Gnome 2.4 Release (d)

chendo writes "Gnome 2.4 will be released today. Here is the link to the article on Ars Technica. GNOME 2.4 is the result of quite a bit of work toward complying with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), which mainly focus on user interface consistency and predictability. This release has also undergone some general polish, and it can finally be said that the GNOME 2 platform has achieved maturity with this release. The Epiphany web browser, a major new component of GNOME, also makes its debut with this release. (From Footnotes)"

Comments

It's not out yet.

[asobala]

When is _is_ out, you'll have all sorts of release notes and screenshots to look at. Slashdot is announcing non-existant releases again :)

Re:That's great! Accessibility?

[KarmaPolice]

From the (f*******) article:
Gnome 2.4 ships with GOK, an award-winning dynamic onscreen keyboard. It supports Direct Selection, Dwell Selection, Automatic Scanning and Inverse Scanning, and includes word completion. A detailed overview can be found on the GOK website.

Gnopernicus, the second accessibility application to ship with GNOME, provides a number of assistive technologies for people suffering from visual impairment. Most notably, it includes a screen reader, a screen magnifier and a Braille writer.

Re:That's great! Accessibility?

[bahamat]

One of the big concessions that I've heard about Windows is that it has a lot of accessibility features that weren't present in other previous GUIs.

That's actually not true. The X-Windowing-System has come with xmag virtually for ever. High contrast themes are not hard to create. You can make icons and fonts whatever size you want. We've even got sticky keys. The only thing X is missing as far as accessibility is keyboard control of the mouse cursor. Then again, you can always run ratpoison and be rid of the rodent forever.

You've been lied to my friend.

Re:That's great! Accessibility?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Shift-Numlock, it worked for me for ages

Re:current gnome 2.x issues (any devels listening?

[JanneM]

The Gnome-panel bug is a new one for me; filing a bug report would likely be very appreciated by the devels.

Sawfish: Just run it. There are some people hacking on it, I believe, so it should be maintained. And tell the sawfish devels if there is something you miss.

The terminal: They are all the same application with multiple windows; cuts down on resource use. Of course, if it dies, so do they all - that's the downside. You can, however, start a new terminal, explicitly stating that it should not be another instance in an existing gnome-terminal application:

gnome-terminal --disable-factory

That will give you an independent terminal instance that will not be affected. Of course, you pay by a bit higher total resource use, but that is probably worth it for you.

Re:simulating clicks

[ThogScully]

5 is a button click and and you change what button it is by clicking / for left, * for both, and - for right. + is a double-click. 0 is button hold, . is release.
-N

Re:Mandrake

[salimma]

You're thinking of Red Hat. It's compiled for a 386

Actually, Mandrake is compiled for i686 but only using the i586 instruction set, while Red Hat is compiled for i686 utilising the i486 instruction set for compatibility. Why it's still called 'i386' is anyone's guess.

Re:Mandrake

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

As much as I like gentoo, it doesn't release packages immideatelly after they are released.

nano -w /etc/make.conf

Advanced Masking
# ================
#
# Gentoo is using a new masking system to allow for easier stability testing
# on packages. KEYWORDS are used in ebuilds to mask and unmask packages based
# on the platform they are set for. A special form has been added that
# indicates packages and revisions that are expected to work, but have not yet
# been approved for the stable set. '~arch' is a superset of 'arch' which
# includes the unstable, in testing, packages. Users of the 'x86' architecture
# would add '~x86' to ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to enable unstable/testing packages.
# '~ppc', '~sparc', '~sparc64' are the unstable KEYWORDS for their respective
# platforms. DO NOT PUT ANYTHING BUT YOUR SPECIFIC ~ARCHITECTURE IN THE LIST.
# IF YOU ARE UNSURE OF YOUR ARCH, OR THE IMPLICATIONS, DO NOT MODIFY THIS.
#
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"

You'll get stuff a LOT faster. I've been using that "unstable branch" (if you will) for a year and a half or so with zero show-stopper problems on 5 or so machines. OK, OK, there's a bad realease from some developer from time to time, but Portage will down-grade it next emerge -u world if there's something really bonked with a package or ebuild.