GNOME 2.24 Release Notes

GNOME 2.24 includes all of the improvements made in GNOME 2.22 and earlier. You can learn more about the changes that happened in GNOME 2.22 from its release notes .

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The GNOME Desktop is released every six months and contains many new features, improvements, bug fixes and translations. GNOME 2.24 continues this tradition. To learn more about GNOME and the qualities that distinguish it from other computer desktop environments (such as usability, accessibility, internationalisation and freedom) visit the About GNOME page on our website.

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.

2. What's New For Users

The GNOME Project's focus on users and usability continues in GNOME 2.24 with its hundreds of bug fixes and user-requested improvements. The sheer number of enhancements makes it impossible to list every change and improvement made, but these notes aim to highlight some of the more exciting, user-oriented features in this release.

2.1. Stay in Touch GNOME 2.24 announces the inclusion of an instant messaging client based off the Telepathy communications framework. Figure 2 Empathy Instant Messenger Empathy also supports XMPP/SIP audio and video conferencing as available on the Nokia N800/N810 devices (video requires H.263 codecs for GStreamer to be installed). Empathy is a great companion to Ekiga, GNOME's audio/video SIP client (see Section 2.3 ― Ekiga 3.0). Telepathy provides a common framework for applications to access instant messaging functionality. It can utilise many common protocols including Jabber/XMPP, Google Talk, MSN Messenger and Apple's Bonjour/Rendezvous local network chat. Any application is able to utilise the instant messaging session. As well as the Empathy client, GNOME 2.24 provides libraries enabling developers to add presence and status information, transfer files or set up sockets (known as Tubes) for collaboration and games over the Internet. See Section 4.4 ― Instant Messaging Libraries for more information on how this technology can be utilised in your application.

2.2. Track Your Time Better For many people in business, it is crucial that they track how much time they assign to each project and client. Everybody has their own system for this, from keeping a diary to making a guess. It's incredibly tedious. In today's world almost everything you do somehow involves a computer, so GNOME has added a panel application to make tracking your time easier. Figure 3 Set Your Task Quickly The panel shows you what task you've been working on and for how long. Clicking on the button allows you to change activity and see what activities you've been working on today. If you like, the timer can stop when your computer goes idle. Activities can be categorised by any grouping you choose: be it the type of activity, client's name or how much you dislike it. You can also view and edit your activity log, insert missing activities and see daily, weekly and monthly graphs to see where you're spending most of your time.

2.3. Ekiga 3.0 Ekiga is a fully-featured SIP audio/video conferencing client for GNOME. As part of GNOME 2.24 we're proud to announce the release of Ekiga 3.0. Figure 4 Ekiga 3.0 As well as a new interface that is centred around your phone book and the presence of your contacts, Ekiga 3.0 features SIP presence support, PBX line monitoring, better video codecs support (H.264, H.263+, MPEG-4 and Theora), accelerated video and optional fullscreen and many SIP-related improvements for robust conferencing.

2.4. File Management As well as icon and list views, GNOME 2.24 now offers the compact list view, popular in several other desktop environments. Choose the view by selecting View ▸ Compact from the menu (or keyboard shortcut Control+3). Figure 5 The three file views: icon, list and compact As with icon and list view, the size of the icons in the compact view can be changed using the zoom options in the View menu. The browser mode of the file manager now supports tabs for rapidly switching between directories within a single browser window. Figure 6 Tabbed Browser Support Today's modern filesystems are able to handle almost any desired character as part of the filename. Unfortunately this is not the case for the FAT filesystem that is commonly used on many USB thumb drives and portable music players, which is unable to use many common punctuation marks as part of the filename. GNOME 2.24 detects when you are copying files with names that contains characters that cannot be used and automatically converts these characters to a "_" without you having to rename the file yourself. Automatic filename completion ("tab" completion) has also been improved in GNOME 2.24. Completion of filenames in the location bar using the Tab key is now faster and more predictable. It is also possible to complete any fragment of the path and the interface provides more feedback for when there are no other possible matches available.

2.5. Do More With Deskbar The Deskbar in GNOME 2.24 adds several exciting new plugins: a calculator, Google Search (and code search), Yahoo! and Wikipedia suggestions plus updating of Twitter and identi.ca. Figure 7 Deskbar Also new is the ability to easily download and install new plugins directly from the Deskbar repository on the World Wide Web.

2.6. New Screen Resolution Controls More and more computers (especially laptops) are gaining support for multiple monitors (known as multihead). Users need to be able to connect a second monitor, either as a clone (e.g. a projector for giving presentations) or as an extension of their desktop. GNOME 2.24 has upgraded its screen resolution controls to make this possible. Utilising the new XRandR 1.2 specification from X.Org, this dialogue enables users to easily set up individual monitors in a number of configurations. Monitors are named and the names appear in the top left corner of the screen for easy identification. Figure 8 New Screen Resolution Controls Changes are applied immediately. No restart of GNOME is required. XRandR 1.2 Driver Compatibility Some X.Org video drivers do not currently support XRandR 1.2 and so will not be able to take advantage of these features. One such driver is the proprietary nVidia X driver.

2.7. New Sound Theme Support Sound themes in GNOME are now handled by libcanberra, which implements the Freedesktop.org Sound Theme and Naming Specification. Sound themes can now be installed like icon themes. Using libcanberra also means that an application's alert sounds are less likely to interfere with your music player or movie player, so you can leave those important alert sounds switched on while watching a fullscreen movie. Figure 9 Sound Theme Support

2.8. Better Digital TV Powered by the GStreamer multimedia framework, GNOME 2.22 introduced digital television (DVB) capabilities into its Movie Player. Determined to make things even better, developers have worked to enhance this support by adding support for multiple DVB tuners (watch multiple channels at once) and better troubleshooting diagnostics. They have also worked to improve out-of-the-box (zero configuration) support for the majority of infrared remote controls (using the LIRC framework). This makes it even easier to chill out instead of writing that important report. Also featuring in GNOME 2.24, support for high-resolution YouTube videos and support for remote (non-local) text subtitling.