Gnome 2.22 ready for Ubuntu Hardy, RHEL6

By admin  |  March 13, 2008

We covered most of the new features of Gnome 2.22 in our preview a couple of days ago. Now the Gnome Foundation has released the final version this popular desktop environment. Gnome 2.22 is is expected to be incorporated into Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (Hardy Heron), Mandriva’s 2008.1 and in forthcoming distributions such as Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 6 as well as Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Destop 11, according to ZDNet.

According to a DesktopLinux.com survey, Gnome is the most popular desktop environment among Linux users, holding a 45 percent share of the desktop and followed by rival KDE with 35 percent.

Worth noting in this final release is the emphasis the Gnome Foundation has put on accessibility. These improvements include enhanced screenreading and magnification and better mouse accessibility. The foundation is also collaborating with Mozilla.org to include the Orca screen reading technology. Orca offers better support for rich internet applications and live regions. The update also features new support for level 3 braille, enhanced screen magnification for smother scrolling and support for colourblind filters.

Gnome 2.24

Of course work doesn’t stop here and the Gnome team has already highlighted some of the planned feaures for Gnome 2.24, due out in six months time. These include:

  • a new version of GNOME’s Ekiga VoIP client featuring a revamped user interface and SIP presence support;
  • the Empathy instant messaging client utilising the Telepathy communications framework;
  • the often requested column and list views in GNOME’s File Manager;
  • the completion of the port from GNOME-VFS to GVFS; and
  • bug fixes, performance improvements, and memory improvements throughout the desktop.
    Tags: ,

    Comments

    2 Responses to “Gnome 2.22 ready for Ubuntu Hardy, RHEL6”

    1. manmath sahu
      April 21st, 2008 @ 2:04 pm

      There are so many waiting for Redhat Enterprise Linux Desktop 6. It’s pity that the current RHEL Desktop 5 is incompatible with most of the modern notebook hardware. It’s high time RH had brought a new desktop release.

    2. Randy Robertson
      April 28th, 2008 @ 8:12 am

      I never understood why anyone would want to run RHEL on their own systems? I understand that the business executive types like the idea of having a tech support number to call, and redhat seems like the biggest guy on the block, but coming from a non-redhat linux background, I’ve had to use RHEL4 and RHEL5 at work, and it is just horrible.

      What am I missing? My experience is that the redhat guys have tried as hard as possible to make RHEL as annoying to an end user as windows.

      While I personally use arch/gentoo (which I realize is not realistic for everyone) my experience with Ubuntu/Debian and even SLES have been way more positive than my experience with RHEL. I just don’t understand what people see in this distribution? Are there some people who actually enjoy the RPM hell? Or are intangibles such as more marketshare which lead to higher likelyhood that a given problem has already been solved on Google when you hit it the reason people stick with RHEL?

      I’m entirely being sarcastic, I genuinely want to know what positives RHEL has over the other distros, because I just haven’t experienced them.

    Comments are closed