First GNOME 2.26 Development Packages Arrive

The first development release in the GNOME 2.25 series that will go on to form GNOME 2.26 early next year is expected to be released today. There's still two months before any freezes go into effect for GNOME 2.26, but a few changes worth mentioning can be found in the handful of packages checked in for today's GNOME 2.25.1 release.

One of the largest changes deal with GNOME Games. With GNOME 2.26 and beyond, the games that come with this desktop environment will have an optional dependency on Clutter. For those unfamiliar with the Clutter Toolkit, it's an OpenGL library (and supports OpenGL ES too) for creating some interfaces quite nicely. The Clutter-OpenGL support will allow some GNOME Games to become more interesting, well, as long as you have hardware GPU acceleration. Using software rendering through Mesa 7.2 isn't reported to work well by GNOME developers.

Started as part of Google's Summer of Code 2008 was a GNOME DVB Daemon. This Daemon is used for controlling DVB devices (hence its name) to record TV shows and such. The GNOME DVB Daemon 0.1.0 release supports manual recordings, automatically distribute overlapping recordings between adapters, channel scanning, browsing EPG data, and EPG schedule recording. This very early release of the GNOME DVB Daemon also has user-interfaces for channel scanning, configuring the DVB devices, and for managing recording timers.

Some of the other changes present in the GNOME 2.25.1 packages include Eye of GNOME picking up improvements to its JPEG meta-data reader, Vala (the GObject type system compiler) receiving a modularized code generator, and across the board there are many translation updates and bug-fixes. If you didn't think GNOME's calculator would receive any development love, guess again. The GCaltool now has dialog-based financial functions, a programming mode, and a gross profit margin financial function.

While not present yet, some of the plans for GNOME 2.26 call for Vinagre supporting RDP connections, a tool-bar editor for the Nautilus File Manager, and minor artwork enhancements. So far no new modules have been proposed.

GNOME 2.25.1 should be officially announced today while coming in December will be two more development releases. There will be a number of other development and testing releases in the GNOME 2.25 series until GNOME 2.26 is officially unveiled on the 18th of March. Look for more information on Phoronix about GNOME 2.26 as the development cycles goes forward.