GNOME 2.31.6 Release Arrives GTK3-Free

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.

Most of the GNOME packages have retained GTK+2 API support while adding in the GTK+3 capabilities and can be configured to use either tool-kit version at build-time. However, a few GNOME packages didn't keep the GTK+2 support around, so for this GNOME 2.31.6 release some packages needed to be reverted to their 2.30 state so that this would be a GTK+3-free release. By the GNOME 2.32 beta, however, these packages should be fixed to work with either GTK+ version.

On the GNOME desktop side, found in this GNOME 2.32 milestone are a number of new desktop features. Some of our top highlights are listed below.

- The Cheese web-camera user-interface has been rewritten to use Vala and Clutter. Cheese now also supports user-configurable effects
- DConf reached version 0.5 that brings the ability to support layering and multiple writers in one service. DConf 0.5 also picked up a dconf-editor utility.
- The Evince Document Viewer has initial support for adding new annotations
- Rygel picked up a horde of new features

Details on other changes, bug-fixes, and translation updates can be found in the desktop news file. The release announcement for GNOME 2.31.6 can be read on the gnome-announce-list. The stable release of GNOME 2.32 is set to arrive in September while GNOME 3.0 will be here next March.