GNOME 2.22 Released!

The GNOME community announced the release of GNOME 2.22 after six months of development. With its aim to provide ease of use, stability, and first class internationalization and accessibility support, let’s see some of the new features of this release.

Like any other release, this release also has new features, improvements, bug fixes, and translations. New application named Cheese. Cheese lets you take photos and make videos using your computer's webcam. It’s an open-source clone of Apple's Photobooth. Vinagre is a new remote desktop client that supports multiple simultaneous connections.

Some newly introduced features include window compositing on capable platforms. By default, this feature is disabled. GNOME has also added live previews when switching windows, transparency effects, simplified keyboard settings, improvements to tomboy and much more. Evolution, GNOME’s messaging and calendar application has also evolved to support Google Calendars and custom message labels (tagging) for your email.

So far we discussed about UI and utilities enhancement, but GNOME comes with some architectural changes as well! Two major changes include: GVFS and GIO. GVFS is the replacement for GNOME-VFS and GIO, a new shared library that is part of GLib and provides the API for GVFS. GVFS will provide a network-transparent virtual filesystem layer for GTK+ and provide better APIs for developers.

I just started GNOME 2.22 VMware Live Demo download which is around 1G and can’t wait to get it downloaded. As of now, Live CD is still not available. New version will be available for installation in Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04. And I am looking forward to move from Ubuntu 6.06 to 8.04! :)

GNOME's Online Desktop

Google, Yahoo! and Facebook... Virtual OSes like eyeOS,Virtual OS, YouOS, and countless other organizations are changing the software we use by shifting applications from Desktop Operating system to the web. Microsoft will integrate their Windows Desktop and Live service for sure(but I can't see it in near future ). Open source is all set and have released Online Desktop to integrate with anything and everything users want to use.

Virtual OS or Web desktops are not enough! That's where products like iGoogle come into picture. But iGoogle is still not complete, you need Google gadgets to integrate the net on your desktop. GNOME's solution to interating Web and Desktop is what we call : Online Desktop! The Open source team doesn't take Online Desktop as another web-based desktop or "webtop". Instead they define it as:

We are trying to create the ideal experience outside your browser. The fact is, you need hardware drivers, and the browser itself can't be web-based. The computing environment of the future won't be "turtles all the way down." But neither does it need a bunch of complexity designed for a pre-web world.

The idea is to keep all the information online. People will use a live CD or "Linux on thumb" to just boot and connect to the web. The main catch in Online Desktop's pilosophy is:

Because our desktop is open source, it will work with all the best-in-category web sites and services that you use, no matter who owns them.

You can access the GNOME Online Desktop through http://online.gnome.org/. The registration is very simple with a invitation. Once registered, you get a interface like social networking where you can aggregate feeds, share links, rate and comment on anything shared on Mugshot. Mugshot (Online Desktop) also have downloadable gadgets for both windows and linux. For linux, they presently have Fedora 6 and 7. It also supports latest Ubuntu or you can download the source and build your binary.

For me, the Online Desktop doesn't seem to be much of a new inovation. But for a open source community its a new start. We will have something like iGoogle,Orkut, etc.... in one box!