GNOME 2.32 Release Candidate Is Out Now

The GNOME 2.32 release candidate is out, several days after the deadline. A number of failures affected the build and took several days to resolve, pushing the release date.

"Phew. It's a few days late, but it's finally there: the release candidate for 2.32.0 is available for wide testing!," the GNOME team said in an email announcement.

"Why is it late? Well, we've accepted to bump the gobject introspection format, which resulted in interesting build failures," the announcement explained.

"We've waited for the last glib release that would contain API changes for API introduced this cycle," it added.

"So we had to get new tarballs after the deadline to fix various build issues. And then again new tarballs, after we found even more build issues," it concluded.

Highlights of GNOME 2.31.92 (2.32 Release Candidate):

· GLib 2.25.16;
· GTK+ 2.21.8;
· GDK PixBuf 2.21.7;
· Alacarte 0.13.2;
· Brasero 2.31.92;
· Empathy 2.31.92;
· Epiphany 2.30.6;
· Evince 2.31.92;
· Evolution 2.31.92;
· GDM 2.31.92;
· Metacity 2.30.2;
· Nautilus 2.31.92.

GNOME 2.32 takes the places of the highly anticipated GNOME 3.0 release. Initially scheduled for launch this fall, GNOME 3.0 was pushed back to allow it to bake some more. Instead, GNOME 2.32, based on the same GTK+ 2 libraries, will be released.

Officially, the regular release schedule remains the same, though the September 29 final release date seems a bit unlikely.

The GNOME 2.32 Release Schedule:

August 18th, 2010 - Beta 1 release;
September 1st, 2010 - Beta 2 release;
September 19th, 2010 - Release Candidate;
September 29th, 2010 - Final release.

GNOME 2.32 Release Candidate (2.31.92) is available for download here on Softpedia. Note that this is a release candidate and should only be used for testing purposes.