GNOME 2.12 Desktop and Developer Platform Released

BOSTON, Sept. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- The GNOME Foundation today released the latest version of the GNOME Desktop and Developer Platform, the leading desktop for Linux and Unix operating systems. Version 2.12 improves the usability and power of GNOME in response to user feedback and developer contributions, and includes thousands of changes which refine the easiest and friendliest free software desktop.

In keeping with GNOME's "users first" philosophy, GNOME makes stable releases every six months. This allows developers and distributors to plan their GNOME-based products with confidence. As a result, distributions such as Fedora, SUSE, and Ubuntu will include GNOME 2.12 in the next release of their products, providing GNOME 2.12 to millions of users. Key features of GNOME 2.12 for users:

* An updated default theme.

* Easier file management.

* Intuitive clipboard behaviour.

* A unified document viewer.

* The About Me control panel. System administrators will also welcome the new Services control panel, and menu editor. Software developers benefit from improvements to the underlying GTK+ toolkit, including integration of the next-generation cairo drawing toolkit from freedesktop.org.

"GNOME 2.12 looks better than ever before and brings greater consistency," said Owen Taylor, chairman of the GNOME Foundation's board. "There are useful new features throughout the desktop, carefully implemented to increase usability while keeping GNOME simple and intuitive."

"This release is the result of lots of hard work by a fantastic group of people," said Elijah Newren, GNOME's release manager. "We are proud of our developers and proud of what they have produced."

GNOME 2.12 is available in 43 languages, with many more languages partially supported. Galician, Estonian, Indonesian, Macedonian, Nepali, Slovak, Vietnamese, Thai, and Xhosa are new supported languages in GNOME 2.12. Availability

GNOME 2.12 will soon be available as part of most popular Linux distributions. For those who can't wait, the new GNOME LiveCD (available from http://www.gnome.org/start/2.12/) allows users and journalists to test the latest GNOME desktop by burning a CD and rebooting -- no installation is necessary.

Developers and advanced users wishing to install the GNOME 2.12 Desktop and Developer Platform now may download the software at http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/desktop/ The software includes the source code for the GNOME 2.12 desktop interface and a complete set of developer tools and libraries. About GNOME

GNOME is a free software project developing a complete, easy to use desktop. Besides including central desktop components like system menus, a file manager, web browser, and utilities, GNOME is a complete development environment allowing developers to create new applications.

More than 500 software developers from every continent, including more than 100 paid developers, contribute their time and effort to the project. Sponsors include industry leaders like Fluendo, HP, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun. GNOME is supported on a variety of platforms, including GNU/Linux (more commonly referred to as Linux), Solaris Operating Environment, HP-UX, Unix, BSD and Apple's Darwin.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading Linux and Unix distributions worldwide, including those of popular community distributions like Debian, Fedora Core, and SUSE, and is the default desktop on major enterprise Linux distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Sun Java Desktop System. GNOME is also the desktop of choice for some of the world's biggest Linux desktop deployments, including large government deployments in Extremadura, Spain, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. GNOME's technology is used by major Linux ISVs such as Firefox, the Eclipse Project, Real Networks, and VMWare.

More information on GNOME can be found at http://www.gnome.org/ About GNOME Foundation

Comprised of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap. More information on the GNOME Foundation can be found at http://foundation.gnome.org. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.