GNOME 2.32 released

Like every six months, a new version of the GNOME desktop environment has been released. Engine 2.32 has been made available before version 3.0 is released in April 2011.

The GNOME Foundation is the official voice of the GNOME project which calls on a good development community to achieve set goals, like what has been done with The Document Foundation with LibreOffice and the new (temporary) identity of the OpenOffice.org suite freed by Oracle. This foundation has now announced the publication of GNOME 2.32, the free desktop environment which is essentially found under GNU/Linux.

According to developer Vincent Untz, the publication of this version 2.32 is "smaller" than what we are used to, with a lot of corrections being provided for bugs in certain modules. For real new functions we will have to wait for the release of GNOME 3.0 anticipated for April 2011 (and not March). We are notably thinking of the windows composition manager for the GNOME Shell desktop, the new interaction with files based on logs and the first GNOME web service with Tomboy Online.

GNOME 2.32 does bring a few new options which can be seen in the version notes. The Empathy instant messaging application comes with additional possibilities with metacontacts allowing you to group related information to a contact using multiple instant messaging services. A discussion with a contact therefore becomes transparent no matter the account they are using.

The Evince document viewer improves accessibility options and handles SyncTeX (available as a plug-in for gedit) for the synchronisation between a TeX source file and PDF output. The Nautilus file manager identifies cut files (cut and paste option) with a transparent icon, while the recycle bin provides more information like the original location of a deleted file and the date it was deleted.

Other changes have been made to the picture viewer so that you can choose a background colour better adapted to the image and automatic decentralising for the Totem video player. It should also be noted that Python and Vala in IDE Anjuta are supported for developers.