GNOME 2.32 Beta 1 Is Here

The first beta of the upcoming GNOME 2.32 has landed to give early adopters, distro builders, developers and generally curious people a taste of things to come.

GNOME 2.32 Beta 1, technically GNOME 2.31.90, is somewhat of a new development since the next release of the popular desktop environment was supposed to be the all-powerful GNOME 3.0.

"This is 2.31.90, and it's out! It's the first beta of what will be GNOME 2.32, enjoy every moment of it, the next beta (2.31.91) will arrive in two weeks," GNOME developers announced.

"With this release we are now UI frozen, no UI changes may be made without confirmation from the release team and notification to the documentation team. The other freezes are of course still in place," the announcement said.

Highlights of GNOME 2.31.90 (2.32 Beta):

· GLib 2.25.14;
· GTK+ 2.21.6;
· Brasero 2.31.90;
· Cheese 2.31.90;
· Empathy 2.31.90;
· Epiphany 2.30.3;
· Evince 2.31.90;
· GDM 2.31.90
· Nautilus 2.31.90;
· Tomboy 1.3.2;
· Totem 2.31.6.

Note that most of the GNOME core apps share the version number - 2.31.90.

GNOME 2.30 is the latest stable release, it's been available for quite a few months now, and it was slated to be the last release in the venerable 2.xx branch.

However, some issues affecting development builds of the upcoming GNOME 3.0 and quality concerns forced the developers to alter the schedule and push the major upgrade to a spring 2011 release date.

Instead, the next release will be GNOME 2.32, an evolutionary update with no spectacular new features. That's not to say there's nothing to get excited about the upcoming release.

GNOME developers label their non-stable releases with odd version numbers, hence GNOME 2.31.90, which will become GNOME 2.32. The next GNOME 2.32 will come in two weeks and the stable release one month after that.

The GNOME 2.32 Release Schedule:

August 18th, 2010 - Beta 1 release;
September 1st, 2010 - Beta 2 release;
September 15th, 2010 - Release Candidate;
September 27th, 2010 - Final release.

GNOME 2.32 Beta (2.31.90) is available for download here on Softpedia. Note that this is a beta release and should only be used for testing purposes.