Interesting Changes For GNOME 2.21.2

The first development release in the road towards GNOME 2.22.0 was released two weeks ago and already the second release is coming this Wednesday. GNOME 2.21.1 had contained a number of changes since GNOME 2.20, but with GNOME 2.21.2 the development towards GNOME 2.22 is really starting to heat up.

Among the updated packages so far for this release are the GNOME Control Center, Deskbar-Applet, Orca, Tomboy, Gypsy, Empathy, gcalctool, GNOME Applets, Metacity, Cairomm, GNOME Schedule, Gossip, Silpexifier, Rhythmbox, Kiwi, TMut, Hotwire, Gnumeric, and GLib. Gnumeric 1.7.14 contains crash fixes along with ODF importing improvements for charts. TMut is designed to be a mobile e-mail client for GNOME and its first available release is version 1.0. TMut uses the Tinymail framework and supports caching of data along with Lemonade IMAP features.

Rhythmbox 0.11.3 introduces drag-and-drop support of cover art display images, manual connection to DAAP shares, support for DAAP smart play-lists and radio streams, new lyric site support, improved track importing for generic audio players, threading Python plug-in support, and support playback from FM radio tuners on Linux. The Gossip instant messenger integrates over a dozen bug fixes with updated translations for eight languages. GNOME Applets also includes a horde of bug fixes along with other GNOME projects.

Expect the release of GNOME 2.21.2 (unstable) this Wednesday. Before the end of the year are two more GNOME 2.21/2.22 development releases and the stable release of GNOME 2.20.2 at the end of November. As updated GNOME packages become available you can find them on the gnome-announce-list.