GNOME 2.30 Released; Farewell To GNOME 2.xx

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.

The GNOME 2.30 release, however, is quite exciting as it is a step towards GNOME 3.0 with work on the GNOME Shell, Mutter, Zeitgeist, and other new GNOME3 packages.

What the GNOME development community is most proud of with GNOME 2.30 (as judging by their release notes) are the improvements to Nautilus for bettering file management in time for GNOME 3.0, many updates to the Empathy instant messaging application, easy data syncing with Tomboy, GNOME System Tools now fully integrates PolicyKit for authentication, a new time-tracker applet, SSH tunneling support in the Vinagre VNC client, and plenty of other changes too throughout the GNOME package collection.

There are also other minor improvements to the Evince Document Viewer (primarily for PDFs), the Epiphany web browser, font installation through Nautilus, unlimited scrollback support in the GNOME Terminal, partial iPod / iPod Touch / iPhone support via GVFS picking up the new libimobiledevice library, accelerating more of the GNOME Games using the Clutter tool-kit, and much more.

Aside from enriching the end-user desktop experience, there are also development improvements with GNOME 2.30 thanks to the GTK+ 2.20 tool-kit, improved libraries, and much more.

GNOME 2.30 can be found in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Fedora 13, among other Linux distributions and operating systems. The next release of GNOME will be the much-anticipated GNOME 3.0 release this September. While the above-mentioned 2.30 release notes are more in-depth, those interested in the mailing list announcement can find it in the mail archives.