Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Review of GNOME 2.26 and GTK+ 2.16

Posted by timothy on from the small-improvements-add-up dept.

devg writes "The GNOME development community recently announced the official release GNOME 2.26, the latest version of the open source desktop environment for Linux. It adds the Brasero disc burning software, UPnP support in the Totem media player, and basic support for video chat in the Empathy instant messaging client. GNOME 2.26 will be shipped in upcoming Linux distributions, including Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04. Some early reviews show that it is an incremental improvement with some good additions. GNOME 2.26 is accompanied by the release of GTK+ 2.16, a new version of the widget toolkit that is used to build the desktop environment. Ars Technica has published a detailed programming tutorial with code examples that demonstrate how developers can use the new features of GTK+ 2.16 in their own applications. Users can test GNOME 2.26 by downloading one of the official Foresight-based VM or ISO images via BitTorrent."

5 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Exchange support? by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From the changelog:

    Second is support for Microsoft Exchange's MAPI protocol. This is the protocol that Microsoft Outlook uses to communicate with Exchange. Previously, Evolution only supported Exchange's SOAP protocol, which is not available on all Exchange servers. This support significantly improves Evolution's integration with Exchange servers.

    That sounds like a big deal. Anyone knows how well it actually works in practice?

    1. Re:Exchange support? by romi · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not well at all.

      The official 2.26.0 "release" of evolution-mapi had a small bug whereby it would crash immediately upon trying to connect to anything.

      2.26.0.1 fixes one of the various issues contributing to that, but there are other changes needed in other libraries and Ubuntu has yet to pick those changes up.

      It's quite amusing to see this trumpeted everywhere though given that anyone who actually tries to use it is in for a world of hurt.

  2. New Audio - Major Win by AvitarX · · Score: 5, Informative

    Per application volume control is a MAJOR feature. Listening to music, while not having web pages blast out your ear drums is a major win. This is my favorite feature of Vista, and I am happy to see it integrated into Gnome.

    --
    Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
  3. Re:Wait... by lordtoran · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And I'm anticipating similar functionality appearing in Kontact really soon... this sort of friendly competition makes Open Source progress so fast.

    --
    Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat /boot/vmlinuz > /dev/dsp
  4. Re:awesome bar by compro01 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You likely wouldn't notice it unless you use it as your fulltime browser. It searches the history and displays results, but in a more indepth manner (searches page titles AND urls and doesn't just search from the front) than a "normal" address bar. It also sorts said results "smartly" based on usage. (lots of people hate it for this reason).

    It really has a love-it-or-hate-it quality. I personally liked it once I got used to it (and vice versa).

    --
    upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time