| GNOME 2.14 arrives |
Mar. 17, 2006
 After six months of effort by the GNOME community, the latest version of the popular Linux and Unix desktop interface has arrived.
Two Linux desktops -- Fedora and Foresight Linux, a cutting edge GNOME-based distribution -- have already made the new desktop available to its users. Other distributions, such as Ubuntu and OpenSUSE are expected to also quickly deploy the desktop.
More adventurous users can use the GARNOME or JHBuild build utilities to build the GNOME desktop from source-code tarballs.
While, in theory, there's a 2.14 live CD that's meant to give users a taste of the new interface, in practice, we were unable to find a live 2.14 CD at this time. There are live CDs available for GNOME 2.12.
What's new
The first thing experienced GNOME users will notice about the new GNOME is it's faster, a lot faster, than 2.10. Faster font rendering and memory allocation gives the entire desktop and GNOME and GTK+ based applications a much snappier feel.
Search and help have also been improved. You can now search from the Nautilus file manager. Beagle, the innovative search framework for GNOME, is not, however, a part of GNOME 2.14. If you want to take advantage of it, check to see if it comes with your distribution. If it doesn't, you can download the source for the latest version 0.2.2.1 from the Beagle Wiki.
GNOME's developers have also revamped GNOME Meeting, the desktop's VoIP (voice and video-over-IP client) as Ekiga. This supports both the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and H.323 protocols. These are both multimedia transfer protocols and are used in many VoIP applications such as Google Talk, Asterisk, and Microsoft's NetMeeting, and by some telecommunications hardware.
Ekiga also uses STUN (Simple Traversal of UDP through NATs, i.e. Network Address Translation) support. This enables user to use Ekiga to make and receive calls through most firewalls, and without having a public IP address.
New sysadmin tools
For all these, and many other, improvements for end-users, perhaps the most important updates in this new version of GNOME aren't for end-users at all. For the first time, GNOME includes tools for system administrators.
The first of these, Pessulus, is a lockdown editor that allows administrators to easily disable select GNOME desktop features. The other, Sabayon, enables administrators to set up user profiles inside a live, interactive GNOME session. These personalized profiles can be based on job description (e.g. for a receptionist or a data entry clerk), and then saved and deployed to various desktop machines.
These programs are the first steps towards making GNOME a more corporate office-friendly desktop interface.
Indeed, the tiny jump in release numbers from 2.12 to 2.14 doesn't do the new GNOME justice. With its added new features and greatly improved font and memory handling, this is a major release. Both new and old GNOME users will enjoy this latest step forward in their favorite desktop interface.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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