Last night, the GNOME developers announced a brand new release of the GNOME desktop environment, version 2.24. It brings a lot of hot extra features, new translations and updated documentation. The upcoming Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Beta Linux distribution, which is scheduled for release on October 2nd (next Thursday), will include a fully functional version of GNOME 2.24.

"GNOME 2.24 is the latest version of the GNOME Desktop: a popular, multi-platform desktop environment for your computer. GNOME's focus is ease of use, stability, and first class internationalization and accessibility support. GNOME is Free and Open Source Software and provides all of the common tools computer users expect of a modern computing environment, such as e-mail, groupware, web browsing, file management, multimedia and games. Furthermore, GNOME provides a flexible and powerful platform for software developers, both on the desktop and in mobile applications."

Below are some of the major features introduced in GNOME 2.24:

Empathy Instant Messenger - a Pidgin-like IM client based on the Telepathy communications framework. Like Pidgin, Empathy supports most of the common chat protocols, such as Jabber, MSN, Google Talk & Bonjour, but also video chat.

Track Your Time Better - a new Panel applet that will show you the tasks that you have been working on and how much time you've spent on them. These tasks can also be organized in groups (by type of activity, client's name, etc).

Ekiga 3.0 - GNOME's SIP audio/video conferencing client has been greatly improved. It has a new interface, supports PBX line monitoring, H.264/H.263+/MPEG-4/Theora video codecs and accelerated video.

Improved File Management - other than list and icon views, the new Nautilus (GNOME's file manager) brings tabbed navigation and compact list view (which allows icon size modification from the View menu's zoom options).

Smarter Deskbar - includes a few interesting additions, such as Google Search (and code search), a calculator, and Yahoo! and Wikipedia suggestions. Another useful utility included is the option to directly download and install new plugins from the Deskbar repository.

New Screen Resolution Controls - GNOME 2.24 introduces X.Org's XRandR 1.2 specification, allowing users to set up monitors in many configurations. This has been provided mainly to meet the increasing need to attach a second monitor (a projector or a desktop extension).

New Sound Theme Support - the job of sound theme handling has been taken by libcanberra, which basically means that you can watch a fullscreen movie while leaving the sound notifications on, as these are less likely to interfere with the movie or the music player.

Better Digital TV - Totem includes support for remote text subtitling and high-resolution YouTube videos. Also, efforts have been made to enhance the zero configuration support for most of the infrared remote controls.

Extra Pretty - good looks has been a priority for GNOME 2.24, which includes new and improved artwork and themes. Also, a very nice desktop background selection has been provided for a better and more eye-pleasing experience.

More new features in GNOME 2.24:

· Better keyboard navigation;
· Improved mouse accessibility;
· Better screenreading;
· GLib 2.18;
· GTK+ 2.14;
· Instant Messaging libraries.

Existing Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10) users (testers) can update their systems today to GNOME 2.24, by issuing the following commands in a terminal window (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

If you want to compile GNOME 2.24, you can get the sources right now from Softpedia.