Delayed seven days, the second Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment was announced today, March 14th, by the GNOME Project developers.

GNOME 3.4 Beta 2 updates various packages such as NetworkManager, Baobab, Brasero, Empathy, Eye of GNOME, Epiphany, Nautilus, Vala, GTK+, gvfs, GNOME Icon Theme, GNOME Desktop, GNOME Control Center, GNOME Screenshot, GNOME Keyring, GNOME Screensaver, GNOME System Monitor, GNOME Contacts, GNOME Backgrounds, GNOME Panel, and much more.

Let's take a closer look at what has been actually changed in each package (of course, we'll list only the important ones):

· IPv6 Privacy Extensions are now enabled by default in NetworkManager, as well as support for checking Internet connectivity; · Brasero gets a couple of fixes related to optical drives; · Empathy has three bugfixes, among which we can mention that the wrong date in chat window and XMPP accounts have a negative priority were repaired; · Eye of GNOME receives various improvements and fixes; · Epiphany comes with a completely rewritten history backend, a few other small fixes; · The GNOME Contacts app brings updated support for calls, in sync with the latest Telepathy/Empathy. It also allows now to link non-primary contacts to each other; · The GNOME Control Center gets some layout fixes, among other not so important fixes; · Themed background pattern and various PanelSeparator improvements land in GNOME Panel; · The GNOME Screenshot utility now uses the new Shell API to include the mouse pointer, and the delay setting is no longer overridden when in non-interactive mode; · Nautilus also gets two fixes (a crash when unmounting volumes with non-empty trash and another crash when closing window slots under various circumstances) and the pathbar scrolling now works with latest GTK; · Vala 0.15.2 switches poppler-glib bindings to .gir and many binding updates and bug fixes.

GNOME 3.4 Release Schedule:

· October 27th, 2011 - GNOME 3.3.1; · November 24th, 2011 - GNOME 3.3.2; · December 23rd, 2011 - GNOME 3.3.3; · January 26th, 2012 - GNOME 3.3.4; · February 9th, 2012 - GNOME 3.3.5; · February 24th, 2012 - GNOME 3.4 Beta 1; · March 14th, 2012 - GNOME 3.4 Beta 2; · March 21st, 2012 - GNOME 3.4 RC; · March 28th, 2012 - GNOME 3.4 Final release Download the GNOME 3.4 Beta 2 source packages right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.

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