Review: GNOME 2.14

Even though I am definitely not someone who would refer to himself as a Gnome fan, the fact remains that the latest version of Gnome has a lot to offer. Yes, even for us KDE users!

The GNOME desktop has come a long way since a study sponsored by Sun Microsystems in 2001 raised usability issues. Since then, GNOME has learned to take usability seriously, developing its Human Interface Guidelines and making strong efforts to apply them more thoroughly with each release. The GNOME 2.14 release continues this tradition. Although few major innovations are visible to the user, the release includes another round of improvements in usability and the continued development of the desktop administration tools, as well as numerous small improvements in productivity software.

Officially released on Wednesday, GNOME 2.14 is available on a live CD based on Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake). The live CD is currently in the 2.12 repository (look at the bottom of the list of files). Alternatively, you can install the latest build for Ubuntu 6.04 or Fedora Core 5. Both distributions will demonstrate the increase in speed in 2.14 better than the live CD, although you might check the GNOME 2.14 start page to add any packages that are excluded. You can also use Garnome, a program designed to install a GNOME release on an existing system without affecting your current GNOME installation. However, I don’t recommend trying this method if you’re only mildly curious, because checking Garnome’s dependencies — 70 for Debian — and compiling it is probably more trouble than you would care to take. The hard-core, of course, may prefer to compile from source, possibly automating the process with JHBuild. Source: Linux.com

[tags]debian,live cd,gnome 2.14,garnome’s dependencies[/tags]