First GNOME 3.0 development release arrives

The GNOME development team have issued the first development version of GNOME 3.0, the next major release of the popular open source desktop for GNU / Linux and Unix. Version 3 of GNOME was originally scheduled for release towards the end of last month, however, in July of this year the release date was moved back by six months to April of 2011 because the GNOME release team felt the code was not sufficiently mature.

According to the developers, the first development version, GNOME 2.91.1 includes several modules that have yet to be ported to the new libnotify API and some modules "might not even run at this point". GNOME Developer Lucas Rocha says that there are still a number of bugs that need to be addressed and a lot more work needs to be done, however, the next release will apparently be smoother. As with all development releases, use of GNOME 2.91.1 in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More details about the development release, including download information, can be found in the official release announcement and in the platform and desktop news files. The latest stable release of GNOME is version 2.32 from the end of September.

See also:

• GNOME and KDE 2011 Desktop Summit dates confirmed, a report from The H.
• GNOME Census: Who writes GNOME?, a report from The H.
• New module decisions for GNOME 3.0, a report from The H.

(crve)