14 DAY TRIAL // Matthias Clasen has announced a few hours ago, October 26th, the first development release of the GNOME 3.8 desktop environment.
After a two day delay, GNOME 3.7.1 is now available for testing, bringing lots of updated applications, new features, and numerous bug fixes.
“GNOME 3.7 development is getting underway, with the 3.7.1 snapshot that is marking the beginning of this development cycle. Features are still being proposed and discussed. This release allows some early glimpses of whats to come.”
“To compile GNOME 3.7.1, you can the jhbuild modulesets (which use the exact tarball versions from the official release). A slight complication is that gnome-control-center 3.7.1 does not build against network-manager-gnome 0.9.6.2.” said Matthias Clasen in the press release.
GNOME 3.7.1 comes with the following updated applications: DConf, Epiphany, Eye of GNOME, Evince, Nautilus, Totem and Tracker.
Among the main components of GNOME 3.7.1 the following were updated: GNOME Shell, GLib, GNOME Control Center, GNOME Desktop, GNOME Keyring, GNOME Online Accounts, GNOME Session, GNOME Settings Daemon, GStreamer, GTK+, GTKmm, gvfs, Mutter, PyGobject, and the libsoup, libsigc++ and libcroco libraries.
The most important component is GNOME-Shell, which includes various interesting features and fixes, covered by Softpedia earlier this week in this article.
Please note that the following packages have been removed from GNOME 3.7.1: Brasero, GCalctool and GNOME Power Manager.
GNOME 3.7.1 is only the first development release towards GNOME 3.8 desktop environment, due for release on March 27th, 2013.
The next development release will be GNOME 3.7.2, which should be available for testing sometime next month, around November 21st, followed by GNOME 3.7.3 on December 19th, 2012. Download GNOME 3.7.1 sources right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.