The second Beta of GNOME 3.4 is available for download

Mar 14, 2012 07:31 GMT  ·  By

Delayed seven days, the second Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment was announced today, March 14th, by the GNOME Project developers.

GNOME 3.4 Beta 2 updates various packages such as NetworkManager, Baobab, Brasero, Empathy, Eye of GNOME, Epiphany, Nautilus, Vala, GTK+, gvfs, GNOME Icon Theme, GNOME Desktop, GNOME Control Center, GNOME Screenshot, GNOME Keyring, GNOME Screensaver, GNOME System Monitor, GNOME Contacts, GNOME Backgrounds, GNOME Panel, and much more.

Let's take a closer look at what has been actually changed in each package (of course, we'll list only the important ones):

· IPv6 Privacy Extensions are now enabled by default in NetworkManager, as well as support for checking Internet connectivity; · Brasero gets a couple of fixes related to optical drives; · Empathy has three bugfixes, among which we can mention that the wrong date in chat window and XMPP accounts have a negative priority were repaired; · Eye of GNOME receives various improvements and fixes; · Epiphany comes with a completely rewritten history backend, a few other small fixes; · The GNOME Contacts app brings updated support for calls, in sync with the latest Telepathy/Empathy. It also allows now to link non-primary contacts to each other; · The GNOME Control Center gets some layout fixes, among other not so important fixes; · Themed background pattern and various PanelSeparator improvements land in GNOME Panel; · The GNOME Screenshot utility now uses the new Shell API to include the mouse pointer, and the delay setting is no longer overridden when in non-interactive mode; · Nautilus also gets two fixes (a crash when unmounting volumes with non-empty trash and another crash when closing window slots under various circumstances) and the pathbar scrolling now works with latest GTK; · Vala 0.15.2 switches poppler-glib bindings to .gir and many binding updates and bug fixes.

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The GNOME 3.4 development cycle will continue with the GNOME 3.4 Release Candidate version in one week from now, on March 21st. The final release of GNOME 3.4 is expected on March 28th, 2012.

GNOME 3.4 Release Schedule:

· October 27th, 2011 - GNOME 3.3.1; · November 24th, 2011 - GNOME 3.3.2; · December 23rd, 2011 - GNOME 3.3.3; · January 26th, 2012 - GNOME 3.3.4; · February 9th, 2012 - GNOME 3.3.5; · February 24th, 2012 - GNOME 3.4 Beta 1; · March 14th, 2012 - GNOME 3.4 Beta 2; · March 21st, 2012 - GNOME 3.4 RC; · March 28th, 2012 - GNOME 3.4 Final release Download the GNOME 3.4 Beta 2 source packages right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.

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