ur yet to hear about the badmouthing of Gnome by kde fanboys try slashdot!
btwn ya all remember- Linus recommended all to shift to Kde and ditch Gnome(gr8 man, ) and now Linus is arguing C(Gnome) rocks and C++(qt base/kde) sucks.
is it hypocrisy?
http://emonk.debianuruguay.org/?p=42
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Linus_Torvalds_hates_C

[infra_red_dude]

arey yaar, thats always there... use whatever suits you, simple

[vish786]

Originally Posted by infra_red_dude

but hey wid gnome in our hands we can even compete wid Mac OS X for eyecandy!!

aah ha... their u go.

i cant c linux users fightin among themselves.

[src2206]

Originally Posted by praka123

^I hope ur yet to hear about the badmouthing of Gnome by kde fanboys try slashdot!
btwn ya all remember- Linus recommended all to shift to Kde and ditch Gnome(gr8 man, ) and now Linus is arguing C(Gnome) rocks and C++(qt base/kde) sucks.
is it hypocrisy?
http://emonk.debianuruguay.org/?p=42
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Linus_Torvalds_hates_C

I think Linus is flexible and accepts things as it changes....it is a quality of a really educated human being and Linus is just one of those very few.

Sorry pal, but I do not think it is hipocracy.