14 DAY TRIAL // Kjartan Maraas has announced today, December 21, the third development release of the GNOME 3.8 desktop environment.
The development of the GNOME 3.8 is well under way and the developers have announced a few major changes already.
First of all, GNOME 3.7.3 (the name of the development version of the 3.8 branch) has only one major problem. Unfortunately, the Gnome-control-center 3.7.3 does not build against network-manager-gnome 0.9.6.4 (you will need the current master), so the network panel cannot be built.
It's well known that the Gnome developers have dropped the fallback mode, in the previous version, but they are trying to replace it with a viable solution.
“Since the release of 3.0, a technology called llvmpipe has allowed for fast software rendering, lowering the need for the fallback mode. However llvmpipe doesn't currently work on some architectures (ppc, s390, arm?--ARM (hf) works-shawnl) and might not work in some non-Linux-based OS (OpenBSD support is not there, for instance),” the official announcement stated.
According to the developers, to compile GNOME 3.7.3, users can jhbuild modulesets, which uses the exact tarball versions from the official release.
As usual, GNOME 3.7.2 comes with a lot of core and app updates, such as Anjuta 3.7.3, Orca 3.7.3, Seahorse 3.7.1, and Evolution 3.7.3.2.
Other major new versions include Eye of Gnome 3.7.1, Epiphany 3.7.3, Evince 3.7.1, gnome-control-center 3.7.3, gnome-shell 3.7.3.1, GStreamer Base Plugins 1.0.2, GStreamer 1.0.2, GTK+ 3.7.4, mutter 3.7.3, Nautilus (Files) 3.7.3, Totem 3.6.2, and Tracker 0.15.0, just to name the major packages.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of updated packages, accompanied by their appropriate changelogs.
Download GNOME 3.7.3 right now from Softpedia. This release is a snapshot of early development code. Although it is buildable and usable, it is primarily intended for testing and hacking purposes.