GNOME News Archives

Within the open-source world, code examples and documentation can be particularly important in ensuring a lower barrier to participation. One developer, Jose Commins, has worked on creating demos, such as how to use OpenGL within GTK+. One of his projects is GtkGLApp, but now he's working on a new one involving real-time video streaming to GTK+ 3D surfaces.

Last night an update was published as to the state of Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1, which is the Unity desktop interface that Canonical will be using in their next Ubuntu release rather than the GNOME Shell. Most all other GNOME distributions, however, will be using the GNOME Shell with GNOME 3.0 when released in March. As it so happens, another development snapshot of the GNOME Shell arrived last night too.

A month ago we reported on a Clutter 1.5 development release bringing a back-end for Wayland so that this tool-kit can run atop this lightweight display server, among other features it brought. In the past month there's been the Clutter 1.5.6 development release too and just this morning Clutter 1.5.8 was released.

Version 3.0 of GTK+ that is set for introduction with GNOME 3.0 already boasts a bold feature set. GTK+ 3.0 is less dependent on X11 (meaning it can work with Wayland and better support on Mac OS X, etc), provides X Input 2 support, uses Cairo more for drawing, eliminates DirectFB support, and boasts cleaner rendering. A new feature though for GTK+3 is being worked on and its quite interesting: an HTML back-end that allows GTK applications to run natively within a HTML5 web-browser off a web server.

As the first (and likely the last) point release of the GNOME 2.32 series, Luca Ferretti has announced the release of GNOME 2.32.1.

Christian Hergert has announced the PerfKit tool (or as he calls it, a "toy") during the Linux Plumbers Conference taking place this week in Cambridge. PerfKit provides a GTK user-interface and the ability to provide plug-ins that hook into the various developer utilities like Valgrind (memory profiling/debugging), FTrace (trace system calls), Perf, and other areas. Thereby with PerfKit you don't need to worry about the individual utilities and it's all presented from a nice user-interface. It's like a Phoronix Test Suite for developer tools.

Back in 2008 it was decided GNOME 2.32 would turn into GNOME 3.0, but earlier this year it was changed to delay GNOME 3.0 to March of 2011 while letting GNOME 2.32 live on. With GNOME 2.32 having arrived last month, it's now time to get all excited for GNOME 3.0 and this morning the first development release of this desktop has arrived.

As good news for those of you interested in GTK+ applications on Mac OS X and other operating systems, or to even run such applications within a Wayland Display Server on Linux rather than an X Server, this tool-kit used by GNOME continues to become more X11-agnostic and easier to port.

Just days after the release of GNOME 2.32, focusing on GNOME 3.0 development for next March has now regained center stage. It was in August that GTK+ began using more of Cairo for its tool-kit drawing and then dropped DirectFB support, but with today's release of GTK+ 2.91.0 (the latest GTK+ 3.0 snapshot) the rendering clean-up of GNOME's tool-kit is complete.

GNOME 2.32 has been released this afternoon. This release, which was once supposed to become GNOME 3.0 until its release was pushed back to next March, is the last for the GNOME 2.x series. GNOME 2.32 incorporates a variety of package updates and other work, though more of the excitement has been postponed to GNOME 3.0.

The release candidate for GNOME 2.32 is now available after it was delayed a few days due to technical problems. GNOME 2.32 will be released later this month as the last major release prior to GNOME 3.0 that is set to be released in March after formerly the 2.32 release was to be marked as 3.0.

While GNOME 3.0 has been delayed to next March, the development releases towards version 3.0 of the GTK+ tool-kit continues in a steadfast manner. After the last GTK+ 3.0 snapshot a few weeks back that ported most of the GTK+ drawing to use Cairo, GTK+ 2.90.7 has been released.

Collabora, the open-source consulting company that's notably backing the development of GStreamer, PiTiVi, and Telepathy, among others, is now supporting a new per-window VNC system too. Thomas Thurman of Collabora has just announced the first public release of xzibit which offers a few features now, but Thurman has much greater plans ahead for this free software project.

The GNOME developers have announced their first public release (v0.1) of SeedKit, consisting of both the GNOME SeedKit Viewer and the SeedKit library. GNOME's SeedKit is designed to blend web technologies (namely HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript) into the GNOME desktop by allowing native user-interfaces to be written in these web technologies. SeedKit leverages GTK+, WebKit, and Seed to lower the barrier to creating new user-interfaces for the GNOME desktop. SeedKit was inspired by Palm's WebOS SDK and Mozilla's JetPack.

With GNOME 3.0 not being released now until March of 2011, GNOME 2.32 is being released next month and will continue to focus on dependable and trusted GNOME 2.x technologies, such as the GTK+2 library rather than GTK+3 that's been in development for quite a number of months and is already supported by most GNOME modules.

Vincent Untz has just announced the release of GNOME 2.31.6, which is the first development snapshot of GNOME 2.32 following the announcement last week that GNOME 3.0 is delayed until March 2011. With the 2.32 release not being the 3.0 milestone, the 2.32 release will continue to use GTK+2 rather than the still-in-development GTK+3.

Two years ago at GUADEC, the annual developer's conference for GNOME, it was announced that GNOME 2.30 would be released as GNOME 3.0. With GNOME's long-standing tradition of putting out major updates every six months, this put the GNOME 3.0 release to be in March of 2010. Last November it was then decided to delay GNOME 3.0 to September of 2010 to give developers more time to prepare on this first major overhaul to the GNOME desktop in years. It's just been announced though from this year's GUADEC conference happening this week that GNOME 3.0 will now not be released until March of 2011.

There's a new release of GStreamer available along with respective updates to the GStreamer base plug-ins and also their good plug-ins. GStreamer 0.10.30 is this new release that's codenamed "Safety First" while the GStreamer Base Plug-ins also reached version 0.10.30 and was named "Difficult Birth" while lastly the good plug-ins hit version 0.10.24 and is known as "Taking Liberties." The GStreamer ugly plug-ins have not been updated with this release.

In preparation for the latest GNOME 3.0 development snapshot due to arrive on Wednesday (tagged as GNOME 2.31.5), a wealth of GNOME packages are being checked-in for this unstable milestone. Among the packages to have been checked-in for this milestone are new releases of GTK+ 3.0, GNOME Shell, and Mutter.

It should come as no surprise that there is now a new GNOME 3.0 test release seeing as in the past couple of days we have talked about new development releases of GNOME Shell and Mutter, GTK+ 3.0, and Clutter 1.3/1.4, along with a slew of other GNOME packages being checked-in.

While there have already been two releases within the unstable Clutter 1.3 development series, a third test release has emerged and it continues to introduce new changes. Introduced in the Clutter 1.3 series already in the road to Clutter 1.4 has been new API additions and other changes while this newest Clutter 1.3.6 release carries many more changes.

Yesterday brought new releases of the GNOME Shell and Mutter and today brings a new (development) release of the GTK+ 3.0 tool-kit. With the release next week of a new GNOME 3.0 development snapshot (GNOME 2.31.4), GTK+ 2.90.4 is this new version that has been released to join the updated package-set and there's also a new snapshot for GTK+ 2.22.

Owen Taylor has announced a new development release of GNOME Shell in the run-up to GNOME 3.0, which is coming now in just a few short months. This newest release of the GNOME Shell continues to bring changes to the user-interface, visual improvements, Shell Toolkit improvements, and plenty of other work.

For those keeping up with the latest GNOME 3.0 development snapshots and packages, GNOME 2.31.3 was just christened today. This newest snapshot of the GNOME 3.0/2.32 desktop environment incorporates the newest GTK+ 3.0 development toolkit along with many other updated packages for the desktop.

Just about one month ago there was the first GTK+ 3.0 test release and then before May ended out there was another development release and it delivered on X Input 2.0 support for GTK. Just days later, another new GTK+ 3.0 test release has been tagged.

GNOME 3.0 is being released this September and as such in recent weeks and going forward there is a whole onslaught of interesting changes in the GNOME desktop stack. GNOME 2.31.2 has been released, which is a development snapshot of the GNOME 2.32/3.0 stack.

Beyond updates to Clutter, Mutter, GNOME Shell, and various other GNOME applications, there is one very other important change that happened to the GNOME desktop this week. After being around for years, X Input 2 support was finally merged into the GTK+ library for the 3.0 release.

A few hours ago there was the release of Mutter 2.31.2 and there were several interesting changes (particularly theme and performance enhancements) for this compositing window manager that's replacing Metacity in the GNOME 3.0 desktop. With the release of GNOME 2.31.2 (a GNOME 3.0 development snapshot) set for release this week, a new release of GNOME Shell has emerged.

Over the past 48 hours or so there has been a horde of GNOME 3.0 development packages being checked in for the forthcoming development snapshot (GNOME 2.31.2). Yesterday we reported on the Clutter 1.3/1.4 enhancements and now there's a release of Mutter, which happens to use Clutter, and it too boasts some interesting changes from the previous development release.

With the GNOME 2.31.2 release (an early GNOME 3.0 development snapshot) due out soon and various GNOME packages being checked-in for this milestone, the Clutter developers have made available their first post-1.2 release. Clutter 1.3 is the development series that will lead up to the Clutter 1.4 release that's expected to be released in tandem with GNOME 3.0. The just-released Clutter 1.3.2 release is this first step forwards.

Last month we looked at the performance of the Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver that can provide software acceleration for the OpenGL-Mesa state tracker (among other state trackers via this driver architecture) on any modern CPU via LLVM (the Low-Level Virtual Machine) to optimize and handle these operations much more efficiently than the traditional Mesa software rasterizer.

Last week a host of GNOME packages began being checked-in for the first test release of GNOME 3.0 and then we reported on the last GTK+ 2.x release being worked on. Today the first test release of GTK+ 3.0 is now available.

As we have mentioned with the first of the early GNOME 3.0 development packages getting checked-in (such as the improved Totem Movie Player), the first GNOME 2.31 development milestone is this week in the road to GNOME 3.0 (a.k.a. v2.32) that will be reached this September. Joining this round of new GNOME development packages that are looking for testing is GTK+ 2.21.0, which is leading up to the 2.22 release of the de facto standard tool-kit for the GNOME desktop.

As was mentioned this morning GNOME's Totem Movie Player is preparing for GNOME 3.0 by picking up de-interlacing support and a-synchronous play-list loading, among other improvements. Other packages are also being checked-in this week for the first GNOME 3.0 development release known as GNOME 2.31.1. Besides the updates to Totem and the major work going on to the GNOME Shell / Mutter / Zeitgeist, there is some other interesting new features too.

The first development milestone for GNOME 3.0 is expected to be reached tomorrow with the release of the unstable GNOME 2.31.1 package set. While Zeitgeist, the GNOME Shell, and Mutter are among the most talked about changes for the GNOME 3.0 desktop, many mature packages are receiving new features and work too. GNOME's Movie Player, Totem, is one of these packages receiving some attention.

The GNOME community is very excited today as they have just released version 2.30 of the GNOME Desktop. Besides being another six-month upgrade to this popular Linux desktop that brings evolutionary upgrades, GNOME 2.30 was originally going to become GNOME 3.0, but that was pushed back by six months.

We are just a few days away from the release of GNOME 2.30 and as such there is a slew of packages being checked in for this final release prior to GNOME 2.32, which will be known as GNOME 3.0 once it arrives in September. GTK+ 2.20 was checked in today along with other GNOME packages now deemed stable, while the GNOME Shell also had its first point release in the 2.29.x series.

Mutter, the new window manager designed for GNOME 3.0 integration to replace Metacity 2, has experienced a new development release. Mutter reached version 2.29.0 last month and it integrated the most recent Metacity changes (up to v2.26), improved appearance of scaled down windows using mipmap emulation, new signals and properties, and many other changes. Metacity 2.29.1 that's been released today doesn't bring as many changes to the table.

A few days back we reported on a new Mutter release, which is the window and compositing manager for GNOME 3.0, and now with the GNOME 2.29.91 beta release coming up on Wednesday there is also the release of another new GNOME 3.0 component. Perhaps the single biggest new component for the GNOME 3.x stack is the GNOME Shell and this is the package that just reached version 2.29.0. GNOME 2.29.0 brings a lot of improvements.

While Mutter should reach version 2.30 with the release of GNOME 2.30 at the end of next month, this evening the Mutter 2.29.0 release has entered the world. This new version of Mutter offers improved appearance of scaled down windows using mipmap emulation, new signals and properties, merging of Metacity changes since the 2.26 release, and many fixes (for crashes, build, and bugs). With the pulling of the recent Metacity work presents theme-able sound support using libcanberra.

Back in December Zeitgeist 0.3 was released with many changes and its engine was even largely reworked. Since then there have been a few point releases as GNOME Zeitgeist is in the process of being stabilized for a Zeitgeist 0.4 release in time for GNOME 2.30. Yesterday afternoon Zeitgeist 0.3.2 was released to deliver on more stabilization work along with better support for GNOME's Activity Journal. The release announcement can be read on the mailing list.

Way back in 2005 a GNOME 10x10 goal was created by Jeff Waugh at a conference in Stuttgart, Germany. The GNOME 10x10 goal was stated as "To Own 10 % of the Global Desktop Market by 2010." Well, it's now 2010 and sadly this goal did not come to fruition for the GNOME project or even the Linux adoption rate in general commanding not even close to 10% for desktop PCs.

Replacing the recently released GNOME 2.29.3, the GNOME 2.29.4 version is now available. GNOME 2.29.4 is still considered developmental quality but represents a milestone that is a step closer to the final release of GNOME 2.30, which will come in March of 2010.

While GNOME 3.0 will not be released until September 2010, many of the GNOME packages are beginning to change in preparation for this major overhaul of the GNOME desktop even though the GNOME 2.30 release is still ahead of us. While Zeitgeist, G-Streamer, Clutter/Mutter, and GNOME Shell grab most of the attention, the mature Nautilus file-browser is receiving some improvements too.

Many GNOME development packages are being released this week in preparation for the next GNOME 2.30 development release (2.29.3). While GNOME 2.30 will not be released as GNOME 3.0 as was once planned -- but instead has been pushed back to September 2010 -- there are still plenty of exciting changes. Zeitgeist, the "activity journal" that will officially premiere with GNOME 3.0 to make it easy to find and browse files and events from your computer, has reached version 0.3 today.

Back on Sunday we shared The GStreamer, Cairo Video Hackfest Results after GNOME, Intel, and X developers were working hard for a few days in Barcelona to hash out plans to improve Linux video playback in the GStreamer multimedia framework via using Cairo/Pixman and gaining support for VA-API/VDPAU. Sunday's article shared most of the details we knew at that time, but now GNOME's Benjamin Otte who organized this "hackfest" has shared his conclusions.

Last month we talked about a hackfest to improve Linux video playback that came about after a GNOME developer began work on using Cairo/Pixman for raw video in GStreamer and looking at other ways to leverage hardware acceleration within this major open-source multimedia framework. This Linux video meeting started in Barcelona on Thursday and is ending today, with some accomplishments.

While GNOME 2.30 will not be the release that goes on to become GNOME 3.0 (instead it will be GNOME 2.32 in September that grabs the "3.0" tag), the second development release for the 2.30 series is now available.

Following a meeting last week between Jesse Barnes, Chris Wilson, and Kristian Høgsberg with developers working on the Clutter tool-kit and GNOME's Mutter window manager, there is a new GLX extension that has been proposed as a result. Jesse Barnes has announced their work on the GLX_INTEL_swap_event extension, which helps GLX integrate better with glib style event loops.

Last week we were the first to report that it looked like GNOME 3.0 would not come until September 2010 after developers wanted a delay compared to their original March 2010 plans. As of last night it's now official that GNOME 3.0 will not be out until September of next year.