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ReleaseNotes_2_26

Eugene Wissner

dropline GNOME 2.26 release notes

Introduction

Many things have changed in both GNOME and Slackware since the last official Dropline GNOME release, some known packages got updated, others were dropped, new features were added and others were removed. We from the Dropline GNOME team are pleased to announce that we are up to speed again and that this release includes all those changes that makes GNOME one of the best desktop environments for Slackware. Here is a small list of some of these changes:

  • System Changes:
    • DeviceKit: A modular hardware abstraction layer that aims to simplify device management on Linux systems and eventually to replace HAL.
    • PolicyKit: A toolkit for defining and handling system policies, allowing unprivileged processes to speak to privileged processes, centralizing the decision making process of who is allowed to do what and when. With Policykit you can easily define which users are allowed to run which operations and what kind of authority is needed for it, like mounting devices or acquiring real-time privileges. This approach gives a lot more of flexibility that was just not possible with the standard Unix permissions set. To be able to do a certain task you need to identify yourself with your password and not the root password. This is done for security reasons.
    • ConsoleKit: A framework for keeping track of the various users, sessions, and seats present on a system. It provides a mechanism for software to react to changes of any of these items or of any of the metadata associated with them.
    • PulseAudio: A sound server that allows you to perform advanced operations on sound data as it travels between the applications and hardware. You can for instance adjust the volume of individual apps, transfer the audio output to other machines on the network, etc...
  • Gnome Changes:
    • Brasero: The well known CD/DVD burning application is now an official part of GNOME. Replacing the former CD Burner application with lots of newer features such as audio CD burning with audio track preview, full multisession support, track splitting and many more.
    • Simpler file sharing: A plugin for the GNOME file manager now enables simple personal file sharing over WebDAV, HTTP and Bluetooth.
    • Totem updates: A new subtitle downloader plugin now allows Totem to automatically find subtitles for the movies you are watching.
    • Volume Control PulseAudio integration: In order to take advantage of the features provided by PulseAudio, a new volume control and a new Sound Preferences tool have been developed and integrated into GNOME.
    • Multiple Monitor Support: The new Display Settings tool now allows you to view which monitors and projectors you have plugged in, making it a lot easier to setup monitors in various configurations.
    • Empathy: An instant messaging application based on the Telepathy communications framework has been added, supporting several different instant messaging protocols such as Jabber and MSN, with several features like file transfers, VoIP and webcam support. For this release we will supply not all of the supported protocols since many are still in big development, and of course we still supply Pidgin. In the future we will probably drop Pidgin to give full priority to the GNOME integrated IM software Empathy. Some other protocols can be supplied as an extra package.
    • Anjuta: The IDE has been upgraded and is now a full part of the GNOME project.
    • Ekiga: New 3.2 version with a new interface and lots of new features.
    • Nautilus: The best of the List and Icon views have lead to the creation of the new Compact view. Support for tabs have also been added.

Requirements & Other Comments

Dropline Gnome 2.26 has been built on top of Slackware 12.2, with both x86 and x86_64 (Slamd) versions. Only the 12.2 version is supported. The other requirements can be found at: http://www.droplinegnome.org/?page_id=5.

Even though PolicyKit and ConsoleKit are available, some settings still require that you are a member of certain system groups for them to work properly, namely:

  • video: To be able to change bright settings
  • plugdev: To be able to use removable media
  • realtime: In case you want to get realtime privileged for PulseAudio