Nepherte (dot) be

My experience with GNOME 2.28

GNOME 2.28, released on early september 24, has recently hit the Arch Linux repositories and, as an old time GNOME user, I was eager to try it out. First, I’d like to congratulate JGC for all his excellent work. He did a wonderful job testing and packaging GNOME 2.28 in such a short notice, considering he also maintains all the X packages. It truly was one of the smoothest GNOME upgrades so far (others may disagree if you look at some of the topics on the Arch Forum). Every release has its problems, often small ones, other times not so small. This time I only encountered 3. The benefits however far outweigh the few downsides.

The first problem is related to GDM and is not that much of a problem but rather a matter of getting used to it. The GNOME login screen has had a major overhaul compared to 2.20, the version I previously had installed. It now blends in  more with the user’s desktop and includes a panel with  session, keyboard and language settings. GDM also doesn’t include a graphical configuration tool. No problem there, I’m “Mister Console” anyways.

The second problem is a little more inconvenient and related to GDM as well. GDM uses its own configuration for the keyboard layout and ignores the hal keyboard layout settings. It always default to the usa keyboard layout. Once you’ve selected your user, it will remember what layout you may have chosen from the gnome panel widget but in the mean while it will stick to the usa layout in the previous user selection prompt. Luckily there’s a patch available. A bug report can be found here and a patch here.

The third problem can be found in gnome-keyring. When logging out of GNOME, there is a 10 to 15 seconds delay before it finally takes effect. This problem was fixed in gnome-keyring 2.28.1.

But enough with the problems. What is new in GNOME 2.28? Most of the changes are made behind the scene. Many efforts were made to remove deprecated libraries from GNOME 2.28. For instance, there is no program anymore that depends on esound,  libgnomevfs, libgnomeprint, or libgnomeprintui. Further efforts were made to remove depenency of libglade, libbonoboui, libgnome and many more. The most visible changes are annotion support for evince, improved bluetooth integration and extra features in Cheese. Webkit has also finally made it in Epiphany after many false announcements since GNOME 2.24. All in all, it’s another fine version of GNOME