GNOME 2.20

This desktop tools enhancement is new in the Developer 1/08 release.

GNOME 2.20 is the latest version of the multi-platform desktop environment, GNOME Desktop. GNOME 2.20 contains the following features:

• Email client – The email client, Evolution, contains the following features:

  • Attachment warning

  • Email notification icon in panel's notification area

  • Backup

  • “Magic Space Bar”

• Text Editing – Gedit, has an all-new syntax highlighting system which now supports syntax highlighting for scripting languages such as PHP and Ruby.

• File Management – Desktop search is integrated into the file chooser dialog. The Nautilus file manager now displays more information in the Properties window for drives, including a pie graph that displays how much space is left. In addition, you can now see the overall disk usage in the Disk Usage Analyzer utility.

• Control Panel – For GNOME 2.20, the control panels are reorganized slightly to reduce the number of control panels, making it easier to find what you need. For example, this release introduces Appearance control panel applet. The Theme, Background, Fonts, and Interface applets have been merged to create this new applet, simplifying the Preferences menu. In addition, some of the Accessibility preferences have been moved to a new tab in the Preferred Applications control panel.

• Help System – The GNOME help browser (yelp) infrastructure is modified to improve the style and layout of the help system. In addition, the colors match your current theme better. Help pages appear more quickly, as individual pages are now loaded on demand instead of the entire manual being parsed unnecessarily.

• Right-To-Left Language Interfaces – Right-to-left language interfaces are present for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew which are written from right to left. Users of these languages expect most user interface elements to be similarly mirrored, compared to left-to-right user interfaces.

• GTK+ – GNOME 2.20 uses version 2.12 of the GTK+ UI toolkit API.

• Glib – The Glib utility library now has a g_get_user_special_dir() that provides the path to special folders defined by FreeDesktop.org's xdg-user-dirs specification and tool. For text processing, the new GRegex API provides regular expression string matching without the need for an additional library.

• Glade – Starting with this release, there are user interface and architectural improvements. For example, tool windows such as the editor, the inspector, and the palette, are now dockable.

• Accerciser – Accerciser is an interactive Python accessibility explorer, and a replacement of at-poke.

• Rarian – Rarian is a documentation meta-data library, designed as a replacement for Scrollkeeper.

• Gnome-devel-docs – Gnome-devel-docs is the GNOME developer documentation suite.

• Poppler-data – New private data is installed under /usr/share/poppler containing private encoding files for use with poppler.

• GNOME Display Manager (GDM) – GDM now has better utmp and wtmp auditing. GDM can also now use Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to control access to the Shutdown, Reboot, and Suspend features.

• Avahi – Some GNOME applications, such as Ekiga and Rhythmbox, provide support for service discovery and registration using Avahi. The Avahi client API can be used by all GNOME applications. The Avahi daemon makes calls to the Bonjour API and uses the Bonjour server for service discovery and registration. On Linux and FreeBSD platforms, the Avahi daemon implements the mDNS stack.