GNOME 2.22 Release Notes

Figure 2 The Cheese program.

GNOME 2.22 introduces a new application, Cheese. Cheese lets you take photos and make videos using your computer's webcam. You can apply a range of different effects like mauve, noir/blanc, shagadelic, and warp. You can share these photos and videos with your friends, load them into F-Spot, or set them as your account photo.

GNOME 2.22 introduces window compositing on capable platforms. Fitting with GNOME's "keeping it simple" policy, the features are very low key. The most noticeable changes are drop shadows on windows, live previews when switching windows with Alt+Tab, and transparency effects.

Not all graphics hardware reliably supports compositing, so this feature is currently turned off by default and not yet exposed in the preferences. If you know you have graphics hardware that supports compositing, you can run the following command: gconftool-2 -s --type bool /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager true from the run dialog, or set the key in the Configuration Editor. To disable compositing, set the key to false.

GNOME 2.22 introduces GVFS: a new network-transparent virtual filesystem layer for GTK+. GVFS is designed to overcome the shortcomings of the older GNOME-VFS system. Improvements over GNOME-VFS include remembering login credentials for the entire session and being more resilient to failures. Many GNOME applications are already using GVFS, including all of the core applications.

With the switch to GVFS, GNOME is now using the Freedesktop.org Desktop Trash Can specification to handle the storage of deleted files.

Some new protocols are also available. cdda:// will show all of the audio tracks on a CD, available as WAV files. gphoto2:// will give you access to any connected digital cameras.

GNOME's File Manager is now smarter about removable media, and will show you an information bar with possible actions when you insert removable media or browse to a folder on a removable drive.

Technical information about GVFS is available in Section 6.1 ― GVFS and GIO under What's New For Developers.

GNOME's Movie Player now offers improved support for DVD playback as well as support for digital television (DVB). Also appearing in 2.22 is a selection of new plugins, including support for MythTV, Youtube, and Tracker-based searching. This release also features playlist sharing and the ability to select subtitles for files.

GNOME 2.22 premieres the capability to preview and play Flash content and video using the free and open Flash decoder swfdec.

No need to do any more mental arithmetic to work out what time your teleconference starts in Sydney. GNOME 2.22 now has internationalisation built into its clock. You can add multiple locations from around the world to see the local time and weather.

Figure 3 The international clock.

3.6. Continual Evolution

Evolution continues to be improved with new support for Google Calendars and custom message labels (tagging) for your email.

Figure 4 Evolution showing a Google Calendar.

Work has also gone into improving the speed of spam filtering and making error dialogs less intrusive on your desktop session by using the status bar rather than popups.

New in GNOME 2.22 is the Remote Desktop Viewer. This application complements the existing remote desktop server support in GNOME. It features the ability to discover machines on the local network and bookmark your favorites.

Figure 5 Remote Desktop Viewer interacting with the current desktop.

Users desiring more control over the remote desktop server will also appreciate the addition of an Advanced tab in the properties dialog.

The keyboard layout and keyboard accessibility preferences have been merged into one dialog, putting every keyboard setting you need in one place. Desktop Keyboard Shortcuts remain separate.

Figure 6 The new Keyboard Preferences dialog.

3.9. But that's not all...

GNOME 2.22 also features many bug fixes and user-required enhancements from the last six months of development, including:

• directly open Evolution contacts in Deskbar;
• improved printing in Text Editor;
• network multiplayer in Chess;
• download notifications in Epiphany;
• LZMA (7-zip) support in Archive Manager;
• inhibit automatic suspend and hibernation while burning CDs;
• Document Viewer is now faster and uses less memory;
• Document Viewer can also now support page transitions in PDF Slideshows;
• Tomboy can now organise your notes into notebooks;
• Sound Juicer now supports more metadata, including disc number and year;
• extensive improvements to Calculator's precision and usability;
• Keyring Manager has been completely replaced by Seahorse;
• much, much more that you'll have to install or upgrade to see!
  

Orca, GNOME's screenreading technology, has many exciting improvements in 2.22. Close collaboration with Mozilla has led to excellent accessibility in Firefox 3, including support in Orca for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) and Live Regions. This allows for much richer accessibility with today's modern, dynamic web applications.

Orca in GNOME 2.22 also adds support for level 2 contracted braille. A Lot of work has also gone into improving its quality and stability.

The screen magnifier has been improved and can now take advantage of technology like X compositing to allow smoother scrolling and fullscreen scrolling on hardware that supports it. There is also improved support for colorblind filters.

GNOME 2.22 now includes a set of special accessibility enhancements for controlling the mouse. Features include:

Figure 7 Mouse Accessibility options.

5. What's New For Administrators

5.1. PolicyKit Integration

PolicyKit is a new cross-desktop security framework. The purpose of PolicyKit is to provide a consistent way for user applications to gain extra privileges, e.g. for administrative applications.

Using PolicyKit, administrators can now configure system-wide settings. For example, you might allow some user to adjust the date and time of the clock, or you might grant specific users the ability to start and stop system services.

For users, control panels now feature unlock buttons next to settings they are not currently authorized to change. Clicking on the unlock button will ask the user to provide extra authorization credentials.

Figure 8 Network Settings.

5.2. Better System Tools

GNOME's system administration tools now monitor for changes in the configuration files they're editing. This means that if another administrator changes the configuration, your display is updated to reflect those changes.

The Shared Folders tool now allows you to edit the SMB user database (smbpasswd).

The Network tool can now set up PPPoE and GPRS connections.

GVFS is a userspace virtual file system with backends for protocols like SFTP, FTP, DAV, SMB, ObexFTP. GVFS is the replacement for GNOME-VFS. GNOME-VFS should now be considered deprecated, and developers should not use it in new applications.

GVFS consists of two parts:

GVFS/GIO aims to provide a modern, easy-to-use VFS system. Its goal is to provide an API that developers prefer over raw POSIX IO calls. Rather than cloning the POSIX IO API, it provides a higher-level, document-centric interface. As well as reading and writing files, GIO provides facilities for file monitoring, asynchronous IO, and filename completion.

GVFS works by running a single master daemon (gvfsd) that keeps track of the current GVFS mounts. Each mount is run in a separate daemon. (Some mounts share a daemon process, but most don't.) Clients talk to the mounts with a combination of D-Bus calls (on the session bus and using peer-to-peer D-Bus) and a custom protocol for file contents. Moving the backends out of process minimises dependency bloat for applications and makes the whole system more robust.

GVFS also offers a FUSE mountpoint in ~/.gvfs/ so that GVFS mounts can be exposed to legacy applications using standard POSIX IO.

Unlike GNOME-VFS, connections in GVFS are stateful. This means that a user only needs to enter his or her password once, not over and over again for each successive connection.

With the switch to GVFS, automounting and autostart are now handled directly by Nautilus rather than gnome-volume-manager.

API documentation for using GIO is available online along with migration guides for moving from POSIX IO and GNOME-VFS to GIO.

The Anjuta IDE is now a part of the GNOME Developer Suite. Anjuta is a GNOME-integrated IDE that offers many features for developers, such as an integrated debugger, integrated Glade UI editor, and a Valgrind interface.

Figure 9 Task list for Anjuta.

7. Internationalization

Thanks to members of the worldwide GNOME Translation Project, GNOME 2.22 offers support for 46 languages with at least 80 percent of strings translated, including the user and administration manuals for many languages.

Supported languages:

• Arabic
• Basque
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Chinese (China)
• Chinese (Taiwan)
• Chinese (Hong Kong)
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• Dzongkha
• English (US, British, Canadian)
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• Galician
• German
• Greek
• Gujarati
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Macedonian
• Malayalam
• Marathi
• Nepali
• Norwegian Bokmål
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Punjabi
• Russian
• Serbian
• Serbian Latin
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Tamil
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Many other languages are partially supported, with more than half of their strings translated.