GNOME 2.8 Release Notes

The GNOME 2.8 Desktop is the latest release of the ever popular, multi-platform free desktop environment.

Every new version of the GNOME 2.8 desktop arrives on schedule, with interesting new features and hundreds of bug fixes. This time GNOME makes it easier to work with removable devices and network servers, and provides valuable new tools for system administrators. We have also adopted the popular Evolution email and workgroup client. You can learn more in the following sections.

GNOME provides a user-friendly environment that "just works" for everyday users, without excess complexity or obscure features. At the same time we provide the rich flexibility experienced developers demand.

GNOME runs on a variety of platforms, including GNU/Linux (commonly called Linux), Solaris, HP-UX, BSD and Apple's Darwin. GNOME includes powerful features such as world-class smooth text rendering, a first-class accessibility infrastructure, and a complete internationalization infrastructure that includes support for bi-directional text.

Of course GNOME 2.8 includes all of the improvements made in GNOME 2.6, which you can learn about in the GNOME 2.6 release notes.

The Desktop release contains all the applications needed to provide basic user functionality. Major applications such as Gnumeric and OpenOffice.org are also available, but are developed in parallel on their own release cycle rather than being included in the core GNOME release.

GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and is free software.

Thanks to the efforts of the GNOME Documentation Project, GNOME 2.8 comes with comprehensive and professional documentation. Careful attention has been taken to detail using free software's most complete documentation style guide. As in GNOME 2.6, each application shipped with GNOME 2.8 includes full user documentation.

Learn to how to use GNOME with the Desktop User Guide. The User Guide and other documentation, including guides to system administration and GNOME's accessibility features, can be found on the GNOME Learn page.

Thanks to members of the worldwide GNOME Translation Project, under the leadership of Christian Rose and Kjartan Maraas, GNOME 2.8 offers support for 40 languages (at least 80 percent of strings translated).

Supported languages:

Note that Basque, Bulgarian, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Panjabi and Tamil are new supported languages in GNOME 2.8, thanks to the hard work of their translators. Also worthy of mention is that British English and Canadian English are also supported.

Another 9 languages are partially supported, with more than half of their strings translated. Croatian and Mongolian are particularly close to "supported" status.

GNOME works closely with groups such as freedesktop.org. Standards support is a big plus for GNOME users. Interoperability support improves the user experience by allowing GNOME, KDE, and other applications to work together more easily, and following open specifications helps ensure that user data is not trapped in proprietary formats.

GNOME developers are working hard with other members of the free software community through Freedesktop.org on the development of standards to allow interoperability. Those standards include: shared MIME database, icon themes, recent files, thumbnail management, and the system tray specifications. In addition, GNOME supports CORBA, XML, Xdnd, EWMH, XEMBED, XSETTINGS, and XSMP.

We recommend that you use official installation packages, such as those for your linux distribution. Vendors are likely to package GNOME 2.8 relatively quickly, and to release new versions soon that include GNOME 2.8. However, many people don't want to wait, and will want to build GNOME from source code, even though that is more difficult.

Building from source is even more difficult than normal this time, because GNOME 2.8 requires your existing applications to register themselves in the new cross-desktop MIME-type system.

As with GNOME 2.6, you must define the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable to the path at which your MIME database is installed, for instance <prefix>/share.

GNOME operates on a time-based release philosophy, an attempt to continuously provide the best of our developers' efforts to users as quickly as we can. Six months after GNOME 2.8, we anticipate that GNOME 2.10 will feature integrated multimedia funtionality and further advances in accessibility, usability and internationalization.

The core of GNOME's success is its many volunteers, both users and developers.

As a user, your contribution can be as simple as filing good bug reports. You can file bugs in our Bugzilla using the simple bug assistant. If you want to contribute more, you can join our active bug-squad.

For developers, there is much exciting progress to be made in any of our active developer groups - Accessibility, Documentation, Usability, Translation, Web, Testing, Graphics and Desktop & Platform Development. Many of these sub-projects have web pages on developer.gnome.org. Choosing a role that suits you may be difficult at first, but here is a guide to help you make your decision.

Helping on GNOME can be an incredibly satisfying experience, allowing you to meet a wide range of motivated, skilled, and helpful people all working towards a unified goal. Join us today and see what a difference you can make.